The Empress's advice was correct.
When the Emperor received the loose-leaf notebook, he immediately recognized its convenience. But as he held it, caressing its surface, he noticed something else was different. Jiang Xian had depicted every item in his private treasury with a unique artistic style, using colors quite unlike those popular among the painters of Yan Chichao. Western pigments had long been available in the Yan Chi Country, but they had never become widely popular. Colorful painting was mostly reserved for architecture, while traditional coloring methods were mainly applied to landscapes of green mountains and blue waters.
