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

I first discuss the respective geographical engagement of Yuan Zhen and Bai Juyi in their individual works. Yuan was an expert in cartography, while Bai had abundant travel experience from an early age. Their different forms of geographic learning resulted in different patterns of interaction between literature and geography in their work. This discussion is meaningful in and of itself, but also serves as a prelude to the poets’ much more sophisticated geographical engagement in their long-distance exchange poetry. The chapter then highlights two sets of poems written in two different circumstances: the first pair was written when Yuan was passing Liangzhou (in modern day Shaanxi Province) on his way to Sichuan while Bai remained in the capital. Both poems address the locations of the two friends in a surprisingly coordinated manner, and my analysis indicates that this poetic wonder was made possible only because the two poets were continually tracing each other in their respective mental maps and wrote about this spatial imagination in their poetry. The second two poems are two long-regulated verses (pailü 排律) written when Yuan was demoted to Tongzhou in Sichuan and Bai was demoted to Jiangzhou in Jiangxi. Bai’s work contains a lengthy section on the local geography of Jiangzhou, while Yuan corresponds with couplets that address one place in the first line and another in the second. This geographic juxtaposition allows Yuan to join and integrate the two otherwise unrelated places in his textual space, enabling him to form connections with his faraway friend. Finally, I study a series of Yuan and Bai’s individual and exchanged works that traced the routes of the dissemination of their literary output. As a whole, these works conjured up a textual map for traveling texts and a literary empire dominated by their creations.

This final chapter culminates in a grand finale that weaves the key issues discussed in the previous chapters into the spectacular case of the poetic exchange between the two most popular mid-Tang poets. Their vision of their sphere of influence was based on an understanding of the empire, and their articulation of that vision took the form of a poetic grand map. Their corresponding poems illustrating the rich details of the