The book under review (hereinafter: Imaginaries) is a study of historical geography from a peculiar angle. Interestingly, its author Wang Ao, an award-winning poet, received his PhD from Yale, one of the top universities in the United States, but one without a geography department. Here Yale is in good company – of the eight Ivy League schools, only one, Dartmouth, still has a geography department. This is probably an indication of the woeful state of geography education in the USA. Any serious academic undertaking that calls attention to the importance of geography should therefore be welcome. There is, however, more to Imaginaries than geography. It deals with the interaction and intersection between geography and literature during the mid-Tang period. The author is inspired by W.J.T. Mitchell's argument that attempts to erase the barrier between graphic/pictorial images and mental (and, by inference, verbal and textual) images.
Imaginaries begins with an introduction on three crucial sources of geographical knowledge during the period in question: the “Map of Chinese and foreign lands” by Jia Dan; a genre of literary writing known as “map-guides”; and the Maps and Treatises of the Prefect[ure]s and Counties of the Yuanhe Reign. These three together provided the backdrop for the interplay of geography and literature during mid-Tang times.
The chapter that follows consists of a number of case studies of the map-reading experiences of four eminent men of letters, Du Fu, Li He, Liu Zongyuan, and Zhang Hu, with a focus on Jia Dan's “grand map”.
The third chapter shifts attention to map-guides (tujing) and their relations with the literati. Daoist inscriptions by Yan Zhenqing, office inscriptions by Liu Zongyuan and Liu Yuxi, orisons of appeal by Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi, and poems by Han Yu and Wang Jian are cited as examples where map-guides played a significant role in literati writing and where the literati participated in a process called “cross-field intertextualizing”.
The fourth chapter takes us further afield into the southern fringe of the empire known as Lingnan (south of the Five Mountain Ranges), encompassing present-day Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, and north Vietnam. In this “underdeveloped” area, prominent men of letters, such as Yuan Jie, Liu Zongyuan, Han Yu, and Liu Yuxi, bore witness to a historic geographical transformation following the An Lushan Rebellion, in literary essays that went beyond the scope of geographic works.
The fifth and penultimate chapter examines the intimate relationship between two mid-Tang literary giants, Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi, with a view to shedding light on the interplay between literature and geography.
In the concluding chapter the author recaptures the points raised in the previous chapters with a special emphasis on the burst of literary activities inspired by geographical advancements in mid-Tang China.
Let us first look at the three crucial sources that underpin this research. In what ways does the first, the “grand map” of Jia Dan, represent a major advancement compared with earlier works, for example, the grand maps in Pei Ju's Xiyu tuji (Illustrated gazetteer of the Western Regions) (circa the early 7th century)? Are the map-guides of mid-Tang China qualitatively better than their predecessors (for example, the Bajun tujing of the Eastern Han)? Is Li Jifu's Maps and Treatises superior to earlier works in the same genre including the aforementioned Tuji by Pei Ju and the much more extensive Kuodi zhi (Comprehensive gazetteer) by Prince Li Tai et al. (641/642)?
Imaginaries takes for granted that mid-Tang started in the 790s (p. 39). However, the traditional periodization of the Tang, as first defined by the Ming scholar Gao Bing, regards 766 as the beginning of mid-Tang, which makes more sense.
The characters junxian in the title of Li Jifu's masterpiece are translated as “prefects and counties”. “Prefects” is clearly a mistake for “prefectures”; a better term is “commanderies”.
One of the fundamental features of China's time-honoured astrological tradition is the fenye 分野 system, whereby the zodiac and celestial equator segments of the sky are divided into the 28 Stellar Lodges (xiu), which are matched with corresponding provinces on earth. Imaginaries uses “celestial division” (p. 83) to translate fenye. I prefer Schafer's “apportioned champaigns” or “allotted fields”.
Allegedly, the malaria-infested tropical far south was permeated with a kind of evil vaporous emanation known as zhang 瘴 (the closest English has for zhang is “miasm”, not “malaria” itself, p. 95).
A type of traveller account known as youji, translated mostly as “landscape essays” (p. 6) or occasionally as “accounts of excursions” (p. 196) and “travel records” (pp. 241–2), was popular in the mid-Tang period. The best-known work of this genre is the voluminous youji by Xu Xiake (Ming dynasty), which goes far beyond the scope of “landscape essays”. Thus it seems more appropriate to render youji into something more inclusive, such as “travel notes”.
In Tang times, first-hand biographical information was provided by the close relatives or friends of a deceased person in the form of a xingzhuang 行狀. This is more like a bare-bone résumé than a biography (p. 186). Twitchett calls it fittingly “account of conduct”.
In traditional poetry and prose, two stars, Shen and Shang, are mentioned together to denote separation by an extremely long distance. Shen is a star in the Shen (Triaster) stellar lodge in the west; Shang is a star in the Xin (Heart) stellar lodge in the east. One can never sight the two stars under the same sky. When translated as Orion and Antares (p. 284) without explanation, they are not comprehensible.
With the arrival of Buddhism from the Subcontinent, the concept of the Indian mystical animal makara (mojie) reached China. It is identified as yu long 魚龍 in the sources, which is rendered in Imaginaries as “fish and dragons” (p. 230).
These quibbles notwithstanding, Imaginaries is a unique work of scholarship on the cross-pollination between geography and literature in mid-Tang china.
