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

cave by an unknown river. The poet Li He 李賀 (790–816), for example, depicted a bird’s-eye view of the entire empire from the vantage point of the cosmos in his poem “Dreaming Heaven” (“Mengtian” 夢天), whose wild and innovative imagination has impressed many critical readers. Detailed and delicate representations of the localities within the empire also flourished in the mid-Tang period. A wide range of poems in various forms by Liu Yuxi, Bai Juyi, and Yuan Zhen, among others, are known for their artful depictions of local geographies, while genres such as the office inscription (tingbi ji 廳壁記), or prose records written by officials or their friends about local territories and inscribed on office walls, became popular at the time. Even more prominent was the landscape essay (youji 遊記), a literary genre that first took its full form in the mid-Tang period and had a profound influence on the prose writing of later times. This genre was marked by its aesthetically pleasing yet geographically precise representations of the landscapes in the southern regions of the empire. These diverse literary forms all opened up new spatial imaginaries in Chinese literary history.

What bridged the extraordinary achievements in the fields of geography and literature in the mid-Tang period was a group of multitalented literati, whose deep involvement in contemporary geographical advancements allowed them to apply a geographical filter seamlessly to the making of literary imageries, metaphors, and narratives. They internalized cartographic images made available through contemporary map-making and map-reading activities to create innovative views of the world, or to navigate swiftly through vast spaces in literary texts. They intertextualized and interacted with local geographical works, most prominently map-guides (tujing 圖經), when writing about the diverse and intricate local spheres of the empire. When they were driven to the empire’s uncharted frontiers due to wars, mass migration, political demotion and other social changes, they made the exploration, domestication and inhabitation of the newly developed land and landscape a literary topic, and thus invented brand-new literary genres and styles. As such, these mid-Tang writers, themselves enthusiasts of geography,