Portion of a sarcophagus panel

What is known of Chinese landscape painting of fifteen hundred years ago comes from written descriptions and images such as this one. Here, landscape elements are present, but they are rather stiff and abstract. There is a distinct foreground, with shrubs and rocks; a middle ground, with trees and figures; and background with distant twisted mountains. The figures are out of scale with the landscape setting. While these objects might seem unsophisticated, they represent a great advance in depicting landscape scenes.