A Chinese export painting on pith showing a new year's parade. leading the procession is a girl in blue holding a banner with the characters "金鳳"(golden phoenix) and with a hanging lantern on each side with the characters "元旦" (new year’s day January the first). Behind, a girl in pink blows into a conch shell, followed by a younger girl playing the flute while standing on a man's shoulders. Finally, a dancer dressed as a peacock (or a phoenix) whose beak holds a hanging object and a pair of rolled-up scrolls.

Pith paintings were created in studios in Canton (Guangzhou) which was one of the few Chinese ports open to Western traders. Such paintings were mounted in albums and sold to Western visitors as souvenirs of their time in China. Thus, most paintings show scenes of daily life, the structure of society and cultural celebration, subjects of interest to curious foreigners.

The works are painted using gouache on pith paper, which is not really a paper but rather a thin sheet of the spongy cellular tissue found in the stem of a small tree called Tetrapanax Papyrifera. This material allowed for the pigments painted on them to sit on its surface giving the colours incredible brilliance and brightness.