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

home in the south that could meet a northerner’s standard, one that combined personal, practical, and aesthetic needs with communal benefits. Following in Yuan Jie’s footsteps, mid-Tang writers such as Han Yu, Liu Yuxi, Liu Zongyuan, and other lesser-known literati took up the task of transforming the desolate south into an inhabitable space by establishing new home-like landmarks, writing about them, and then inscribing their writings in the landscape itself. Finally, I will conduct a revisionist close reading of several of Liu Zongyuan’s most acclaimed landscape essays, such as “To the Little Rock Pond West of the Little Hill” (“Zhi Xiaoqiu xi Xiaoshitan ji” 至小丘西小石潭記) and “Rocky Stream” (“Shijian ji” 石澗記) within this new context, interpreting these works beyond the personal scope of political frustration and philosophical introspection. As the landmarks that these writers built, marked, or inscribed became new features in later geographical works, a reciprocal cycle between literature and geography was completed.

Chapter 5 approaches Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi from a new perspective, building on the previous discussion of the interactions between mid-Tang literature and the contemporaneous advancement of geographic studies. Under the collective denomination “Yuan-Bai,” Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi rapidly ascended to celebrity status in the early ninth century. Their deeply intertwined works attained a vast and penetrating popularity and represented the prevalent literary tastes of their age, especially during the Yuanhe period (806–820). Among other factors, what helped these two poets build up their joint poetic enterprise was a dynamic, interactive geographic dimension in their exchange writing. Over the course of their turbulent migratory careers, they integrated knowledge of routes, landmarks, places, distances, travel speed, and so on into their exchange poems about memories, hopes, dreams, telepathy, and imagined journeys so as to orient each other toward imaginary reunions. In so doing, they tested how geographically unrelated corners of the empire could be connected by the lines of their literary texts and could consequently acquire new meanings in the real world.