| Chapter 1: | Geographical Advancements in the Mid-Tang |
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After Emperor Xianzong had received his ministers’ respects, he studied maps and enumerated the tributary states, saying, ‘Alas! Heaven endowed my family with everything and passed it onto me. How can I go to the ancestral shrine without any accomplishments?’ All his ministers held these words in awe and busied themselves fulfilling their duties.
睿聖文武皇帝既受羣臣朝，乃考圖數貢。曰：“嗚呼！天既全付予有家，今傳次在予，予不能事事，其何以見于郊廟?” 羣臣震懾，奔走率職。35
This scene of the emperor studying a map in front of his subjects marks the crucial moment in which he became determined to recover all the lost territory of the empire. Here, Han evokes the map as a source of political incentive for imperial revival and a symbol of the integrity of the empire.
While Yuan Zhen and Han Yu stood out as well-trained cartographers, Liu Yuxi was known for his contribution to texts of regional geography. In 815, Liu was demoted to Lianzhou, a prefecture in the remote imperial south. A local friend described to him a local natural phenomenon, namely the impressive sea tides, and asked him to write about it. Liu wrote a poem titled “Song for the Pounding Tide with Introduction” (“Tachao ge bing yin” 沓潮歌並引), in whose introduction he made it clear that the poem would be included in the “Record of the Southern Yue” 南越志, a record of local history and geography.36 In 839, he wrote an essay titled “Record for the New Post Road in the West of the Shannan Circuit” (“Shannan xidao xinxiu yilu ji” 山南西道新修驛路記). At the end of the essay he again revealed that the piece was written at the request of local people to be included in the “Treatise on Geography” (“Dili zhi” 地理志) in the official record of history.37 At the time, it was quite common for compilers of local geographic works to include relevant literary texts in geography, but Liu’s explicit mentioning of such inclusion demonstrates that as he was writing, he was highly aware that he was composing literature for geographical works. Later chapters will show that Liu’s literary writing on places in general resembles geographic writing in many ways.