The upper part of the walls in the Western Reception Room (Dining-Room) is decorated with hand-painted Chinese silk in shaped oak frames. The wall-hanging was created by Chinese craftsmen artists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in the finest traditions of Chinese painting for the European market. Of no small significance in the painting of silk wall-hangings was a treatise published in China in 1701 entitled A Word about Painting from the Garden the Size of a Mustard Grain. The silk, in rolls 70 centimetres wide, was painted following picture books that were published as illustrations to famous Chinese novels and dramas that had gradually become part of the national folklore. The subjects seen in the Reception Room were drawn from a celebrated early-fourteenth-century play by Wang Shih-fu. The Romance of the Western Chamber tells the tale of the love and adventures of the student Chang Chun-jui and the beauty Tsui Inin. Each of the six compositions has as its basis a mountain landscape with the traditional Chinese atmospheric perspective and scenes from the play set into the space of the landscape. The scenes are not presented in the order of the plot, which emphasizes the decorative character of the painting. The appearance of such wall coverings in European palaces was a tribute to the fashion born of extensive links between Europe and China. In Russia interiors decorated with hand-painted silk first appeared in the reign of Peter the Great. It is supposed that this silk adorned Peter's summer apartments in the Summer Garden, then the interiors of the Yekaterinhof Palace from where it entered the Hermitage in 1951.