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

according to art historians such as Pan Gongkai and Zhang Hongxing, from the Six Dynasties to the Tang, landscape painting as a genre developed out of the tradition of cartography.⁴⁵ This fluid relationship between map and painting allowed a map reader to appreciate a map within the traditions of landscape painting, or vice versa.

Moreover, just like ancient maps, Tang maps used numerous textual explanations either on the map or accompanying the map in the form of an appendix, connecting maps closely to intellectual writing. The most notable case is Jia Dan’s “Map of Chinese and Foreign Lands,” which was accompanied by an encyclopedia of forty volumes titled “Notes on Administrative Jurisdictions and Foreigners in Four Directions” (“Gujin junguo xiandao siyi shu” 古今郡國縣道四夷述). This prose work was intended to explain in great detail what was represented on the map, and it constituted a collection of Jia’s work over several decades. Since both the map and the encyclopedia were highly inclusive, they functioned together as a visual and textual interface designed to accumulate and integrate a wide range of knowledge.

The category of grand map, or datu 大圖, refers to maps of the empire or world maps in premodern China. It is also sometimes called imperial maps, or guotu 國圖.⁴⁶ Today we know of two grand maps of the mid-Tang. One is Jia Dan’s “Map of Chinese and Foreign Lands” and the other is “Map of the Territorial Record” (“Dizhi tu” 地志圖) by Li Gai (dates unknown). These maps joined landscape with seascape, situated the empire in the cosmos, and established order between the Chinese and the non-Chinese. Of the two, only Jia’s map was an official project sponsored by the court; it marked the highest cartographic achievement in the Tang Dynasty and was highly informative and inspirational for the production of an image of the world in mid-Tang and Late-Tang literature. Li’s map, on the other hand, was independently made and was much less known than Jia’s map. Today, we can only read about his map through Lü Wen’s 呂溫 (772–811) “Preface to the Map of the Territorial Record” (“Dizhi tu xu” 地志圖序). Our focus here will therefore be on Jia’s map.