Structures of the Earth: Metageographies of Early Medieval China (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series) 0674251164, 9780674251168

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Structures of the Earth Felt, D. Jonathan

Published by Harvard University Asia Center Publications Program Felt, D. Jonathan. Structures of the Earth: Metageographies of Early Medieval China. 1 ed. Harvard University Asia Center Publications Program, 2021. Project MUSE.

muse.jhu.edu/book/113544.

For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/113544

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Structures of the Earth

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Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 123

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Structures of the Earth Metageographies of Early Medieval China

D. Jonathan Felt

Published by the Harvard University Asia Center Distributed by Harvard University Press Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London 2021

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© 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Printed in the United States of America The Harvard-Yenching Institute, founded in 1928, is an independent foundation dedicated to the advancement of higher education in the humanities and social sciences in Asia. Head­ quartered on the campus of Harvard University, the Institute provides fellowships for advanced research, training, and graduate studies at Harvard by competitively selected faculty and graduate students from Asia. The Institute also supports a range of academic activities at its fifty partner universities and research institutes across Asia. At Harvard, the Institute promotes East Asian studies through annual contributions to the Harvard-Yenching Library and publication of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies and the Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series. Material in chapter 3, which first appeared in “Metageographies of the Northern and Southern Dynasties,” T’oung Pao 103, nos. 4–5 (2017): 334–87, has been reproduced with the permission of Brill Academic Publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Felt, David Jonathan, 1982– author. Structures of the earth : metageographies of early medieval China / David Jonathan Felt. Cambridge (Massachusetts) : Harvard University Asia Center, 2021. | Harvard-Yenching ­Institute monograph series ; 123. Includes bibliographical references and index. LCCN 2020041876 | ISBN 9780674251168 (hardcover) LCSH: Geographical perception—China. | China—History. | China—Geography. LCC G71.5 .F45 2021 | DDC 304.2/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041876 Index by Anne Holmes & Rob Rudnick, EdIndex Printed on acid-free paper Last figure below indicates year of this printing 27 26 25 24 23 22 21

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To my family Cambria, James, Lucy, and Henry Thank you for your patience

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Looking up, [the sage] observes the patterns of heaven; looking down, he examines the structures of the earth. Hence, he understands the causes of all things both perceptible and imperceptible. 仰以觀於天文，俯以察於地理，是故知幽明之故。 —Zhou yi zhengyi 7.312

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Contents

List of Figures and Maps ix Acknowledgments

xi

Chronology of Sinitic Cores in the Early Medieval Period

xii

Introduction

1

1 Geographical Writing

17

2 Region and Ecumene

66

3 North and South

117

4 Mountains and Rivers

165

5 East and West

211

Conclusion

256

List of Abbreviations

275

Notes

277

Bibliography 335 Index 371

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Figures and Maps Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 C.1 C.2

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Number of texts in each subgenre of geographical writing recorded in Sui shu 28 Number of texts in each subgenre of geographical writing recorded in Han–Tang dili shuchao 28 Local, natural, and foreign geographies recorded in Sui shu 30 Local, natural, and foreign geographies recorded in Han–Tang dili shuchao 30 World and capital geographies recorded in Sui shu 31 World and capital geographies recorded in Han–Tang dili shuchao 31 Local geographies recorded in Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi 34 Local geographies for the Yellow and Yangzi River basins, as recorded in Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi 34 Geographical subgenres for the Yellow and Yangzi River basins, as recorded in Sui shu 37 Geographical subgenres for the Yellow and Yangzi River basins, as recorded in Han–Tang dili shuchao 37 Yuji tu (Map of the traces of Yu [the Great]) 267 Sihai huayi zongtu (General map of the Sinitic and foreign lands within the four seas) 271

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x

Figures and Maps

Maps I.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9

River drainage basin regions for the Shuijing zhu maps 14–15 Number of citations from all texts in Shuijing zhu 22 Number of citations from geographical texts in Shuijing zhu 23 Number of citations from local geographies in Shuijing zhu 23 Sites in the life of Yu the Great from local geographies 83 Number of local geographies, from Sui shu 92 Number of local geographies, from Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi 92 Number of geographical texts (excluding world geographies), from Han–Tang dili shuchao 93 Number of citations from anomaly accounts on the West in Shuijing zhu 218 Number of citations from imperial sources on the West in Shuijing zhu 218 Number of citations from Buddhist geographies on the West in Shuijing zhu 219 Schematic outline of the Indo-Sinitic bipolar metageography 233 Character count of the Shuijing zhu text 240 Number of references to stupas (ta) in Shuijing zhu 246 Number of references to temples/monasteries (si) and pagodas (futu) in Shuijing zhu 247 Number of unique sources quoted in Shuijing zhu 248 Number of citations from Buddhist geographies in Shuijing zhu 249

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Acknowledgments

Like the proverbial dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants, I am profoundly indebted to many people and institutions who have made this book possible. Foremost, I extend my gratitude to my teachers for their brilliant instruction, patient guidance, honest feedback, and sincere ­encouragement. These include Mark Lewis, Al Dien, Kären Wigen, Matt Sommer, Paul Kroll, Terry Kleeman, and Michael Farmer. My notes ­reference the generations of scholars whose research enabled my own. Countless friends, classmates, colleagues, reviewers, and conference participants have read portions of the book manuscript or have engaged in dialogue with me about the book’s ideas. The book is much better because of them. A few deserve special mention: Andrew Chittick, Jörg Hüsemann, Peter Bol, Diana Duan, Kirk Larsen, Aaron Skabe­lund, and one anonymous reviewer for the Harvard University Asia Center publications program. Much of chapter 3 was published previously in T’oung Pao, and I am grateful for their permission to reproduce that material here, as well as for the reviewers of that article who helped to refine its argument. Ryan Heuser of the Stanford Spatial History Lab provided invaluable assistance with data mining, my research assistant Sarah Quan facilitated the GIS mapping, and my research assistant Lizzy ­Gipson did proofreading. My research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Stanford University, Virginia Tech, and Brigham Young University. The staff of the Harvard University Asia Center publications program has been immensely helpful. Especially noteworthy are Deborah Del Gais and copyeditor Susan Stone, who greatly improved the quality of the manuscript. Lastly, I am grateful for the loving support of my wife Cami and my three children, James, Lucy, and Henry. Far from being distractions from my important historical research, these people keep me grounded in the far more important work of the here and now. It is to my family that I dedicate this book.

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Introduction

B

y 207 BCE, the Second Emperor of Qin 秦二世 (Ying Huhai 贏胡亥, r. 210–207 BCE) had lost control of the empire his father had built. Competing generals raced to the imperial capital at Xianyang to claim the official seals that symbolized imperial rule. Liu Bang 劉邦 (later, Han Emperor Gaozu, r. 202–195 BCE) and his army were the first to arrive, but Xiang Yu 項羽 (232–202 BCE), with a much larger army, was close on his heels and would easily take the capital as soon as he arrived. As Liu Bang took possession of the city and palaces, he and his officers greedily rushed to the treasuries and storehouses to seize as much of the court’s riches as they could—gold, silks, and other jewels that had been gathered from across the known world. All of his officers but one, that is. Xiao He 蕭何 (d. 193 BCE) alone understood what the most valuable objects at the Qin court actually were. He raced to the chancellor’s office, where he gathered the “maps and documents” (tushu 圖書) of state that were stored there. After confiscating as much treasure as possible, Liu Bang withdrew from the capital. Xiang Yu then sacked it and burned it to the ground. Xiao He understood better than Liu Bang, Xiang Yu, and all the other generals that, for the upcoming struggle to bring order to the world, the geographical information contained in these maps and documents was of far greater value than any amount of gold. Writing a century later, the historian Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 86 BCE) explained, “It was through this that the King of Han [Liu Bang] knew all of the strategic points of the world, the

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2 Introduction

size of populations, the strong and the weak places, and the sufferings of the people” 漢王所以具知天下阸塞，戶口多少，彊弱之處，民所 疾苦者.1 Geographical information, in other words, was recognized in the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) to be essential to the imperial project. Eight centuries after Sima Qian, officials of the Tang dynasty (618– 907) held far more ambivalent opinions about the now independent literary genre of geographical writing (dili ji 地理記, literally, “records of the structures of the earth”). Du You 杜佑 (735–812 CE), for example, acknowledged the political utility of geographical records in “examining the changes [in administrative units], understanding strategic points, and observing local customs [i.e., so that they can be corrected]” 徵因革，知要害，察風土. But he also objected vociferously to the high quantity and low quality of geographical literature, criticizing how “minutiae fills these documents; not a tree or stone is left out. At every movement they fill a hundred scrolls. How could this be what is called extracting the pivotal and important? They are preposterous and baseless, records of everywhere with random accounts” 纖介畢書，樹石無 漏，動盈百軸，豈所謂撮機要者乎，如誕而不經，遍記雜說. He continued his diatribe, explaining that “all of these [geographical texts] describe the miracles of their hometown and the prosperity of their local worthies. But, if one consults other documents, there are many ­errors and mistakes” 皆自述鄉國靈怪，人賢物盛。參以他書，則多紕謬.2 By the Tang dynasty, much of geographical knowledge had come to be seen as trivial, unreliable, and parochial—and therefore detrimental to the imperial project. What happened between the Han and Tang dynasties to elicit such different interpretations of geographical learning among imperial ­officials? Between the Han and Tang dynasties, geographical writing developed into an independent literary genre. How, then, was geography transformed through this developmental process from being essential to imperial order to being viewed as detrimental to maintaining order? I will argue that this newly emergent genre of geographical writing was an intellectual response to the unique and complex spatial realities that took shape after the fragmentation of Han imperial order in the

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Introduction

3

third century. The Han spatial ideology of centrality and universality was challenged by the postimperial realities of a Sinitic civilized world that was more spatially vast, culturally diverse, environmentally varied, and politically fragmented than it had ever been before. To make sense of this new landscape, literati explored new geographical topics, spatial scales, and worldviews that had previously been ignored in Warring States (475–221 BCE) and Han texts. They structured all of this new geographical knowledge within innovative “metageographies” that highlighted the importance of regional, frontier, natural, and foreign spaces, thereby undermining the precepts of court centrality and cultural universalism. This book will focus on four of these early medieval (ca. 200–600 CE) metageographies and will conclude by elucidating their enduring influence throughout Chinese history—as well as their utility for historians and Sinologists today as alternatives to imperial and nationalistic models of monolithic unity and Sinocentrism. But first, defining some foundational terms will help to delineate the boundaries of this study.

Metageographies A “metageography” is, according to Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen, “the set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world.” Metageographies are both conscious and unconscious spatial frameworks that inevitably organize human understanding of the natural and human geography within which they exist. They divide and demarcate space; they define identities and relationships; they illuminate some spaces and obfuscate others. Modern examples of global metageographies include Eurocentrism, the East-West model, the n ­ ation-states system, the geographic coordinate system, Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, and the first, second, and third worlds. From medieval times, Europe’s T-O maps and India’s Jambudvipa maps are further examples. Although metageographies are often claimed by their makers to be true depictions of lived realities or “natural,” they are in fact culturally constructed and historically contingent. They are related to but are not mere reflections of human practice

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4 Introduction

on the ground. They are perpetuated by existing power structures so as to maintain their power and authority.3 Metageographies matter because they both depict and construct spatial realities. This relationship can be articulated within Henri ­Lefebvre’s influential postmodern conceptual triad of “spatial practice” (physical and experiential), “representations of space” (conceptual and discursive), and “representational spaces” (cultural and symbolic). Metageographies are one type of representation of space. They are a cognitive interpretation and representation of spatial practice.4 They inevitably simplify the entirely overwhelming complexity of the real world—showing this but not that, showing it this way but not the other. It is “precisely because of this interesting selectivity,” articulates Denis Wood, “that the map is enabled to work.” Representations of space are unavoidably a selective, interpretive, and purposeful representation of spatial practice. They therefore highlight certain spatial patterns over others and thereby redirect spatial practices according to those newly highlighted patterns. This construction of space affirms particular sociopolitical structures as it empowers some historical agents and marginalizes others. Wood further explains that, although representations of space are constructed by particular historical agents in a particular historical context, they “conspire to . . . naturalize this product of so much cultural energy” in order to present their spatial model as if it were a faithful reproduction of a lived reality. But, once representations of space are “no longer confused with the world, [they] are suddenly capacitated as powerful ways of making statements about the world.”5 Whether intentionally or not, the set of spatial structures through which Sinologists, historians, and average people have all ordered their knowledge of Chinese history has overwhelmingly been the imperial metageography. This metageography was initially developed by QinHan officials and literati and has been passed down and updated throughout the two subsequent millennia of rising and falling dynastic empires. Thoroughly embedded within concepts of Chinese exceptionalism, this spatial framework asserted that Sinitic civilization was the central and structuring realm of the entire world and that the imperial court was the central and structuring point of Sinitic civilization. Because of the geographic isolation of East Asia when this imperial metageography was first developed, it assumed a conflation of Sinitic

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Introduction

5

elite culture with civilization itself, that the political authority of the Son of Heaven extended across the entire world, and that the rise and fall of individual dynastic empires maintained a tidy and timeless ­political order for the entire civilized world. This metageography prioritized political structures over cultural, economic, or environmental patterns. It insisted that political unity was and always would be the natural order of the (Sinitic) civilized world and that regionalism and periods of political fragmentation were abominations, being aberrations from this normative ideal. Like the dynastic histories, this metageography was developed by officials and for officials in order to legitimize their artificial imperial order and to claim that such insti­ tutions were natural and desirable. The uncritical reception of this imperial metageography in Western scholarship has led to an overly simplistic understanding of China and the “Chinese world order.”6 In Chinese scholarship, despite the inherent contradictions between the imperial and national models of political authority, the ancient principles of Sinocentrism, Chinese exceptionalism, and political unity have greatly influenced the modern nationalistic interpretation of China’s premodern history.7 After the fragmentation of imperial order in the third through fourth centuries, literati found themselves within a “postimperial” world in which the Han imperial metageography was no longer useful in making sense of a world that was now far larger, more diverse, more environmentally varied, and less politically centralized than it had ever been before. As a work of spatial history, this book examines the interrelations between historical geography (spatial practice) and the history of geographical thought (spatial representations). The two must be examined together to make any sense of them individually.8 I argue that this watershed moment in the production of geographical literature with its framing metageographies was primarily a response to and a reshaping of three profound shifts in the human geography of the Sinitic ecumene during the early medieval period. The first was the fragmentation of Han imperial order into regional regimes controlled by military dynasts and local communities dominated by great families. Second was the transformation of the Yangzi River basin from a southern frontier into the secondary core region of the Sinitic ecumene. Third was the transplantation of Indian-born Buddhism into the

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6 Introduction

Sinitic ecumene. Although the epithet “age of chaos” is an overstatement and has been used to dismiss this postimperial period from historical attention, it was still undoubtedly an age of dynamic spatial movements, fragmentations, realignments, and transformations in spatial practice. It is this fluidity in spatial practice in the third through fifth centuries that inspired the flourishing of geographical writing and the development of novel metageographies with which to make sense of this new, more complex, postimperial world. It is also what makes this first postimperial period so pivotal and influential for the rest of Chinese history.9 Early medieval literati sought to make sense of a new postimperial world in which the official Han imperial metageography was no longer compelling or useful. Of the four novel metageographies that restructured space and challenged the basic tenets of Han imperial metageog­ raphy, the first is a metageography of ecumenical regionalism. In contrast to the imperial metageography that subordinated regionalism to the imperial center, ecumenical regionalism presented a reciprocal relationship between the distinctiveness of regional cultures and the unity of the Sinitic ecumene. This cultural work was especially important for the transformation of the Yangzi basin during the early medieval period. In this model, the (Sinitic) civilized world was defined through collective participation by local elites rather than top-down, centralized rule—as a cultural ecumene rather than a polit­ical empire. I explore this metageography in chapter 2 through an exam­ination of local geographies of the third through fifth centuries. At variance with the singular and absolute claim to imperial centrality, the metageography of northern and southern dynasties articulated a political/cultural binary within the Sinitic ecumene between competing imperial claims from the old civilizational core of the Yellow River basin and the new secondary core of the Yangzi basin. Sui (581–618) and Tang officials would describe this binary as equal and complementary, but literati of the fifth through sixth centuries understood the binary as asymmetrical and competitive. Chapter 3 will examine the development of this metageography as presented in imperial geographies of the fifth through seventh centuries. Contrary to the imperial claim to the anthropocentric ordering of the natural world, the metageography of the hydrocultural landscape

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Introduction

7

took natural river systems as the primal and enduring foundation that structured the ephemeral social, political, and cultural patterns of human geography. Although nature was the foundational and dominant structure in this model, there existed a dialectic relationship between the natural and the human landscape, in which each shaped and was shaped by the other. This model dismantled political boundaries (both internal and external), effaced civilizational divides, and provided a consistent organizing structure for new geographical knowledge beyond the Sinitic ecumene. I explore this metageography in chapter 4 through an examination of Li Daoyuan’s Shuijing zhu. However, the concept of nature and culture working in a reciprocal relationship informs my analysis in the entire book. Dismantling the imperial conflation between world, civilized world, and world-empire, the metageography of the Indo-Sinitic bipolar worldview divided the world into eastern and western halves, separated topographically by a continental divide and distinguished culturally by Sinitic and Indic cultural ecumenes. Each half was centered on its own parallel “central realm” (zhongguo in the east or madhyadeśa in the west). The entry of Buddhism into Sinitic culture disrupted traditional assumptions of Sinocentrism and allowed Sinitic literati to engage for the first time in thinking about civilizations within a comparative framework. The Indo-Sinitic bipolar metageography is examined in chapter 5, but the associated analytical tool of comparative history is used throughout this book in order to deconstruct the assumed imperial and nationalistic paradigms of Chinese exceptionalism that still unduly influence the field.10 To be clear, none of the four labels I use (ecumenical regionalism, northern and southern dynasties, hydrocultural landscape, or Indo-­ Sinitic bipolar worldview) appears in early medieval texts. These are frameworks that structured spatial thought and practice in the early medieval period, both consciously and unconsciously, but they vary con­ siderably in their emic expression. The hydrocultural metageography was the most self-consciously articulated in its own time in Li Dao­ yuan’s preface to the Shuijing zhu. It was not until the Sui and early Tang periods that the northern and southern dynasties metageography would be fully articulated and labeled as such, but the framework shaped geopolitical rhetoric and policy for centuries preceding its

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8 Introduction

textual expression. The remaining two metageographies were less self-­ consciously expressed by early medieval authors, with the framework of ecumenical regionalism articulated least of all. Yet these two metageographies still shaped spatial thought and practice. In articulating these four metageographies, I have sought to remain true to the embryonic concepts first used by early medieval literati. Although these metageographies were products of the unique postimperial cultural milieu of the early medieval Sinitic ecumene, they endured long after the Sui-Tang empire conquered most of the Sinitic ecumene in the late sixth century and reasserted the orthodoxy of imperial metageography. Whenever imperial order fragmented or literati sought to imagine the world outside of the imperial framework, these four metageographies would inevitably be resuscitated, adapted, and reemployed. The enduring influence of these early medieval metageog­ raphies will be explored in the book’s conclusion. My final argument is that these metageographies can be fruitfully employed by modern historians and Sinologists as alternatives to the imperial metageography, which is too often the unconscious default spatial framework for thinking about Chinese history and culture. The imperial metageography was hardly a faithful representation of lived reality. Indeed, its court-centered and monolithic framework makes it singularly ill-equipped for examining the history of anything happening outside of the imperial court. Instead, these four early medieval metageographies offer alternative spatial frameworks for thinking about Chinese history in new and more complex ways. They illuminate spaces and historical actors that are obfuscated by imperial and national spatial frameworks. They highlight longue durée patterns that transcend the specificities of the early medieval milieu in which they were first constructed.

China, Reconsidered “China” is not at all the uncomplicated or self-evident thing that it first appears to be. The word has been used confusingly to refer to rather different entities throughout history: a cultural civilization, a geographical territory, a political state, and an ethnic nation. None of these

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Introduction

9

entities were coterminous with each other or consistent across history, and the complexity of the early medieval period muddles these definitions further. A number of historians have pointed out the inconsistent and ahistorical use of the concept of “China.” Charles Holcombe has noted that the English word “China” “had no precise premodern Chinese counterpart at all,” explaining that although the term zhongguo 中國 (“middle kingdom[s]” or “central realm”) “does have an extremely ancient pedigree . . . the expression only really became equivalent to the English word ‘China’ in the twentieth century as China struggled to redefine itself as a nation-state in conformity with distinctly modern expectations.” Similarly, Hugh Clark has warned against the “teleological paradigm of ‘China,’ the presumption that the China that ‘is’ today—the geopolitical entity that includes ­everything from the Yellow and Yangtze River basins to the deeper south, what is sometimes called the core eighteen provinces—has always been, in potential if not reality.”11 Despite these problems, many historians and Sinologists still resign themselves to employing the term (and inevitably the idea of ) “China” for expediency’s sake. In conformity with the geographical lens through which I will examine an already politically and culturally complex period of history, I will go one step further and jettison the term “China” altogether, thereby avoiding unconscious slips into the nationalistic teleology that I am in fact arguing against. When talking about geographic spaces, I will employ natural features, such as the Yellow and Yangzi River basins—neither of which was indisputably “Chinese” land during the early medieval period.12 When talking about a political entity, I will use the name of the dynastic state. All of the dynasties that are commonly referred to as “Chinese” were in fact universalist empires—self-consciously multiethnic in their leadership and subject populations.13 The most common articulation of something resembling “China” in premodern texts is as a cultural/civilizational realm or ecumene. For this I will use the term “Sinitic.”14 This is usually what is meant by the ancient terms hua 華 and xia 夏 or their compound huaxia.15 The Sinitic ecumene was a historically dynamic cultural community that was united by a common elite culture based on the classical literature of the nonalphabetic Sinitic script that first emerged in the Yellow River

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10 Introduction

plain. It encompassed considerable ethnic and linguistic diversity. The Sinitic ecumene was therefore like other premodern “civilizations,” as characterized by Patricia Crone: a literary-based, transregional community of elites who shared a common set of beliefs and practices that defined participants as “civilized person[s],” quite separate from the vernacular-based, localistic communities that characterize the multicultural assortment of nonelites, which “a veneer of high culture” conceals.16 Although all premodern elite scripts (such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Arabic) functioned in this way, the nonalphabetic quality of Sinitic script and its lack of competition from alternative scripts across East Asia made the Sinitic ecumene an extreme case of a unitary, hegemonic script concealing vast and diverse vernacular cultures. Although the question of the boundaries of the Sinitic ecumene seems an obvious one, it exposes the modern obsession with territorially bounded nation-states. It was in the interest of the premodern universalist empires to claim that its domain had no limits or that, if limits did exist, they extended to the edges of the civilized world, beyond which was an outer realm of barbarism that was not worthy of direct administration. This definition of boundaries was an imperial fiction and is laden with expediencies, contradictions, and tautologies. Instead of trying to define hard boundaries of the Sinitic ecumene, it is more useful to think of it (like all premodern cultural ecumenes) in terms of civilizational cores that gradually disseminated outward with an ever lighter touch as they began to overlap with alternative elite cultures. The Yellow River plain was the ancient core of the Sinitic ecumene, and the Yangzi River basin was, during the early medieval period, in the process of becoming a new secondary core of Sinitic civilization. But the Sinitic ecumene extended wherever Sinitic script was used to articulate refined culture. It reached south through the Pearl and Red River basins and into peninsular Southeast Asia, east through the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese archipelago, north into Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, and west through the Gansu corridor. These boundaries (if one insists on imposing them) shifted over time and varied significantly in their selective adoption of Sinitic elite culture, which always had to be negotiated with regional vernacular cultures both on the frontiers and in the interior of the Sinitic ecumene as well as with alternative elite, literary cultures in Central and Southeast Asia.

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Introduction

11

Although important today in modern nationalist political ideology, the concept of ethnicity is little discussed in early medieval sources, since it was usually hidden underneath the universalizing ­imperial and civilizational ideals expressed in Sinitic script. The use of “Han” as an ethnonym is first attested in this period but in a very different way from the modern Han ethnicity that today makes up over 90 percent of the People’s Republic of China. In the fifth century, it was used as a term of derision by the Särbi overlords for their subject population in the Yellow River basin and did not include people of the Yangzi basin whose descendants today are identified as “Han.” These Han people were just one of many ethnic groups (each with its own vernacular language and culture) that competed with others for political dominance of the Sinitic ecumene throughout the early medieval period, including, most importantly, the Wu of the lower Yangzi basin, the Eastern Chu of the Huai River region, and the Särbi of the Sino-steppe borderland—none of whom fit neatly into the ideologically driven inner “Chinese” versus outer “barbarian” binary.17 Within imperial territory there were also many “interior borderlands” that resisted assimilation into the dominant Sinitic literary culture. These disparate geographical, political, cultural, and ethnic definitions of “China” rarely mapped onto each other, and their unique historical configurations perpetually transformed over the thousands of years of history. Replacing the monolithic and ahistorical term “China” with spatially specific and historically contingent terms empowers historians and Sinologists to see beyond the image of uniformity that imperial officials sought to project. It reveals ruptures, inconsistencies, and disjunctions that undermine both the discourse of imperial continuity between “Chinese dynasties” and the teleologies of modern East Asian nation-states.18

Geographical Writing The initial corpus of geographical writing (dili ji; “records of the structures of the earth”) that developed during the early medieval period will make up the primary body of evidence for this study. Bibliographic lists

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12 Introduction

and textual fragments preserved in commentaries and collectanea ­reveal that hundreds of geographical texts were written between the Han and Tang dynasties. However, since today only a handful of such texts have survived in complete form, I must foreground the issue of sources in this introduction.19 The loss of these texts no doubt imposes limitations on the conclusions that one can reliably make. But there is sufficient extant source material with which one can, with a healthy dose of uncertainty, piece together the fragmentary evidence, outline the basic developmental arc of the genre, and say something of its cultural work. As Tian Xiaofei has argued about this period of scant textual sources, it is better “to perform textual excavations and make use of what we have to try and reconstruct, as best we can, what once was, even knowing that it can only be a partial picture,” than “to dismiss such a period out of hand.”20 The sole extant comprehensive geographical treatise from the early medieval period is the Shuijing zhu 水經注 (Guide to waterways with commentary).21 For this reason, it will be the anchor of this study. In about 515 to 524 CE, Li Daoyuan 酈道元 (d. 527), an official of the Northern Wei (386–534) court, took the late third-century text known as Shuijing as an outline with which to structure his comprehensive geography of the world. He expanded the terse, one-fascicle sketch of 137 rivers of mainland East Asia into an exhaustive, forty-fascicle (988 pages in one modern print edition) tome of 1,252 rivers and the physical and cultural geography surrounding them—extending his coverage to include India, Inner Eurasia, and Southeast Asia. To accomplish the author’s stated goal of being “all-encompassing in scope” (zhou 周) and “complete in detail” (bei 備), the Shuijing zhu draws from over 450 earlier textual accounts, 300 stone inscriptions, and frequent vernacular sources. Much of this material would have been lost completely if not for the fragments preserved therein. Although the hydrological organizing structure of the Shuijing zhu is idiosyncratic, its content is made up of the many geographical texts that had been written over the preceding three centuries.22 It therefore, if used carefully, provides an invaluable window through which to view the development of geographical writing throughout the early medieval period.23

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Introduction

13

A number of other fully extant early medieval texts were classified in the seventh century as geographical writing but are often not thought of as such today. This reminds one that the traditional concept of dili 地理 (structures of the earth) does not map precisely onto our modern concept of geography. With this in mind, it turns out that a rather high percentage of extant nonreligious prose literature from this period was in fact traditionally classified as geographical writing. These texts include Faxian’s 法顯 (fl. 399–416) account of his travels to India in the Foguo ji 佛國記 (Record of the Buddhist states), also known as the [Gaoseng] Faxian zhuan [高僧] 法顯傳 (Memoir of [the eminent monk] Faxian). They also include Yang Xuanzhi’s 楊 衒之 (ca. 547) semifantas­t ical account of the Buddhist temples of Luoyang in the Luoyang qielan ji 洛陽伽藍記 (Record of the monasteries of Luoyang). Some traditional scholars included within geographical writing the rich regional history of Sichuan, Chang Qu’s 常 璩 (ca. 291–ca. 361) Huayang guozhi 華陽國志 (Record of the kingdoms south of Mount Hua). All of these have received considerable attention in Western scholarship and have been or are in the process of being translated.24 I make use of them here in the context of their original literary classification as works of geography and therefore primarily as representations of space. Indeed these texts, along with the Shuijing zhu, provide fully extant representative samples of the five subgenres of geographical writing—world, local, foreign, natural, and capital geographies. Although these new geographical texts explored innovative spatial scales and discursive topics, administrative geographies of the period maintained the precepts of Han imperial metageography. Five such administrative geographies survive as chapters of official histories.25 These texts focus on census information and updating administrative boundaries and hierarchies. This most conservative form of geographical writing, although well represented in the surviving texts, should not, however, be taken more generally as representative of geographical writing in the early medieval period. As varied as these extant texts are, they are still only a small fraction of the hundreds of geographical texts written during the early medieval period. Two additional sources allow one to evaluate how

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14 Introduction

Map I.1.  River drainage basin regions for the Shuijing zhu maps.

representative these surviving texts are of the larger corpus. First, ­collectanea, commentaries, and later comprehensive geographies preserved thousands of textual fragments. These fragments vary considerably in size and utility, but they collectively offer a breadth that, when paired with the handful of fully extant texts, provides a basic picture of geographical writing’s content and its relationship to spatial

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Introduction

15

practice.26 Second, there also exist retrospective descriptions and bibliographic lists of early medieval geographical writing from Tang literati.27 Although Tang literati described these texts quite negatively because they perceived them as detrimental to the imperial order, as will be discussed in chapter 1, their accounts still provide the earliest intellectual reflections on the literary genre as a whole.

