In 1240, the Southern Song artist Mou Yi (1178-after 1242) did a painting based on the poem "Pounding Cloth" by the Southern Dynasty poet Xie Huilian (397-433). This painting entered the imperial collection in Qing times (it is now in Taipei's National Palace Museum). "Pounding cloth" (daoyi) refers to the process of producing raw silk. The conventional division of labor had men working in the fields and women at the loom: the task of "pounding cloth" was gender-specific. Painters, however, depicted women pounding cloth not to portray their hard labor, but to convey a melancholy female beauty through the act of pounding cloth. Mou's painting is a noted example of this. Mou's painting is over four meters long, featuring a total of thirty-two ladies. Following the structure of Xie Huilian's poem, the action of the women thereon can be divided into five sections. The sorrowful tone of this work actually originated from the "Pounding Cloth" poem. In the many literary works on this topic since the Six Dynasties, almost all were written from the perspective of a male writer hearing the sound of pounding in the night and imagining a lady pounding cloth. These male writers would then create a voice for the lady in her boudoir lamenting about having to make winter clothing for the faraway husband. Whereas the "pounding cloth" poems were a process of "visualization" of the aural experience, the "pounding cloth" paintings were to recreate this sense of beauty in visual images for the public eye. In this painting we see an example of how a male painter constructed the female voices as rendered by male poets: through gender role-playing, poets and painters spoke for the female protagonists. The women's voices are heard through the poems on the painting, providing the narratives for the silent images. Viewers in later times also participated in a dialogue with these female protagonists by writing colophons on the painting. For example, colophons from the three viewings of the painting by the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-96) reveal his longing for the late Xiaoxian empress, adding yet another sentimental story to Mou's painting, and yet another layer of role reversal to this multivalent work.