Realistic-looking clouds were depicted by Chinese artists long before they appeared in the art of Western cultures. One early Chinese cloud master was the tenth-century artist Dong Yuan. His ink-on-silk-scroll landscape Dongtian Mountain Hall shows Stratus fractus clouds clinging to mountain summits and fog gathering in the valley below. During an age when barely a single cloud, let alone a realistic one, graced the illuminations of Western religious manuscripts, ethereal cloud formations played a starring role in the landscape art of East Asia.