Spatial Imaginaries in Mid-Tang China: Geography, Cartography, an ...

of appeal and other texts engaging with the governance of local deities and their shrines. I argue that all of these works rely heavily on the geographical information provided by the map-guides; at the same time, we sometimes find interesting stories in the map-guides that were likely intended to subtly manipulate the official’s view of widely worshiped but illegitimate local deities. The chapter will end with examples of travel writing with explicit reference to the map-guide by Han Yu and Wang Jian 王建 (767–830), as evidence of yet another use of the map-guides among the mid-Tang literati.

Chapter 4 provides a new reading of some of the most important landscape essays about the southern part of the empire written by Yuan Jie 元結 (723–772), Liu Zongyuan, Han Yu, and Liu Yuxi. Because most of these landscape essayists wrote in the underdeveloped south to which they had been sent as political punishment, many critics believe that the harsh political dynamics of the period were the driving factor behind their favorable representations of the landscapes they encountered there. My reading supplements previous scholarship by situating landscape writing within the context of the mass southward migration after the Rebellion and the consequent geographical transformation in the south. It explores how literature helped establish new homes and create new landmarks in the developing imperial frontiers and served to transform the unfamiliar land into dwelling places. Many of these landmarks were then included in later geographical works and became an essential part of local geography. The chapter provides fresh interpretations of classical landscape essays from the perspective of home-building in the midst of radical geographical change and outlines a relationship of mutual reinforcement and inspiration between literature and geography.

I begin with a brief overview of the radical demographical and geographical changes that the imperial south underwent after the Rebellion. I then discuss works by Yuan Jie, a writer-official active shortly before the mid-Tang, as the prototype of the mid-Tang landscape essay. I argue that central to Yuan’s landscape writing was an image of a