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The principal forms of traditional Chinese painting are hanging scroll, album of paintings, fan surface and long horizontal scroll. Hanging scrolls are both horizontal and vertical. They are mounted and hung on the wall. For an album of paintings the artist paints on a certain size of xuan paper, then binds a number of paintings into an album, convenient for storage. The surface of both folding fans and round fans is painted. Before people had electric fans or air-conditioning, they used fans made of bamboo strips pasted with paper or silk. Artists painted the fan's surface as recreation. In time this developed into a form of painting that has been handed down to the present. The long horizontal scroll is also called a hand scroll. It is less than fifty centimetres high, but several to a hundred metres long. Pictures on long horizontal scrolls are not restricted as to time, whether seasons or decades. A hundred or a thousand human figures can be portrayed in one painting. After being mounted, it can be appreciated section by section.
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