Leon🫶🎮 | VTuber Soldier Goober

The viral 731-year transformation of Jinan, China, viewed toward Que Mountain and Hua Buzhu Mountain, as depicted in Zhao Mengfu's 1295 painting Autumn Colors on the Que and Hua Mountains, through historical photographs from 1903 and modern-day Jinan in 2026... Jinan is known as the “City of Springs.” It has more than 70 famous natural springs, and the most famous, Baotu Spring, has been celebrated by poets for centuries. . . . The painting is called “Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains.” The artwork captures a tranquil, rural landscape with fishing boats, simple homesteads, and the distant twin peaks northeast of Jinan. The two hills outside the city: the rounded Mount Que on the left and the sharply pointed Mount Hua on the right. Painted by scholar-artist Zhao Mengfu (considered one of China’s greatest painters and calligraphers) for his friend Zhou Mi (a scholar whose family came from the Jinan area, though he had grown up far away in the south). Zhao had served as an official in the region and painted the scroll so Zhou could finally see the landscape of his ancestral home. The original scroll is now kept at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. More than 700 years later, those same two hills are still standing... A historical view showing the early expansion of the city and agricultural plains spreading across the terrain, with the same two mountains anchoring the background horizon. In the early 1900s, the land around them was mostly farmland. Today, Jinan is the capital of Shandong Province and a city of more than 9 million people, with skyscrapers stretching toward the hills Zhao painted. A dense high-rise metropolis of Jinan (capital of Shandong Province) filled with skyscrapers and urban infrastructure, while Que Mountain and Hua Buzhu Mountain still remain visible in the distance. #archaeohistories