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16 Introduction

I have used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping software and other quantitative tools to help make sense of this early medieval geographical literature. 28 Because the defining feature of geographical texts was their spatial structure, all titles and included information, no matter how fragmentary, are linked to a specific place, lending themselves well to spatial analysis through GIS. This mapping software is well suited for information, such as this, that is too unwieldy for standard tools of historical narrative making. The process of creating and layering maps reveals spatial relationships that are not readily apparent in the sequential reading of textual narratives or the disjointed reading of textual fragments. It also allows for the comparison of spatial patterns from different sources and for tracing the changes in spatial relationships over time.29 Most maps in this book visualize data from the Shuijing zhu, and map I.1 identifies the river drainage basin regions that make up the spatial units in these maps. As all of these pieces of evidence are woven together, one finds that there is indeed much that can be said about this lost genre of early medieval geographical writing and the various metageographies it ­articulated. One can piece together the fragments and construct a new story of the first flourishing of geographical writing, a story that overturns traditional narratives of a monolithic China and Sinocentrism. The incongruities and complexities of an “Age of Disunion” are precisely what make this story an important corrective to the assumptions inherent in official imperial geographies and nationalistic historical narratives. It would be impossible for a study to be definitive on this subject, given the small percentage of texts that survive. I hope, rather, that readers find my reconstructed metageographies useful in understanding this complex period of Chinese history and that this book will encourage them to be more conscientious about the spatial frameworks they themselves use to make sense of the past.

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Chapter One

Geographical Writing

I

n the bibliographic catalog of the Han shu 漢書 (History of the [former] Han dynasty), presented to the throne in 96 CE, there was no distinct category of texts identified as geographical writing. But by 636 CE, when the next imperial catalog was presented, geography had become an independent literary genre, encompassing hundreds of works.1 The emergence of a new literary genre is a momentous event in the history of a culture. As Robert Campany articulates in his study of the contemporaneous development of anomaly accounts, “we should expect that the new genre must have allowed some sort of cul­ tural work to get done that was not getting done in the genres already available.”2 Or, in the language of Lefebvre’s spatial theory discussed in the introduction, the spatial conceptualizations that developed in this new body of geographical literature shaped and were shaped by spatial practice, transforming and responding to the political, cultural, and social landscape. Geographical writing did this in ways that were especially meaningful for the distinctive cultural needs and socio­ political power structures of this particular historical context and in ways that previous forms of literature with their own imbedded spatial conceptualizations were unable or ill equipped to effect. It is apparent to most that geographical texts depict lived experiences, but it is less obvious that they also transformed lived experiences in ways that served the interests of their authors. They got work done; they accomplished something.3 Therefore, the driving question of this chapter

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[128.104.46.196] Project MUSE (2024-04-09 19:25 GMT) UW-Madison Libraries

18

Chapter One

asks, what in fact were the sociopolitical structures and lived experiences that this new genre both shaped and was shaped by? 4 Some have looked to Tang era descriptions of early medieval geographical writing to answer this question.5 Overwhelmingly, Tang ­literati described this genre as parochial, biased, self-serving, and errorridden. The Tang reconstruction of the development of the genre ­contrived greater continuity with the authoritative classical past by prioritizing comprehensive state-centered geographies, exaggerating ancient origins, and minimizing consequential developments from the early medieval period. Such a narrative, though, reveals more about the goals of Tang imperialism than it does about the thoughts and intentions of the original early medieval authors. By balancing Tang era descriptions against the surviving early medieval sources, I aim to penetrate this Tang cultural filter, to sketch the general contours of the formation of this genre, and to suggest what cultural work this genre accomplished for people of its own time. Unlike Tang officials, who were trying to legitimize the creation of a new world-empire, early medieval authors were exploring alternatives to the defunct Han imperial order, alternatives that could legitimize the new sociopolitical landscape taking shape in their postimperial world. The alternative developmental narrative that I present here—one that better incorporates the breadth of evidence described in the ­introduction—emphasizes three pivotal movements: the initial bourgeoning of geographical writing in the third century, its dramatic expansion beginning in the mid-fourth century, and its consolidation in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. Key geographical ideas, metageographical schemas, and spatially linked information are scattered piecemeal throughout Warring States and Han literature. After the Eastern Han (25–220 CE), these small, dispersed trickles of geographical ideas and information coalesced into various related, but still disparate, streams of geographical writing that primarily focused on a distinct spatial scale (such as commanderies, cities, mountains, or foreign lands). The dramatic transformations in the human geography of Sinitic civilization during the third through fifth centuries brought a surge in the production of these streams of geographic writing, which might also be called proto-subgenres. But it was not until the consolidation movement in the late fifth and early sixth centuries that these

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Geographical Writing

19

proto-subgenres finally pooled together into a singular emic genre of geographical writing. Three profound transformations in the human geography of the Sinitic world during this period undermined the foundational imperial tenets of centrality, unity, and universality. First came the sociopolitical fragmentation of imperial order. Local society came to be dominated by great families who increasingly detached themselves from the imperial court beginning in the Eastern Han. By the third century, the Han empire was divided up into multiple successor states by military dynasts who competed with each other for political supremacy within a common cultural ecumene. The second transformation was that of the Yangzi basin from a southern frontier into a secondary core of Sinitic civilization. As the empire fragmented, nomadic armies conquered the Yellow River ­basin, refugees migrated from the Yellow to the Yangzi River basin, agriculture expanded, urbanization grew, and elites established an empire centered on Jiankang 建康 (modern Nanjing). Through all this, the Yangzi basin finally matured into an economic, cultural, and political rival to the old civilizational core in the Yellow River basin. As Mark Lewis asserts, the military stalemate between the two political centers and the subsequent cultural divergence between them “define[s] the historical significance” of this “seminal epoch in the history of imperial China.”6 Third was the transplantation of Buddhism into Sinitic culture. This Indian religion was first introduced from the Silk Roads during the Han dynasty, but it did not entrench itself within Sinitic society until the third through seventh centuries. Far more than merely introducing new religious ideas, Buddhism drastically transformed the ­social, cultural, economic, and political systems of Sinitic civilization. Furthermore, India (with its impressive civilization) posed a considerable challenge to the assumed Sinocentrism of traditional geographical thought. In sum, during the early medieval period, sociopolitical fragmentation, frontier expansion, and international exchanges created a Sinitic world that was more regionally varied, politically decentered, ethnically diverse, socially segmented, and culturally varied than it had ever been before.7 Early geographical writing gave cultural expression to this diversity and complexity.

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20

Chapter One

These three early medieval shifts in human geography interacted with each other to inspire three innovative general reconceptuali­ zations of the structures of the earth. The first reconceptualization was a greater emphasis on local and regional spaces. Han imperial metageography had viewed regionalism with suspicion, making it a target of the court’s civilizing mission. But the erosion of imperial institutions and their replacement with regional military dynasts and local great families reoriented the focus of geographical writing away from the political preeminence of the imperial center and toward the cultural inclusion of local provinces within the Sinitic civilized world.8 Geographical texts reinterpreted local customs (fengsu 風俗) in ways that affirmed the cultural legitimacy of these emerging provincial elites. The need to assert local inclusion in and local contributions to the (Sinitic) civilized world was especially crucial for the literati of the new secondary core in the Yangzi basin, who were trying to overcome the stigma of their past frontier status. The second reconceptualization was a greater emphasis on environmental geography. Han imperial metageography claimed to transcend natural patterns, but postimperial realities revealed otherwise. Patterns of regionalism had long been interpreted as the workings of natural forces (qi 氣) on local communities. In the political turmoil of imperial fragmentation, mountain ranges and rivers inhibited military campaigns and shaped political boundaries, mountains provided a refuge for communities fleeing roving armies, and the countryside housed elites escaping the “corruption” of public service. This more intimate engagement with the natural landscape was heightened with the demographic shift southward into the Yangzi basin, as northern émigrés encountered a foreign, subtropical environment of lofty mountains and grand rivers, quite different from that of the Yellow River plain. The rich natural resources and beauty of this new secondary core were used to claim political superiority over the ecologically meager core. Furthermore, Buddhism often encouraged adherents to escape from the profane world up into mountain monasteries. The third reconceptualization was a new worldview. Han imperial metageography had conflated the world, the civilized world, and the world-empire, placing the imperial court at the center of it all. But the elite culture of India and the success of Buddhist conversions in Sinitic

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Geographical Writing

21

society presented compelling evidence for the existence of a potentially equal civilization in the west. Also, the fragmenting of imperial order and its replacement by successor states originating from the frontiers of the Sinitic ecumene weakened the claims of a politically structured Sinocentric world. The traditional division of the world between Sinitic civilization and barbarism collapsed on several fronts. To construct a more global world model that incorporated this newly introduced knowledge of the outside world, some geographical writers turned to natural patterns or Buddhist metageographies for alternative orga­ nizing structures. These three reconceptualizations in early medieval geographical writing were cultural responses to the sociopolitical realities of their time, each providing an intellectual alternative to the traditional orthodoxy of the Han imperial metageography.

Defining the Genre Literary historians sometimes conceptualize a genre not as a container but more as a fuzzy set, noting that one may speak of degrees of membership in the genre, with some texts being more core and others more marginal. They further note that authors and audiences need not self-consciously participate in a genre in order for later literary historians to meaningfully categorize their texts as a part of that genre. Indeed, it is often only through historical hindsight that the boundaries and significance of the genre can be understood.9 But, at least in the case of geographical writing, historical hindsight has too often become presentist and teleological thinking, presupposing a prioritization of a single subgenre, topic, or text in order to contort the complexities of early medieval geographical writing into tidy narratives of Chinese nationalism, scientific progress, or the development of the gazetteer (difangzhi 地方志) that would dominate geographical writing in the late imperial period.10 Indeed, I will argue that Tang officials were themselves advocating a similarly narrow reading of the geographical texts in order to affirm the imperialist ideology of their own day. In my own reconstruction of the development of the genre, I will compare the earliest attempts to consolidate and codify the genre in the sixth and seventh centuries with the surviving fragmentary

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22

Chapter One

Map 1.1.  Number of citations from all texts quoted in the Shuijing zhu (by drainage basin).

and extant texts themselves in order to uncover the internal logic of the genre. My approach reveals that the defining feature of early medieval geographical writing was not regionalism or local customs—as Tang literati or those seeking the origins of late imperial gazetteers would claim it to be. Geographical writings encompassed a diverse range of spatial scales (such as mountains, provinces, and the world) as well as a range of distinct topics (including nature, censuses, and history). Furthermore, much of the information was shared with other literary genres of the time, including history, landscape poetry, and anomaly accounts.11 The single defining feature of geographical writing was its spatially organized textual structure, facilitating an analysis of change over space rather than change over time. Other forms of writing took time (e.g., chronicles), people (e.g., biographies), or topic (e.g., essays) as their narrative thread. But all geographies organized their text as though moving through space. Some move along rivers or roads and some hop between urban wards or administrative units, but they all

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Map 1.2.  Number of citations from geographical texts quoted in Shuijing zhu (per 10,000 citations, by drainage basin).

Map 1.3.  Number of citations from local geographies quoted in Shuijing zhu (per 10,000 citations, by drainage basin).

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24

Chapter One

primarily move through space and secondarily present “locality ­stories” that explain the cultural significance of each place.12 As they do this, the narrative often leaps through different chronologies and topics at a disorienting pace. This defining feature of a spatially structured text might seem obvious, but in Tang and modern studies of the genre this feature has often been sidelined in favor of the topic of regionalism and local customs.13 It was the unique spatial structure of the text that allowed geographical writing to articulate the spatially complex transformations of the early medieval Sinitic ecumene effectively, in ways that no other genre could. Whereas most other literature continued to focus (either implicitly or explicitly) on the civilizational core of the Yellow River plain, geographical literature engaged directly with all of Sinitic civilization’s various peripheries: outward toward the frontiers (especially toward the south) and even farther toward foreign lands (especially toward the west), upward into the highlands, and inward toward local communities. This pattern is evident in a comparison of the spatial distribution of geographical and nongeographical texts cited in the Shuijing zhu. Map 1.1 presents the spatial distribution of all texts cited in the Shuijing zhu, revealing a clear focus on the Yellow River plain. This is in part due to the antiquarian bent of Li Daoyuan’s historical geography, but it is also a product of literary forms that did not handle spatial diversity well. Chronicles, for example, require the simplification of space down to a single point—usually the court. Maps 1.2 and 1.3, conversely, present the distribution of citations in the Shuijing zhu of geographical writing and then local geographical writing, respectively. The spatial pattern is opposite to that of literature in general, focusing instead on Sinitic regions outside of the Yellow River basin and foreign regions outside of the Sinitic ecumene—spaces neglected in traditional, nongeographical literature.

Warring States and Han Antecedents Many have tried to trace the origins of geographical writing or a ­particular form of geographical writing to its earliest inceptions in pre-Han or Han literature. But such efforts are often motivated more

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Geographical Writing

25

by the authority and legitimacy that such ancient origins bestow upon their subject than by the analytical weight the origin provides in their developmental narrative.14 It is clear, however, that in pre-Han and Han literature there was a great deal of geographical information, locality stories, place-names, and spatial schemas, and even some independent spatially structured texts that would later be classified as geographical writing. But these early texts were few in number, disparate in their format, and lacking in intertextual dialogue. Most were component chapters within larger encyclopedic works and therefore served the cul­ tural goals of their encompassing text. No self-conscious bibliogra­phic rubric had been established to organize this varied and incoherent assortment of spatially linked concepts and information.15 These late Warring States and early Han texts can be roughly divided into two different approaches. First, anthropocentric geographies emphasized the human ordering of the natural world. The “Yu gong” 禹貢 (Tribute of Yu)—with its description of quelling the flood, structuring the Nine Regions, and extracting local products as tribute—is the foundational text in this tradition.16 Similar anthropocentric themes are present in all of the geographically inclined chapters of Sima Qian’s Shiji 史記 (The grand scribe’s records): the “Hequ shu” 河渠書 (Monograph on rivers and canals) describes hydrological geog­raphy, the “Huozhi liezhuan” 貨殖列傳 (Memoirs of moneymakers) describes local products and customs within the Han empire, and the memoirs of foreign peoples describe the local products and customs beyond Han borders. The fact that these component texts resemble geographical literature but are awkwardly dispersed throughout the larger encyclope­ dic history is emblematic of the disordered state of geographical writing at the time.17 Similar anthropocentric geographical component texts are scattered through the Guanzi 管子 (Writings of Master Guan).18 Other geographical texts focused on nonhuman structures of the earth. The Shanhai jing 山海經 (Classic of mountains and seas) constructs a world model based not on human and political geography but on natural and supernatural geography. Despite its apolitical themes, the Shanhai jing’s spatial model was still centered on the ancient core of ­Sinitic civilization, describing a spatial correlation between distance from this center point and marvelous and monstrous phenomena out in the “seas” and “wildernesses.” In retrospect, this text (which is unique for its

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26

Chapter One

time since it is an individual work rather than a component chapter within a larger text) is clearly a work of geography. Its text is organized spatially, and it provides the earliest examples of the locality stories that would become a defining literary feature of early medieval geographies.19 But in the Han it was classified as a work of “mantic arts” rather than of geography (since the bio­graph­ical category “geography” did not yet exist).20 In a more theoretical formulation, the “Dixing” 墬形 (Terrestrial forms) chapter of the Huai­nanzi 淮南子 (Master of Huainan) also presents an all-encompassing vision of the world that deprioritizes human and political geography. This chapter adopts the Zou Yan 鄒衍 (ca. 250 BCE) model of a Kunlun-centered world in which Sinitic civilization inhabits the southeastern corner of the earth. In its separate chapter “Qi su” 齊俗 (Integrating customs), the Huainanzi discusses local customs extensively and in a far less pejorative way than do the aforementioned anthropocentric texts. The Huainanzi, with its Daoist and antiimperial inclinations, prefigures many of the key ideas of early medieval geographical texts but in a disparate format.21 By the Eastern Han, the state-centered and anthropocentric ­geographies had gained intellectual dominance, as they j­ustified the political imperial order. This “Han imperial metageography” will be explored in chapter 2. The key text that embodied this development is Ban Gu’s 班固 (32–92) “Dili zhi” 地理志 (Monograph on geography), the most topically comprehensive geographical text to date. Although it does not present a great deal on each topic, it does tie together information on natural, historical, cultural, and political geog­raphy. But it does so in a way that subordinates all of these structures of the earth under an imperially decreed, self-consciously artificial administrative geography. Ban Gu confined all the nonpolitical information under his rubric of the “lands” (di 地) of the Warring States. He then showed how these lands were superseded by the administrative districts and census records of the commanderies ( jun 郡), princedoms (guo 國), and districts (xian 縣) of the Han empire.22 This imperial theme of Warring States regionalism being superseded by Han universalism is also apparent in the two surviving Han texts that most resemble local geographies, the “Wu di zhuan” 吳地傳 (Tales of the land of Wu) and “[Yue] di zhuan” [越]地傳 (Tales of the land [of Yue]) chapters from the Yue jue

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Geographical Writing

27

shu 越絕書 (Lost histories of Yue).23 Although the “Yu gong” was presented as the canonical fountainhead of geographical writing, the “Dili zhi” became the defining standard for the field in the Eastern Han.24 The purpose of this brief survey of pre-Han and Han geographic literature is primarily to point out this literature’s early limitations and incoherence. As Sinitic civilization expanded outside of its cradle in the Yellow River basin, the diversity of the landscapes and peoples that it encountered and sometimes incorporated inspired greater intellectual investigation into the differences in political, economic, cultural, and supernatural patterns across space, from local to world scales. Later, these topics would fall under the conceptual rubric of dili (structures of the earth), but at the time there was no literary form dedicated to making sense of this expanding understanding of spaces and spatially linked information. Encyclopedic texts like the Shiji and the Huainanzi contained considerable geographical topics and spatial schemas, but this information is scattered piecemeal throughout different chapters, categorized under other more important intellectual rubrics of the time. For the most part, natural and human geography remained categorically separate.25 The closest thing to a comprehensive geographical text coming out of the Han, the “Dili zhi,” pales in comparison to the comprehensive world geographies of the early medieval period, in terms of both spatial scope and topical coverage.

Heterogeneous Origins Early medieval geographical writing consisted of a heterogeneous ­assortment of texts that were loosely tied together by their common spatial organization of information. Texts varied in spatial scale: world, empire, region, locality, and city. They varied in topic: topography, hydrol­ogy, administrative districting, local customs, eminent locals, local products, temples, tombs, palaces, gardens, and history. And they varied in narrative format: following a personal journey through space, tracing movement along natural features, or jumping from one site to the next. To grasp this diversity, I have divided the assortment of geographical texts into five major categories, defined according to their primary spatial scopes: local regions, natural spaces, foreign lands, the

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World, 21.5 Other, 33.5

Local, 34 Capital, 15

Foreign, 18

Natural, 16

Fig. 1.1.  Number of texts in each subgenre of geographical writing recorded in Sui shu.

World, 59 Other, 114

Capital, 15 Local, 141

Foreign, 20 Natural, 39

Fig. 1.2.  Number of texts in each subgenre of geographical writing recorded in Han–Tang dili shuchao.

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Geographical Writing

29

world or world-empire, and capital cities.26 The texts of these categories originated independently, each responding to different spatial realities and cultural needs. For the sake of expediency, I will call these categories subgenres, but it should be recognized that they predate the codification of the geographical genre in the late fifth and early sixth centuries and were not classified as independent subgenres in their own time. The subgenres’ relative sizes are compared in figures 1.1 and 1.2. Besides these major subgenres, there are several minor subgenres that were smaller and more marginal (and, for these reasons, we know even less about them). These minor categories include travelogues, placename dictionaries, and accounts of specific kinds of sites such as tombs, gardens, or temples. Each subgenre followed a distinct developmental path. But there are rough parallels in the development of local, natural, and foreign geographies (charted together in figures 1.3 and 1.4) and that of world and capital geographies (charted together in figures 1.5 and 1.6). These charts are based on very incomplete bibliographic lists, and so the actual numbers are not reliable. The charts are useful, however, for extrapolating a rough outline of developmental patterns, especially when the patterns are confirmed in Tang accounts of the development of the genre and in the few fully extant geographical texts. Based on these sources, local geographies appear to be the earliest and largest of the subgenres, flourishing from the third to the fifth century. Because of its early development and comparatively large number of texts, the subgenre of local geographies set the tenor for geographical writing more generally. During the third and fifth centuries, natural geographies and foreign geographies also proliferated. These three subgenres appear to stagnate or decline during the imperial resurgence of the Western Jin (265–316), during which time world geographies and capital geographies gained in popularity. Then, in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, there was a general movement to write comprehensive world geographies that could encompass and unify these growing and increasingly interrelated, yet still disparate, spatially organized texts. Although little geographical writing was produced in the Northern Dynasties (386–581), accounts of capitals and expeditions were comparatively popular there. Each of the five major subgenres, although

newFelt Structure of Earth.indd 29

[COM

[COM

[CO

[CO

[CO

[CO

2/18/22 2:35 PM

0.1

0.08

0.06

Local

Natural

0.04

Foreign

0.02

0

Number of texts per year by dynasty

.H

1) –8 50 (5 6) ou 4–5 Zh (53 i & ei . Q W 4) N W . –53 & 86 3 E. ei ( 89) – .W 7 N (55 57) n 2– he C (50 02) g 9–5 an Li (47 79) i Q 0– ) S. (42 420 0) ng 17– ) –8 So (3 316 220 n 5– ( Ji 6 s E. n (2 om i d E) . J ng ) W Ki 220 8 C e – E– re 25 Th n ( BC 2 a H 20 E. n ( a W

0.45

0.4

0.35

0.3

0.25

0.2

Local 0.15

Natural 0.1

Foreign 0.05

0

1) –8 50 (5 ou Zh 4) i & –53 6 .Q 8 N (3 ei 9) . W 7–8 N 5 (5 7) n –5 he C (502 ) 02 g an 9–5 Li 7 4 i( 9) Q –7 ) S. 420 80 ( – 0 ) 2 ng 420 (2 – So E) s C 65 m (2 do 25 n ng Ji E– Ki 20) BC e re 5–2 00 Th ( 2 .3 an (ca H n E. Ha E. ePr

Number of texts per year by dynasty

0.12

Fig. 1.3.  Local, natural, and foreign geographies recorded in Sui shu.

Fig. 1.4.  Local, natural, and foreign geographies recorded in Han–Tang dili shuchao.

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newFelt Structure of Earth.indd 30

0.1 0.08

0.06

0.02 0.02

1) –8 50 (5 ou Zh 4) 53 i& 6– .Q N i (38 ) e 89 . W 7– N 5 (5 7) n 5 he 02– C 5 ( 2) g 50 an 9– Li 7 4 i( 9) Q –7 ) S. 20 80 (4 ) 0– 2 ng 420 (2 – So E) C 65 oms (2 d 25 n ng Ji E– Ki 20) BC e re 5–2 00 Th ( 2 .3 an (ca H n E. Ha E. ePr

2/18/22 2:35 PM

newFelt Structure of Earth.indd 31

Capital 0.04

World 0.06

World Capital 0.04

0

Number of texts per year by dynasty

1) –8 50 (5 6) ou –5 Zh 534 ( i & ei ) . Q . W 34 5 N W 6– 8 & 3 E. ei ( 89) – .W 7 N (55 57) – n he 02 ) C (5 502 g – an 9 Li (47 79) i Q 0– ) S. (42 420 0) – ng 17 6) –8 So n (3 –31 220 Ji 65 s ( E. n (2 om i d E) . J ng ) W Ki 220 8 C – e – re 25 CE Th n ( B 2 a H 20 E. an ( .H W

0.12

0.1

0.08

0

Number of texts per year by dynasty

0.12

Fig. 1.5.  World and capital geographies recorded in Sui shu.

Fig. 1.6.  World and capital geographies recorded in Han–Tang dili shuchao.

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Chapter One

related to the others, had an independent developmental trajectory and literary origin. Each category was a response to different societal and ideological changes. Therefore, to answer the question of why geographical writing emerged when it did, one must reframe the question to ask why each of these subgenres of geographical writing developed when it did.

Local Regions Local geographies were the earliest and largest subgenre to develop, and they consequently had the greatest influence on the development of other forms of geographical writing. Local geographies numbered in the hundreds, and (at least according to the bibliographic lists of the Sui shu and the Han–Tang dili shuchao as can be seen in figures 1.1 and 1.2) they made up roughly one-third of all geographical writing from the early medieval period.27 Overwhelmingly, these local geographies were spatially defined by provincial administrative units, either zhou 州 (prefectures) or jun (commanderies), thereby reaffirming imperial control over provincial spaces. These texts were short (on average about two fascicles) and written about all regions of the empire but especially the Yangzi basin.28 The key literary innovation in local geographies, identified by ­Andrew Chittick, was the “locality story”—a short anecdote that was linked to a particular location and revealed the distinctive character of that place. The use of this literary technique allowed local geographies to draw information and anecdotes from a wide range of other texts that were not necessarily local in scope (including classics, his­ tories, philosophies, biographies, poetry, anomaly accounts, and even folklore) and then to tie this information to necessarily localized sites: cities, monuments, tombs, temples, and so forth. This allowed local geographies to become an extremely flexible catchall genre that could address a wide range of topics (including locally eminent men, great families, imperial officials, historical events, local products, flora and fauna, local customs, natural landscape, urban design, and religious edifices) while maintaining consistency in its spatial structure and ­local perspective. Locality stories not only allowed geographical writing to draw information from other genres, but they also facilitated

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intergenre sharing of information. Much content from the early local geographies would later be incorporated into other forms of geographical writing.29 Growth periods in the writing of local geographies correlated to periods of imperial weakness and the presence of an independent state in the Yangzi basin. For local geographies, Liu Weiyi’s collection of textual fragments, the Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi, provides our most comprehensive bibliographic list. As charted in figure 1.7, one can see the first considerable increase in the writing of local geographies during the Three Kingdoms period (220–80). After rates of production stalled during the Jin period (265–420), production increased a second time during the (Liu) Song dynasty (420–79).30 Calculating the production of local geographies during the Jin dynasty is quite difficult, since many of the lost texts cannot be dated as either Western Jin or Eastern Jin (317– 420). This is unfortunate because the shift in 317 from an imperial center based in the Yellow River plain to one in the Yangzi basin is a pivotal turning point in the geopolitical landscape of the Sinitic ecumene.31 One can, however, speak with greater confidence about the spatial distribution of the locales described in these geographies. As figure 1.8 shows, there was a strong preference in local geographies for lands of the Yangzi basin. This is especially true of the two flourishings during the Three Kingdoms and Song periods. It is also apparent in texts that can be dated from the Eastern Jin period.32 There also seems to be a general disinterest in local geographies in the Sixteen Kingdoms (304–439) and Northern Dynasties, as can be seen in figures 1.3, 1.4, and 1.7. The spatial distribution of these local geographies and their relationship to spatial practice will be discussed in greater detail in chap­ ter 2. Suffice it to say at this time that the motivation behind local geographies was not to assert local autonomy and imperial subversion— as characterized in Tang accounts—but was instead to show local participation in the larger civilized world. What local geographies could do that no other literary genre could was to articulate how local communities were both local inheritors of a universalist civilizational heritage and at the same time full contributors to those civilizational norms. Much of the writing of this subgenre describes how mythic and imperial figures from the past had some sort of special connection to a particular local community and how local natives of that community

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[CO

[CO

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0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 an

1) –8 50 (5 ou Zh ) i& 34 –5 .Q N 86 (3 ei ) 89 .W N 7– 5 (5 n 7) he –5 C 02 (5 2) g 50 an Li 9– 47 i( ) Q 79 S. 0– 2 (4 0) ) –8 ng 20 20 So (2 –4 s 65 (2 om n d Ji ng Ki 0) e re 22 5– Th (2

H E.

Number of texts per year by dynasty

1

Fig. 1.7.  Local geographies recorded in Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi.

Number of texts

50 40 30 20 10 0 1) –8 50 (5 ou Zh ) i& 34 –5 .Q N 86 (3 ei ) 89 .W N 7– 5 (5 n 7) he –5 C 2 0 (5 g 2) an 50 Li 9– 47 i( 9) Q –7 S. 20 (4 0) ) ng –8 20 20 So (2 –4 s 65 m (2 n do Ji ng Ki 0) e re 22 5– Th (2 an

H E.

