With Schools Closed Down,

due to the current crisis,

 a teacher from China’s Shanxi Province, namely Zhao Wenrui, an art teacher in Fanzhi County, decided to draw a chalk version of Along the River during the Qingming Festival he just wanted to do something interesting for his students, to surprise them when they came back from the coronavirus quarantine,

 Along the River during the Qingming Festival, is a five-meter-long scroll depicting the Song Dynasty capital of Haifeng during the festival of Qingming, is sometimes referred to as China’s Mona Lisa, but what started out as a small project soon escalated into him using over 5 buckets of chalk and taking over 3 months to complete!

just like the original scroll, Zhao Wenrui’s 32-meter-long chalk replica features around 550 people (farmers from the countryside, boatmen, vendors, priests with long beards, etc), as well as dozens of animals, buildings, bridges, and the environment itself,

the photographs do not do justice to how big and detailed the work is, but the video above shows the sheer size of the piece, unfortunately, this chalk version will not be around for a thousand years, as the chalkboards will be cleaned as soon as the children come back to school and see their teacher’s artwork in person, but what a superhuman effort to surprise his students when they return.