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

channeled contemporary geographical advancements as they engaged with space through literature.

At the same time, the mid-Tang writers’ powerful reworking of geography brought new meanings to spaces, places and sites, and offered new materials for future geographical writing. In literature, authors reorganized natural objects, local sites, and other knowledge recorded in geographical works into images or narratives that were conducive to aesthetic, political, or social values. For them, geographical information meant not only knowledge and perspectives, but also words and letters to be matched with rhymes and woven in parallelisms, or rhetorical devices that would empower the authorial voice in their literature. For these purposes, they would sometimes depart from the verifiability of geography, giving it a fictional, creative twist; at other times, they established connections between otherwise unrelated places, thus subtly altering readers’ spatial perception in related regions. Furthermore, by writing about landscape and inscribing their writings in the landscape itself, literary authors also helped establish new landmarks in the physical space and changed the milieu of the local environment. These landmarks would then in turn feature in later geographical works and become famous sites of literary pilgrimage.

To summarize, by identifying traces of the epistemological and aesthetic filter in part shaped by contemporary geographical advancements in mid-Tang literary texts, my cross-field investigation will probe into the sources of inspiration for those texts’ diverse and intricate spatial imaginaries and illuminate their effects on readers. This geographical perspective will give birth to a new and revealing line of interpretation into some of the most important works of Tang literature. More broadly, a close investigation of how geography and literature cross-pollinated in the mid-Tang period will uncover a rich cultural history of the intellectual exploration of the world on both fronts. In a time when the empire was struggling to revive itself, multitalented literati used their geographically