Yellow River Basin

Yangzi River Basin

Fig. 1.8.  Local geographies for the Yellow and Yangzi River basins, as recorded in Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi.

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contributed to the cultural and political achievements of civilization. In these local geographies, local customs (fengsu)—which had in Han literature been disparaged as antithetical to the civilizing mission of the imperial order—were now reinterpreted as local vestiges of an ancient civilization whose reception was no longer monopolized by the imperial court. With the collapse of imperial order, the migration of Central Eurasian nomads into the Yellow River core, and the migration of Yellow River inhabitants into the Yangzi River frontier, the Sinitic cultural ecumene was becoming far larger, more geographically varied, more culturally diverse, and less politically centralized than it had ever been. Nowhere was this cultural need to assert local participation within the civilized world more important than in the Yangzi basin, which was transitioning from a southern frontier into a new and independent secondary civilizational core. The political claims to legitimacy of states in the Yangzi basin depended on this land’s inclusion within the civilized world. Local geographical writing was an essential literary tool for maintaining the cultural cohesiveness of this divided and heterogeneous postimperial ecumene.

Natural Spaces A similar developmental trajectory and relationship to spatial practice can be seen in natural geographies, geographies that take a natural feature (mostly mountains or rivers) as their spatial unit of analysis and major topic of inquiry. Some natural geographies exclusively described the natural features of the space (flora, fauna, topography, or hydrology), but others used the natural features to structure an account that combines both natural and human elements, especially religious sites atop mountains. The only fully extant example of this subgenre, the Shuijing zhu, uses natural features to organize a comprehensive account of both natural and human geography (I will discuss this further in chapter 4). But bibliographic lists make it clear that most natural geographies took individual mountains or rivers (or the mountains and rivers of a particular region) as their spatial parameters. Like local geographies, natural geographies were mostly local in scope, small in size, attentive to the relationship between natural and human patterns

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through the medium of fengsu, and written about the Yangzi region— but for somewhat different reasons. Unlike local geographies, natural geographies (mostly) challenged the orthodoxy of structuring the world through administrative units of prefectures and commanderies. They also focused much more on numinous and religious patterns than did most local geographies. As can be seen in figures 1.3 and 1.4, bibliographic lists indicate that natural geographies became popular about a century after local geographies did, but both saw their highest levels of production in the centuries following the immigration into the Yangzi basin— during the Eastern Jin, Song, and Qi dynasties (479–502).33 The natural world had been a topic of literary exploration since ancient times, but these ancient antecedents served a rather different purpose. They were generally used to assert cosmic comprehensiveness, imperial control over the natural world, or relationships with divinities who dwelt atop great mountains.34 Few of these works, with the notable exception of the Huainanzi, integrated natural and societal patterns together the way early medieval natural geographies did.35 Although still building on these classical foundations, the writing of early medieval natural geographies was a cultural response to or an interpretation of two parallel social migrations of the fourth century: southward into the Yangzi basin and upward into the mountains. Early medieval natural geographies were predominantly written about southern landscapes, as can be seen in figures 1.9 and 1.10.36 The Yellow River basin was a temperate alluvial floodplain that had been transformed into cultivated fields and deforested hills since ancient times. When Yellow River inhabitants migrated into the Yangzi basin, they entered a dramatically different landscape and ecology. The Yangzi basin was a crisscross mesh of massive rivers cutting valleys and gorges through precipitous mountain chains, all in a semitropical environment that remained mostly forested and uncultivated at that time.37 The contrast between these two landscapes was striking for the large number of émigrés who moved south with the Eastern Jin court. Initially, perspectives on the southern frontier were filtered through a lens of exile, captivity, and foreignness, describing the southern environment (as it had been in the Han) as confining, hot, and malarial.38 But, after a generation or so, émigré elites acquiesced to the reality of their inability to retake the heartland and began to acclimatize to their

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90 80

Number of texts

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Local

Natural

Yellow River basin

Capital

Other

Yangzi River basin

Fig. 1.9.  Geographical subgenres for the Yellow and Yangzi River basins, as recorded in Sui shu.

30

Number of texts

25 20 15 10 5 0

Local

Natural

Yellow River basin

Capital

Other

Yangzi River basin

Fig. 1.10.  Geographical subgenres for the Yellow and Yangzi River basins, as recorded in Han–Tang dili shuchao.

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new subtropical homeland. Literati began to use the natural beauty of the Yangzi basin to legitimize this new secondary core of Sinitic civilization. For example, Gu Kaizhi 顧愷之 (ca. 345–406) described his native Guiji 會稽: “Thousands of cliffs rise in a contest of beauty; myriad streams run in rapid race. Plants and trees luxuriantly grow, like multicolored nimbuses ascending” 千巖競秀，萬壑爭流，草木蒙 籠其上，若雲興霞蔚.39 One of the earliest advocates for the natural beauty of the Yangzi basin was Guo Pu 郭璞 (276–324), who composed the Jiang fu 江賦 (Rhapsody on the Yangzi River) in praise of the river’s majesty. The political motivations of this rhapsody were obvious to He Fasheng 何法盛 (5th c.), who explained that, “because the King of Restoration [i.e., Jin Emperor Yuan (Sima Rui 司馬睿, r. 317–23), who ‘restored’ the Jin state in 318 at Jiankang] took up residence beyond the Yangzi, Guo Pu composed the Jiang fu to relate the beauty of its streams and waterways” 璞以中興王宅江外，乃著江賦，述川瀆之美.40 In geographical literature, a similar use of natural endowment to affirm political authority can be seen in the imperial compilation Song Yongchu shanchuan ji 宋永初山川記 (Record of the mountains and rivers of the Yongchu reign period of the Song dynasty) by Liu Chengzhi 劉澄之 (Qi dynasty).41 Natural geographies reveal a cultural fascination with the novel environment but also a domestication of that environment, transforming it from exotic to extraordinary, from weird to special. The second social migration to inspire natural geographies was the migration up into the mountains and hillsides. Mountains had long been conceptualized as numinous and nonnormative spaces, but during the third and fourth centuries the number of people moving up into the mountains increased considerably. They were motivated to expand agriculture, protect themselves from roving armies, escape from state authority or court service, or worship at monasteries and shrines. Mountains and hillsides were appealing for the new institutional religions of Daoism and Buddhism because of mountains’ cultural association with the numinous as well as their distance from existing sociopolitical power structures. Buddhist monasteries were especially prominent in natural geographies.42 Quite different from mountain shrines, immortals, and recluses, monastic communities were much larger and more permanent, and they maintained regular exchange and interaction with associated monasteries in the cities of

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the lowlands. Furthermore, monastic organizations had available to them the large capital inputs and well-organized labor force necessary to realize the agricultural and economic potential of this remote and treacherous terrain.43 This migration up into the mountains, in all its varied forms, brought mountains down to earth, within the realm of human activity and intellectual inquiry.44 Some continuity was maintained with Han and pre-Han literary depictions of the natural environment: worldwide scope, nature-based spatial structures, well-maintained canals as markers of good governance, and the divine inhabitants of mountaintops. But new geographic shifts in population southward into subtropical climates and upward into the hills inspired a transformation in the discourse on natural environments. This discourse shifted toward the unique characteristics of distinct natural features, an aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty, and the extension of human activity into isolated natural spaces. Natural geographies were part of a general literary and artistic fascination with the natural environment during this period, a fascination that also manifested itself in landscape poetry, landscape painting, and ­materia medica texts, which similarly focused on the exotic-turningdomestic landscape of the Yangzi basin.45 Although geographical writing was not the only literary genre capable of articulating this new cultural awareness of landscapes, geographical writing was easily able to incorporate pieces from all these other genres into more comprehen­ sive accounts of particular natural features through the flexibility of its spatially structured text.46

Foreign Lands Geographies of foreign lands provided short descriptions of foreign states, peoples, customs, local products, and peculiar things (yiwu 異‌物). However, “foreign” is not easily defined for the early medieval period. “Foreign” mostly meant outside of the old Han administrative prefectures, but sometimes it meant outside of a particular regional state and sometimes outside of the larger Sinitic ecumene. Many local geographies of frontier provinces similarly included descriptions of foreign things, blurring the boundaries between the inner and outer realms more so than did Han administrative geography.47 There were

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some comprehensive accounts of all foreign lands, but most focused on a single state, people, region, or journey.48 By far, the regions most commonly written about were Southeast Asia and especially the Western Regions (the Tarim basin, Transoxiana, and India). The sole extant example of a foreign geography from the period is the Foguo ji 佛國記 (Record of the Buddhist states).49 These foreign geographies of mostly the third through fifth centuries (see figs. 1.3 and 1.4) articulate an unprecedented engagement of Sinitic civilization with the rest of Asia and an openness to foreign cultures. This engagement and openness would challenge traditional Sinocentrism for centuries to come. Most accounts of foreign lands from Warring States and Han literature describe the foreign lands as either a bizarre realm of demons and deities (such as the Mu Tianzi zhuan 穆天子傳 [Account of Mu, Son of Heaven] or the “Huang jing” 荒經 [Classic of the wildernesses] chapters of the Shanhai jing) or as an uncivilized realm of barbarian kingdoms offering up their local products as tribute to the one true Son of Heaven (as in the memoirs of barbarians in the dynastic histories).50 Sima Qian’s memoir of Zhang Qian’s 張騫 (d. ca. 114 BCE) mission and of the Xiongnu empire were some of the earliest quasi-ethnographic— at times sympathetic—accounts of foreign peoples.51 Although accounts of Southeast Asia from the Three Kingdoms period resemble Sima Qian’s imperial-driven quasi-ethnographic model, the accounts of Western Regions beginning in the fourth century offered something radically different: religiously motivated praise (or propaganda) for an alternative civilization and sacred central realm in India. Literary attention on Southeast Asia reflected several important geopolitical and commercial shifts in the third century.52 The rise of complex states in Southeast Asia such as Funan 扶南 elevated the importance of political and commercial relationships, and the creation of an independent Wu state in the Yangzi basin prioritized these relationships all the more. The spread of Buddhism throughout East and Southeast Asia from its homeland in India strengthened the early Sino-Indian exchange network further, with Southeast Asia acting as a pivotal intermediary between the two civilizational cores. Wu and Funan exchanged several diplomatic missions, and like Zhang Qian of Han times, third-century ambassadors such as Kang Tai 康泰 and Zhu Ying 朱應 wrote reports on the political geography, history of diplomatic

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relations, and local customs and products of the lands through which they traveled.53 After Kang Tai’s and Zhu Ying’s two groundbreaking accounts, several other geographies followed from later Jiankang-based courts, which similarly prioritized overseas, rather than Silk Roads, intercontinental trade networks.54 Although the types of information reported in these third-century foreign geographies and their structuring metageography were not new, the heightened political and commercial attention to this southeastern frontier was. The fourth century saw a revival in literary attention toward the geography of the Western Regions but now with radically different, Buddhist-inspired content, authorship, and metageography. 55 The Foguo ji is our sole extant example, but fragments from other similarly titled and authored texts indicate that it is representative of this sub­ genre. The focus of attention toward the Western Regions shifted during this period from the Tarim basin and Transoxiana regions (where Han diplomats had sought allies against the Xiongnu) toward India as the homeland of Buddhism. Besides the traditional topics of political ­geography, travel routes, and local customs and products, these new ­accounts focused considerable attention on the traces of the Buddha’s life, relics, sacred sites, monasteries, and miracles. Authors of these texts were not court-appointed ambassadors; instead, they were often pilgrimaging monks, many of whom were Central Eurasians or Indians. In no other category of geographical writing was this kind of ethnic and ideological diversity in authorship present.56 Furthermore, unlike the diplomatic mission–based foreign accounts, which affirm Sinocentric metageographies, these Buddhist-authored foreign geographies presented alternative worldviews antithetical to Han imperial metageography. Some of these foreign geographies asserted that India was in fact the central realm, and others introduced into Sinitic texts the Buddhist worldview of Jambudvipa.57 Quite distinct from earlier foreign geographies (or any other form of geographical writing), Buddhist accounts of India and Central Asia were written in a cultural context where Buddhism was making significant inroads into Sinitic culture and having to defend itself against the number one critique from Daoists and Confucians: its foreignness and, by extension, its barbarian taint.58 Geographical literature was employed within these polemical debates to counter this critique,

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describing instead the similarities between Indian and Sinitic civilizations, and sometimes even the superiority of Indian civilization. They portrayed India as the central realm, employed Buddhist metageographies of Jambudvipa to affirm that centrality, and compared the equal levels of civilization between the two lands. But they focused most of their attention on the Buddha’s traces, relics, and miracles, which imbued the land with a profound sense of sacredness.59 The Foguo ji describes the Indian central realm in utopian terms: the climate was temperate, the government was benevolent and nonintrusive, and the people were happy and moral without being compelled to be so by the state. East Asia, in contrast, was a “peripheral land” (biandi 邊地) of unenlightened barbarians, so much so that Faxian’s traveling companion Daozheng 道整 refused ever to return to his own homeland.60 The Foguo ji—and probably the other Buddhistauthored accounts of the Buddhist realms to the west—expresses an acute angst among Sinitic Buddhists. They had to accept that they lived at the edges of the (Buddhist) enlightened world, developing a “border­land complex” that would not be resolved until the Tang dynasty, when East Asia became a center of Buddhism in its own right.61 Despite the religious motivation of these texts, they still presented a wealth of new geographical information from firsthand informants and therefore had to be dealt with (incorporated, modified, or obfuscated) within world geographies that claimed comprehensiveness and totality.62

The World Tang literati characterized the geographical writing of the early medieval period as almost exclusively regional, but in fact many geographical works took the entire known world as their canvas.63 In contrast to local and environmental geographies that clustered around periods of imperial fragmentation, world geographies were written more often during the imperial resurgences of the Jin and Sui dynasties. The eminent conceptual issue at stake in these world geographies was the ­redefinition of what was meant by “the world.” In Han times, tianxia 天下 (all under heaven) meant both the world (or at least the civilized part of the world that mattered) and the world-empire. These two spatial

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realms were, in theory, coterminous.64 But the fragmentation of the Han world-empire into smaller states, the expansion and diversification of the Sinitic civilizational model on its frontiers, and the adoption of Buddhism from the comparable Indian civilization all combined to shatter this conflation. New knowledge of the outer realm was introduced via the aforementioned foreign geographies. The unavoidable issue for world geographies was then how to respond to this expanded worldview. Some world geographies maintained the traditional imperial metageography, either ignoring foreign lands completely or fitting them into the old outer realm model, which marginalized and dehumanized them into obscurity. Other world geographies attempted to incorporate knowledge of these new lands in meaningful ways, forcing authors to experiment with alternative metageographies that reevaluated the assumed centrality of Sinitic civilization in the world. Precursors to the early medieval geographical debate regarding imperial and nonimperial structures of the world can be found in Han encyclopedic literature even before the discovery of India.65 Geographical texts like the “Yu gong” and the “Dili zhi” affirmed the orthodoxy that the empire was the world, structured by administrative units tied to the central court through the emanation outward of refined culture and the gathering inward of resources. But world models such as those presented in the Shanhai jing and the Huainanzi articulated an alternative vision of a much larger world, structured not by the state but by natural and supernatural patterns. The influence of these two latter texts is apparent in much of the early medieval geographical literature.66 Most early medieval “world” geographies remained limited to the imperial scope and maintained administrative districts as their organizational structure. This approach carried the weight of tradition, but it also made it easier to cull information from local geographies, which themselves remained overwhelmingly structured by administrative districts. Although these imperial geographies could claim comprehensiveness in their summation of all constituent administrative units, the format made it impossible for them to integrate into a single text descriptions of both foreign and domestic lands with a consistent organizing structure.67 Official geographies, such as those preserved in the dynastic histories of this period, entirely ignored the growing body

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of geographical writing on local characteristics and foreign lands, limiting themselves to merely updating jurisdictions, nomenclature, and household registrations. Sima Biao 司馬彪 (d. 306) justified this limited approach by explaining that no more than this was needed after Ban Gu’s thorough description of the natural and cultural geography of tianxia presented in the “Dili zhi.”68 In contrast, Li Dao­ yuan, in the early sixth century, criticized these imperial geographies as being “scant in detail and not all-encompassing in scope” ( jian er bu zhou 簡‌而不周).69 But comprehensive geographies, especially of the fifth and sixth centuries, began to incorporate the topical breadth of new geographical knowledge (e.g., customs, landscape, folklore) insofar as it fit within the spatial confines of imperial administrative districts.70 There were, however, several geographical treatises that sought to encompass the entire known world, beyond imperial territory. The principal challenge in this endeavor was how to integrate foreign and domestic spaces with a consistent organizing structure, one that would unavoidably challenge imperial metageography. One approach was to sideline administrative units through the use of natural landscape, usually mountain or river systems. This model had the historical precedent of the Shanhai jing and the Huainanzi and could draw from similarly structured local geographies of mountains or rivers.71 The other approach was to make use of newly introduced Buddhist metageographies, which had entered into Sinitic literature during the third and fourth centuries via travel literature and translated sutras. These described an inhabited continent of Jambudvipa, with its center at Mount Anavatapta, from which the great rivers of the earth issued forth. The Sihai baichuan shuiyuan ji 四海百川水源記 (Record of the source of the hundred rivers within the four seas) by Daoan 道安 (d. 385) appears to be the earliest Sinitic world geography to adopt this model.72 The sixth-century Shuijing zhu is actually a combination of natural and religious world models, equating the Kunlun-centered Sinitic model with the Anavatapta-centered Buddhist model. It situates Mount Kunlun/Anavatapta somewhere in the Himalayan Mountains or the Tibetan Plateau and traces the great waterways of Asia (including the Indus, Ganges, and Yellow Rivers) from this central point. The Shuijing

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zhu uses this comprehensive structure to organize a similarly comprehensive compilation of geographical information.73 The final approach in composing a world geography was to compile it as a spatially structured compilation of texts with only the slightest connective framework. Such a format alleviated the need for an internally consistent structure and merely presented domestic and foreign texts together, with all their inconsistencies preserved. This approach appears to have been used for two massive compilation projects of the fifth century, the Dili shu 地理書 (Geographical writing) by Lu Cheng 陸澄 (425–94) and the Diji 地記 (Records of the earth) by Ren Fang 任昉 (459–507). These compilations “drew from texts from long ago to the present and from far away to nearby, and compiled them into a single work” 依其前後遠近，編而為部. Although it is clear that these compi­ lations included works about the entire known world, there is nothing to indicate that the compilers did anything more than just assemble them together within a collected work resembling a geographical encyclopedia.74 These different approaches to constructing a world-encompassing spatial scale were essential steps toward the consolidation of the genre, but they were insufficient by themselves. World geographies—although all-encompassing in their spatial scope—were not necessarily comprehensive in their geographical information. In the section “Consolidation of the Genre,” I will explore the importance of comprehensive geographies (comprehensive in both scale and content) in the consolidation of the genre in the late fifth and early sixth centuries.

Capital Cities Like imperial geographies (and unlike local and natural geographies), capital geographies affirmed the imperial geography through accentuating its ritual center. Also as with imperial geographies, the writing of capital geographies correlated with periods of imperial unity between the Yellow and Yangzi basins. They tended to focus on Yellow River basin capitals (see figs. 1.9 and 1.10). Capital geographies enumerated primarily the manifold and grandiose palaces and halls of the capital but also other monumental architecture such as gates, tombs,

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Chapter One

and, in the later periods, gardens and monasteries. For example, the Huang tu 黃圖 (Yellow chart) was described as “recording such things as imperial recreation palaces, royal mausoleums, the Brilliant Hall, the Hall of the Circular Moat, and the suburban altars of the capital district” 記三輔宮觀陵廟明堂辟雍郊畤等事.75 These affirmations of a capital’s ritual centrality resembled the panegyric capital rhapsodies of the Han period. But the spatial layout of cities—with wards and blocks—lent itself well to the spatial structure of geographical writing. Early capital geographies closely resembled the Han models, but by the sixth century capital geographies were describing capitals that were quite different from their Han predecessors.76 The first early medieval transformation in these capital cities was their proliferation across the Sinitic ecumene as regional regimes ­attempted to legitimize their own rule by mimicking the canonical capital of Eastern Han Luoyang.77 This historical development is suggested in the two most prominent clusters of capital geography writing, at least as they are preserved in bibliographic lists. The first was a series of accounts of Luoyang during the imperial resurgence of the Jin dynasty, affirming Jin claims to re-creating the Han empire, with its ritual center at Luoyang. Few capital geographies were written during the fifth century, but, after the Northern Wei capital of Luoyang was sacked again in 528, a second cluster of capital geographies appeared. These were about the three competing capitals of the sixth century— Jiankang, Chang’an, and Ye 鄴—each claiming to replace the then-­ ruined Luo­yang.78 Because of its location outside of the Yellow River heartland, Jiankang’s elevation to imperial capital was the most radical. But it is also well attested, with almost as many works on Jiankang as on the old Qin–Western Han capital of Chang’an.79 The second transformation in capitals was the addition of gardens to the cityscape—artificial miniature replicas of landscapes constructed within the city limits to provide a space for the new cultural activities of official withdrawal that defined elite status, especially in the Yangzi basin. With only a handful of texts on this topic, this change is less evident in capital geographies than the other two transformations of the age, but it is important for its spatial relationship to natural geographies. Urban gardens and country villas were spatial transpositions of each other—moving natural environments into human cities

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and moving human habitation out into the natural environment. Both developed together in the Yangzi basin as part of an elite cultural ideal of escaping the court in the embrace of nature, and both were manifested in capital and natural geographies.80 The third transformation in capitals was the introduction of Buddhist temples, monasteries, and pagodas. These new edifices utterly transformed the appearance of Sinitic cities. The Eastern Han capital of Luoyang lacked any truly multistoried buildings and had only one Buddhist temple in it, whereas early-sixth-century Luoyang contained 1,367 temples, the tallest of which towered nine stories above the streets.81 Although this was the most dramatic transformation in the urban cityscape, its depiction was slow to enter into capital geographies. No titles or textual fragments from before the sixth century indicate the presence of Buddhist edifices in these capitals, but beginning in the sixth century one finds texts devoted exclusively to the Buddhist sites of the capital. These include the fully extant Luoyang qielan ji 洛‌陽伽‌藍‌記 (Record of the monasteries of Luoyang) by Yang Xuanzhi 楊 ​ ‌衒‌之 (fl. c. 550).82 Textual fragments indicate that the Luoyang qielan ji is not representative of the subgenre of capital geographies more generally, but it does nicely encapsulate these three developments of the sixth century. The Luoyang qielan ji was very much a reaction to the destruction of the canonical capital of Luoyang in 528 and the subsequent sense of displacement. It records the natural beauty of twenty gardens in this capital, far to the north of where the practice of city gardens originated. And its organizing structure is a tour of Buddhist monasteries, their origins, miracles, and historical contexts.83

Minor Subgenres As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, it is often useful to think of a literary genre as having core and peripheral texts. The five aforementioned subgenres make up the core of geographical writing, but several other spatially structured texts fall outside this core, forming smaller and less influential traditions of geographical writing. Their portion of the total can be seen in figures 1.1 and 1.2. These peripheral texts include geographical treatises devoted specifically to travel and

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marches, place-names, local products (including peculiar things [yiwu] and materia medica), or specific kinds of sites (e.g., palaces, temples, monasteries, tombs, and gardens). They were sometimes and sometimes not categorized as geographical writing. Accounts of expeditions and travels were not included in Lu Cheng’s and Ren Fang’s compendia, but they were included in the Sui shu bibliography. Wang Mo included local compilations of biographies and tales, but the Sui shu does not (presumably owing to the lack of spatial structure in the biography format).84 In many cases, the relationship of these texts to spatial practices resembled those of other aforementioned subgenres. For example, travelogues usually described expeditions into foreign lands and therefore closely resembled foreign geographies in their content. When these expeditions were military campaigns into foreign lands (as many of them were), they affirmed rather than challenged the traditional state-centered metageography.85 The topics and textual format of sitebased geographies resembled those of capital geographies. But sitebased metageographies employed a vaster spatial scale, thereby revealing how unexceptional the capital might be and undermining the capital’s authoritative centrality. Accounts of local products praised the natural endowment of a province but also affirmed the imperial principle of tribute. Materia medica texts about the lands south of the Yangzi expressed a similar fascination with the southern environment as both local and natural geographies. Accounts of peculiar things were the focus of both foreign lands and frontier provinces, blurring the distinctions between these two subgenres. This exoticizing seems to have been acceptable for the distant Lingnan region, but it ran contrary to the aims of Yangzi basin local geographies, which sought to overcome the stigmas of the Yangzi basin’s former frontier status and to affirm instead its inclusion within the civilized world.86 All of these contradictions are reminiscent of the fuzzy boundaries between artificially imposed categories, of the complex relationship that geographical writing had with spatial practice, and of the flexibility of a spatially structured text in exploring similarities and differences of diverse lands. Even if little information is available about these various minor subgenres, it is important at least to acknowledge them if for no other reason than to highlight the great diversity and complexity of early medieval geographical writing.

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To sum up this section on the early and heterogeneous origins of geographical writing, the third through fifth centuries saw an unprecedented expansion in the number and originality of geographical texts. Geographical writing was both a response to and a shaper of profound transformations in the political, social, and cultural spatial practices of the age. Within the flexible format of the spatially structured text, authors were able to present a diverse range of information and spatial scales, and to accomplish varied cultural work. By categorizing this vast assortment of texts into etic subgenres, one can discern some consistent patterns. All of these spatially structured categories were linked to the three aforementioned shifts in the geographic landscape of the Sinitic world—sociopolitical fragmentation, southward expansion, and Buddhist transplantation. Local geographies attempted to replace the political structures of the fragmented Han sociopolitical order with a new common cultural ecumene, making local and frontier spaces active participants within the Sinitic world. But world-empire and capital geographies attempted to preserve Han imperial metageography, maintaining the centrality and singularity of the imperial court in a Sinocentric world. Local and environmental geographies articulated the transformation of the Yangzi basin from a southern frontier into a sec­ondary core of the Sinitic world. Foreign geographies revealed the high level of civilization in India, thereby challenging the supposed universalism and ethnocentrism of imperial geographies. New world geographies sought to surpass the imperial model with real all-inclusiveness by adopting alternative metageographies introduced from foreign or natural geographies. Although these different subgenres responded to the transformations in human geography in sometimes contradictory ways, they were all, each in its own way, trying to respond to and make sense of a world that was considerably different from that of the Han empire.

