No.1 scholar is hard to get into the ranks of everyone. Among the 265 No.1 scholars in Tang and Song Dynasties, eight poets such as Su Shi, Li Bai and Du Fu, none of them won the No.1 scholar. This extremely unique historical and cultural phenomenon is still an ancient cultural mystery that puzzles people.
Among the top scholars in the past dynasties, Wang Wei, the top scholar of Xinweike in the 19th year of Tang Kaiyuan (731), achieved the highest achievement in poetry and painting. He is one of the outstanding representatives of the pastoral poetry school in the prosperous Tang Dynasty, and his poetic art is considered to be "from Li (Bai) to Du (Fu) and should be the first". There is a saying that "Li Bai is a genius, Du Fu is a local talent, and Wang Wei is a talented person". Because of his deep belief in Buddhism, later generations also called Wang Wei Shi Fo.
Wang Wei is not only recognized as Shi Fo, but also the master of literati painting in Nanshan. Qian Zhongshu called him "the number one painter in the prosperous Tang Dynasty".
after the sui dynasty, landscape painting in the Tang dynasty developed into two schools with different styles. First, the "green landscape" represented by the military commanders Li Sixun and Li Zhaodao in the early Tang Dynasty; One is the "ink landscape" represented by Wang Wei. In the Ming Dynasty, Dong Qichang compared Li Sixun and Wang Wei with the difference between the north and the south of Zen Buddhism, calling Li the originator of the landscape of the northern Sect and Wang Wei the founder of the landscape of the southern Sect.