1492 & All That

In the same year that Columbus discovered the New World, a painter named Ch'iu Ying put the finishing touches on a little world of his own. Last week Ch'iu's world, a 30-ft. silk scroll, was seen for the first time in the U.S. when it was unrolled at Southern California's Pomona College. It proved to be one of the real treasures of the. Ming Dynasty. The property of a Chinese collector who kept it in his home, it was first put on public exhibition in Nanking three years ago, where George C, Marshall, on his mission to China, was one of the first foreigners to see it.

Ch'iu's world is a wild, mountainous landscape thick with waterfalls. Banners aloft, the ambassadors of eleven nations march across it, bringing tribute to the Emperor of China: petrified wood from Yunnan, coral from Java, elephants from Annam, yaks from Tibet.

Painted in microscopic detail, often with a single-hair brush, the caravan sparkles and shines against freely sketched crags. As one critic put it, each tiny figure seems carved in jade. But like many a Western master, Ch'iu found little fame while he lived; his work had been too meticulous for the contemporary taste of 1492.

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