Ch: Tuhui baojian. Precious Mirror of Painting, a late Yuan dynasty history of Chinese painting by Xia Wenyen (Jp: Ka Bungen 夏文彦, 1296-1370). Dated in the author's preface to 1365, the five-chapter work was known in Japan by the early Muromachi period and served as a model for Japanese treatises on painting such as *Kundaikan sōchōki 君台観左右帳記, *Tansei jakubokushū 丹青若木集 and *Honchō gashi 本朝画史.
The Edo period interest in Tokai hōkan is indicated by the 17th-century handwritten copy (Naikaku Bunko 内閣文庫, Tokyo) and woodblock version reprinted in Japan. The first chapter is on painting theory, and quotes liberally from the writing of Liu Daoshun 劉道醇, Guo Ruoxu 郭若虚, and Tang Hō 湯ほう, leading painting theorists of the Song and Yuan dynasties. Beginning with the second chapter are short biographies of roughly 1,500 painters from the Six Dynasties until the Yuan. It relies heavily on Xuanhe huapu (Jp: Senna gafu 宣和画譜, Catalog of Paintings in the Xuanhe Collection) compiled at the court of Emperor Huizong (Jp: Ki Sō 徽宗, 1082-1135). The originality of Tokai hōkan lies primarily in Xia's reworking of the old formulation of the Three Classes *sanpin 三品 as levels of quality.