Consolidation of the Genre Bibliographic lists suggest that the writing of geographical texts was beginning to slow in the late fifth century. By this time, each of the subgenres of geographical writing had produced a critical mass of texts

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sufficient to establish its own set of literary forms and expectations, thereby offsetting the early dominance of local geographies. From this messy assortment of texts, the late fifth and early sixth centuries brought the final consolidation of the genre through a series of massive comprehensive geographies that unified the varying spatial scales and diverse topics into a coherent literary corpus. These consolidated, highly inclusive geographies built on the accomplishments of comprehensive imperial geographies from the preceding centuries but also experimented with a variety of alternative organizing structures. Early steps toward consolidation were first made during the Western Jin period, with its increased interest in world geographies. The disorderly nature of geographical writing became apparent, and attempts were made at creating a comprehensive treatise to rectify the problem. The primary complaints were of incompleteness and inco­ herence. For example, Pei Xiu 裴秀 (224–71), in his preface to his thirdcentury Yu gong diyu tu 禹貢地域圖 (Map of the regions of the tribute of Yu), lamented that his sources “are not complete accounts of the famous mountains and great rivers. Even though they provide only a rough outline, they are still inaccurate and cannot be relied upon” 亦不備載名山大川。雖有粗形，皆不精審，不可依據.87 An attempt at solving the problem of incompleteness and incoherence was made in the Jifu jing 畿服經 (Classic of the imperial domain) by Zhi Yu 摯虞 (d. 311), in an unprecedented 170 fascicles. The Sui shu describes the comprehensiveness of this work: “It was an undertaking to demarcate the borders between the prefectures, commanderies, and districts. ­Capital cities, mountain ranges, springs, towns both large and small, roads, fields under cultivation, conditions of the people, local customs, worthies of the past, and old relations. There was nothing that was not fully understood” 其州郡及縣分野封略事業，國邑山陵水泉，鄉亭城 道里土田，民物風俗，先賢舊好，靡不具悉. But the text was lost shortly after its writing, and, thus, literati continued to “each make their own records. Hence it was impossible to unify the genre under a single author” 並有記載，然不能成一家之體.88 This desire for comprehensiveness reemerged during the late fifth and early sixth centuries, most clearly articulated in Li Daoyuan’s preface to the Shuijing zhu. In this preface, Li Daoyuan explicitly articulated an ideal geographical text as one that is both “all-encompassing

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in scope” (zhou) and “complete in detail” (bei) and is knitted together with a consistent organizing structure. In ancient times, the Da Yu ji [Record of Yu the Great] recorded the mountains and seas; it was all-encompassing in scope but not complete in detail. That which is recorded in [the Han shu’s] “Dili zhi” is scant in detail and not all-encompassing in scope. The [“Yu gong” of the] Shangshu, the “Benji” [Basic annals], and the “Zhifang” [Manager of regions, of the Zhou li] are all mere outlines.89 That which is described in capital rhapsodies is reductive and does not convey any meaning. Although the Shuijing roughly traces the courses of rivers, it still lacks extensiveness and thoroughness. This is what is called “they each speak of their own aspirations,” but they are rarely able to provide comprehensive guidance.90 昔《大禹記》著山海，周而不備；《地理志》其所錄，簡而不周；《尚 書》、《本紀》與《職方》俱略；都賦所述，裁不宣意；《水經》雖粗綴 津緒，又闕旁通。所謂各言其志，而罕能備其宣導者矣。

The terms zhou and bei both mean “complete with everything,” but they imply two different kinds of completeness. The original meaning of zhou was to encircle and therefore means “all-encompassing” or “encyclopedic,” suggesting a comprehensive spatial coverage that would have incorporated new information from foreign geographies. The “Dili zhi” was not all-encompassing in scope since it covered only the area directly administered by the Han empire, thereby maintain­ ing the conflation of world and world-empire. The original meaning of bei was to have everything one needs and, by extension, to be completely equipped, suggesting a comprehensive gathering of all information from the various texts about a particular place. (Note that Pei Xiu used this same term to describe the shortcomings in geographical infor­ mation in the mid-third century.) Geographical texts that focused solely on the state administration of space were not comprehensive in this way.91 This theme of comprehensiveness is repeated throughout the preface, calling for a work that is “extensive” (pang 旁), “thorough” (tong 通), and “comprehensive” (xuan 宣), and criticizing works that were “scant in detail” ( jian 簡), “reductive” (cai 裁), or mere “outlines” (lüe 略). Although Li Daoyuan’s solution to these problems was unique

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to his own text, the sentiment captures the opinions of many of Li Daoyuan’s contemporaries. At the same time in the Yangzi basin, literati of the Qi and Liang (502–57) dynasties produced several comprehensive geographies, ­attempts to bring unity and order to the various spatially structured texts. The most important of these encyclopedic geographies was Lu Cheng’s massive Dili shu, in 149 fascicles. Although this text was lost sometime in the late tenth or early eleventh century, it figures prominently in the Sui shu’s bibliographic essay on the development of geographical writing.92 According to this essay, during the Southern Qi dynasty, “Lu Cheng gathered together the remarks of 160 authors. ­Relying on texts from the beginning to the end and from near to far, he compiled them into a single work and called it the Dili shu” 陸澄聚 一百六十家之說，依其前後遠近， 編而為部，謂之地理書. During the Liang dynasty, Ren Fang expanded the Dili shu by adding an additional eighty-four authors, bringing the total size to 252 fascicles, and renamed it the Diji.93 Little more is known of these comprehensive works beyond what the Sui shu describes in its terse account, but one can surmise a few important points. First, the Dili shu and the Diji seem not to have developed an innovative metageography or furthered geographical theory. Instead, their accomplishment was in their consolidation: compiling interrelated but still disparate strains of spatially organized writings into a single work and thus facilitating a sustained and integrated intertextual dialogue. Furthermore, as compilations of existing works, these two texts created clear-cut boundaries around what should be included in the genre and what should be excluded. Although literary historians prefer not to think of genres as containers for texts, the exercise of demarcating a genre’s boundaries can be useful, especially for writers who seek to establish the uniqueness and legitimacy of a new genre through dogmatic standards. Such boundaries are subjective and contested, reflecting the values of each individual author, but the unambiguous standard established by these compilations was useful nonetheless. The size of the Diji and its claims to comprehensiveness made it the primary guide for defining the boundaries of the genre. The Sui shu was explicit in its use of the Dili shu and the Diji to

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define the genre: “All texts that the two authors Ren Fang and Lu Cheng included as well as other travelogues are cataloged first. The remaining texts are listed after these. In doing so, we have made a complete (bei) record of geographical writing here” 任、陸二家所 記之內而又別行‌者，各錄在其書之上，自餘次之於下，以備地理 之記焉.94 World geographies aimed to provide all-encompassing (or nearly all-encompassing) spatial models of the world or the world-empire. Writers of the consolidation movement took these structures and ­attached to them comprehensive content. The most common structure was the imperial administrative geography, which both had the weight of tradition and continued to be the dominant structuring format for local geographies. Although many imperially structured geographical treatises were limited to administrative districting and census information (as Sima Biao encouraged compilers to do and as Li Daoyuan criticized them for doing), some treatises in the fifth and sixth centuries included comprehensive information that drew extensively from the various subgenres. Textual fragments show that this is the case with Kan Yin’s 闞駰 (fl. 439) Shisan zhou zhi 十三州志 (Record of the thirteen regions) from the Northern Wei dynasty and Gu Yewang’s 顧‌野‌王 (519–81) Yudi zhi 輿地志 (Record of the earth) from the Chen dynasty (557–89).95 Buddhist metageography offered an alternative all-encompassing spatial model. As mentioned in the section on world geographies, Buddhist world models of a Mount Anavatapta–centered Jambudvipa were introduced into Sinitic literature beginning in the Jin period. During the fifth and sixth centuries, these world models were employed as organizing structures to which comprehensive information could be attached. The monk Sengyou’s 僧祐 (445–518) Shijie ji 世界記 (Record of the world), written during the Liang dynasty, focuses mostly on Buddhist cosmology and geography but also includes descriptions of gods and ghosts, flora and fauna, weather, and natural disasters.96 Too often Sinologists construct artificial divisions between Buddhist and “normal” Sinitic literature. But the prominence of Buddhist authors and Buddhist metageographies throughout early medieval geographical literature breaks down these divisions. The Sui shu catalogs these

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Buddhist geographies as geographical, not Buddhist, texts. Furthermore, the direct influence of Buddhist metageographies on the Shui­ jing zhu and the Shuijing zhu’s subsequent influence on the rest of geographical literature reveals the cultural traction that Buddhist ideas achieved beyond strictly defined Buddhist literature.97 In the early-sixth-century Shuijing zhu, Li Daoyuan combined the hydrological structure of the Shuijing with the hydrological structure of Buddhist Jambudvipa, creating an organizing structure that could reach all places and penetrate every detail. “High and low, there is nothing that [water] does not reach; of the myriad things, there is nothing that it does not moisten” 高下無所不至，萬物無所不潤.98 Hence, there was no detail that could not be attached to this organizing ­structure—no locality story, historical event, natural object, or humanmade city that could not be included in this “all-encompassing” and “complete” treatise. Li Daoyuan’s rejection of imperial metageography and liberal adoption of Buddhist metageography were idiosyncratic approaches to constructing an all-encompassing spatial structure, but his desire to construct an all-encompassing spatial structure was characteristic of geographical writing of the time.99 These comprehensive geographies of the late fifth and early sixth centuries—with their attempts to assemble all geographical information about the known world into a meaningful and consistent organizing structure—were key to the final consolidation of the genre. Before this time, “it was impossible to unify the genre under a single author.”100 The several spatially structured categories were interrelated, sharing spatial schema and geographical information, but continued to use fairly independent modes of writing. Comprehensive geographies consolidated these expanding subgenres, giving them a forum within which to engage each other in literary dialogue. After this consolidation movement, one begins to see geographical writing evaluated in works of literary criticism.101 One of these works, Liu Zhiji’s 劉知幾 (661–721) Shitong 史通 (Com­prehensive understanding of history), explicitly comments on the significance of these late fifth- and ­early sixth-century comprehensive geographies in the formation of the genre. “From Shen Ying’s writing of the Linhai shuitu [Landscape of Linhai] and Zhou Chu’s composing the Yangxian fengtu [Local environment of Yangxian], the texts of this cate­ gory were numerous. They surely were not a single genre. Hence, the Dili

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was written, and Lu Cheng’s collection was inexhaustible. The commentary was added to the Shuijing, and Li [Dao]yuan’s compilation was limitless. All things regarding regions are exhausted in these works” 自沈瑩著《臨海水土》 ，周處撰《陽羨風土》 ，厥類衆多，諒非一族。是 以《地理》爲書，陸澄集而難盡；《水經》加註，酈元編而不窮。蓋方 物之事，盡在是矣.102 Liu Zhiji’s statement articulates the dual role of these comprehensive works. They gathered together the numerous and diverse texts pertaining to matters geographical and finally unified them into a single tradition or genre. This was not accomplished by just one comprehensive work, but by a series of comprehensive works written during the late fifth and early sixth centuries.

Rewriting the History of Geography The retrospective developmental history of geographical writing that was constructed by early Tang officials does not match the available evidence. In this chapter, I have traced a heterogeneous developmental trajectory. Key geographical concepts could be found in Warring States and Han texts, but they were scattered piecemeal throughout the literature. Geographical writing first proliferated in the Three Kingdoms and Jin periods (especially local geographies), production peaked in the Song and Qi periods, and then the genre consolidated in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. During the Sui and early Tang dynasties, imperial officials began to dominate the production of geographical writing, developing the tujing 圖經 (map-treatise) style to integrate provincial and imperial geographies. Early Tang officials constructed their own narrative of geographical development that affirmed the ­legitimacy of the newly reestablished imperial state and their own importance in its continued existence. Tang officials constructed a narrative affirming an essentialist vision of geographical writing that favored (1) state-centered comprehensive geographies, (2) the importance of geography to statecraft and good governance, (3) the ancient origins of this relationship with the sage-kings of old, and (4) the continuity of this relationship up to the present Tang dynastic empire.103 This argument was not new; it resembled, in essence, what was presented in the “Dili zhi” over five centuries earlier.

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But this old narrative faced a new problem. Since the Han empire, geographical writing had emerged as an independent and vibrant literary genre. The vast majority of such literature from these intervening centuries did not conform to this tidy, imperialist narrative of geographical development. Instead, geographical writing from this period was mostly local in scale and cultural or environmental in topic. In response to these changes, Tang officials made three rhetorical moves in reformulating the history of geographical writing. First, they greatly exaggerated the significance of the few geographical texts from Warring States and Han times. Second, they denounced early medieval literature as trivial, parochial, self-serving, and even subversive. And, third, they highlighted the few early medieval texts that did conform to their vision of what geographical writing ought to have been. In constructing this narrative of the development of geographical writing, Tang officials were making their own self-serving depiction of the spatial past. Thus, geographical writing was once again being refashioned to perform new cultural work that was needed in the new sociopolitical climate of the early Tang empire.

Establishing Classical Precedent In order to claim canonical foundations for geographical writing and continuity from these foundations to the Tang dynasty, officials exaggerated the significance of Warring States and Han “geographical” texts—texts that were not classified as geographical in their own time. This exaggerated claim is clear in the bibliographic essay on geographical writing in the Sui shu. Two-thirds of this essay is devoted to Han and pre-Han developments, even though texts from these periods make up only 6 of the 138 texts (about 4 percent) in the Sui shu’s own bibliographic catalog that precedes the essay.104 The essay narrates how geographical knowledge was foundational to the sage-kings’ establishment of civilization. In the primeval days, “across the lands of the five directions, the habits that are born from one’s environment, whether people are firm or flexible and light or heavy, their cuisine and attire, each of these had their own nature and could not be moved or transformed” 五方土地，風氣所生，剛柔輕重，飲食衣服，各有其性，不可 遷變. Armed with thorough knowledge of the advantages and

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disadvantages of the “things appropriate for each land” 物其土宜, the sage-kings were able to know the will of the people, establish government, and teach civilizing principles. The continued importance of ­geography to the state is furthered in this Sui shu account with a descrip­ tion of the idealized Zhou office of manager of regions (zhifang 職方) from the Zhou li 周禮 (Rituals of Zhou) and the anecdote of how Xiao He 蕭何 (d. 193 BCE) saved the Qin maps from the fire that destroyed Xianyang so he could know the strategic points of the empire.105 Of the few texts that the Sui shu could actually cite from this ­period, Ban Gu’s “Dili zhi” receives the most attention. The “Dili zhi” fits nicely into the imperial agenda, but the Sui shu still overstates its comprehensiveness. It describes its contents as recording “regions and princedoms, commanderies and districts, mountains and rivers, safe and dangerous places, the distinguishing of prevailing customs, the dividing of guiding stars, that which local climate spawns, the breadth of territories, and the enumeration of households” 其州國郡縣山川夷 險時俗之異，經星之分，風氣所生，區域之廣，戶口之數. Although this breadth of topics is indeed included, they are packed very briefly into the concluding section on the Warring States lands (di), which makes up less than a quarter of the whole text. The other three quarters enumerate only administrative districts and census information. Based on this measurement, one might agree with Li Daoyuan’s assessment that the “Dili zhi” was “scant in detail and not all-encompassing in scope.” But the “Dili zhi” offered precisely what the Sui shu editors wanted: a vast spatial scale that was still confined to imperial territory and a broad cultural coverage that was still subordinated to imperial administration.106 In short, the bibliographic essay of the Sui shu devotes most of its narrative to the classical period, a period that produced only a tiny fraction of the Sui shu’s own bibliographic list. The essay compensates for this lacuna of early geographical texts with idealized offices, historical anecdotes, lost works, texts that were not recognized as geographies in their own time, and component chapters of larger encyclopedic works. But the desired goals were accomplished: the narrative affirmed that geographical writing had always been political in orientation and comprehensive in scope and that it had been instrumental in imperial governance in the classical Zhou and Han and now Sui-Tang states.

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Repudiation of Local Geographies After establishing the classical precedents for geographical writing, Tang officials had to deal with the fact that the greatest growth and innovation in geographical writing happened not in the classical age of Zhou and Han, but during the Age of Disunion, a reality that under­ mined the assumed superiority of imperial unity. One approach to this issue was simply to ignore the period and its geographical texts entirely, as was done in the Yuanhe junxian tuzhi 元和郡縣圖志 (Map-records of the commanderies and counties of the [Tang] Yuanhe reign period).107 When they did write about the early medieval geographical texts, Tang officials repudiated the untoward direction geographical writing had taken during this chaotic period. Tang accounts describe early medieval geographical writing as if local geographies were the only form of geography being written during this period. Although it is true that local geographies were the largest single subgenre of geographical writing, describing the entire genre in this way ignored the many other categories that collectively were more numerous than local geographies. Liu Zhiji’s seventh-century definition of the genre conflates geographical writing with local geographies. The Nine Regions and the limits of the earth, the myriad states and the mountains and rivers, material culture that is uniquely suited [to that place], customs and distinctive folkways, if each of these aspects is recorded about one’s home state, it is sufficient to understand this single region. Such is the case with Cheng Hongzhi’s Jingzhou ji [Record of Jing­ zhou], Chang Qu’s Huayang guozhi, Mr. Xin’s Sanqin [ji] [Record of Sanqin], and Luo Han’s Xiangzhong [ji] [Record of Xiangzhong]. These are what are called geographical writings.108 九州土宇，萬國山川，物產殊宜，風化異俗，如各志其本國，足以明此 一方，若盛弘之《荊州記》、常璩《華陽國志》、辛氏《三秦》、羅含《湘 中》。此之謂地理書者也。

Liu Zhiji’s assumed topic of “home states” and “single regions” as well as his selected examples affirm that geography, at its foundation, is nothing more than chorography. This caricature made it easier to focus attention on the trivialities and biases of early medieval geographical writing.

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Tang literati criticized early medieval local geographies for containing massive amounts of useless information. The geographical chapter of the Tongdian 通典 (Comprehensive canons), compiled by Du You, makes this point clear: In total, there were many who spoke of geography, of differentiating regions, verifying the changes in administrative units, understanding strategic points, and observing local customs. Minutiae fills these documents; not a tree or stone is left out. At every movement they fill a hundred scrolls. How could this be what is called extracting the pivotal and important? They are preposterous and baseless, records of everywhere with random accounts. How could one have sufficient time to compile and cite all these texts!109 凡言地理者多矣，在辨區域，徵因革，知要害，察風土，纖介畢書，樹石 無漏，動盈百軸，豈所謂撮機要者乎！如誕而不經，遍記雜說，何暇 編舉。

Writers were many, scrolls numbered in the hundreds, and topics were boundless. Such overabundance made it impossible to read and compile all the texts into a comprehensive work. But this impossibility was also due to the incoherence of the genre and the triviality of the content. Geographical writing lacked the transcendent “warp thread” (jing 經) that would allow one to recognize the “pivotal and important.”110 It is clear from the content of the geographical chapter of the Tongdian that Du You considered administrative geography the proper purview of geographical writing, the true guiding spatial schema. This sentiment is mirrored in the Sui shu, which describes local geographies as “superficial studies” (moxue 末學), unlike the state-centered geographies of the classical age that served the important functions of “regulating the boundaries of tianxia” 疆理天下 and “organizing the government” 齊其政.111 Beyond the overabundance and trivialities of these texts, Tang ­officials further condemned geographical writing for being biased, self-serving, and inaccurate. Liu Zhiji identified the root problem as hometown pride leading to exaggerations and inaccuracies. According to him, authors of geographies thought that “their own [land] is a paradise” 自以為樂土 or “their own [town] is a famous capital” 自以為

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名‌都. “When debating the merits of one’s own residence” 競美所居, he asserted, “talk exceeds the facts” 談過其實. Such biases were “so vulgar!” 鄙哉.112 This relationship between hometown pride and inaccuracies was also noted in the Tongdian: “All of these [local geographies] describe the miracles of their hometown and how their men are worthy and their goods abundant. But, if one consults other documents, one finds many errors and mistakes” 皆自述鄉國靈怪，人賢物 盛，參以他書，則多紕謬.113 The Sui shu assessment of local geographies is less focused on local pride and more on narrow-mindedness and parochialism: “After [the Han], literati peered through bamboo tubes and made superficial studies. Unable to reach great distances, they merely recorded the fame of their own prefecture or commandery” 是後載筆之士，管窺末學，不能及遠，但記州郡之名而已.114 Like a frog in a well, early medieval authors were incapable of writing about anything beyond their own locale, incapable of seeing the larger world that was the proper vision of classical and Tang scholars. Finally, Tang officials equated the chaos, self-service, and parochialism of local geographies with the equally chaotic, self-serving, and parochial Age of Disunion from which the genre emerged. This parallelism is most overtly articulated in the Tongdian. In its preface to the chapter on geography, the Tongdian sets the stage with this horrific description of the historical context of geographical writing: After the Qin and Han dynasties, they relied on heavy taxes to make the state rich, on massed infantry to make the army strong, on opening up the frontiers to make the empire great, and on bringing tribute in from distant lands to make their efficacy full. With the fighting over cities, murder filled the cities; with the fighting over lands, murder covered the countryside. They exchanged human flesh and blood for uncultivated fields. On the small scale, the world sighed with resentment while gangs of bandits began to swarm. On the large scale, they perished, and their clans were annihilated, passing on this evil for myriad generations. How wrong was this!115 秦漢之後，以重斂為國富，卒眾為兵強，拓境為業大，遠貢為德盛，爭 城殺人盈城，爭地殺人滿野，用生人膏血，易不殖土田。小則天下怨 咨，群盜蜂起；大則殞命殲族，遺惡萬代，不亦謬哉！

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Only after these images of carnage, lawlessness, and chaos does the Tongdian turn to the similarly chaotic geographical texts that reflect their sociopolitical context—full of minutiae that had lost the warp thread, biases that served their authors rather than the greater good, and exaggerated and erroneous claims that sowed confusion and ­ignorance. The chaos and disorder of pre-sixth-century geographical writing mirrored the chaos and disorder of pre-Sui political history. Although analyzing literary production within a sociopolitical context (as I do throughout this book) is often fruitful, here the Tongdian uses a simplistic caricature of a complex political history to explain an equally simplistic caricature of a complex literary history, all in the service of Tang imperial ideology. According to Tang officials, early medieval geographical writing had run afoul of its original mission of imposing political order upon the natural world. But it could be redeemed, if Tang officials brought it back into alignment with the classical standards that Tang officials themselves had constructed, based on a very selective reading of Han and pre-Han spatially structured texts. Pivotal to this selective reading were the handful of comprehensive geographies that were actually written during the early medieval period.

Accentuating Comprehensive Geographies While denouncing early medieval geographical writing as parochial and self-serving, Tang officials also accentuated the comprehensive imperial treatises that had been written during the early medieval ­period so as to claim continuity with the idealized version of classical geographies that they had spent such effort constructing. The handful of comprehensive imperial geographies that were composed during this period were presented as flickers of light, preserving the universalizing vision of the Han empire throughout an otherwise abysmal darkness of narrow-minded local geographies. The presentation of ­imperial geographies as the only exception to the general pattern of local geographies establishes an essentializing dichotomy between the two. Local geographies represented the interests of the regional regimes of the Age of Disunion, and imperially structured comprehensive

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g­ eographies affirmed the imperial ideal that all knowledge of tian­xia could and should be circumscribed and subordinated to imperial order. The myopic attention to imperial over local geographies is apparent in the developmental narrative of geographical writing presented in the Sui shu, which focuses especially on comprehensive imperial geographies. Although the essay does not identify by name a single local geography from the forty texts listed in its own bibliographic catalog, it does name and describe six of the eight comprehensive imperial geographies from its catalog. The developmental narrative presents the burgeoning of local geographies upon the breakup of the Han empire as a rupture with the genre’s classical foundations, a deterioration from which a gradual and halting recovery was eventually achieved. During the imperial reunification of the Western Jin, Zhi Yu wrote the Jifu jing, within which “there was nothing that was not known.” But then this text was lost, and chaos returned. The massive compilations of the late fifth and early sixth centuries brought about a consolidation of the genre. But, even among the various world geographies of this period, the Sui shu focuses on comprehensive imperial geographies, avoiding references to comprehensive nonimperial geographies (such as the Shuijing zhu) or noncomprehensive imperial geographies (such as the Yuanjia liunian diji 元嘉六年地記 [Geographical record of the sixth year of the (Song dynasty) Yuanjia reign period]). Finally, the narrative culminates with the political unification by the Sui regime, which “made a general edict to all commanderies of tianxia that a catalog of all local customs, local products, and maps should be submitted to the secretariat” 普詔天下諸郡，條其風俗物產地圖，上于尚書. This ushered in the tujing system of government-ordered, locally authored, comprehensively compiled geographical writing.116 Repudiating local geographies and lauding comprehensive geographies, however, posed a problem: if local geographies were biased and unreliable, how could the comprehensive geographies that drew their information from them not also be unreliable? The solution seems to have been in the comprehensive scale and imperial structure. Just as local writing would inevitably be parochial, biased, and trivial, comprehensive geographies would inevitably be impartial, catholic,

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and substantive. As Liu Zhiji wrote, local geographies will always ­exaggerate the greatness of their own regions, but, if geographies are written at the world scale, “flowing through the Nine Regions” 浹於 九州 like Zhu Gan’s 朱贛 (Han) work or “exhausting the kingdoms of the four corners” 殫於四國 like Kan Yin’s (Northern Wei) Shisan zhou zhi, “then their language is all elegant and correct, and their content is without bias or preference” 斯則言皆雅正，事無偏黨者矣.117 But the comprehensive scale was not enough in itself, as is evident in the Tang reception of the comprehensive Shuijing zhu. This tome bore too great a resemblance to the disruptive literary style and natural metageography of local geographies and was similarly criticized. The near-contemporary Shishan zhou zhi, conversely, received positive evaluations for its comprehensiveness and traditional administrative structure.118 Once the trivialities and prejudices of local geography were woven into a comprehensive scale and an imperial metageography, the same content could then support literary claims to totality and unity and thereby legitimize imperial claims of transcending time and space. In sum, Tang officials constructed their own version of the history of geographical writing, one that legitimized the imperial project and its claims to spatial transcendence. To do this they exaggerated the contributions of Han and pre-Han “geographical” texts so as to connect the new genre to authoritative foundations in classical literature and the Han political order. They minimized the contributions of early medieval geographical writing and conflated all geographical writing with local geographies. Finally, they claimed continuity with classical foundations through a thin thread of comprehensive imperial geographies that wove its way between the mess of local geographies. This Tang narrative is quite different from the far messier developmental reconstruction that I described in the previous section. This should surprise no one. Just as early medieval literati originally composed geographical texts to respond to and refashion spatial practice in their own time and according to their own needs, Tang officials were once again doing the same, now in the service of the empire. The sociopolitical landscape had changed again, and the cultural work of geographical writing changed with it.

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Conclusion In many ways, the story of the development of geographical writing is the story of the early medieval period itself. Geographical writing is a literary genre built on classical roots that came into its own in this period. It was a literary manifestation of the transformations of the age, which were profoundly spatial in their experience and complexities: fragmentation of imperial order, localization of sociopolitical structures, movement of populations, relocation of a civilizational core, and transplantation of Buddhism into the Sinitic ecumene.119 This manifestation in no way resembles the simplistic Tang caricature of early medieval geopolitical history or of its equally simplistic caricature of the development of geographical writing. Rather, it is a story of a complex and diverse assortment of spatially structured texts written in order to make sense of an unstable and confusing human experience. Imperial and nationalist historical narratives have tried to ignore or marginalize the early medieval period, but the extraordinary innovations of this age and its literature demand to be reckoned with. Although foundational geographical information and schemas can be found in Warring States and Han literature, these instances remained marginal and piecemeal, focusing primarily on the construction of a Han imperial metageography. Spatially structured texts became especially useful as imperial order fragmented into a cultural ecumene that was larger and more diverse than it had ever previously been. The third through fifth centuries saw a burgeoning of new geographical writings that addressed a wide range of spatial scopes and geographical topics. Local geographies were the earliest and largest of these subgenres, but geographical texts were also structured around natural features, foreign lands, the world, capitals, monuments, and expeditions. All of these subgenres were produced both to understand and to manage in their own ways the quickly shifting geopolitical and geocultural landscape of the age. The transformation of the southern-frontier-turned-secondary-core encouraged the writing of local and environmental geographies. The imperial resurgences of the Western Jin and Sui-Tang regimes inspired the writing of imperial and capital geographies. Geographic accounts of the centrality of India

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validated the faith of Sinitic Buddhists but also undermined traditional Sinocentric visions of the world and wrenched apart the classical conflation of world, civilized world, and world-empire. The spatial structure of geographical writing allowed early medieval authors to address all of these spatial transformations of the age more adeptly than did other literary forms. In the late fifth and early sixth centuries, a series of comprehensive geographical treatises from both Yellow and Yangzi basin literati encompassed these obviously related but still disparate and varied sets of spatially structured texts. In accomplishing Li Daoyuan’s stated goal of creating a work that was “all-encompassing in scope” and “complete in detail,” these comprehensive geographies brought order and intertextual dialogue to the various spatially structured texts. Through this consolidation movement, they “unified the genre under a single author” and constructed “a single genre.”120 Subsequently, Tang officials evaluated and reinterpreted early medieval geographical writing to serve their own imperial ideologies. They asserted that geographical writing originated in the classical texts of the Zhou and the Han, that comprehensive state-structured imperial geographies were the proper format of geographical writing, and that early medieval local geographies were an aberration of this imagined normative standard. All of these assertions declared that geographical writing tied the Tang empire directly to authoritative classical roots, affirming the ancient and natural state of a world-empire that could transcend space and time. In doing so, Tang officials—like early medieval literati before them—were employing geography to accomplish the pressing cultural work of their own time. But having to gaze through this Tang portrayal of the Age of Disunion that preceded it is also characteristic of early medieval studies more generally. We are forever indebted to Tang officials for preserving and interpreting for us as much as they did, and at the same time we are always trying to see through the filters and look past the biases that they used in their preservation and interpretive efforts.

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Chapter Two

Region and Ecumene

T

he prominence of local geographies in the early medieval period, as described in the previous chapter, foregrounds the contested issue of regionalism and its appropriate place within two competing superstructures that were usually conflated by imperial officials: the political empire and the cultural ecumene. This chapter will explore how local geographies collectively challenged the monolithic and topdown model of imperial metageography and described instead a reciprocal relationship between the region and ecumene in which local elites were both inheritors of and active contributors to the civilized world. I call this metageography ecumenical regionalism.1 All agrarian societies were primarily local in their economic, social, and political structures, because local landlords had the most ­direct control over the resources of land and labor—the two primary sources of wealth and power in agrarian society. Any premodern state invariably had to negotiate mutually beneficial relationships with its constituent local elites.2 The states of the Sinitic ecumene were no ­exception. The myth that the Han empire had successfully subdued regionalism was propagandized through the monopoly on writing held by its literate elites, who were mostly committed to state service and defined their social and cultural status by their transcendence of ­regionalism.3 As Mark Lewis has observed, “while the history of early China was a history of regions marked by great diversity, the writing of that history in the early imperial centuries paid little attention to

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these divergences.” Regionalism was associated with the chaos of the Warring States and was therefore “a target of suspicion that was deliberately excluded from the historic record.”4 A comparison with the Roman empire here is instructive. For both empires, simplistic narratives of Sinicization or Romanization fail to capture the complexities of local elites attempting to balance local and panimperial cultures and identities. The most significant difference, however, is that within the Roman empire local elites had a variety of non-Latin scripts with which to express the distinctiveness of their local cultures, but within the Han empire there was only the single nonalphabetic Sinitic script, allowing greater court control over the expression of elite local cultures across East Asia.5 Despite this seeming monolithic homogeneity presented in court-dominated Han literature, in reality entrenched patterns of regionalism persisted throughout the four centuries of supposed Han “grand unity” and reemerged quickly into the literary record of the third century as power shifted away from the imperial court and into the hands of regional military governors and local great families.6 Local geographies offered a literary articulation of this dynamic and dialectic relationship between local and ecumenical spaces. As has been noted by Andrew Chittick, the unique spatial structure of geographical writing allowed these texts to nimbly describe both outside influences coming into the locale and local influence affecting the outer world.7 As such, local geographies linked markers of regionalism (such as local customs, local products, and local elites) with symbols of universalism (such as canonical literature, mythic sage-kings, and world-empires). They therefore describe both the distinctiveness of a locale and, at the same time, its commonalities with other locales across a common cultural ecumene. They describe local elites as full participants in the civilized world with local cultures that are both an instantiation of ecumenical standards and a model for the rest of the world to follow. Or, as Michael Farmer sums up the early medieval local histories of Sichuan, they were at the same time “powerful arguments for cultural inclusion and statements of regional pride.”8 Ecumenical regionalism is an etic label for a metageography that was operative and apparent in early medieval local geographies even if not self-­consciously articulated by them, at least not in surviving texts.

