After failing to become a scholar, he accepted donations and became an official, becoming a junior official of the sixth grade, specializing in surveying and mapping. His boss told him: Pictures must be based on facts. He remembered. But in this world, fake pictures and books are the norm. The wealthy gentry occupied a thousand acres of land, but only two hundred was recorded in the fish scale book; the grain was sold privately, and only "loss" was written on the ledger. He took a ruler to measure the truth step by step, but this touched the interests of countless people. From the south of the Yangtze River to the north of the Great Wall, from the imperial prison to the Longchang, he only told the truth and drew the true picture throughout his life. Someone asked him: You are a painter, why are you so serious? He answered: If the map is wrong, the mountains and rivers will be wrong; if the mountains and rivers are wrong, the people will have no way to survive. During the Zhengde period of the Ming Dynasty, a small official who "only painted true pictures" measured mountains and rivers with his footsteps and stayed true to the right path throughout his life. Wang Yangming said to him: To guard the heart is to guard the mountains and rivers. And he used his own life to guard every inch of real land in his writings.
