Escaping from a scroll

People can get lost in incredible art. Erik Nilsson experiences this - literally - when he can't find his way out of a building's entire floor that houses the world's longest Tibetan thangka on every wall.

We were amazed the planet's longest thangka filled the room. Then we more amazed it also filled the next one. And the next one. And the next one. And so on. On and on. And on. We were literally lost in the Tibetan painting at the Tibetan Medicine Museum of China in Xining, capital of Qinghai province. The museum was closing. Lights were dimming.

And we couldn't find our way out of the maze forged by the 618-meter-long scroll. It had to be mounted across numerous walls that jut in different directions to produce enough surface area to fit in the building's second floor, carving several rooms out of a more than 70,000-square-meter area.