This unclassifiable masterpiece is a series of prose poems describing Chinese paintings, which do not exist. The four completed works of Segalen's China years: Rene Leys, Peintures, Steles, and Equipe represent an attempt to marry Eastern and Western aesthetics, to instil Daoist and Buddhist ideas within Western forms: literary fiction, painting, verse, and travel writing respectively.

Segalen's Chinese antecedents for this are the histories of Chinese art from the Tang Dynasty, especially the famous Li Tai Ming Hua Ching by Chang Yen Yuen, which provide the only source for biographies of artists and descriptions of much older paintings which are now lost. The European antecedents for this project are the prose poems of Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, of Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer and Les Illuminations, and Mallarme's Anecdotes and Poemes.

But Segalen here is going beyond...

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