Explain the unique features of Chinese poetry, music, and painting

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

To the Chinese, all arts functioned to imitate and sustain the harmony of nature.
Music was regarded as an expression of cosmic order. Like most of the music of the ancient world, that of China was monophonic, but it assumed a unique timbre produced by nasal tones that were often high in pitch and subtle in inflection. A close kinship between Chinese music and speech was enforced by the unique nature of the Chinese language. Consisting of some 50,000 characters, spoken Chinese demands subtle intonations: the pitch or tonal level at which any word is pronounced gives it its meaning. A single word may have more than a hundred meanings, depending on how it is uttered. In this sense, all communication in the Chinese language is musical—a phenomenon that has particular importance for Chinese poetry.
Chinese poetry is a kind of vocal music: a line of spoken poetry is— like music—essentially a series of tones that rise and fall in various rhythms. Moreover, since Chinese is a monosyllabic language with few word endings, rhyme is common to speech. During the Tang era, China produced some of the most beautiful poetry in world literature. The poems of the eighth and ninth centuries—an era referred to as the golden age of Chinese poetry—resemble diary entries that record the intimate experience of everyday life. Restrained and sophisticated, the poetry of the Tang period was written by scholar-poets who considered verse-making, along with calligraphy and painting, the mark of educational and intellectual refinement. From earliest times, nature and natural imagery played a large part in Chinese verse. Tang poets continued this long tradition: their poems are filled with the meditative spirit of Daoism and a sense of oneness with nature.
This focus on nature extended into Chinese painting as well. By the tenth century, landscape painting became the favorite genre, functioning as wordless poems. Chinese landscapes work to convey a spirit of harmony between heaven and earth. This cosmic approach to nature, fundamental to Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, asks the beholder to contemplate, rather than simply to view the painted image. Chinese paintings generally assume one of three basic formats: the handscroll, the hanging scroll, and the album leaf (often used as a fan).