The Rainbow Bridge and the Bian River from Along the River During the Qingming Festival, rebuilt as a real-time 3D scene. Five viewpoints, a sixty-second tour, and the original scroll to compare it against.
Into the Painting · Bianjing (入画·汴京) is a real-time 3D reconstruction of part of Along the River During the Qingming Festival, the Northern Song handscroll held in the Palace Museum. Rather than pan across the painting, you move a camera through it: the Rainbow Bridge, the boats on the Bian River, the market street and the city gate in the distance.
It is a place to look at rather than a game to finish. There are five viewpoints, a sixty-second automatic tour if you would rather just watch, and a side-by-side view of the original scroll so you can check the reconstruction against the source.
How to play Into the Painting · Bianjing
- Drag to look around, scroll to zoom, right-drag to pan. Press H to hide the interface for a clean view.
- Use the five numbered viewpoints in the panel to jump between the bridge, the river traffic, the riverside market, the streets and the distant city walls.
- Press the sixty-second tour button to have the camera fly the whole route on its own.
- Open the settings panel to change the time of day — morning, warm afternoon or dusk — and to switch quality between smooth, detailed and maximum. Drop to smooth on a laptop with integrated graphics.
- The original-scroll panel scrolls horizontally, so you can line up what you are standing in against what Zhang Zeduan painted.
Click Fullscreen above the game for the largest play area. If the game does not load, use Open in new tab to play it directly from our copy.
Why it's worth your time
The interesting decision here is restraint: it reconstructs one section of a very long scroll rather than the whole thing, and it keeps the original beside it instead of asking you to take the 3D version on trust. The frame-rate readout is honest about being a live measurement rather than a claim.
The author built the geometry with Blender scripting and renders it with Three.js and WebGL 2, with Draco-compressed models. Our copy is about 16 MB, almost all of it geometry and textures — the heaviest single scene in this collection. The interface is in Chinese, and it takes a mouse or touch — on a phone, switch the quality panel to the preset the author marks as suited to phones.
How it was made and where it lives
Published on GitHub Pages from a public repository. The author publishes as Rising1234Sun. Original: https://rising1234sun.github.io/qingmingshanghetu/. The Play button above runs our own unmodified copy, so the game keeps working here if that page goes down — which on free hosting usually has nothing to do with the author. Nothing about the game itself is changed, and the original stays linked from every page.
If you like Into the Painting · Bianjing, try these
The other places here to look at rather than play are Moonlit Forge, a scrolling 3D diorama, and RB19 Engineering Lab. If you would rather walk through a painting than orbit one, Van Gogh Town does exactly that.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this a game?
- No. It is an interactive 3D reconstruction — there is nothing to win. We list it because it is built with the same web technology as the games around it.
- How much of the painting is reconstructed?
- The section around the Rainbow Bridge and the Bian River, presented in five viewpoints, not the entire scroll.
- It runs slowly on my machine.
- Open the settings panel and switch quality to the smooth preset — it is there for laptops and low-power machines.
- Is it in English?
- No, the interface is in Chinese. The controls are drag, scroll and right-drag, and the viewpoint list is numbered.
- Is Into the Painting · Bianjing free to play?
- Yes. Everything on Floating Arcade is free, with no account, ads or downloads.
- Can I embed this game on my own website?
- Yes — copy the snippet below. The embedded player links back here, which is how we ask to be credited.
Embed Into the Painting · Bianjing on your site
Paste this where you want the game to appear:
