Template:POTD/2023-04-22
The Orchid Pavilion Gathering, also known as the Lanting Gathering, was a cultural and poetic event held in China in 353, during the Jin dynasty of the Six Dynasties era. During the Spring Purification Festival, forty-two literati met at the Orchid Pavilion (Lanting) on Mount Kuaiji, near present-day Shaoxing in Zhejiang. This 7th-century scroll, now at the Palace Museum in Beijing, is considered to be the best of the surviving copies of the Lantingji Xu, written by Wang Xizhi as a preface to the collection of poems produced at the Orchid Pavilion Gathering. Copies of the work were made throughout Chinese history. The text reads, in part: "Reading past compositions, I can recognize the same melancholy from the ancients. I can only lament before their words without being able to verbalize my feelings. [...] The future generations will look upon us, just like we look upon our past. How sad! Hence, we record the people presented here today and their works; even though time and circumstances will be different, the feelings expressed will remain unchanged."Calligraphy credit: Feng Chengsu, after Wang Xizhi