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

to mid-Tang intellectuals. Their broad familiarity with geography of the past also afforded them wide latitude to appropriate and deploy previously established terms and ideas in their own very contemporary literary creations.

The mid-Tang writers were exposed to a variety of early geographic advancements. They were familiar with the ideas, images, and narratives in classical geographic texts such as “Tribute of Yu” and Classics of Mountains and Seas, or in later geographic monographs by authors such as Ban Gu and Li Daoyuan. In addition, fragments of a wide range of geographic studies by literati geographers from ancient times to the sixth century, including many records of the earth, were transmitted through the numerous encyclopedias, or leishu 類書, in the Sui and the Tang. Literally “classified books,” leishu consists of extracts taken from a variety of earlier writings and classified under different categories. Scholars in general trace the origin of leishu back to the early third century, and by the Tang Dynasty, leishu had developed into a crucial intellectual resource and literary reference that was widely consulted by the literati when composing literary works.²⁶

Understanding the accumulative impact of geographical works on mid-Tang writers is useful for our later discussions, because we sometimes need to tease out different layers of geographical influences in literary texts so as to find out which layer can be attributed to the contemporary geographical development of the mid-Tang period. For example, knowing that the scenic descriptions in Liu Zongyuan’s landscape essays draw heavily upon records of the earth from the Six Dynasties, we can then focus on elements in his essays that are not associated with records of the earth and are instead directly related to the geographical changes of his time. Knowing what conventional associations the “Maps of Mountains and Seas” would evoke for Tang poets, we can then look into how the poet Zhang Hu imposed a grand map-view that only became available in his time onto the old map-pictures. Likewise, when we discuss the possible geographical references behind literary writers’ engagement