Read right to left, as a viewer would unroll it, successive scenes reveal the lifestyle of all levels of the society from rich to poor as well as economic activities in both rural areas and the city, and offer glimpses of clothing and architecture.

People from all walks of life are depicted: peddlers, jugglers, actors, paupers begging, monks asking for alms, fortune tellers and seers, doctors, innkeepers, teachers, millers, metalworkers, carpenters, masons, and official scholars from all ranks.

Outside the city proper (separated by the gate to the left), there are businesses of all kinds, selling wine, grain, secondhand goods, cookware, bows and arrows, lanterns, musical instruments, gold and silver, ornaments, dyed fabrics, paintings, medicine, needles, and artifacts, as well as many restaurants.

In addition to the shops and diners, there are inns, temples, private residences, and official buildings varying in grandeur and style, from huts to mansions with grand front- and backyards.

People and commodities are transported by various modes: wheeled wagons, beasts of labor (in particular, a large number of donkeys and mules), sedan chairs, and chariots.

Many of these details are roughly corroborated by Song dynasty writings, principally the Dongjing Meng Hua Lu, which describes many of the same features of life in the capital.

[4][9] It was frequently copied by later artists of successive periods and it became familiarized among the nobles, scholar officials, urban residents and merchants.

Many scholars thought of the Song original as the "masterpiece", and gave little respect to later versions, which they called mere copies, forgeries, reproductions, reinterpretations or elaborations, more than a hundred of which are now in museums in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, North America, and France.

[17] In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, dozens of copies were made by little-known professional painters in Suzhou, usually carrying the (forged) signature of either Zhang Zeduan or Qiu Ying.

These painters, she says, created “distinctive paintings that visualized pre-modern viewers’ various conceptions of a “great age,” an ideal society from the traditional Chinese perspective.”[14] Quite different was the painting, known as the "Qing Court Version", commissioned by the Yongzheng Emperor, which was completed only after his death by five court painters (Chen Mu, Sun Hu, Jin Kun, Dai Hong and Cheng Zhidao).

The calligraphy is in the running script style, and is in the hand of Liang Shizheng (梁詩正), a prominent court official and companion of the emperor.

蜀錦裝金壁 吳工聚碎金 謳歌萬井富 城闕九重深 盛事誠觀止 遺踪借探尋 當時誇豫大 此日歎徽欽 Shǔjǐn zhuāng jīn bì Wú gōng jù suìjīn ōugē wànjǐng fù chéngquè jiǔchóng shēn shèngshì chéng guānzhǐ yízōng jiè tànxún dāngshí kuā Yù dà cǐrì tàn Huī Qīn.

From January 2–24, 2012, the painting was exhibited in the Tokyo National Museum as the centerpiece of a special exhibition to mark the 40th anniversary of normalized diplomatic relations between China and Japan,[3] with the Japanese museum officials providing the "highest security standards" for the work as this was the first attested time ever in the almost nine centuries since the painting's creation that it had left China.

The computer-animated mural, with moving characters and objects and portraying the scene in 4-minute day and night cycles, was one of the primary exhibitions in the Chinese Pavilion, drawing queues up to two hours with a reservation.

[39] An allegorical interpretation proposed that the painting was a subtle entreaty to the emperor that he recognize dangerous currents beneath the surface of prosperity.

The term "Qingming" did not refer to either the holiday or the calendar but was taken from the phrase 清明之世 ("A bright and enlightened era") from the Book of the Later Han, and used ironically.

[40] The wooden bridge depicted in the original version was reconstructed by a team of engineers and documented by the PBS television show NOVA during their Secrets of Lost Empires series.