| Chapter 1: | Geographical Advancements in the Mid-Tang |
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earlier and contemporary records of the earth, both with and without explicit reference to the original texts.22
Records of the earth were highly literary in nature. They dealt with natural geographic objects such as mountains and rivers as well as regional products and customs. Felt observes that records of the earth and other similar geographic writing of the time typically move the narrative “through space the way a human might physically travel between places, making observations, and then continuing on to the next location.”23 This is reminiscent of the tradition of very early geographic work, except that in records of the earth the implied traveler is human rather than a legendary figure and the geographic details are much richer and more realistic. For literary scholars, records of the earth are noteworthy for their stylistic descriptions of natural landscape in well-crafted lyrical prose. Wang Liqun argues that records of the earth in early medieval China paved the way for the emergence of the landscape essay in the Tang Dynasty in two important ways: first, it marked a leap in the intellectual awareness of natural landscape in Chinese history; and second, these well-written geographic records were frequently paraphrased in later landscape essays.24 In fact, Chinese and Western scholars have long found that some of the most celebrated passages in Liu Zongyuan’s landscape essays were taken from Li Daoyuan’s Commentary on the Classic of Waters, which in turn may have been taken from other records of the earth by Li’s contemporaries.25
This present book is set in the period of grand unification that followed in Chinese history. While my primary focus is the interplay between the new geographic developments of the mid-Tang and contemporaneous literature, it should be noted that writers of the period were by no means oblivious to earlier geographic achievements. Acutely aware of the unprecedented flourishing of geography in their own time, they also understood that this was a culmination of a long process of evolution. The fact of their appreciation of ancient geographic knowledge and works will help us better understand the general significance of geography