A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains

Wang Ximeng was 18. He completed this 11.9-metre-long silk scroll in six months in 1113, working under the personal tutelage of Emperor Huizong. He died shortly after, at age 20 or 23. Nobody knows why. The scroll uses ground malachite and azurite for the blue-green mountains — hugely expensive pigments only available at the imperial court. The colours still glow 900 years later. It is one of the greatest landscape paintings in Chinese history, made by a teenager who never painted anything else that survived. Now at Palace Museum, Beijing, Beijing.