| Chapter 1: | Geographical Advancements in the Mid-Tang |
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In addition to making maps and writing geographic texts, literati writing itself established new landmarks in the newly developed imperial frontiers, which in turn became new favorites of future geographic works. Accompanying the mass immigration to the south during and following the Rebellion, leading cultural figures including Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan, Bai Juyi, Liu Yuxi, and Yuan Zhen were all sent to the south for official posts, mostly in the form of political demotions. While in the south, many of them actively discovered new landscapes, built new buildings, and designed new cities and dwelling places. They wrote to record their explorations or to mark them in the physical terrain by inscribing the literary texts into the landscape. In this sense, their relocation was part of the broader geographic changes of the empire, and they actively participated in these changes as both political officials and literary writers. The landmarks they created can be found in geographic works from as early as the Late Tang, and some still persist today. This is yet another way that the mid-Tang literary writers contributed to contemporary and future geographic advancement, and it required a high level of both geographic and literary sensitivity.
As a result, the mid-Tang witnessed a number of achievements in geographic exploration that were among the most important during the dynasty and even in the medieval period as a whole. Next, I would like to introduce two major geographic achievements in the mid-Tang, both of which are closely related to our discussion of mid-Tang literature. They are the grand maps and the map-guides.
Maps and Grand Maps in the Mid-Tang
Jia Dan’s “Map of Chinese and Foreign Lands” provided mid-Tang writers with fresh perspectives with which to imagine and navigate the world through literature. To prepare for our investigation into the intellectual conversation between maps and mid-Tang literature, in this section I will introduce how Tang maps represented space in general, and more