The previous episode mentioned that although couplets started in the Qin Dynasty, they became popular in the mid-Song Dynasty, and flourished greatly in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The couplets in the Dream of the Red Chamber were said to be from the Tang Dynasty, but they contained text, when couplets at that time were supposed to have only images, not calligraphy, so Cao Xueqin made a mistake there.
In the era before textiles and paper, murals had an important position, as they were typically painted on cave walls or building walls. However, as Chinese houses were mostly made of wood and were destroyed by the northern nomadic tribes, these cultural and historical murals became increasingly rare. After the invention of textiles and silk, people started painting on them and then pasting them on walls, changing the form of murals and even creating folding screens. There are two types of folding screens – one is the landscape screen, where several paintings are connected as a whole, which is very popular in Japan as a way to pass down mural paintings and cultural tastes. Later, some folding screens were even transformed into calligraphy.
The disadvantage of hand scrolls is that they are like movies, displayed frame by frame. Later, people invented bound volumes, which can be displayed in three ways: top-down, side-to-side, and accordion-style. Bound volumes use harder paper, like cardboard, compared to the scrolls.