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

representation may not apply.”³ Yee then attributes this characteristic of Chinese cartography to the fact that “the Chinese intellectuals who made and read maps held ‘broad learning’ (boxue 博學), not specialization, as an educational ideal and seem to have regarded cartography in those terms.”⁴ What Yee observes for Chinese cartography also applies to traditional Chinese geographic studies in general. It is commonly known that medieval geographic works often included a pictorial element as well as a textual element, and the maps or pictures themselves were heavily annotated with text. Moreover, when medieval Chinese geographers drew maps or wrote geographic works, in addition to observational measurements of physical geographical objects, they also relied on texts as important sources of information.⁵ In these ways, visual and textual materials supplemented and substantiated each other in conjuring up comprehensive geographical images. Consequently, in literary texts that share similar ways of seeing the world as geographic works or that draw reference from them, one sometimes observes a “verbal map”: the text lays out the spatial arrangement of geographic objects and navigates the reader through the objects as a picture or a map would do. In a broader sense, a verbal map may be found in any literary work dedicated to delineating a physical space. But as our discussion in the book will show, works by medieval Chinese authors often bear a resemblance to, or can be easily associated with, the textual parts of Chinese cartographical works, thus aligning them even more closely with actual maps.

Moreover, Mitchell’s emphasis on mental images as a proper member of the image family applies to medieval Chinese landscape literature. Landscape literature, especially the landscape essay, was a representative literary genre that engaged with space during the mid-Tang period. As Xiaofei Tian points out, early Chinese medieval literature and art depict the landscape as xiang 象, which refers to a kind of “mental seeing and image-making.”⁶ For early medieval literati, “landscape was essentially a grand image (xiang 象), and the perception, interpretation, and indeed the very construction of this image were contingent upon the workings of the mind.”⁷ Accordingly, the rise of the representation of the natural