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As imperial institutions weakened throughout the third and fourth centuries, the operative superstructure that tied regions together shifted from the sociopolitical hierarchy of an empire toward the c­ ultural networks of an ecumene. By defining their identity through participation in the civilized world rather than their submission to the world-empire, local elites could ride through the vicissitudes of competing military dynasts. The Jin empire brought about a short-lived resurgence in the imperial metageography, after which the centrifugal forces of the third century returned again in the fourth and fifth centuries. The need for a metageography that could assert a region’s cultural participation within a more inclusive civilized world was all the more consequential, especially for Yangzi basin–based states whose rising political strength was at odds with their traditional cultural peripherality. Throughout this period, literati of the Yangzi basin were consistently more willing to adopt ideas of ecumenical regionalism to replace the traditional “central realm” metageography that a priori marginalized their own positions within the Sinitic ecumene.

Han Imperial Metageography Greg Woolf has observed how “successful empires are sustained by long-term relationships with other social entities with which they are in some sense symbiotic.” They engineer mutually beneficial “synergies” between imperialism and other institutions, such as aristocracy, civilization, the military, and provincial elites. “During the symbiosis each set of partners modified the other.”9 These varied relationships find spatial expression in an imperial metageography that claims ­centrality in the world, mastery over nature, transcendence over regionalism, control over provinces, preeminence over foreign states, and conflation with civilization. With the emergence of bureaucratic states in the Warring States period, the idea of state power imposing order on the natural world gained cultural traction. The Zhou li describes idealized officials whose responsibility it was “to hold the maps of the world so as to hold the lands of the world” 掌天下之圖，以掌天下之地.10 The “Yu

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gong” provides the earliest state-centered spatial model of the whole (known) world. As discussed in chapter 1, the foundational concepts from these late Warring States texts were further synthesized and elaborated in Ban Gu’s highly influential “Dili zhi.” These core texts organize the structures of the earth according to a politicized spatial model that legitimized the Han imperial project. They formed a set of spatial schemas that I have been calling the Han imperial metageography. Although developed within these geographical texts, this metageography provided the spatial structure to imperial literature in a variety of genres, including dynastic histories, poetic rhapsodies, and ritual instructions.11 This model asserted the centrality of the imperial court over the entire world. Spatial authority was affirmed, first, through canonical ritual that transcended time and space, thereby superseding the regional confines of the Han court’s actual locale. These timeless rituals bound the Han court to the idealized ancient Zhou court, making the imperial court the connective node between heaven, earth, and human­ kind. Second, centrality was affirmed through a cosmographic collecting of goods and information from human, natural, and supernatural spaces. The imperial court gathered taxes, tribute, and local products (fengtu 風土) from its subordinate provinces and neighboring states, but it also gathered information from across the world in the form of folk customs, popular sentiments, natural portents, and divine sanctions. Doing so placed the periphery into a hierarchical relationship with the center and constructed in the capital a microcosm of the universe.12 Third, the relationship of the earth’s spaces to the imperial center was one of concentric gradation. Mutual obligations to and from this ritual center were most heavy for those closest to the court (in terms of relative, not necessarily absolute, space), and then extended outward, gradually diminishing as the structure reached the farthest ends of the earth. By superimposing the various meanings of the term tianxia (the world, the civilized world, the world-empire), the imperial metageography espoused universal rulership, singular in its authority and limitless in its reach.13 This Han imperial metageography was not a reality, but it was a set of spatial conceptualizations that were in a dialectic relationship with the realities of imperial practice. The idea of the transcendent imperial

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capital was reified through the construction of the Eastern Han capital at Luoyang following canonical prescriptions and through the concentration of key rituals and their performances within that capital, most importantly the sacrifices to heaven. The prioritization of the imperial capital over subservient regions was expressed institutionally in the resettlement of local elites to the capital region, the division of provincial space into artificial administrative units, the policy of making gov­ ernment office dependent on mastery of a literary language divorced from local or spoken vernaculars, and the regular flow of regional products into the capital in the form of taxes or tribute. In Han foreign relations, practical accommodations had to be made, but the geographical model was flexible enough to justify a variety of different foreign policies, including defensive walls, expansionist campaigns, or a loose rein policy. As such, the Han imperial metageography—like all metageographies—was (in the words of Henri Lefebvre) part of a “dia­ lectical relationship which exists within the triad of the perceived, the conceived, and the lived.”14 Han imperial geography primarily operated within three distinct spaces: the capital, the inner realm, and the outer realm. The capital was the center of the earth, the seat of power, the home of the Son of Heaven and his court. It was from here that powerful rituals were performed that transcended the temporal and spatial limitations of the physical geography that surrounded the court. These were prominent themes in the Han rhapsodies on imperial “capitals, palaces, hunts, and spectacles” 京都宮觀遊獵聲色.15 In a microcosmic reading of the ­official histories, the temporal centrality of the capital was structured into the text as the “fundamental chronicles” (benji 本紀). These take the chronicling of one supreme ruler as the guiding thread of history, thus fitting the Liu 劉 house into a singular and universal teleology that superseded dynasties and transcended time.16 The inner realm was (in theory) both the civilized world and the territory directly administered by the Han court, the idea being that the dissemination of the refined culture of the court went hand in glove with imperial administration. These two political and cultural realms conveniently mapped onto and reinforced each other. The “Dili zhi” asserts this political-cultural transformation of the inner realm through the division of its record into two parts, describing the same

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spatial territory twice at two distinct temporal periods. First are the directly administered commanderies ( jun) and subordinate princedoms (guo) of the Western Han (202 BCE–23 CE), and second are the “lands” (di) of the Warring States that preceded Han unification. All descriptions of regionalism, such as local customs and environment, were attached to the account of the ancient “lands.” But this ancient and regionalistic world, according to the “Dili zhi,” had been superseded by Han administrative geography. It restructured the naturally defined regions into purposefully artificial administrative units and asserted direct administrative control over them from the imperial court, clear down to the local district (xian).17 So compelling was this replacement of Warring States regionalism with imperially administered commanderies and districts that subsequent geographical essays in dynastic histories following the Han shu claimed no need to return to the subject of local customs. Sima Biao explained in his “Junguo zhi” 郡國志 (Monograph on commanderies and principalities [of the Eastern Han]) that Ban Gu’s “Dili zhi” had already “recorded every detail [lit. root to branch] of the commanderies and districts of tianxia as well as the peculiarities of topography and the origins of local customs” 記天下郡縣本末，及山川奇異，風俗所由. Future geographies, therefore, needed only to update changes in jurisdictional boundaries and household registrations.18 Finally, the outer realm was the territory beyond the pale of Han control and Sinitic civilization but still theoretically subject to the Son of Heaven’s universal authority. Barbarism was merely the extreme case of cultural variation due to environmentally affected local customs. An account of this realm in the official histories is presented in the bio­ graphical section and is hence categorically separated in this microcosmic reading of the official histories from the inner realm described in the geographical essay. In the Han shu, foreigners are presented along a spatial continuum, farther from the emperor than officials but closer than court women and usurpers.19 The placement of court women along this spatial continuum with foreigners and usurpers reveals, once again, the disconnect between spatial representation and practice in the Han imperial metageography. Court women, like provincial elites and frontier generals, were in reality pivotal to the functioning of the imperial state but were intentionally marginalized in this

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spatial framework. It was precisely this dissonance between spatial representation and practice in the Han imperial metageography, exacerbated by transformations in early medieval spatial practice, that inspired alternative spatial frameworks and topics of inquiry in early medieval geographical writing.

Local Geographies and Ecumenical Regionalism Three long-term sociopolitical developments throughout the second to fourth centuries disrupted Han relationships between capital and province: (1) the rise of locally powerful families across the countryside, (2) the independence of regional governors, and (3) the growing population in the Yangzi basin. As landlordism expanded throughout the Eastern Han, members of great families filled the imperial bureaucracy while still maintaining local bases of support. As this bureaucratically supported landlordism sucked the imperial coffers of revenue, the imperial army diminished, and prefectural inspectorates built up their own military forces in order to provide security. With support from local great families, inspectorates (originally tasked with merely report­ ing on the commanderies assigned to them) transformed into regional military governors that could act with autonomy from the imperial court. Both of these problems for imperial unity were exacerbated in the Yangzi basin, where local elites could carve out even larger estates from the vast southern frontier, and physical distance from the capital gave regional military governors even greater autonomy. As populations from the Yellow River basin migrated southward, landlords and warlords were given the manpower necessary to turn their peripheral remoteness into significant rival power bases. This shift southward had already started in the Eastern Han, but it greatly accelerated in the beginning of the fourth century with the move of the Jin court to the Yangzi basin.20 The writing of local geographies correlates with this fragmenting of imperial institutions and the rise of independent states in the Yangzi basin. As can be seen in figure 1.7, the first flourishing in the production of local geographies was in the third-century Three Kingdoms period, and the second came in the fifth century with the rise of the Jiankang

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Empire in the Yangzi basin.21 Throughout this period of weaker imperial institutions, it behooved local great families and regional military governors to reconsider the Han imperial conflation of the world, world-empire, and civilized world. As local and regional leaders implicitly distanced themselves from current ambitions of reestablishing a new world-empire, they explicitly strengthened their claims to active participation in and inheritance from the civilized world and the Han world-empire of the past. As the people of each locale laid claim to this relationship, collectively the inhabitants of the Yellow and Yangzi River basins asserted their common heritage of a culturally defined Sinitic community. This process shifted the meaningful spatial superstructure for these local and regional communities away from a politically hierarchical empire and toward a culturally networked ecumene.

Spatially Structured Text It was the unique spatial structure of local geographies that allowed these texts to articulate a dialectic relationship between local and ­ecumenical spaces in terms of mutual engagement, describing the distinctiveness of place while still situating it in a meaningful way within a larger spatial superstructure.22 Because space was the organizing structure of the text, ecumenical influences on a particular locale and its local influences on the ecumene were presented together, highlighting the multidirectional codependencies at work in each individual local space. The result was the construction of a polycentric ecumenical regionalism, in which communities from across the civilized world could cite local inculcation of ecumenewide civilizational values and at the same time assert unique locally derived contributions to civilization, claiming inclusion within a diverse yet collective elite cultural identity.23 This unique ability of geographical writing can be illuminated through a comparison with other local and regional forms of literature. In the chronicles of regional states, the question of political legit­ imacy was unavoidable, since the very existence of the regional state (and every­thing about it, including its own court dating system used to chronicle its historical narrative) undermined the imperial claim to universal rulership. This form of regional writing, therefore, merely

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heightened the perceived tensions between the universal narrative of the “standard histories” (zhengshi 正史) and the regional “histories of illegitimate [regimes]” (weishi 僞史).24 In contrast, the genre of local compilations of biographies, like local geographies, did indeed tie together the imperial-provincial divide. These texts compiled biographies on eminent men (and occasionally women) from a particular local administrative unit—usually successful officials in the imperial bureau­cracy or great literary talents.25 Like local geographies, these local compilations of biographies effectively described the contributions that a provincial locale could make to the wider civilized world. But, unlike local geographies, the genre was structurally limited to biographies of local natives only, and the genre was therefore unable to pair these endogenous influences from the locale on the ecumene with the exogenous influences from the ecumene on the locale. The ability of local geographies to account for both of these reciprocal forces allowed local geographies to displace local compilations of biographies in the third century as the dominant literary genre for describing local spaces.26 The spatial structure of local geographies also allowed for the easy incorporation of spatially linked anecdotes from a wide variety of literary sources, and the collective diversity of these various anecdotes articulates a more complex, multivalent relationship between the ecumene and the locale. Because of the spatial structure of geographical writing, anything that happened in a particular local space (or could be claimed to have happened there) was fair game for inclusion. Information was gathered from texts irrespective of their original spatial scale, literary genre, or political purpose, ranging from canonical to vernacular sources, from poetry and history to philosophy and myth. Local geographies were “an extremely fluid, catch-all genre” for any and all information regarding a particular place.27 This hodgepodge of anecdotes from heterogeneous sources inevitably presented a more multifaceted depiction of regionalism and its relationship with the ­political-cultural center than possible in any one of those sources by itself. Pairing a local geography’s spatial dialectic with its composite source base allowed it to be more politically ambivalent on the issue of regional versus imperial legitimacy, sidelining the political issue in favor of ecumenical inclusion, a cultural idea that could potentially be appealing to both regional authorities and imperial claimants.28

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The new literary technique in geographical writing that Andrew Chittick labeled the “locality story”—a short anecdote that was linked to a particular location so as to reveal the distinctive character of that place—was the means through which local geographies developed the idea of ecumenical regionalism. Chittick’s classification of these ­locality stories into three types is useful in explaining how they reformulated the spatial relationship between the ecumene and the locale. First, and least innovatively, writers retold well-known historical anec­ dotes from traditional literature that had already been identified to have happened in the particular locale being described. These familiar stories, mostly from the late Warring States and Han periods, tend to affirm the principles of Han imperial metageography—the capital as the source of civilization and officials bringing refined culture to provincial rustics. These tales are spatially clustered around the old core of the Yellow River basin. Second, and more interesting, writers took known anecdotes that lacked a specific spatial marker as told in traditional literature and then assigned a location to it. Anchoring old literary stories to these new locales allowed local communities from a far vaster spatial range than the Yellow River core to claim local participation and inclusion within the ancient literary world of Sinitic texts. The third type of locality story introduces entirely new stories. These were sometimes about familiar historical or mythic characters, sometimes about entirely new local characters, and sometimes about divine spirits. These too had a much wider spatial distribution than the first type.29 The flexibility of these locality stories (especially the second and third types) granted authors considerable creative license to extend the foundational myths of Sinitic civilization beyond the confines of the Yellow River plain, across the countryside and out into its frontiers. As locality stories tied each region to this common cultural heritage, collectively these regions formed a diverse but coherent ecumene. On the one hand, locality stories affirmed the particularity of a place and how its genius loci made unique contributions to the civilized world. On the other hand, they affirmed the full inclusion of local communities within the civilized world, defined most often by its literary, mythic, and political past. This membership was particularly important for the emerging secondary core of Sinitic civilization in the Yangzi basin.

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[128.104.46.196] Project MUSE (2024-04-09 19:25 GMT) UW-Madison Libraries

Genius Loci In traditional Sinitic thought, the uniqueness of place was articulated in terms of the distinctive environmental qi (pneuma, natural force) of a place. Although qi was universally present, every place had a unique qi makeup with an inherently localistic efficacy. It produced the local variations in the structures of the earth (dili), including the diversity in landscape, climate, flora, fauna, and humans. Regional variations in human appearance, behavior, and mentality were expressed in terms of fengsu (local customs), which are intimately tied to the localistic environmental qi of that place. In the first century, Ban Gu wrote that, although humans all have the same nature, regional variations in human characteristics were “tied to the feng [aura] and qi [pneuma] of the natural environment” 繫水土之風氣.30 In the late second century, Ying Shao 應劭 (ca. 140–206) further explained in the Fengsu tongyi 風俗通義 (Comprehensive meaning of local customs) that, “as for feng, climates can be warm or cold, terrain can be diffi­cult or easy, streams can be sweet or foul, and plants can be firm or tender. As for su, it is when beings of flesh and blood live in resemblance of this [feng]. Thus, speech and words, folk songs and ballads all have different sounds; drums and dance, movement and action all take distinct forms” 風者、天氣有寒煖，地形有險易，水泉有美惡，草 木有剛柔也。俗者、含血之類，像之而生。故言語歌謳異聲，鼓舞 動作殊形.31 In short, people from different regions spoke, behaved, and thought differently because they were themselves a single component part of an all-encompassing localistic environment, imbued with the same natural forces (qi or sometimes feng; a sixth-century text would simply equate the two) that caused all other variations in natural geography.32 Natural forces were the dominant factor in explaining local customs, but the character of a place was not permanently determined by them. Human efforts could change local customs and reshape the natural forces that, in turn, shaped human behavior. Within Han imperial ideology, this capacity to change the local character of a place was discussed only in terms of the civilizing mission of the ancient sages or imperial representatives: converting wild land into cultivated fields or

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“altering the feng and transforming the su” 移風易俗 through music, ritual, and literature.33 But local compilations of biographies and local geographies of the late Han and Three Kingdoms period begin to articulate the agency of local figures to transform their own local fengsu. These virtuous men and women could rebuild their environment or effect moral changes to transform their local feng, thereby passing virtue down to subsequent generations of the same native place.34 As imperial order crumbled throughout the late second to fourth centuries, fengsu shed some of its traditionally pejorative connotation. In this supposed degenerate age, the imperial court was no longer looked to as the singular and universal standard of refined culture. Instead, if virtuous people from the golden ages of the Zhou and Han dynasties had lived or worked in a provincial space, then their presence must have affected the feng of that locale, imprinting on it the v­ irtues of these people. Local customs could, therefore, be looked to instead as a possible reservoir of virtuous practices from an ancient golden age, now no longer monopolized by the imperial court. Although Ying Shao, writing near the end of the Han dynasty, primarily affirmed the imperial ideology of understanding local customs in order to correct them, he did acknowledge the ambivalence toward local customs that had developed by that time: “Some [local customs] are upright and some are deviant; some are good and some are licentious” 或直或邪，或善或 淫也.35 Fragments of local geographies regularly assert how the feng of virtuous sages, imperial officials, and local natives of the past was still evident in the customs of people living in a locale at that time. Local customs were, therefore, no longer set up in necessary and absolute opposition to canonical standards, but were presented as a complex mix of both uncivilized provincialisms and inherited virtues from past golden ages. They were, as Robert Campany writes, “a real if distorted link with the past. . . . Once subjected to a corrective hermeneutic, they could be read as gateways to an otherwise quickly and disturbingly receding past.”36 The concept of environmentally shaped fengsu was the primary emic concept with which early medieval literati understood geography and regional variation. It provided meaning to seemingly disparate structures of the earth: its natural landscape that infused all who lived there with its distinct qi, its human-made monuments (such as steles,

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shrines, pillars, and residences) that commemorated the lives of people who affected this natural endowment, and its vernacular customs (folk songs, common sayings, non-text-based traditions) that revealed the folksy thoughts of nonelites.37 But, as the concept of fengsu became more morally ambivalent, authors of local geographies could bring regionalism outside of the imperial shadow for use within a new ecumenical metageography.

Local Contributions to Civilization Local geographies emphasized the contributions that people within that locale made to the larger civilized world, describing many people who were ignored in court-centered dynastic histories. Some local elites made their contribution in the imperial bureaucracy, whereas others did so outside of official service—providing a broader range of both favorable and critical evaluations of the imperial court than what was presented in official histories. Importantly, local elite women appear not infrequently among these tales. Local geographies anchor biographical anecdotes about these native-born figures to the physical remnants of their ancient homes (guzhai 故宅, jiuzhai 舊宅, or jia 家) or their tombs (zhong 冢, mu 墓, or shiku 石窟)—many of which had steles and shrines a­ ttached to them.38 These structures made the men and women they memorialized along with their political careers and virtuous deeds part of the physical landscape and local character of the place. The promotion of a region’s panimperial reputation for cultivating officials appears to be the driving cultural work of late Han local compilations of biographies, and this motivation seems to have continued into early local geographies as well. The implicit argument was that, if a particular locale has a long history of producing eminent officials and worthy gentlemen, then it must be that the local environment had an especially virtuous feng that imbued its natives with talent and that one should expect similarly excellent people from this locale now and into the future. For example, the Jizhou lun 冀州論 (Essay on Jizhou) by He Yan 何晏 (ca. 189–249) asserts that, “roughly speaking, from the Spring and Autumn era to the present, [the gentlemen of Jizhou] can be compared favorably against all within the seas” 略言春秋以來，可與海內 比而校也. The text then proves this point by listing twenty-eight

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examples (at least in this one fragment) of virtuous officials from Jizhou in the following format: “As for admonishing his ruler with understanding and discernment, no one was as excellent as Guan Gao; as for loyalty, duty, and uprightness, no one was as excellent as Bao Zidu; as for forthright candor and loyal remonstration, no one was as excellent as Wang Hong” 証主知分，莫賢乎貫高。忠義正直，莫賢乎鮑 子都。謇諤忠諫，莫賢乎王宏.39 Similarly, Lu Yu’s 盧毓 (d. 257) Jizhou lun 冀州論 (Essay on Jizhou) praises this region as a “top-tier realm of the world” 天下之上國. Emphasizing the relationship between environment and human virtues, Lu Yu wrote: “Generally speaking, since the time of Tang and Yu, Jizhou has been a sanctuary of sages and worthies, a precious land of emperors and kings. . . . It has thousands of miles of fertile land; it is a place where heaven and earth meet and where yin and yang intersect” 略言唐虞已來，冀州乃聖賢之淵藪，帝 王之寳地. . . . 膏壤千里，天地之所㑹，隂陽之所交.40 These local contributions to civilization were more than mere local instantiation of canonical standards; they were contributions that originated from a unique genius loci. Quite different from the pejorative idea of local customs in Warring States and Han texts, early medieval local geographies describe how a local environment imprinted its ­virtues on its populations. For example, the San Qin ji 三秦記 (Record of the Three Qin) quotes a poem contrasting how the positive characteristics of the landscapes of Wu and Shu infused their people with distinct virtues. Because “the land [of Wu] is level and plain, the rivers limpid and clear” 其地坦而平，其水淡而清, therefore “the people are modest and true” 其人廉且貞; because “the mountains [of Shu] are talltowering and crag-crested, the rivers mud-roiled with tossing waves” 其山嶵巍以嵯峨，其水㳌渫而揚波, therefore “the people are rockrugged, with heroes aplenty” 其人磊呵而英多.41 It was this distinctive genius loci of a place that allowed it to claim superiority over other locales, to make a unique contribution to civilization, and to set itself up as a model for the rest of the civilized world to follow. These claims to local contributions to civilization are no doubt what Liu Zhiji had in mind when he criticized authors of local geographies for hyperbolically describing their homeland as if it were “a paradise” or a “famous capital.”42 But Tang scholars exaggerated this sentiment of local pride by decontextualizing it from the many

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exogenous imperial and civilizing influences that local geographies also included (which will be discussed in the following sections). The purpose of these local panegyrics should instead be seen as a counterweight to the more dominant imperial perspective, providing evidence that local communities were not just passive receptacles of the imperial civilizing mission, but also active participants in the formation of that civilized world. Furthermore, by anchoring stories of eminent officials and worthy gentlemen in their hometowns—rather than listing them by their official positions as in the dynastic histories—local geographies manifested the unique virtues of the indigenous feng that produced an official—rather than the refined culture emanating outward from the court. Just as local geographies described the deeds of local gentlemen and middling officials who otherwise might have been beyond the regular purview of textual history, so too did they extend to include several anecdotes about local women. These women, like their male counterparts at the local level, were presented as virtuous models for the world and as evidence of the virtuous feng that inspired the region. Local female contributions to both civilization and empire combine in the story of Old Woman Kong 孔姥 from the Three Kingdoms San Wu junguo zhi 三吳郡國志 (Record of the commanderies and princedoms of the Three Wu). She raised her eight sons to exemplify Confucian virtues, and all of them received official posts and served the state honorably. In commemoration of her influence on the local feng, her name was affixed to a local hill, reifying the dialectic relationship between landscape and custom.43 Tales of virtuous women seem to be especially prominent in Chang Qu’s Huayang guozhi. For example, there are two parallel tales of Xian Luo 先絡 of Fu 符 District in Ba Commandery and Zhang Bo 張帛 of Bodao 僰道 District in Shu Commandery in which each woman’s husband or father, respectively, drowned in the Yangzi River. Each woman boated to the site of her husband’s/father’s death, mourned deeply, and then threw herself into the river, ultimately recovering the body of her husband/father. Characteristic of local pride expressed as vernacular aphorisms, “contemporaries would say: Fu District has Xian Luo and Bodao District has [Zhang] Bo. For searching after their men, they are unmatched in all the world” 時人為語曰，符有先絡僰道帛，求其

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夫，天下無有其偶.44 This reversal of the traditional court-centered civilizing mission is all the starker given the association of Bodao District with the Bo barbarians. Michael Farmer has described other tales in the Huayang guozhi of chaste widows committing suicide, explaining them as local critiques of the Han government’s inability to protect the most vulnerable members of society as well as evidence of a stricter standard for female chastity by the people of this area.45 Exemplary local women are an especially poignant manifestation in local geographies of how the local, vernacular, subliterate realm of environmentally determined local customs could challenge the textually based, court-centered, male-dominated world of writing.46 Although depictions of the relationship between local heroes and the imperial court were generally positive, local geographies did also recount tales of provincial opposition or moral superiority to imperial authorities. Tales of local recluses who “retire from the world” (bishi 避世) are commonly referenced in local geographies, and their stories inherently critique the sociopolitical order centered on the imperial court.47 Recluses will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 4, in the context of the spatial tensions between mountains and court. One can also find tales of local heroes openly criticizing the court.48 But, like the hyperbolic expressions of local pride, these critical comments about the imperial court in local geographies are taken out of context and criticized by Tang officials in order to delegitimize local writing. Local geographies certainly did include such comments as one component within a complex character of place, but they were surrounded by the more frequent references to exogenous civilizational and imperial ­influence acting virtuously upon the local community. Once again, local geographies were not written to overturn the imperial and civilizational structures of tianxia, but to claim a special position within the structures for that locale.

Common Mythic Heritage One of the common topics of local geographies was the description of “ancient traces” (guji 古蹟)—physical remnants of the lives of mythical heroes and historical figures that provided evidence for the continued influence of these people on the local environment and population. As

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described in the section on genius loci, exogenous influences from sage-kings and virtuous men from long ago were understood to have transformed the local customs of the area and, in so doing, preserved long-lost virtues of a past golden age. These ancient traces were often paired with temples and shrines, constructing ecumenewide cults to these mythic and historical heroes. Sinitic cultural identity was deeply rooted in a sense of being the civilized people of the world, and the genesis of this civilization was attributed to the superhuman sage-kings of ancient days as they instructed people how to farm, write, organize into states, and perform rituals that ordered social relationships.49 Although traditional canonical texts placed the lives of these sage-kings primarily within the ­civilizational core of the Yellow River plain, locality stories in local geographies anchored these sage-kings across a far wider territory, extending to the frontiers of the Sinitic ecumene. If touched by the civilizing hands of these sage-kings, even in rural, provincial, or ­frontier lands, local elites could make a strong case against the courtcentered dismissal of provincials as rustic bumpkins, a mere step above illiterate barbarians.50 Tales of Yu 禹 the Great, the central figure in the myths of the origin of geographical writing, provide an instructive example. Stories of Yu quelling the flood and channeling the waterways were well known from such classical literature as the “Yu gong” and the Shiji. These canonical accounts affirmed the court-centered imperial metageography: demarcating administrative boundaries, evaluating local products, and establishing tribute relationships between the provinces and the court. Early medieval geographical writing added greater spatial specificity to ancient accounts of Yu the Great’s life and in so doing articulated a rather different metageography. According to various early medieval geographical texts, Yu was born on Shiniu 石紐 Mountain (Beichuan District, Sichuan).51 He married a local girl of Tushan 塗山 (either Bengbu City, Anhui; Ba District, Sichuan; or Shaoxing District, Zhejiang) who gave birth to his son there.52 He rebuked and expelled troublesome yellow dragons at Dragon’s Nest 龍 巢 along the Yangzi River (Shishou District, Hubei). 53 He received a numinous ­document to aid him in the quelling of the flood at either the Tao 洮 River (Wenxi District, Shanxi), Mount Wanwei 宛委山 (Shaoxing

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Map 2.1.  Sites in the life of Yu the Great from local geographies.

