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

and refracted by the lens interface, results in a changed image of the original on the final surface. Let me appropriate this notion from physics to explain my idea of cross-field affinity. The final surface on which the projected image appears corresponds to the field of literature. The images projected onto it are the spatial imaginaries, which may take various forms, from the pictorial and graphic to the textual, mental, and so on, or any combination thereof. The lens interface that transmits and refracts the light beam corresponds roughly to an ontological and epistemological filter through which writers processed information to make sense of the world. In premodern China, this refracting lens is essentially cross-field, although at different times and for different minds, the composition of that lens varied widely.

The focus of this study is how space is processed through this intellectual lens and transformed into images on a literary surface. My approach is to investigate how the literati’s geographical awareness and literary sensibility, two of the many dimensions that constitute this filtering lens, worked together to produce some of the most sophisticated spatial imaginaries in Chinese literary history. The prominence of geography in this study is a reflection of the significance the field had during the mid-Tang, when efforts to rejuvenate the post-Rebellion Tang Empire hinged in large part upon a better geographic understanding of its changed frontiers and underdeveloped hinterlands. The intellectual filtering lens, dually sharpened by geography and literature, enabled writers to delineate a rapidly changing imperial space and beyond with a mix of grandeur and subtlety, enchantment and accuracy. Their spatial imaginaries reflected the ambition and anxiety of contemporary men of letters, who aspired to be pillars of the imperial enterprise.

Given that the past millennium has destroyed or obscured most geographical materials from the Tang, we can reconstruct the geographical dimension of this filter only in indirect ways. In fact, here I have had to rely heavily on different kinds of textual records of geographical materials, many rich in literary elements, to restore the facts, context,