| Chapter : | Introduction |
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his duties included managing imperial maps. Liu Zongyuan, Bai Juyi, and Liu Yuxi all repeatedly evoked contemporary maps and geographic guides in their writing about landscape, history, and specific local sites. Although literature and geography were never mutually exclusive disciplines in premodern China, the acute collective awareness of the importance of geography among the mid-Tang literary masters is still a curious departure from earlier literary norms. Their frequent and explicit invocation of geographic terms and works in their literary writing gives further proof of the vitality of the mid-Tang confluence between the two fields.
As more evidence and clues surfaced in the course of my research, I became convinced that certain significant achievements in geography and literature in the mid-Tang were closely related to each other. The period from the An Lushan Rebellion to the mid-Tang is one of the most crucial eras of geographical reconstitution in Chinese history. Wars and economic decay in the northern heartland of the empire drove massive populations to unfamiliar peripheries and compelled the educated elite to seek more geographic knowledge and tools for navigation. Strong political and intellectual calls to revitalize the much weakened, shrinking post-Rebellion empire added further symbolic value to the study of geography. Many leading political and cultural figures considered the expanding scope and depth of geographic knowledge to be a positive sign pointing to a successful imperial revival. This heightened geographic awareness across the empire is illustrated by the fact that the two long-standing chief ministers at the turn of the ninth century, Jia Dan 贾耽 (730–805) and Li Jifu 李吉甫 (758–814), were both acclaimed geographers. They produced a dazzling array of works such as maps and imperial geographic encyclopedias that became milestones in premodern Chinese geography, and their emphasis on geography became a shared basic tenet among mid-Tang cultural elites.
Correspondingly, mid-Tang literature witnessed innovative ways of exploring and representing space, from the vast cosmos to an obscure