District, Zhejiang), or Mount Heng 衡 (Hengshan District, Hubei).54 And finally he held a great assembly of his lords, passed away, and was buried at Guiji 會稽 Mountain (Shaoxing District, Zhejiang), where his tomb still resided and where a temple had been erected that was visited by divine goddesses from across the sea.55 These sites are visualized in map 2.1. Unlike accounts of Yu the Great in classical literature, the purpose of these anecdotes in local geographies was to claim local relationships with this mythic sage-king. They bore witness that his presence had transformed the local landscape, the feng of the place, and the customs of its people, and that these influences were still present in the early medieval period, when these geographies were being written. This was evident in the shrines and local cults to Yu the Great that sprouted up at these sites of significant events in his life. In his birthplace at Shi­ niu, his spirit was said to protect criminals who fled there, and it was

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said that, after three years of hiding out, all their crimes would be forgiven.56 The Yuzhang jiuzhi 豫章舊志 (Old records of Yuzhang) ­reports that some of the local gentlemen in Yuzhang 豫章 (Nanchang, Jiangxi) were in fact descendants of Yu the Great and that one of them, Lu Su 盧俗, was instrumental in the establishment of Han dynasty control over the area.57 Yu the Great’s moral example was said to have transformed the marriage customs of the Huai and Yangzi River regions. When Yu the Great married a woman of Tushan, he spent only the four days between the xin and the jia days with her before returning to his work quelling the flood—so as to “not allow the private to harm the public” 不以私害公. “For this reason, it is the custom in the lands of the Yangzi and Huai Rivers only to marry on xin, ren, gui, or jia days” 故江、淮之俗，以辛、壬、癸、甲為嫁娶日也.58 These local cults, c­ ustoms, and lineages—in sharp contrast to their negative assessment in Han literature—are described here as residual traces from a golden age of a virtuous sage-king who embodied the ethics of civilization. The spatial distribution of these anecdotes of Yu the Great—­ extending into the Yangzi River basin, Sichuan, and the upper Yellow River—far surpass the geographical reach of Sinitic civilization during Yu’s supposed lifetime at the beginning of the Xia dynasty or during the authorship of canonical texts about his life in the Eastern Zhou period (eighth–third c. BCE). Especially for the emerging secondary core of the Yangzi basin, local appropriation of the founding myths of civilization was essential in claiming a common cultural heritage with the civilizational core of the Yellow River plain. The flexibility of mythmaking granted local writers the creative license to anchor these ancient tales to new places. In the local appropriation of Yu the Great tales, one will recognize each of the aforementioned three forms of anchoring: borrowing information from traditional sources with the location already identified, adding spatial specificity to existing stories, and inventing entirely new anecdotes that elaborated on traditional figures. The need for spatial specificity mandated by these spatially structured texts facilitated this creative spatial expansion of ancient myths into the frontiers of Sinitic civilization.59 The hybrid cultures along borderlands of Sinitic civilization also adopted this pattern of claiming common lineage with sage-kings.60 To the north, Särbi tribespeople established hybrid Sino-Särbi states in

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the fourth century and asserted local connections to mythic sagekings, claiming ancestral descent from Di Ku 帝嚳 and the Yellow Emperor 黃帝 (Huangdi).61 To the south, the Man tribespeople also claimed descent from Di Ku through his daughter, who was given in marriage to the dog Panhu 槃瓠 for saving the empire. Di Ku granted the couple and their descendants autonomy on Wu Mountain 武山.62 This merging of Sinitic and non-Sinitic origin myths and their documentation in local writings speaks to the malleability of these myths and to the artificiality of the supposed civilized-barbarian divide.63 The multiplicity of local geographies each individually attempting to make claims to local traces of mythic sage-kings inevitably led to competing claims, inconsistencies, and contradictions with each other and with classical texts. But this seems to have been a problem only for those attempting to compile information from local geographies into comprehensive accounts—like Li Daoyuan or Tang literati after him. A clear example is the competing local claims about the long-lived Pengzu 彭祖. According to classical texts like the Shiben 世本 (Origins of descent lines) and the “Dili zhi,” the ancient enfeoffment of Pengzu took place in the area of Pengcheng 彭城 (Tongshan District, Jiangsu). This location is described in the Shuijing zhu as demarcated by a Pengzu Tiered Pavilion 彭祖樓 atop a Pengzu Tomb 彭祖冢 at a “splendid place” (jia­ chu 佳處) at the confluence of the Fan 汳 and Si 泗 Rivers.64 But local geographies of Sichuan like the Huayang guozhi, Wei Wan’s 魏完 Jin period Nanzhong zhi 南中志 (Record of Nanzhong), and the Yizhou ji 益州記 (Record of Yizhou) all identify the area of Pengwang Mountain 彭望山 in Wuyang 武陽 District (Pengshan District, Sichuan) as the place where Pengzu grew up, lived, and died and where his body was laid to rest in a Pengzu Tomb with a Pengzu Shrine 彭祖祠 on top of it. This second location is also incorporated into the Shuijing zhu.65 This kind of inconsistency in the collective information presented in local geographies is probably what Tang scholars were referring to when they criticized local geographies for being inaccurate and unreliable. But despite these criticisms, many traditional commentators on classical texts still cited them in their notes to explain where ancient events had actually taken place. They did this despite the obvious contradiction between different local geographies and the ahistorical spatial extent of these claims. This misinterpretation of these inconsistencies

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is also apparent in nineteenth-century Chinese scholarship that attempted to prove a scientific approach to geographical studies in premodern China—despite the reality that these sage-kings are actually mythic figures. In his commentary to the Shuijing zhu, Yang Shou­ jing 楊守敬 (1839–1915) queried in exasperation how Li Daoyuan could possibly have cited two different locations for the tomb of Pengzu: “How could this land also have a tomb?!” Like Tang scholars before him, Yang resolved the contradiction by dismissing the Sichuan claim as less reliable because it “should probably be taken as a tale from folk legend.”66 Both the textual studies of traditional scholars and the scientific approach of Yang Shoujing and his generation overlooked or disregarded the original cultural work that these contradictions actually reveal. As part of the emerging secondary core, Sichuanese natives were domesticating Yellow River plain mythic heroes for their own local communities in order to repudiate ancient prejudices against the peripheral status of the Sichuan region. Accomplishing this aim sometimes required that they contradict ancient texts that were written when the civilized world had been a much smaller and less diverse place than it was in the early medieval period.

Imperial Memory The other enduring dominant transregional spatial superstructure, besides the concept of the civilized ecumene, was the imperial realm. Like the Roman empire in the Mediterranean, the memory of the Han empire remained a powerful force within political rhetoric and cultural identities across its vast territory long after the empire ceased to exist.67 During the unprecedentedly successful four centuries of Han imperial control over the (Sinitic) civilized world, notions of cultural identity and political order had intertwined. In theory, the refined culture of the court emanated outward throughout the provinces to transform the local customs of this civilized world in accordance with transcendent principles of canonical texts. In the postimperial world, therefore, provincials could claim local manifestations of imperial culture by demonstrating how the local community had in the past either (1) received the transforming effect of emperors or their court-appointed

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officials or (2) provided young men from their local community for official imperial service. Local tales of either of these activities could verify that the local customs of a particular region were not of the crude sort described in the imperial metageography, but preserved vestiges of a past golden age. As explained above with regard to spatially structured text, the spatial structure of geographical writing uniquely allowed this genre the flexibility of describing the significance of both exogenous influences (court officials coming in) and endogenous influences (native officials going out) in the identity formation of provincial communities. This flexibility allowed local gentlemen to become imperial heroes (as described in the section on local contributions to civilization) but also allowed imperial representatives to become local heroes, as will be described later in this section. Locality stories about court-appointed governors or native officials both required a selective memory that interpreted the Han empire (and the more distant Zhou state as well) as a golden age of the past, the remnants of which were visible now only in crumbling ruins and cultural vestiges.68 In this idealized model, court and province were bound together in a mutually beneficial relationship, but this relationship was distanced into the past. Tales of unjust officials and court corruption were rare in local geographies, even though they were common in the much more politicized dynastic histories and local compilations of biographies.69 Contrary to the Tang depiction of local geographies as separatist literature, positive depictions of a historical relationship between one’s commandery or district and the classical imperial court affirmed full inclusion in the current postimperial cultural network of regions. This ecumenical unity actually lent itself well to the political reunification of the Sui-Tang empire. The emperor himself is the most powerful symbol of the empire.70 Local geographies frequently preserved tales that assert some sort of personal connection between this central figure of imperial power and the local community. These were generally positive anecdotes of the most powerful of emperors—the First Emperor of Qin (r. 221–210 BCE), Han Emperor Gaozu, and Han Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE). These locality stories vary considerably in their range of topics. Sometimes they describe ways in which the emperor left his mark on the local

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structures of the earth—reorganizing administrative units, building edifices, or even disfiguring the landscape to maintain its subordination to imperial authority.71 Sometimes the tales reveal a special ­fondness or affection that an emperor might have for a particular land’s local products, customs, or people.72 They sometimes recount the significance of a particular place in the founding of an empire, and they sometimes describe encounters between the emperor and divine beings there.73 Just as the flexibility of locality stories allowed stories of sagekings to be anchored in new lands beyond the narrow spatial confines of canonical texts, the same was true for locality stories about emperors, with the same effect of expanding their spatial range beyond the narrow court-centered scope of dynastic histories. Even when these anecdotes could also be found in dynastic histories, placing them within a spatially structured text transforms their meaning, emphasizing the emperor’s special relationship with a particular place rather than his personification of universal rulership. The innovativeness of early medieval ecumenical regionalism and its power to transform preexisting spatial patterns is highlighted all the more when locality stories of an emperor’s special affection for a particular place are in direct contradiction with official imperial texts. Such is the case with the Hanzhong ji’s 漢中記 (Record of Hanzhong) claim that Lady Qi 戚 (d. 194 BCE) (whom Emperor Gaozu favored for a time over his principal wife, Lü Zhi 呂雉 [241–180 BCE]) was born near Yang River 洋‌川 in Hanzhong (southern Shaanxi), rather than in Dingtao 定陶 (Shandong), where her official biography in the Shiji states that she was born. In this geographical rather than biographical format, the purpose of the information is not to develop the character of the person Lady Qi but to develop the character of the place of Yang River by explaining the origin of its name. The locality story embeds into the identity of the place the great affection that an emperor had for this otherwise remote location. The Shuijing zhu elaborates on the Hanzhong ji fragment: “Emperor Gaozu doted on her, and Lady [Qi] adored her hometown. She would ask for rice from Yang River, and the emperor had it shipped to Chang’an” 高祖得而寵之，夫人思慕本鄉，追 求洋川米，帝為驛致長安. He elevated her hometown to a district seat and “looked upon this land as the Auspicious River, because it manifested the ­auspiciousness of Lady [Qi]’s birth” 目其地為祥川，用表夫

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人載誕之休祥‌也.74 This is but one example of how local geographies contradict imperial geographies by dispersing the events described therein across a more expansive landscape. By far, though, the most common expression of imperial presence in local communities was not in the figure of the emperor but in virtuous provincial officials—outsiders who moved into the local commu­ nity as state administrators. Many of these were district magistrates (xianling 縣令), the lowest rung of the centrally appointed administrative bureaucracy. Although some of these tales can be found in dynastic histories, they are much more prominent in local geographies, and the spatial context within local geographies transforms these officials with panimperial reputations into local folk heroes. Local geographies recount provincial officials transforming the natural landscape and local customs—putting down rebellions and banditry, administering disaster relief, initiating public works projects, and eliminating local cults.75 For example, the Chenliu fengsu zhuan 陳留風俗傳 (Account of the local customs of Chenliu) reports on the enduring influence of Magistrate Qiao Gong 譙貢 on Xiaohuang 小黃 District (near Chenliu District, Henan), where he served in the first century BCE. Under his leadership, “the roads were safe and the prisons empty” 路不拾遗，囹 圄空虛. When he was recalled by the imperial court, “commoners wiped away tears and guarded the gate towers, supplicating that [the emperor] return Qiao Gong to them” 百姓挥涕守闕，求索還貢. Such was his influence that “Qiao Gong’s transformation of the local feng is still present today. These people are fond of learning even though many are poor; this is the effect of his feng” 貢之風化猶存。其民好學 多貧‌，‌此其風也.76 The influence of virtuous officials was manifest in multiple facets of local culture. For governor Zhang Kan’s 張堪 (Eastern Han) service introducing agriculture to “the commoners” (baixing) of Hunu 狐奴 District (Shunyi District, Beijing), their children sang in a nursery rhyme that, “under Lord Zhang’s administration, we were overjoyed” 張君為政，樂不可支.77 These officials’ transformation of the local feng is reified in the physical addition to the landscape of steles erected to commemorate their special contributions.78 Li Daoyuan explicitly equated stone steles with the permanence of the natural world. Steles are “inscribed on stone . . . in order to honor an incorruptible legacy”

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刊石 . . . 以旌不朽之傳, and “stone [steles] endure for a thousand springs” 石至千春.79 Also, temples and shrines were built for especially meritorious officials who served in a province, at which commoners “have been offering sacrifices from ancient date to the present time” 自古祠享來今矣.80 Folk songs, nursery rhymes, stone inscriptions, and local cults were traditional markers of regionalism, of difference and parochialism. Tying officials to these markers of regionalism transformed imperial officials into local heroes and transformed markers of regionalism into evidence of ecumenical inclusion. Situated in the past as it was, this dialectic relationship between court and province could serve both localistic and ecumenical interests. Local geographies reported on how virtuous, court-appointed officials ministered to the communities of their assigned precincts, accomplishing the imperial civilizing mission and transforming the essential feng of the province. They also reported on how local communities produced from their local feng talented officials who could contribute to civilization and to the empire. But describing this relationship in the past (especially the Han period) constructed, in the words of Michael Nylan, a literary “empire of memory”—a “collection of memories about the past . . . that cluster around and haunt a range of sites,” “invisible to the naked eye and heedless of temporary political arrangements.”81 Distance from current political arrangements and focus on dialectic cultural ties between court and province help explain Michael Farmer’s observation about how claims to a region’s cultural inclusion within a common ecumene could be used to advance political goals of either a regional state or an imperialistic state trying to reincorporate the regional state back into a new empire.82

Southern Frontier Nowhere was the tension between regional distinctiveness and ecumenical inclusion more pronounced in the breakup of the Han empire in the third century than in the Yangzi basin. The status of the Yangzi basin within the Sinitic ecumene had long been an ambivalent one. Although the Warring States of Chu, Wu, and Yue were actively involved in the geopolitical struggles of the Yellow River plain, they were usually excluded from the Zhou “central states” (zhongguo) or Huaxia

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華夏 cultural identity.83 Qin armies had conquered “the lands south of the Yangzi” (Jiangnan 江南) in the third century BCE, and Han administrators maintained territorial control over them for the subsequent four centuries. But their minimal economic and military importance to the empire did little to overcome this peripheral status. For those willing to brave the subtropical climate, this southern frontier offered far more open land than the more densely populated Yellow River plain, attracting very gradual but eventually substantial migrations. By the end of the Han pax imperium, the Yangzi basin was made up of populations of non-Sinitic peoples controlled by a much smaller population of Han officials and immigrants from the Yellow River plain who, living around administrative centers in the lowlands, surrounded a vast territory of uncultivated lands.84 Although there is information on only a fraction of the local geographies that were written during the early medieval period, the available evidence indicates that their initial burgeoning in the third century was mostly about the lands of the Yangzi basin. The Han–Tang fang­ zhi jiyi is our most complete list of local geographies from the period (although still incomplete). Figure 1.8 compares the number of texts from this source that are written about either the Yangzi or Yellow River basin, revealing an overall two-to-one preference for the Yangzi basin. But, if one were to include late Eastern Han texts and combine texts on the Lingnan region with those of the Yangzi basin, then the ratio becomes nearly three-to-one.85 This early southern focus in the writing of local geographies is confirmed in the spatial distribution of all local geographies from the Sui shu catalog, the Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi, and the Han–Tang dili shuchao, as visualized in maps 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4, respectively. Although one must be cautious of drawing conclusions from these limited sources of information, the available evidence establishes a consistent preference in local geographies for lands in the Yangzi basin as well as a temporal correlation between local geographies and the rise of independent states in the Yangzi basin. This pattern makes sense given the unique ability of geographical texts simultaneously to articulate local difference and assert a common ecumenical inheritance. The initial frontier status of the Yangzi basin is apparent in early local geographies that highlighted the peculiar things (yiwu) of the southlands—terminology characteristic of foreign

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Map 2.2.  Number of local geographies, from Sui shu (by macroregion).

Map 2.3.  Number of local geographies, from Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi (by macroregion).

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Map 2.4.  Number of geographical texts (excluding world geographies), from Han–Tang dili shuchao (by province).

geographies.86 But later local geographies recounted more locality ­stories that depict the exogenous influences from the ecumene on the Yangzi basin locale and the endogenous influences from the Yangzi basin locale on the ecumene. Local geographies recount sage-kings gracing these southern lands with their presence, emperors displaying special relationships with the southern provinces, and local officials bringing civilization and prosperity to these southern lands. But they also recount native talents from the Yangzi basin serving the empire and moral exemplars from the Yangzi basin setting virtuous standards for the civilized world, both of which evidenced the uniquely virtuous feng of its local environment. The idea of a dialectic cultural relationship between the ecumene and the locale (independent from the hierarchical relationship between the court and the province) became important in the third century as imperial dynasts established independent Han successor states in the

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Yangzi basin. Characteristic of secondary state formations, the Three Kingdoms states of Wu and Shu had the awkward task of asserting their political independence from the state of Wei, while still claiming cultural continuity and authority from the civilizational core over which Wei ruled.87 The spatial flexibility of local geographies in balancing exogenous and endogenous influences and their differentiation between empire and ecumene appear to have made local geographies an effective tool with which to negotiate this fraught relationship. They overturned traditional imperial discourse that described southern differences as foreign and recast them instead as local variation within an extensive but inclusive civilizational ecumene. This reciprocal relationship became all the more important in the fifth century, as the Yangzi basin developed from a southern frontier into a secondary core. During this time, local geographies would reach their highest level of production, with their spatial distribution still focused on the Yangzi basin, as discussed below in the section “Southern Frontier to Secondary Core.” But first we must take a look at the short-lived Jin imperial resurgence and its effect on the ideas of ecumenical regionalism.

Regionalism within Imperial Recovery The Three Kingdoms Wei dynasty (220–65) was gradually able to assert control over the various military governors of the Yellow River basin, the Gansu corridor, the Hanzhong region, southern Manchuria, and eventually over the rival imperial claimant in Sichuan by 263. The Sima clan led a military coup against the Cao clan in 265, establishing the Jin dynasty, and then completed the reunification of Han territory by 280, with the conquest of the last rival imperial claimant in the lower Yangzi region. Humpty Dumpty had been put back together again. The new Jin court claimed the same universal rulership and transcendent authority as had the Han empire, asserting that the chaos of the third century had been an aberration from the norm of imperial unity. They seem to have expected that, as after previous disruptions, imperial institutions would be reinvigorated and sociopolitical unity would persist. In this political context of imperial optimism one finds a renewed interest in the imperial metageography.

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But a closer examination quickly reveals that, although the Jin regime had put the Han territory back together again, it had not solved the structural problems that had caused the fragmentation of Han ­authority a century earlier. The Jin emperors did not centralize authority the way their contemporary Emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305) did with his new Dominate system after the Roman empire’s own “third century crisis.” Just as in the late Eastern Han, local great families continued to control the countryside, independent military governors (now Jin princes) challenged the authority of the imperial court, semiautonomous nomadic armies threatened the northern and north­ western borderlands, and populations continued to grow in the distant Yangzi frontier. The hope of Jin imperial resurgence was influential in geographical literature, but the gap between imperial ideology and regional reality still loomed large.

Geographical Writing during Imperial Unification The reassertion of imperial order in the political arena brought about a resurgence of imperial metageography and a stagnating of ecumenical regionalism in the literary sphere. But the fragility of the imperial order made it difficult to suppress elite regionalism as the Han empire had done previously or as the Sui-Tang empire would do three centuries later. Although local geographies had been the dominant form of geographical writing in the Three Kingdoms period, Western Jin literati wrote more geographies that took as their parameters quintessentially imperial spaces: the world/empire and the capital. This trend was discussed in chapter 1 and is apparent in figures 1.5 and 1.6. But the variety of world geographies produced during this period complicated the politically structured world/empire conflation of the Han metageography. Some of these were imperial geographies that adhered to Sima Biao’s injunction that Ban Gu’s “Dili zhi” had thoroughly described the timeless elements of geography (i.e., topography and local customs) and that future geographies needed only to update the changes in jurisdictional boundaries and household registrations.88 Some imperial geographies included information more characteristic of local geographies: locality stories, descriptions of customs, and explanations of name origins. Based on textual fragments, this seems to be the case with

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the Taikang sannian diji 太康三年地記 (Geographical record of the third year of the Taikang reign period [283]).89 Such sharing between local and imperial geographies was facilitated by the fact that local geographies continued to use the administrative units of prefectures, commanderies, and districts to frame their local accounts, making it simple to reincorporate them back into an imperial geography. Furthermore, some Jin world geographies abandoned the imperial model altogether, focusing instead on natural and supernatural topics, reconfiguring both the spatial and topical confines of Han imperial metageography.90 In sum, although the imperial expansion of the Jin state renewed interest in imperial geographies, the new geographies had to negotiate two significant shifts in geographical thinking since Ban Gu’s time. The dominance of political geography had been mollified, and the conflation of empire and ecumene had been complicated. Capital geographies during the Jin period focused especially on the rebuilt imperial capital at Luoyang, describing its grandeur and preeminence among the cities of the world. For example, Hua Yanjun’s 華‌延㑺 ‌ Luoyang ji 洛陽記 (Record of Luoyang) reports, “Within the city walls of Luoyang there are palaces, towers, treasures, and monasteries, in total numbering 11,219” 洛陽城內宮殿，台觀，府藏，寺舍，凡 有一萬一千二百一十九間.91 These geographical texts tended to describe and praise the imperial capital with less grandiloquence than did Han capital panegyrics presented mostly in the form of rhapsodies. Although fragments mostly present a straightforward description of the capital’s edifices, they also include some locality stories and vernacular sources, which makes them resemble local geographies to some extent.92 In both territorial extent and imperial center, the Jin state was making geographical claims of re-creating the Han empire, but in both cases it was doing so with geographical literature and concepts that had changed considerably since the Han period. According to the fragmentary evidence available, it appears that local geographies continued to be written at a roughly similar rate as during the Three Kingdoms period, but they were making up a smaller percentage of the total geographical texts being written, as the popularity of topics on the capital and the world grew. Of the local geographies that were written during this period, texts on the lands of the Yellow River plain and the middle Yangzi region matched those on the lower

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Yangzi region (which had been the most common focus of the Three Kingdoms period).93 It would appear that, even during imperial unification, the concept of local cultural inclusion within an ecumenical superstructure continued to be appealing and useful for provincial elites on the frontier and, interestingly, even within the civilizational core of the Yellow River plain. These latter local geographies suggest the perceived distance that local elites across the Yellow River plain still felt from the imperial capital. If more of these texts had survived, it would be illuminating to contrast how local geographies from the Yangzi basin frontier during the political division of the Three Kingdoms period differed from those from the same area during Jin occupation or from the Yellow River plain during the Jin dynasty. Unfortunately, available evidence does not allow for such a comparison. Concepts of ecumenical regionalism can also be found in other literary forms of the period, particularly by former Wu officials who moved to Luoyang to serve in the new imperial capital. In discussing how Lu Ji’s 陸機 (261–303) poetry at times valorizes Wu regional culture and at times emulates Wei court culture, Wang Ping and Nicholas Williams observe that “the fall of the Han and the advent of political disunion did not result in cultural fragmentation, but rather in new attempts at creating a synthesis of regional cultures. Here regional identity . . . was often a way of contributing to a larger whole.”94 Similarly, Jessey Choo characterizes the work of another Wu native who joined the Jin court at Luoyang, Ge Hong 葛洪 (283–343), as an expression of both “imitation and mockery” of Central Plains culture.95 As has been described for local geographies and Three Kingdoms political discourse (and as will be described below for Jin histories of the Three Kingdoms and Northern and Southern Dynasties political discourse), Yangzi basin elites were consistently more willing to employ a metageography of ecumenical regionalism that did not a priori privilege Yellow River plain culture.

Jin Accounts of the Three Kingdoms Although Jin imperial literati-officials certainly reasserted the ideology of imperial metageography to justify their rule, they had to do so in negotiation with the body of literature on ecumenical regionalism that

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had developed during the Three Kingdoms period.96 Indeed, Jin’s two claims to legitimacy (succession from Wei and unification of Shu and Wu) were maximized only if Jin histories of the Three Kingdoms period disaggregated the Han conflation of the world-empire and the civilized world. A strict application of imperial metageography would have clearly asserted the singular and teleological succession of universal rulership from Han to Wei to Jin, which would have dismissed Wu and Shu as outer realm barbarian kingdoms.97 But such an application would have undermined Jin’s second claim to legitimacy—a reunification of Han territory that Wei had not achieved. A metageography of ecumenical regionalism (with its inclusion of the states of Wu and Shu) would have better supported this second legitimizing claim of unification, but in the process it would have undermined the first claim to a linear succession of universal rulership. Ultimately, Jin ­literati-officials ended up blending the two metageographies together, thereby explaining how Wu and Shu were not part of the third-century central realm in the political sense (meaning the Wei dynasty) but were still part of the third-century central realm in the cultural sense (meaning the Sinitic ecumene). This ambivalence between imperial and ecu­ menical metageographies can be seen in two prominent Western Jin accounts of the Three Kingdoms: Chen Shou’s 陳壽 (233–97) Sanguo zhi 三國志 (Record of the Three Kingdoms) and Zuo Si’s 左思 (250– 305) “Sandu fu” 三都賦 (Rhapsodies on the three capitals). These Jin accounts of the Three Kingdoms blend the two competing models that Three Kingdoms statesmen themselves used to make sense of their own geopolitical landscape. Although the metageography of a “tripartite power structure” (dingli 鼎立, dingzhi 鼎峙, or dingzhi 鼎跱) has since become the most common framework for understanding this period, this appears to have not been the case in its own time. Officials of Wei favored a Central Plains model that privileged their own position in the civilizational heartland, dismissing Wu and Shu as rogue provinces on the peripheries of the civilized world.98 It was officials of Shu and Wu—anxious for a metageography that did not a priori privilege the Central Plains state of Wei—who favored the tripartite power structure, a model that treated the three kingdoms as equals, each an essential leg of the Sinitic world “tripod-cauldron” (ding).99 The ecumenical principles of this model and its popularity in

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the Yangzi basin frontier parallel the cultural work of local geographies from the same period. In his history of this period, Chen Shou amalgamated these two models, structuring the ecumene according to a tripartite configuration but granting Wei the privileged position in that ecumene. The imperative for and the method of asserting Wei legitimacy used by Chen Shou—as a Western Jin official—in the Sanguo zhi has been well attested in previous scholarship, made obvious in the presentation of Wei history as the “official chronicle” (ji 紀) of the “emperor” (di 帝), whereas the histories of Wu and Shu are presented as the mere “memoirs” (zhuan 傳) of “lords” (zhu 主).100 In this microcosmic structuring of dynastic histories, the centrality of Wei is obvious, but the position of Wu and Shu is far more ambiguous.101 They are neither imperial centers in their own right, nor imperial provinces (coterminous in imperial metageography with the civilized realm), nor barbarian states of the outer realm. They were independent states but firmly within the realm of the Han cultural and political order.102 The Han conflation of empire and ecumene had ruptured, constructing a new intermediate space for civilized, Sinitic, but still illegitimate states. A century and a half later, Pei Songzhi 裴松之 (372–451) (writing under the Yangzi basin based Song court) augmented the ecumenical elements of the “Wu shu” and the “Shu shu” through his commentary, which drew heavily from local geographies, local compilations of biographies, regional histories, and genealogies to compensate for Chen Shou’s “brevity” (lüe 略) and “omissions” (tuoluo 脫漏), especially in the histories of Wu and Shu.103 Zuo Si’s “Sandu fu” articulates a similar blending of imperial and ecumenical metageographies. It takes the Han imperial genre of capital rhapsodies but infuses it far more than does the Sanguo zhi with information from local geographies and their principles of ecumenical regionalism.104 The three rhapsodies are presented as a debate between a master of Wei, a prince of Wu, and a lord of Shu. Conceptually, though, it is a debate over competing metageographies with which to make sense of the Sinitic ecumene. The Shu lord and the Wu prince—from their perspectives outside of the Central Plains—advocate for a metageography of ecumenical regionalism consistent with the emerging local geographical literature. Inclusion within the Sinitic ecumene is assumed and superiority is asserted through claiming more beautiful

