Wang Boshu (Collection of Wang Boshu), Volumes 29 and 30

Wang Bo Collection, Volumes 29 and 30

The brushwork on this paper scroll was set down within about a decade of its author's death, which makes it the oldest surviving copy of the writings of Wang Bo (Ōbotsu in Japanese, 649–676). Wang Bo was a Chinese writer of the early Tang dynasty, ranked among the Four Eminences of the Early Tang (chū-Tō no shiketsu) alongside Yang Jiong, Lu Zhaolin, and Luo Binwang. He came from Longmen in Jiangzhou, in present-day Shanxi, and was a grandson of the late-Sui Confucian scholar Wang Tong. He entered official service under Emperor Gaozong and served Prince Pei, was later dismissed from his post, and drowned while travelling, dead before the age of thirty.

The scroll measures 26.5 centimetres in height and stretches to 447.7 centimetres, written in ink on paper. Despite the title, it is a single scroll: it carries the surviving portions of two books of Wang Bo's collected works. Volume 29 preserves one kōjō, a formal account of a deceased person's life and conduct, together with five of an original six saimon, the addresses read aloud at memorial offerings. Volume 30 holds four further pieces of condolence and memorial prose. These are texts of mourning rather than the lyric poetry for which Wang Bo is usually remembered.

Why It Is a National Treasure

Wang Bo's collected works were recorded in the official histories, including the Old Book of Tang, as a set of thirty books. In China the text was lost early, and for centuries readers knew it only through later compilations assembled from quotations, such as the Qing scholar Jiang Qingyi's annotated edition of the works of Wang Zi'an. The scrolls preserved in Japan changed that. Where the Chinese transmission has gaps, this manuscript supplies original wording that no other source records, which is why scholars treat it as a primary witness to the early Tang text rather than a mere copy.

The dating rests on a telling absence. Between 690 and 705, the empress Wu Zetian introduced a set of newly invented graphs, the so-called Zetian characters, which appear in documents written during her reign. This scroll uses none of them. That, with the archaic flavour of the writing, points to a copying date before 690, roughly the years 685 to 689, only about ten years after Wang Bo himself had died. The manuscript was designated a National Treasure on 9 June 1951.

The hand itself rewards close looking. The lines are slender, the character forms unusually broad, and the overall effect is heavy and grave rather than fluent. Specialists place the style close to that of the preceding Northern Dynasties, a reminder that this is writing from the threshold between two eras of Chinese calligraphy.

What to Look For

Turn the paper over and a second document appears. On the reverse, in a hand from the late Heian period, someone copied out Buddhist monastic rules, including an abridged text of the four-part disciplinary code. The two layers are separated by centuries and a sea: a Chinese literary text of the seventh century on one face, a Japanese Buddhist transcription of the twelfth on the other. Reused paper of this kind is part of how such fragile material reached the present at all.

The survival story is unusually concrete. The scroll is thought to have crossed from Tang China to Japan during the Nara period and to have been kept at Kōfuku-ji in Nara. Much later it passed into the collection of the painter Tomioka Tessai before entering the Tokyo National Museum. A companion scroll, Volume 28, is a designated National Treasure held privately; a further fragment of Volume 29 survives separately. Together these pieces are the closest the world now comes to the lost original.

Because manuscripts on this kind of paper are vulnerable to light, the scroll is shown only occasionally and for short stretches. When it is on view, the place to read the calligraphy slowly is up close to the glass, following the column of broad, deliberate characters from right to left.

Seeing It and the Area Around It

The scroll belongs to the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park, where it carries the inventory number TB-1203. Works of this fragility are not on permanent display; rotations in the Asian Gallery (Tōyōkan), which houses the museum's Chinese painting and calligraphy, are the usual chance to see it in person, and the museum's published schedules list the dates. When the original is resting, the full scroll can be examined in high resolution through the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage digital platforms, where every column can be magnified.

Ueno Park rewards a longer visit. The Tokyo National Museum is the oldest and largest of Japan's national museums, and a single ticket opens several buildings. Within walking distance are the National Museum of Nature and Science, the National Museum of Western Art, and the green expanse of the park itself, busy with cherry blossom in spring and with the lotus of Shinobazu Pond in summer. Ueno Station, a few minutes' walk away, connects the area to central Tokyo and to the wider rail network.