While intended as a manual for would-be artists, at the time of writing this manual is the oldest existing color-printed work on paper in the world, and has thus perhaps come to be better known for the technical quality of its printing than its already established pedagogical significance. The work is said to have partly inspired the famous flourishing of colorful graphic printing that was Japan's Edo period, which itself heavily influenced much of the modern international culture of cartoons and resulting developments in animation. Truly 
then, this is an important work in human history and one which we can all enjoy.

More info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Zhengyan

-------------

The current PDF was assembled from images[0] downloaded from the Cambridge University Library[1], who were nice enough to digitize their (no doubt ill-gotten) copy of the original, but insist on sharing it only via a captive web interface with broken zoom, probably designed to frustrate downloading.

The images were then cropped to remove burned-in Creative Commons copyright text (bottom) and a ruler (right) in order to return the viewing experience to something closer to the original item.

In order to perform smart cropping, Fred Weinhaus' autotrim[2] script for the ImageMagick[3] set of image processing utilities was used.

Images were then assembled in to a single PDF using ImageMagick.

The resulting file was then shared.

-------------

May each enjoy equal opportunity to access our shared heritage.

Thanks to all the great sharers - in particular STBGD for continuously impressive output on great subjects. You are all an inspiration.

Free Julian Assange!

-------------

[0] http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-FH-00910-00083-00098/
[1] http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/
[2] http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/autotrim/
[3] http://www.imagemagick.org/