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nature, richer resources, a grander history, or more eminent natives. The master of Wei—from his historically privileged position in the Central Plains—employs more traditional claims to spatial authority consistent with those of Han imperial metageography. Like Chen Shou, Zuo Si was an official of the Jin court and ultimately was obliged to assert the superiority of Wei and its model of spatial authority. This ultimate assertion that Wei’s political legitimacy rested in ­canonical rituals that transcend the specificities of place is strangely at odds with Zuo Si’s own commitment to geographical accuracy in his rhapsodies—his self-described primary contribution to the genre. In his preface to “Sandu fu,” he criticized authors of Han capital rhapsodies for their “contrived rarities and wonders in order to embellish their writings” 假稱珍怪，以為潤色. In contrast, he reported that in the research for his own rhapsodies, “for the mountains and streams, cities and towns, I consulted maps. Birds and animals, plants and trees, I have verified in local geographies. Each of the popular ballads, songs, and dances is consistent with local custom, and all of the prominent personages are based on old traditions” 其山川城邑，則稽之地圖，其 鳥獸草木，則驗之方志。風謠歌舞，各附其俗；魁梧長者，莫非其舊.105 With a foot in both rhapsodic and geographical literary traditions, the “Sandu fu” is rife with spatial tensions between imperial and ecumenical metageographies. The assertion of Wei superiority in the “Sandu fu” is made in geographical terms according to two spatial dynamics: (1) centralizing ritual versus regional customs and (2) a centralizing normative topography. The canonical rituals of the Wei capital imbued it with a cosmic centrality. It was “the pivot of the six directions” 六合之樞機, just as the Han imperial capital had been. In a microcosmic ritual, the barbar­ ians of the four cardinal directions are described as gathering at the Wei capital to submit to its universal authority, to offer tribute of their local products, and to be fed by imperial largesse.106 In contrast with the transcendent center, Wu and Shu are “unguided by proper decorum” 威儀所不攝, and their differences from Xia (the civilized people of the Central Plains) are explained as products of local customs.107 The centrality of the Central Plains is also asserted through cosmological links with the heavens. The Central Plains was where “Qian [heaven] and Kun [earth] combine and work harmoniously together” 乾坤交泰

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而絪縕 and “the frost and dew are properly balanced” 霜露所均. This normative Central Plains geography is contrasted with the caricaturized extreme topographies of the Yangzi and Sichuan basins as antithetical extremes—Shu with its high mountains and Wu with its low wetlands. On both ritual transcendence and normative topography, the master of Wei presents geographical arguments for imperial centrality that differ little from his Han predecessors.108 It is, however, in the mouths of the lord of Shu and the prince of Wu that Zuo Si made—according to his own preface—his most important contribution: geographical realism. This was achieved with a thorough integration of local geographies into the rhapsody style along with the implicit metageographies that come with them. Consistent with local geographies, the Shu and Wu spokespersons present their lands as tightly bound to Sinitic civilization, with both lands receiving influences from the cultural core of the Yellow River plain as well as contributing to it. They accomplish this while still expressing a uniqueness of place that marks the region as special and distinct from others within the ecumenical network of Sinitic culture. Within this multiregional, polycentric landscape, preeminence had to be asserted by having more or better assets (be they environmental, cultural, economic, or political) than other peer states within the same civilized realm. Both rhapsodies on Wu and Shu emphasize the ties that bound their region through ancient influences to the core figures and institutions of Sinitic civilization. So fundamental was this claim that it is described in both the introductory and the concluding remarks of both of these rhapsodies. The lord of Shu’s opening lines state that Shu’s “origins can be traced to high antiquity, and it was founded as a state in the middle ages [of Han]” 兆基於上世，開國於中古. Wu would claim even more ancient origins from the Zhou prince Taibo 太伯, who headed south and organized the Jing and Man tribes into a state.109 The two poems claim that ancient sage-kings and other divine beings graced their lands anciently. This claim was especially strong for Wu, where it is reported that Shun 舜 and Yu 禹 visited Wu in their imperial tours of the realm, Yu gathered his vassal lords there, and Shun and Yu both were buried in the mountains of Wu. So much did these sagekings “appreciate the unique beauty” 翫其奇麗 of the Wu mountain slopes that “they were oblivious of returning home” (wanggui 忘歸),

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and “their spiritual essence” ( jingling 精靈) remained in Wu.110 Furthermore, both poems describe how their capital architecture was modeled on that of the Zhou and Han capitals.111 Time and again, these rhapsodies articulate how their lands were inheritors of the illustrious mythic past and ancient history of Sinitic civilization. The Shu and Wu rhapsodies also point out how these frontier regions at times greatly influenced the Sinitic core, how at times the tail wagged the dog. Shu’s primary assertion in this respect regarded the numerous intellectual luminaries of the Han period who hailed from Shu. Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 (179–117 BCE), Wang Bao 王褒 (ca. 84– ca. 53 BCE), Yang Xiong 楊雄 (53 BCE–18 CE), and the Daoist Zhuang Zun 莊遵 (fl. ca. 34 BCE) all produced “rhetorical displays [that] dazzled the [Han] imperial court” 摛藻掞天庭. “Even compared with the whole world, they stand preeminent, and in Han’s middle years they commanded special fame” 考四海而為侊，當中葉而擅名.112 Wu’s claim to preeminence in the world came instead in the political arena, when the Wu kings Helü 闔閭 (r. 514–496 BCE) and Fuchai 夫差 (r. 495–473 BCE) were able to dominate the Sinitic world. Such was the wealth of this land and the power of the state that ruled from it that Wu, not the Yellow River plain, provided the “standards for the four directions” 四方之所軌則, and “people from the four quarters would come here to pay their respects” 四奧來暨.113 Although claiming cultural inheritance from the Yellow River core indicated membership in the civilized world, descriptions of regional counterinfluence on the civilizational heartland asserted a coming of age of these frontier regions. Although the spatial and historical relationship of the region to the larger Sinitic ecumene frames these rhapsodies in their introductions and conclusions, the vast majority of their content depicts a unique sense of place. Half of the Shu rhapsody and a quarter of the Wu rhapsody describe in meticulous detail the natural landscapes—the unique flora, fauna, and local products—that establish the foundation for regional distinctiveness. These local products were gathered in the capital through markets, hunts, and feasts.114 At the feasts, music and dance was performed “all in accordance with folk songs and customs” 皆與 謠俗汁協.115 Through gathering local products and customs into the city, these regional capitals became microcosms of their distinctive regions, making them unique from all other rival capitals.116

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In conclusion, Zuo Si’s “Sandu fu” reveals a layering of two very different spatial constructions of a transcendent and centered empire and of a regional and polycentric ecumene. The Wei master (from his location in the Central Plains) presents traditional Han geopolitical concepts, whereas the two noblemen of Shu and Wu (from their location on the Yangzi frontier) employ newer conceptualizations of ­regional environments, histories, and politics that were being worked out in the emerging genre of geographical writing. Ultimately, in accordance with the literary expectations of capital rhapsodies and the political obligations of a Jin official, Zuo Si maintained the imperial metageography, its ritual centrality affirmed through its transcendence of regional customs and environments. But Zuo Si’s introduction indicates that the real significance of this work lay in its geographical realism, which is most manifest not in the confirmation of Wei imperial centrality but in the much more pervasive exploration of regional distinctiveness, drawn largely from the burgeoning geographical literature of Zuo Si’s time. The significance of this ecumenical metageography is highlighted in the transformation of Ye from imperial capital to regional city. After the transmission of authority from the Wei to the Jin regime, Ye is described with all the same markers of regionalism as Shu and Wu had been.117 The “Sandu fu” therefore presents an early, comprehensive, well-developed articulation of a postimperial spatial paradigm in which multiple states vied for power within a context of both imperial memory and ecumenical regionalism. Elites of each region attempted to claim inclusion in the political and cultural heritage of the Han empire and to assert a special status within that common heritage through distinctly regional contributions to civilization.

Southern Frontier to Secondary Core The first flourishing of local geographical production appeared in the third century, with the fragmentation of imperial authority, but the second flourishing and the highest level of local geographical production emerged with the second early medieval transformation of the geopolitical landscape of the Sinitic ecumene: the transformation of the Yangzi basin from a southern frontier into a secondary core. This

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transformation had been long in coming. During the Han period, the Yangzi basin had been the destination of considerable migrations but had remained a comparatively lightly populated ecological frontier, inhabited by a variety of ethnic groups. Gradual yet substantial southern migrations continued into the resource rich but population poor frontier during the instability of the Three Kingdoms period and the short-lived pax imperium of the Western Jin.118 The largest mass migra­ tion, however, came in the early fourth century, when the old Yellow River core was conquered by nomadic armies migrating southward from borderlands with the Eurasian Steppe, consequently driving nearly a million inhabitants from the more urbanized Yellow River basin farther south into the less urbanized Yangzi basin.119 This ecological frontier provided abundant natural resources, but considerable labor input and sociopolitical organization were required to realize the latent potentials of these rich frontier lands. Rice agriculture is highly productive in this region, but it required the laborious infrastructural work of damming rivers, draining swamps, constructing rice paddies, and terracing. Émigré elites and the retainers they brought with them provided a sudden investment of both manpower and capital. Since much of the lowlands had already been occupied at this point, many of the émigré elites had to carve out new estates from previously uncultivated lands, putting their laborers to work devel­ oping wetlands and hillsides.120 Furthermore, the decision to retreat to the southern provinces and reorganize a rump Jin state (recentered at the old Wu capital of Jianye, renamed Jiankang) attracted further migration from the Yellow River plain, especially elites (and their retainers) who would not otherwise have been willing to relocate to the edges of the civilized world but who were helpful to the successful organization of the state there. The court at Jiankang helped organize labor for cultivating the Yangzi frontier, and it reinvested tax revenues in public works and governance that benefited the Yangzi basin—rather than redirecting them toward the old imperial center in the Yellow River plain.121 These refugees initially saw Jiankang as a temporary holding ground before they could retake their homeland in the Yellow River basin, but within a generation or two they began to establish roots in this former frontier. Although reconquest of the old cultural core was

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important political rhetoric, the reality of such ambitions proved more complicated.122 Instead, émigré elites took advantage of the political and economic opportunities afforded them in this newly emerging secondary core—open land to carve out large estates, greater access to the imperial court, and freedom from nomadic conquerors. They began writing poetry and painting pictures that praised the natural beauties of their new subtropical homeland of mountains and rivers. This relocation of the Yellow River basin population and court into the Yangzi basin effaced some of the cultural differences between the two regions, though it far from eliminated them. To these émigré families, the Yangzi basin did not feel quite as foreign as it had just a few generations before. By the early fifth century, the fragmented Eastern Jin court was replaced with a more assertive, expansionistic, and native-led Song court. Leadership of the Jiankang empire shifted from aristocratic émigré families from the Yellow River plain to native southerners who had gained control of the state through their dominance of the Northern Headquarters Army (Beifubing 北府兵).123 This Jiankang empire will be the subject of chapter 3. For now, it is important to examine the connection between local geographies and the transformation of the Yangzi basin from a southern frontier into a secondary core region of the Sinitic ecumene. The centuries-long development of civilizational infrastructure finally reached a tipping point. The Eastern Jin court and the Southern Dynasties after it were now economic, cultural, and political rivals to the older civilizational core in the Yellow River basin. Geographical literature of this period would reflect this more confident and assertive position of Yangzi basin society within the Sinitic ecumene.124

Local Geographies and the Yangzi Basin More local geographies were written per year during the (Liu) Song dynasty (420–79) than during any other period, and these were overwhelmingly about the Yangzi basin lands that made up the Song ­domain.125 Thus, as in the third century, the writing of local geographies is once again closely correlated with the rise of independent states in the Yangzi basin, as can be seen in figure 1.7. The texts of these two

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periods are also parallel in their overwhelming focus on the lands of the Yangzi basin, as can be seen in figure 1.8.126 If using local geographies to assert cultural inclusion within the Sinitic civilized world had been important for local communities upon the fragmentation of Han imperium, it was even more so for the fifth-century Song state. With the conquest of the Yellow River heartland by Central Eurasian nomads in the early fourth century and the consolidation of an imperial successor state in the Yangzi basin, the Jiankang court had a reasonable claim to being the only legitimate heir to the Han empire and the center of (Sinitic) civilization. But this claim rested on the notion that the lands of the Yangzi basin were less foreign than were the nomadic tribes ruling the Yellow River heartland. This particular interpretation of “Chineseness” that emphasizes heritage over geography was not as self-evident at the time as it appears to be from the modern nationalist perspective.127 Local geographies of the Yangzi basin during this period were extremely useful in making this case—with their spatial structure that allowed for transplanting markers of civilization and articulating regional distinctiveness within a common ecumene. Although the second flourishing of local geographies in the fifth century continued all of the patterns described earlier in this chapter (genius loci, local contributions to civilization, common mythic heritage, and imperial memory), it differed somewhat from that of the third century in ways that reveal the importance of the Yangzi basin landscape. First, local geographies began to be framed not just by administrative units (prefectures, commanderies, and districts) but also by drainage basins, expressing in literary form the physical realities that bind such spaces together. These were cultural geographies inscribed within natural boundaries.128 A second difference was the concomitant flourishing of nature geographies, primarily focused on the southern landscape of mountains and rivers.129 And, third, the language used in local geographies to describe the Yangzi basin shifted from that of strangeness in the third century to descriptions of magnificence and beauty in the fifth.130 Indeed, Cheng Yü-yü (Zheng Yuyu) argues that the geographical texts of the post–southern migration period are part of a “new geographical discourse” (xin dili lunshu 新地理論述) that emphasized descriptions of the bodily experience with nature. She argues

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that intimate interactions with the radically new environment of the Yangzi basin and the cultural aesthetic that it facilitated were founded on the economic necessities of managing country estates carved out of the Yangzi wilderness and the cultural legitimization of seizing these wetlands and hillsides. The resulting intimacy with the landscape of mountains and rivers shifted the language of nature away from quantitative measurements of natural resources (as had been inherited from the Han) and toward personal, sensual experiences with nature. Within geographical literature, this shift is evident in the increased production of natural geographies and the inclusion within other forms of geographical writing of more sensual descriptions of landscape, personal anecdotes of the author’s visits to a site, and quotations of other literati’s emotional response to natural scenery.131 To cite but one example of this more aesthetic, intimate description of nature, Kong Lingfu 孔靈符 (Song dynasty) wrote in his Guiji ji 會 稽記 (Record of Guiji) that “the peaks and cliffs are lofty and precipitous, breathing in and out the clouds and mists. The pines and junipers, sweet-gum and cypress trees extend their trunks and raise their branches high. The pools and ravines are as clear as mirrors, pouring forth pure currents. When Wang Xianzhi saw them, he said, ‘The beauty of this landscape is such that it entirely overwhelms people’” 峰崿 隆峻，吐納雲霧，松栝楓柏，摧榦竦條，澄壑鏡徹，清流寫注。王子敬 見之，曰：山水之美，使人應接不暇.132 The Yangzi basin environment is described here as if it were a living entity that intimately affected the people who e­ ntered it. Beyond geographical writing, this new geographical discourse is most clearly evident in the contemporary rise of landscape poetry, with such luminaries as Xie Lingyun 謝靈運 (385– 433) (who also, not coincidentally, composed local and natural geographies).133 The cultural work of the local and environmental geographies of the fourth and fifth centuries—as well as landscape poetry—was to transform the literary descriptions of the Yangzi landscape from strange to special, from weird to wonderful. The burgeoning production of local and natural geographies in the late fourth and fifth centuries, their disproportionate focus on the Yangzi basin, their increased attention toward drainage basins as functional spatial units (especially the entire Yangzi basin), and their literary shift toward natural aesthetics all point toward local geographies

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as a literary articulation of the rising political, economic, and cultural prominence of the Yangzi basin as a new secondary core of Sinitic civilization. Local geographies—more than any other literary genre— allowed local elites from this region to assert that their ancestors had been part of the civilized world since ancient times, that their landscape was not something to be feared as foreign but something to be awed by as beautiful, and that the combination of cultural heritage and environmental factors in the Yangzi basin had created distinctive cultural and political achievements that made significant contributions to (Sinitic) civilization. All of these characteristics of local geographies combined to ascribe political and cultural legitimacy to this frontier-turned-core empire.

Huayang guozhi and Ecumenical Regionalism Chang Qu’s (ca. 291–361) Huayang guozhi (Record of the states south of Mount Hua) is a fully extant example of the balancing of endogenous and exogenous cultural influences characteristic of ecumenical regionalism. It articulates regional distinctiveness within ecumenical inclusion. It also contains one of the most cogent and well-argued critiques of Han imperial metageography from early imperial literature. Chang Qu was a native of Shu Commandery (in modern Sichuan) and an official of the native Sichuanese Cheng-Han 成漢 (304–47) state. After the conquest of Cheng-Han by Eastern Jin in 347, Chang Qu relocated to Jiankang to pursue (unsuccessfully) official service there. In this frustrating political climate, dominated by men of Wu and Yellow River basin émigrés, Chang Qu had to defend himself against common prejudices about the cultural backwardness of Shu. Ren Naiqiang writes that Chang Qu’s “primary intention [in writing the Huayang guozhi] was to boast of the long-standing culture of Ba and Shu and to record their historic figures, to show that they matched those of the Central Plains and overwhelmed the lower Yangzi, so as to counter ridicule from lower Yangzi literati.”134 Michael Farmer further explains that “the Chengdu Plain remained to some extent culturally apart from the center of imperial power concentrated in the Yellow River heartland” and that “both Qiao Zhou’s and Chang Qu’s local histories ­f unctioned as a counterbalance to these views” in arguing that “the

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Chengdu Plain was both cultured and integrated into the larger Chinese sphere from ancient times and, by extension, remained so in [their] own time.”135 Although some Tang scholars classified the Huayang guozhi as a local geography, its format is quite distinct from the spatially structured texts of geographical writing. Wang Zhongluo characterized it instead as a “a regionalistic comprehensive history” 地方性的通史.136 It is comprehensive in its composite structure that combines local ­geographies, chronicles of regional states, and local compilations of biographies as well as in its temporal coverage, as it links the histories of several states from different time periods into one continuous narrative. For these reasons, the Huayang guozhi (as a whole) tends to be more politicized than typical local geographies. However, it is regional in its spatial scope of just the Sichuan basin (including the Hanzhong region) and in its prioritization of geographical essays (rather than chronicles, as in traditional comprehensive histories).137 As Michael Farmer has shown, Chang Qu drew heavily from earlier local geographies and local compilations of biographies, many of which had been written by eminent Sichuanese natives such as Qiao Zhou and Chen Shou.138 Therefore, although the Huayang guozhi is comprehensive in some ways, its cultural work was framed within a metageography of ecumenical regionalism. The Huayang guozhi, like other local geographies before and after it, was written to articulate how this southwestern frontier was still fully part of the civilized world, that the ancient sage-kings and classical empire had transformed its lands and peoples long ago, and that the native Sichuanese had in turn contributed greatly to the civilized world.139 In order to claim full membership within the (Sinitic) civilized world, Chang Qu repeatedly affirmed the successful civilizing mission of the Qin-Han empire in Sichuan. He described in considerable detail the cultural transformation at Sichuan’s initial incorporation into the imperial order when the state of Qin conquered it in 316 BCE, noting especially the acculturation during the governorship of Li Bing 李冰 (ca. third c. BCE).140 After the Western Jin conquest of Sichuan, “Shu no longer had the customs of making licentious sacrifices; the cultural transformation had proceeded on such a grand scale” 於是蜀無淫祀 之‌俗，教化大行.141 Furthermore, in his geographical treatise on Ba,

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Chang Qu described the Ba people as “valuing what is upright and being fond of propriety; they are by custom honest and sincere” 質直好義，土 風敦厚; he then ascribed these qualities to an “inheritance from the early immigrants [from the Yellow River basin]” 有先民之‌流.142 Chang Qu argued, however, that this civilizing process was hardly monolithic or unidirectional. Placed prominently at the beginning of his biographical chapters, Chang Qu’s “General Praises” makes the case that a civilizing process could also come from indigenous sources— self-contained at the local level and independent from the Yellow River plain. He asserted that “all humankind relies on being filled with harmony and born of qi in order to live. But there must surely be some who are more worthy and talented than others, and these we make our ordering guides. They proclaim virtue and attain instruction; they broaden cultural transformation and make local customs honest” 含和誕氣，人倫資生，必有賢彥，為人經紀，宣德達教，博化篤俗.143 This assertion is confirmed in many of the biographies, which describe virtuous locals of Sichuan who, on their own, despite being born of the same local qi as everyone else in their community, were able to “transform the feng and alter the su” (fengyi suyi 風移俗易) of their own native lands.144 Just as in the “Shu du fu,” Chang Qu’s greatest claim to Sichuanese influence on the civilized world was the disproportionately high number of brilliant literati who hailed from Shu. Chang Qu leveraged these luminaries to great effect and argued that their literary genius was in fact a product of the unique, naturally empowered local customs of Shu. In the opening lines of his geographical treatise on Shu, he wrote, “[Shu’s] hexagram is Kun, so there are many resplendent literary works; its celestial body is number eight (wei), so they value fine tastes. Its generative power is in Shaohao, so they are fond of bitterness. Its star receives the Chariot Ghost Constellation, so its gentlemen are ingenious, and its commoners are cunning. It is in the same division as Qin, so many are brave and fierce” 其卦值坤，故多班綵文章；其辰值未，‌故 尚滋味；德在少昊，故好辛香；星應輿鬼，故君子精敏，小人鬼黠；與 秦同分，故多悍勇.145 These cosmological and geographical endowments upon the people of Sichuan, Chang Qu argued, explains their inordinate literary brilliance within the Sinitic ecumene. Chang Qu reported twice that the people of Shu were “by custom fond of literary

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inscriptions” (su hao wenke 俗好文刻). This natural inclination ­explained how it was that so shortly after Wen Weng 文翁 established academies in Shu (ca. 157 BCE) its students had become the equivalent of those of Lu and Qi (the region usually recognized as the intellectual center of the ancient Sinitic ecumene).146 Hence, natural endowment and local customs were used to explain the popular sayings that “Han summoned eight scholars, and four of them were from Shu” 漢徵八 士，蜀有四焉 and that “the Han had four methods of appointing upright officials, and the men of Shu were selected by means of two of them” 漢具四義，蜀選其二.147 Although Chang Qu ultimately accepted the ideal of singular ­political unity over tianxia, he still argued vociferously for a culturally polycentric ecumene. The local customs of the Sichuan basin had been transformed and corrected by the universal standards of civilization from the Yellow River core. And, at the same time, moral standards and literary brilliance could also come from the local worthies, inspired by their distinctive Sichuan environment and local customs. This unique regional combination of exogenous civilizing influences and endogenous local customs could produce such flourishing of cultural creativity that it could spawn a cultural counterflow of literary brilliance back into the ancient Yellow River core. Shu literary achievements were more than mere instantiation of central realm standards; they were facilitated by a unique environment and therefore could not have been produced from anywhere else. Chang Qu was not arguing for a displacement of the old political and cultural center so much as for a new expanded, multiregional conceptualization of shared cultural polycentrism.

Correcting the Errors of Imperial Metageography In his postface to the Huayang guozhi, Chang Qu made a thorough and cogent critique of imperial metageography. It is presented as an effort to correct several common misconceptions about Shu, misconceptions founded on the assumptions of imperial metageography. The first mistaken “tradition” (chuan 傳), as he called them, was that the reigns of the kings of Shu, beginning with Can Cong 蠶叢, encompassed three thousand years. The second was a series of claims about strange natural

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phenomena of Shu: that Bieling’s 鱉靈 corpse transformed back to life in the western lands (xitu 西土) and then became the emperor of Shu, that the blood of Changhong 萇弘 of Zhou became jade (abundant in Sichuan), and that Du Yu’s 杜宇 white-soul transformed into the Zijuan 子鵑 bird (native to Sichuan). The third was that people of Shu tied their robes on the left (unlike in Sinitic culture, which does so on the right) and that they were illiterate until the Western Han governor Wen Weng introduced writing to them in the second century BCE.148 The implication of these misconceptions was clear: Shu was a land of the mythic and bizarre and of the barbaric and uncivilized. These misconceptions affirmed the Han imperial metageography that marginalized Shu as a distant and foreign periphery of the civilized world. Chang Qu could not let such misrepresentations about his homeland go uncontested. On the first point, Chang Qu responded that his history clearly showed that Can Cong and Du Yu were both alive during the Eastern Zhou, therefore placing Shu in the historical context of the Zhou world.149 On the second point, Chang Qu countered these anomaly tales with rational arguments on the impossibility of people coming back to life, the implausibility that jade spread out over thousands of miles could possibly have come from a single source, and the actuality that the Zijuan bird could be found not just in Sichuan but throughout the land within the Four Seas. He admitted that one does encounter such tales of “strange phenomena” (guaiyi 怪異) but countered that such matters were inappropriate to discuss when writing about serious political histories. Because of the strong association ­between “anomaly accounts” and foreign lands, Chang Qu’s rejection here of such tales through rational argument situates Sichuan securely within the inner and normative realm.150 The final misconception about the uncivilized, foreignness of Shu was perhaps the most damning, so Chang Qu took special care responding to it. He did so with five pieces of evidence that affirmed Sichuan’s inclusion within the Sinitic cultural and political sphere since ancient times. First, he pointed to the supposedly universal rule of the ancient sage-kings Tang, Yao, and Shun, which covered the “myriad states” and extended to the “eight extremities” (babiao 八表) and therefore must have included Sichuan. Second, he cited how Yu the Great and Houji introduced agriculture to the whole world, and hence “the

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system of well-fields and the teachings of local schools [in Sichuan] are both from this distant point” 井田之制，庠序之教，由來遠矣. Third, he claimed that the ancient and long-lived Pengzu 彭祖 was a native of Shu and was also a scribe for the Shang court and was praised by Confucius himself as a sagely model. Fourth, at the end of Zhou, Shu was incorporated into the Qin state and was directly administered through commanderies and districts. “Although it bordered the barbarians, it still had officials’ caps” 雖濱戎 夷，亦有冠冕. Finally, he cited the Shuwang benji, which states that Shu was a “country of great men” 大人之鄉.151 All of these counterarguments are deeply resonant with claims of local geographies: local traces of sage-kings, inclusion in the empires of the past, and eminent locals who were admired across the civilized world. With these localistic claims to ancient inheritance from and contribution to the civilized world, Chang Qu challenged the idea that, somehow in the Han, Sichuan had lost this tradition of civilization and somehow “reverted back to the Wild Domain” 反當荒服. Quite the contrary, during the Han and post-Han periods, Sichuan had produced some of the greatest literary minds of the Sinitic world. In conclusion, Chang Qu explained that these misconceptions had originated from “minor points of joking and teasing” 談調之末 between Han officials and Shu gentlemen that were thought comical in their own time but were recorded, transmitted, and then taken seriously in later times.152 By this account, it was ironically the comfortable collegiality between men of Shu and other Han literati and the ignorance of Chang Qu’s contemporaries about Han literati that resulted in these misunder­ standings about the backwardness of Sichuan. Finally, it is important to clarify that Chang Qu’s critique of imperial geography was not so much a rejection of empire itself, but of the myopic, teleological, Yellow River plain–centered narrative of civi­ lization that was used by Yellow River plain–based empires to jus­tify their political control over a regionally diverse imperial domain. Although he did present chronicle histories of several Sichuan-based states, in his postface Chang Qu clearly accepted the ideal of a single and universal ruler that ordered the world ecumene and explicitly denied that any of these Sichuan-based states possessed such a mandate. He criticized these regimes for relying too much on their defensive

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geography rather than on heaven’s virtue.153 The Huayang guozhi, like local geographies, was neither making a political case for a Sichuancentered world order nor even demonstrating Sichuanese nativist separatism. It was the civilizational accomplishments of Sichuan that were the primary thrust of Chang Qu’s work. Empires rise and fall, capitals move about, but beneath this political hierarchy was a network of regions that composed the civilized world. It was a multiethnic community tied together by a common nonalphabetic Sinitic script—a cultural garden that cross-­pollinated regional virtues, a civilized ecumene within which Sichuan was a fully participating member.

