Known as a leading literary man, historian and art patron in Ming China, Wang Shizhen (1526-1590) not only was a prolific travel writer, but also keen to reinvent the genre of travel literature in pictorial form. Such cross-medium endeavors might be best exemplified in his pictorial travel album Shuicheng tu, originally entitled Jixing tu (pictorial travel journal). Commissioned around 1574, this album contains 84 topographic paintings to record his journey through the Grand Canal to assume his new position in the Ming imperial court. Although it has been frequently discussed under the rubric of "jiyou tu" (tourism painting), a prevalent type of travel painting which flourished in the sixteenth-century tourism boom and was created primarily to amuse a leisure-seeking audience, in actuality, the entire album rarely shows much interest in exploring tourist attractions such as scenic spots, historic places and pilgrimage sites. Nor does it intend to depict sightseeing or other recreational activities. Instead its main focus is on a journalistic delineation of the administrative and transportation infrastructures as well as river control system along the canal, including prefectural and county seats, customs offices, police stations, courier stations, sluices, dykes, and those staff and laborers hired by the government to maintain public facilities. In other words, what it represents no longer meets the criteria of "jiyou tu." Rather, its preference for chronicling daily itineraries of official trips or local geographic features, cultural heritages, socioeconomical life, and traffic conditions along public transportation routes bears a much closer resemblance to the narrative frameworks and thematic choices of "jixing lu" (travel journal), a well established literary subgenre since the Song dynasty. It indicates that, following the footsteps of travel literature, the formats of travel painting were also expanded and further diversified to accommodate different types of travel during the mid-Ming.