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

Drawing inspiration from this large body of Western and Chinese scholarship, my work departs from conventional studies of Chinese literary geography and echoes Sheila Hones’ proposal for an integrated approach to literature and geography. It explores new frontiers in the field from a medieval Chinese perspective by capturing a specific historical moment when fields and knowledge were not yet demarcated by discipline, and when experts in geography and literature were one and the same group of people. First of all, my subject requires a broader understanding of geography and space. As I briefly touched upon at the beginning of this introduction, I understand geography not as a convenient synonym for geographic environments, nor merely as a body of knowledge in and about such environments. Rather, I employ a richer conception of geography that includes the literati’s heightened awareness of the urgent need to know more about their lived space, their direct involvement in exploring and recording that space, new perspectives in seeing and representing the world that issued from their geographical activities, and new ways of thinking about human inhabitation. Furthermore, geography in my study is not only spatial. It also has a temporal dimension. As my later discussion will show, premodern Chinese geographical studies are known for their wide-ranging coverage of local histories and customs. Accordingly, I am interested in how geography as a medieval idea subsumed history under new, massive imaginaries of space-time, shaping the experience of the viewer/visitor at any given time. I believe that this holistic perspective should enable a fuller appreciation of the complex encounter between geography and literature in the Chinese medieval world.

The relationship of geography to literature also goes beyond a unidirectional influence. In my study, I recognize the two fields, to borrow Hones’ terms, as truly a “combined double subject, on the one hand, and a combined, double, theoretical, and methodological framework, on the other.”²⁹ They are a dual dimension of the multitalented literati’s intellectual outlook. In my work, the combined and double framework matches nicely with the mid-Tang literati’s new cultural-spatial outlook,