The interior is decorated with hand-painted silk wallhanging that can be counted among the rarer Chinese artistic exports. The strips of fabric are placed in shaped gilded frames. Depicted on the silk are mountains with fanciful trees, blooming bushes, flying birds, the figures of heavenly denizens, plants and objects full of beneficent symbols that Europeans perceived as something fascinatingly exotic. The wallhanging 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. 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.