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Secondary sourcePainting19th century

Qin Shi Huang Portrait in a 19th-century Korean Album

Unknown · 19th century

A 19th-century Korean painting of Qin Shi Huang, copied from a 1609 Chinese original, showing how he was imagined centuries after his death.

This later portrait shows how Qin Shi Huang's image was imagined and copied centuries after his death.

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Painted portrait of a bearded man in profile, wearing a black tall hat with dangling beads and a yellow robe with cloud and roundel patterns. Vertical Chinese characters appear at the upper left and beside the figure's head.
Qin Shi Huang, portrait in a 19th-century Korean album, copy of a 1609 Chinese original.

About this source

What it is

This painted portrait of Qin Shi Huang appears in a 19th-century Korean album of famous historical figures, with Korean colophons. It is a copy of an earlier Chinese portrait from 1609. The painting shows a bearded man in profile wearing a tall black beaded hat and a yellow robe decorated with cloud and roundel patterns.

Why it matters

No portrait of Qin Shi Huang was made during his own lifetime that survives, so images like this one reflect how later generations, in this case Korean artists working from a Chinese model, imagined the appearance of China's first emperor. It shows how his memory traveled and was reshaped across cultures and centuries.

Look closer

  • Since this was painted long after Qin Shi Huang died, what choices did the artist have to make about his appearance?
  • Why might this portrait being copied from an earlier Chinese painting matter for how accurate it is?
  • What does the clothing and the hat in the portrait suggest about how the artist wanted viewers to see the emperor?

This painting is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Emperor Qin Shi Huang on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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