Conclusion A particular locality story about the Wu region encapsulates the various arguments presented in this chapter about the characteristics and cultural work of local geographies. The details of this story vary across texts, but the essential story is that, while the First Emperor of Qin was on an imperial tour of his newly formed world-empire, he visited the land of Wu. It was observed there that the natural landscape of this region had “the qi of a Son of Heaven” (Tianzi qi 天子氣). To counteract the threat of this local qi to centralized authority, the First Emperor ordered thousands or tens of thousands of convict laborers to dig up and disfigure the region’s natural terrain. Nevertheless, centuries later Wu did indeed become the capital of several regimes claiming the same imperial authority as had the Qin and Han emperors.154 This anecdote embodies four themes regarding local geographies and ecumenical regionalism presented in this chapter. First is the intimate connection between landscape, its natural qi, and the fate of humans who reside there. Wu’s landscape and natural qi manifested a unique genius loci that made it distinct and special. This natural endowment destined the rise of the Yangzi basin such that even the First Emperor with his tens of thousands of laborers could not thwart it. The second theme is the reciprocal relationship between ecumene and locale articulated through the spatially structured text of geographical writing. In these texts, representatives of civilization and empire could inject exogenous influences into the local community and

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landscape, but local figures could also project endogenous influences outward onto the rest of the civilized or imperial world. In this story, the First Emperor’s tour, his anxieties about the region’s potential to steal the leadership of tianxia from him, and his efforts to prevent it encapsulate the multidirectionality of imperial influence on the locale and local influence on the empire. Third is the theme of the rise of the Yangzi basin from southern frontier to secondary core region. This story legitimized an imperial order centered on the lower Yangzi basin through claiming a localistic natural endowment, heaven’s touch, and imperial participation in the past. Although “the qi of a Son of Heaven” in Wu is referenced as early as the late Han period, it was during the Eastern Jin and Southern Dynasties, with the rise of a Yangzi basin–based Jiankang empire, that this story was developed and popularized in local geographies and dynastic histories. Although this story interprets the rise of the Yangzi basin in terms of deterministic environmental qi, I have presented the frontier transformation into a secondary core as a fulfillment of longue durée geographical patterns that encouraged the expansion of Siniticstyle civilization into this environmentally rich southern frontier.155 Finally, the fourth theme is the proliferation of similar local claims to special status across the entire Sinitic ecumene. Although this tale of the First Emperor and Wu is particularly detailed in the links between landscape, natural qi, and political authority, many other regions also claimed “the qi of a Son of Heaven” in their own lands. Although such claims might be obvious for lands within the Yellow River plain, and they were indeed made there, more radical were the large number of such claims from across the former frontiers of the lower, middle, and upper Yangzi regions.156 Thus, like so many of the other claims to local connections to the markers of civilization described in this chapter, these individual claims to having “the qi of a Son of Heaven” in one’s local environment collectively construct a common cultural heritage that tied together multiple and diverse regions into a composite civilized ecumene. In sum, local geographies and their locality stories were uniquely suited to renegotiate the spatial relationship between center and province as the symbiotic relationships between the Han court and local authorities waned. With the sociopolitical fragmentation and demographic

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shifts southward of the third and fourth centuries, Sinitic literati were left with a cultural ecumene that was far larger, more geographically varied, more demographically diverse, more culturally heterogeneous, and less politically centralized than it had ever been before. Local geographical writing was a useful literary tool for making sense of this spatial complexity. Like imperial geographies, local geographies could describe the civilizing influences on the local provinces, but they could do so in a way that covered a broader range of civilizing vectors— political, cultural, and mythic. However, unlike imperial geog­raphies, they could also articulate local contributions to civilization, provincial preservation of ancient traditions, and regional participation in the collective Sinitic ecumene. Local geographical writing could do all this without the politicization of the relationship inherent in histories of regional regimes and compilations of local biographies. With the flourishing of local geographies, networks of a common cultural heritage rivaled political spatial hierarchies as the primary mode of framing the Sinitic ecumene. Tang literati were, therefore, only partially right about the subversive qualities of local geographies. These texts did indeed moderate the centering and hierarchical structure of Han imperial geography, but they also affirmed a common cultural and political heritage across the fragments of the vast and multiethnic Han empire. Whereas sociopolitical forces tore the empire apart, local geographies stitched together the regions of the former imperial realm into an expansive yet diverse cultural ecumene.

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North and South

T

he previous chapter examined the rise of local geographies from the third through the fifth centuries and their integrated articulation of both regional distinctiveness and ecumenical inclusion. This pattern of regionalism took on a new form in the fifth and sixth centuries as two states emerged on the borderlands of the crumbling Jin empire.1 One gained control over the Yellow River core, and the other gained control over the Yangzi basin frontier-turned-secondary-core. The two states vied with each other for dominance over the entire ­ecumene. This geopolitical arrangement is traditionally termed the “Northern and Southern Dynasties.” This chapter will trace the development of this north-south metageography from the fourth to the ­seventh century. My primary argument is that this metageography of a “China” composed of two equal and complementary halves of one greater whole was a creation of Sui-Tang literati to support their own unification discourse and was foreign to the people who lived in the period that we now call the “Northern and Southern Dynasties.” This is not to say that we, as modern historians, should necessarily abandon the metageography of northern and southern dynasties. It is still an extremely useful “set of spatial structures through which [to] order [our] knowledge” of the fifth- and sixth-century Sinitic ecumene. As the sole English-language survey of this period asserts, the military stalemate between the two political centers and the subsequent cultural divergence between them “define[s] the historical significance of this period.”2 Although the metageography is useful in historical retrospect,

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we must employ it carefully, never slipping into ahistorical thinking by assuming that fifth- and sixth-century literati conceptualized their own contemporary geopolitical arrangement the same way that Tang officials would a century or two later, which is how most historians have conceptualized it since. The development of the metageography of the northern and southern dynasties can be roughly sketched out in terms of three overlapping phases from the fifth through seventh centuries. First, initially the Northern and Southern Dynasties both assumed the Han imperial metageography, depicting themselves as universal empires emanating transcendent culture from their own world center. Each portrayed its rival to the north or the south as peripheral and barbarian, limited by their parochial regional environments and local customs. Second, as the realities of a multistate ecumene settled in, universalist imperial discourse gave way to regional-based comparisons. Supremacy was asserted not by transcending the limitations of regionalism but by ­displaying superior regional characteristics than those of one’s rival. Despite the inherent contradictions between these imperial and regional appeals to spatial authority, they were often employed together throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, with a gradual shift toward the latter approach as the stalemate between the northern and southern states hardened and the cultural divide softened. As in the previous chapter, the Yellow River plain–based state tended to favor traditional imperial metageography with its prioritization of the central realm, whereas the Yangzi basin–based state was more willing to experiment with polycentric, ecumenical frameworks. In the third phase, the idea of two asymmetric and adversarial states gave way to the idea of two equal and complementary halves of one greater whole. This idea culminated in the Sui conquest of the Yangzi basin and the “unification” discourse of the early Tang.

The Tabgatch and Jiankang Empires The Northern and Southern Dynasties did not see themselves as northern and southern dynasties. They did not consider themselves to be mere half empires, and they certainly did not consider themselves to

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be complementary or equal to their rival to the north or south.3 Rather, each laid claim to the imperial metageography inherited from the Han empire. They saw their own state as a universal empire, the center of the world, the model of refined culture to their uncivilized neighbors, and the recipient of tribute from their subordinate peripheries. These imperial self-representations hardly matched geopolitical realities (they never had, not even during the Han empire), but they are still meaningful in understanding how literati at the time made sense of their own geopolitical landscape. So as to not presuppose a teleology of a northern and southern dynasties metageography as Sui-Tang officials did, I will avoid the terms “Northern Dynasties” and “Southern Dynasties” altogether. Instead, I will refer to these states as the Tabgatch empire and the Jiankang empire, respectively. This is more than just rebranding. It redefines the boundaries and delineating institutions of each regime and situates them within a different metageography. It also facilitates more fruitful comparisons with imperial formations across Eurasia. The new terminol­ ogy moves away from unjustified assumptions of Chinese exceptionalism, the artificial prioritization of dynastic cycles, and the presupposed unity of lands that would one day become “China.” The concept of the Jiankang empire has been developed by Andrew Chittick to overcome the “invisibility” of the Eastern Jin and Southern Dynasties in traditional Chinese historiography, to reveal these Yangzi basin–based regimes to be more than mere regional or exiled regimes that were so ideologically committed to reconquering the heartland that their failure to do so only proved their weakness and illegitimacy. Chittick criticizes the traditional paradigm for prioritizing the perspective of the minority northern émigré elite, who are overrepresented in the literary sources of the period; for aligning with Sui-Tang “unification” propaganda; and for failing to explain the actual behavior of the empire. The Jiankang empire originated in the Three Kingdoms period frontier state of Wu, with the Sun family establishing a Han-style imperial court in the city of Jianye (later Jiankang, modern Nanjing). Interrupted by nearly four decades of Jin occupation (280– 316), the empire revived as the Eastern Jin (317–420), Song (420–79), South­ern Qi (479–502), Liang (502–57), and Chen (557–89) dynasties. Although leadership of the court shifted between Wu people (Wuren

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吳人) of the lower Yangzi region, recent émigré Han people (Hanren 漢人) from the Yellow River plain, and Chu people (Churen 楚人 or Chuzi 楚子) of the Huai River borderland, these three protoethnic ­factions were consistent components of the imperial government of all of these dynasties. Despite these shifts in leadership, the Jiankang empire maintained a consistent imperial capital and a mostly consistent territorial reach and political institutions.4 The Northern Wei (386–534), Northern Qi (550–77), Northern Zhou (557–81), and Sui (581–618) dynastic states were collectively l­ abeled Northern Dynasties by Tang historians. But, in terms of continuity of leadership, territory, or political institutions, there is little that ties these regimes together. My conception of the Tabgatch empire includes the Tang regime as well as the states mentioned above. For historical analysis, it is more useful to include the Tang dynasty and then reorganize these five dynasties into two distinct imperial formations. The first of these, the Tabgatch (Tuoba 拓跋) empire, will be the focus of this study on the north-south metageography.5 The Tabgatch empire originated with a new protoethnic identity of “the men of Dai” (Dairen 代人), which consolidated out of a multiethnic confederation under the leadership of the Tabgatch clan of the Särbi (Ch. Xianbei 鮮卑) tribe during the fourth century. From the Sanggan basin uplands (northern Shanxi), the Tabgatch conquered the old civilizational core to the south and east. It incorporated Han literati into its bureaucracy and reached its apex of power in the fifth century during the Northern Wei dynasty, extending control across the Gansu corridor and the southern steppelands. The empire fragmented during the first half of the sixth century with the Revolt of the Six Garrisons in 523 and the Eastern and Western Wei split in 534–35.6 Leadership in the Northern Zhou successor state in the Guanzhong 關中 region shifted into the hands of a new group of mixedheritage Sino-Särbi elites. These people synthesized Särbi military traditions with Sinitic statecraft into a highly effective hybrid state and ushered in a second imperial formation that encompasses the Northern Zhou, Sui, and Tang dynasties. This Sino-Särbi empire (to use Chen Sanping’s label) conquered the territory of the former Tabgatch empire by 577, subjugated the Jiankang empire by 589, and then expanded westward into Turkish lands in the early seventh century.7 There was

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greater continuity in ruling elites and imperial-military institutions within the Tabgatch and Sino-Särbi empires, respectively, than there was within the so called Northern Dynasties, making them far more analytically useful his­torical units.8 When compared to premodern empires across Eurasia, the Tabgatch and Jiankang states are certainly worthy of the label “empire” in their own right. Definitions of empire vary, but essentially an empire is “a territorially extensive, hierarchical, multiethnic political organization with a strong sense of foreignness between rulers and ruled.”9 As far as territorial extent, both the Tabgatch and Jiankang empires easily meet Peter Turchin’s (admittedly somewhat arbitrary) requirement of one million square kilometers for being included in his comparative study of premodern “megaempires.” Although these two empires mostly stalemated along the border between them, they both expanded imperial control along other fronts, especially northward into the steppe and southward into Southeast Asia.10 The ethnic and cultural diversity within these territories was profound, extending far deeper than just the simplistic Särbi versus Han split in the Yellow River basin and the northern émigrés versus southern natives split in the Yangzi River basin. Like the Han empire before them, the Jiankang and Tabgatch empires each ruled over and received revenue from ethnically diverse populations.11 Indeed, the whole idea of a “Chinese empire”— that is, an empire that is limited to an ethnically “Chinese people”— would have made no sense at the time. Even if such a national identity existed (which it did not), limiting the state in such a way would have contradicted the entire premise of universal rulership developed during the Han empire. To justify multiethnic rule, empires make universal claims to authority, claims that by necessity transcend ethnic, linguistic, and cultural limitations, and the Jiankang and Tabgatch empires did just that. Rather than seeing these empires as two halves of “China,” it is better to conceive of them as divergent successor empires originating from the northern and southern borderlands of the Sinitic civilizational core of the Yellow River basin. Both inherited from the Han empire (through its late classical incarnation of the Jin empire) aspects of elite court culture, technologies of statecraft, and, particularly important for the current discussion, imperial metageography. But, from

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their borderland origins in the upper Sanggan River basin and lower Yangzi basin, each regime innovated upon these inherited Han institutions in different ways. The field of borderland studies has revealed these special spaces to be zones “of multiple overlapping and often contested boundaries, of intercultural negotiation and accommodation, of autonomy, agency and opportunity, of the exploitation of differential conditions, of movement across boundaries, and of subversion of dominant power structures.”12 The northern “perilous frontier” faced the continuous threat of nomadic raiding and invasion and was thus highly militarized. It was also profoundly influenced by nomadic culture, economy, and military traditions. The southern frontier, in contrast, favored the reproduction of agriculturally based sociopolitical structures there. But it also offered significant economic opportunities with its resource-rich and population-poor ecological frontier connected by the natural transportation network of the Yangzi River. The Tabgatch and Jiankang empires were, therefore, the earliest manifestation of a longue durée pattern within Sinitic civilization of competing pulls between new military centers on its northern frontier and new economic centers on its southern frontier.13 Both empires faced the theoretical conundrum of how to claim universal rulership while sharing a common cultural ecumene with another empire that was also claiming universal rulership based on the same Han model. This chapter discusses several different attempted solutions to this intellectual dilemma and how these solutions developed over time. This conundrum, however, was hardly unique to East Asia. The Carolingian and Byzantine successors to the Roman empire, the Hellenistic successors to the Achaemenid empire, and the successor empires of the Abbasid Caliphate all had to explain away the ideological inconsistencies of competing claims to universal authority rooted in the same cultural framework.14

Competing Imperial Centers As discussed in chapter 2, the concepts of geographic centrality and political authority are tightly interconnected in Sinitic theorization of universal rulership. Correct rituals of conduct (li 禮) were prescribed by canonical texts ( jing 經) and transcended the spatial limitations of

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region and custom (su 俗), establishing universal standards for the entire world (tianxia). Court rituals situate the ruler and his capital at the spatial center of tianxia and at the cosmic nexus between heaven and earth. In the system of universal rulership developed by the Han, the ruler’s political and moral potency emanated outward from this center point, gradually extending to every corner of the earth. Although peoples and kingdoms varied in the degree of their reception of the universal standards of civilization, governance, and moral suasion, the center point of this cultural-political-moral matrix was singular and absolute—at least in theory.15 Both the Tabgatch and Jiankang courts accepted this fundamental spatial concept of universal rulership, each asserting that its own court was the one and only true center of the world and successor to the Han empire. Each tried to situate itself within the authoritative line of ­dynastic successions through imperial calendars, reign titles, and fivephases cosmology. Both adopted the key rituals of the Han court, most importantly the suburban sacrifices to heaven and the sacrifices to the deities of soil and grain.16 And each presented its own history within the cosmological framework of the dynastic cycles, making the annals of its own court the organizing structure of time and space and presenting all other political organizations as appendages to its own world-centering court.17 This spatial centrality was imagined, and the continuity from Han rituals is questionable, but the point is that both the Tabgatch and Jiankang courts sought to veil their regimes within Han imperial ritual and geographic ideology. The officials of the Jian­ kang and Tabgatch empires and their successor states each depicted their own states as universal empires in their own right, with all the ritual trappings that should identify them as such. This was quite different from how Tang literati would depict these two empires centuries later. In theory, the universalizing rituals of Han imperial ideology transcended the peculiarities of cultural and regional geography. But, in practice, up until the fourth century imperial authority had been ­layered atop Yellow River basin geography and Huaxia civilization, creating an assumed conflation of political, cultural, and geographic centrality. Imperial capitals had been in the Central Plains (Zhongyuan 中原) (synonymous from the Han to the Tang with the central realm [zhongguo]), or at least the upriver region of Guanzhong (which itself

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had posed problems for this assumed geographical-political overlay).18 This geopolitical center was inhabited by the Huaxia civilization or people (also called zhonghua 中華 by the Six Dynasties period), defined by their adherence to the aforementioned world-centering universal standards of literature and ritual. Competing claims to the Han mantle from the Jiankang and Tabgatch empires disaggregated these assumed civilizational and geographical overlays. Although the complexity of these terms resists simple definitions, the Tabgatch empire tended to claim geopolitical centrality through rooting political authority and the Huaxia civilization into Yellow River plain geography. In contrast, the Jiankang empire did so through emphasizing the capacity of political authority and the Huaxia civilization to transcend the geographic limitations of the Yellow River plain. Because of its control of the Sinitic heartland in the Yellow River plain, the Tabgatch empire had the easier task in appropriating Han imperial metageography. The geographical rhetoric in the Wei shu 魏書 (History of the Wei dynasty) sounds more conservative, repeating the assumed overlays of political, cultural, and geographic spaces. With control of the entire Yellow River basin, the Tabgatch empire had a good claim to territorial continuity between the Han, Jin, and Wei dynastic states. As Li Chong 李沖 (450–98) boasted, “The Wei territory covers eight of the Nine Regions, and has subjugated 90 percent of [the world’s] population; the only remaining people are either in the northern deserts or in the lands beyond the Yangzi” 魏境所掩，九州過八，民人所臣，十 分而九。所未民者，惟漠北之與江外耳.19 The empire’s firm entrenchment within the assumed spatial center of civilization made the loosening of the assumed ethnic character of civilization a less radical transformation of Huaxia identity during this period. Although the Wei dynasty is often depicted by modern historians as a foreign “conquest regime,” Wei officials saw the multiethnic Tabgatch empire as the reification of Han ideology of universal rulership. They interpreted Huaxia not as the quasi-ethnic identity that had developed during the xenophobic third and fourth centuries, when fear of barbarian infiltration had been at its height, but as the supraethnic identity modeled on the cultural universalism of the confident and multiethnic Han empire that had incorporated Xiongnu and other tribespeople into its domain. The Wei shu’s geographical essay would

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compare the Qin-Han empire that “encompassed all within the seas . . . and mixed into one the Sinitic people and the barbarians” 吞海內 . . . 混一華夷 with the Tabgatch empire that “extended through the wildernesses of the Nine Domains . . . and unified the state as a single family” 遂荒九服 . . . 一國一家.20 The Mandate of Heaven, moral virtue, and canonical rituals mattered more than ethnic background, as is articulated in the edict on naming the dynastic state Wei. Cui Hong 崔宏 (d. 418) drafted the edict for the Wei emperor: “Tianxia was fragmented, and the Lands of Hua [i.e., the Central Plains] were without a ruler. Although various customs are different, [these lands] are pacified through innate virtue. There­ fore, I [Wei Emperor Daowu 道武 (Tuoba Gui 拓拔珪, r. 386–409)] personally led my armies to restore peace to the Central Land until the rebellious were destroyed, and the places far and wide submitted to my authority” 天下分裂，諸華乏主。民俗雖殊，撫之在德，故躬率六 軍，掃平中土，凶逆蕩除，遐邇率服.21 Wei officials employed here the standard tropes of dynastic succession: the world was in chaos, but one particular ruler, through virtuous leadership, brought peace to the central realm, and the rest of the world submitted to him. This version of the story, however, especially highlights the importance of the Yellow River plain and the superiority of innate virtue or moral power over mere differences in custom.22 This imperial ideology favored a geographically restrictive interpretation of Huaxia civilization as being limited to the Yellow River plain (thereby excluding the “island barbarians” [daoyi 島夷] of the rival Jiankang empire). It also features an ethnically inclusive interpretation of Huaxia that could encompass the new Tabgatch overlords. Besides claiming geopolitical centrality and universal rulership modeled after the Han empire, the Tabgatch empire also added Buddhism into its repertoire of authority—with Buddhism’s useful international reach, multiethnic sangha (community of believers), and metaphysical cosmologies.23 Tabgatch rulers claimed to be the incarnation of the Buddha, depicted themselves as such in bronze statues and grotto carvings, and required Buddhist communities within their realm to submit to their authority. As Wang Jianshun concisely describes for the Yungang Grottoes, “Buddhas had become emperors and emperors buddhas.”24 Like the microcosmic palace complexes of the

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Qin-Han empire that symbolized the capital’s central position in the world, the Buddhist monasteries, pagodas, and grottoes of the Wei capitals similarly situated them as singularly remarkable places within Buddhist geography.25 With regard to Pingcheng 平城 (modern Datong), the Shuijing zhu reports that, “at the capital city, the imperial town, Buddhism flourished. Its sacred pagodas and marvelous stupas stood erect, facing each other. The dharma wheel turned east [i.e., Buddhism spread to East Asia], right here more than anywhere else” 然‌京 邑帝里，佛法豐盛，神圖妙塔，桀跱相望，法輪東轉，茲為上‌矣.26 The imperial capital of Luoyang, at its height in the first decade of the sixth century, had more than 1,300 monasteries.27 Paramount among these Buddhist sacred sites was the Yongning 永寧 Monastery with its nine-story pagoda, which Yang Xuanzhi spotlighted in his description of the Wei capital. The microcosmic architecture was clear: its foundation “reached beneath the Yellow Springs [i.e., the underworld]” 至黃泉下, its top reached so high that it “looked down on the clouds and rain” 下臨雲雨 (as well as the neighboring imperial palace), and its repositories stored Buddhist-related tribute submitted to the Tabgatch rulers from around the world.28 Official and religious histories alike describe the Yongning Monastery as “preeminent in all the world” 天下第一, and the monk Bodhidharma, who was “visiting the central lands from a remote wilderness” 起自荒裔，來遊中土, declared that, “in my hundred and fifty years, I have traveled throughout many countries and have been everywhere, but there is not a temple of such pure beauty anywhere within Jambudvipa [the Buddhist name for the world]. Even in the realm of the Buddha there is nothing like this” 年一百五十 歲，歷涉諸國，靡不周遍；而此寺精麗，閻浮所無也。極物境界，亦未 有此.29 Although these Buddhist appeals to authority are marginalized in the official histories, the Tabgatch empire made considerable use of them to transcend the assumed ethnic boundaries within traditional Sinitic claims to universal rulership. There were many like the monk Faguo 法果 (fl. 396–97) who were unwilling “to bow before the Son of Heaven” 拜天子 but were enthusiastic about reverencing a Wei emperor who was a “present-day Tathagata” 當今如來, “a sovereign who is able to spread the [Buddhist] way” 能鴻道者人主也.30 The Jiankang empire’s claim to geopolitical centrality required greater adaptation from the Han model than did the Tabgatch empire’s

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claim. Jiankang was not part of zhongguo as it was traditionally defined (that is, as the Yellow River plain and/or the state[s] controlling this land). No state with its capital in the Yangzi basin had been recognized in the orthodox line of imperial dynastic succession to that point. The imperial metageography of the Jiankang empire, therefore, emphasized the power of ritual to transcend geography, to transform any regional space into the center of the world. This idea had old roots. The imperial capitals of the Han, Wei, and Jin regimes had moved repeatedly throughout the Yellow River basin, and the literary motif of capital rhapsodies emphasized that it was the transcendent ritual, not the local geography, that made a particular city into the world capital.31 For J­ iankang officials, this logic should extend further: if the legitimating rituals could move the center of tianxia between cities within the Yellow River basin, even so far as Guanzhong (which by some Warring States and Eastern Han accounts was also outside the central realm), then why could these rituals not relocate that center beyond the Yellow River basin to Jiankang? After the establishment of the rump Jin state in Jiankang in 317, officials took special care to establish the traditional imperial rituals of the Altar of Soil and Grain, offerings at the ancestral temples of the royal Sima clan, and the sacrifices to heaven in the southern suburbs.32 Some Eastern Jin officials made the case that it was the flagrant disregard of canonical rituals during the Western Jin that had led to the loss of the Yellow River heartland. “To oppose the rituals and harm the teachings [of the Sage]—there is no crime greater than this. The downfall of the central court [in Luoyang] was really because of this” 悖禮 傷教，罪莫斯甚，中朝傾覆，實由於此.33 Centrality, therefore, was tied to the transcendent rituals that defined civilization and to the people and state that adhered to them, not to the piece of real estate on which they were performed.34 Rather than claiming geographic continuity, Jiankang officials claimed spatial-political centrality through fidelity to the cultural inheritance from the civilized center of the past. Physical space and geo­ g­raphic distance were overcome through cultural heritage, ritual fidelity, literary traditions, lineage ancestry, and political legacy that could all be traced back to the cradle of Huaxia civilization with greater cultural continuity than that of the current rulers of that heartland. Cultural

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ties such as these allowed Yangzi basin literati to claim ritual integrity and therefore spatial centrality, even though they were now living in a land that their ancestors, just a few generations ago, would have dismissed as a backwater.35 Through this spatial reconceptualization, Jian­ kang officials could reappropriate traditional terminology that had assumed the overlapping of civilization and the Yellow River plain. Shen Yue 沈約 (441–512), for example, explicitly called the Yangzi basin the “central land” (zhongtu 中土) and calls the sociopolitical order that resided there the “transcendent Hua civilization” (shenhua 神華)—two terms that were conventionally tied spatially to the Yellow River plain.36 For Jiankang officials, it was literati-gentlemen, cultural institutions, transcendent rituals, and literary arts that defined Huaxia civilization and the geopolitical center of the world. Although the Tabgatch empire claimed continuity with the Han and Jin empires through its occupation of the land of the Yellow River basin, the Jiankang empire asserted continuity through its resettlement of the people of the Yellow River basin. As “barbarians brought chaos upon the Sinitic people . . . , those who remained loyal to Jin transferred the capital south of the Yangzi and established ‘lodged’ administrative units that were not in their old lands” 夷狄亂華 . . . 遺民南渡，並僑 置牧司，非舊土也.37 These “lodged” (qiao 僑) units and “white registers” (baiji 白籍) allowed émigrés and the government to maintain an imagined dual residence in both the longed-for homeland of the Yellow River basin and the present reality of the Yangzi basin. Initially, this was a temporary holding stage before the inevitable reconquest of the Yellow River plain, but, as the stalemate endured, lodged units were integrated into the regular administrative system, becoming a tool for re-creating the Yellow River plain with its administrative units in the Yangzi basin and integrating its residents as regular subjects of the Jiankang empire.38 Jiankang officials were somewhat ambivalent about the transcendence of ethnic diversity within this relocated Huaxia civilizational centrality. On the one hand, the Jiangkang empire ruled over a vast and ethnically diverse territory. The capacity of universalizing rituals to transcend ethnic differences was therefore important in legitimizing the incorporation of these people under Jiankang imperial rule. But, on

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the other hand, nomadic tribespeople ruling over the ancient cradle of civilization were depicted as the antithesis of civilization, as a barbarian other beyond the capacity of rituals to civilize. This same ambivalence can be found in Han discourse about the Xiongnu as well.39 In con­trast to the Wei shu depiction of the Han empire integrating its multiethnic subjects into one, the Song shu’s geographical essay emphasizes how the Han “drove off the Hu and the Yue, opening up land and expanding the frontier [i.e., for Hua people]” 攘卻胡、越，開地 斥境.40 Only if the assumed spatial center of the world could be discounted as beyond the pale of civilization could arguments for a new relocated center of civilization take root. Thus, the Jiankang empire paradoxically embraced an inclusive interpretation of Huaxia with their own subject populations but an exclusive interpretation with the Central Eurasians who ruled the civilizational heartland. The Jiankang empire developed Buddhist concepts and rituals of universal rulership to a far greater extent than did the Tabgatch empire. This is consistent with the aforementioned pattern of Central Plains– based empires more easily appropriating traditional Sinitic universalism and of Yangzi basin–based empires experimenting more freely with alternatives. Buddhism’s foreign origins, transcontinental community, and cosmological framework meant that there was no history of assumed geographical bias in favor of the Yellow River plain. Indeed, Buddhists in the Jiankang empire constructed a revisionist history in which the state of Wu was the original center of Buddhism in East Asia and the Jiankang state was the divinely sanctioned reconstitution of Aśoka’s (Ch. Ayujia 阿育伽, r. 269–232 BCE) universal Buddhist empire. Jian­ kang elites endowed monasteries, ­patronized eminent monks, and sponsored translation projects. The Jian­kang court was able to situate itself as the center of a Buddhist diplomatic system that spanned the South Seas (the South China Sea and into the Indian Ocean). These were all practices of the third through fifth centuries, but it was in the sixth century that Buddhist universalism was able to displace Sinitic universalism as the dominant political ideology of the Jiankang court.41 Although Liang Emperor Wu 武 (Xiao Yan 蕭衍, r. 502–49) is the best-known example of Buddhist emperorship in the Jiankang court, his elevation of Buddhist rituals was consistent with foundations laid

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by Jiankang emperors of the fifth century and was sustained by sub­ sequent emperors throughout the sixth century.42 Buddhist rituals at court, ­including bodhisattva ordinations, fasting assemblies, dharma assemblies, grand meetings, and vegetarian feasts, emphasized cosmic centrality, universal inclusiveness, devotional unity, and textual fidelity. During these rituals, the emperor sat at the center of a concentrically structured universe, with celestial orbs, buddhas, and bodhisattvas encircling him. He hosted “limitless assemblies” (wuzhe dahui 無遮大會) in which he would promise to bestow his merit first upon his own subjects, then upon the people of the Tabgatch empire, then upon all people outside of the Sinitic ecumene, and finally upon all sentient beings. These rituals would unite this vast assemblage—irrespective of social rank or religious ordination—into a common commitment to Buddhist awakening, creating “one body, one group, one assembly, one heartmind, and one thought” 一物一共一會一心一意. Meticulous textual research was expended on the correct performance of these rituals.43 Emperor Wu’s bodhisattva ordination ritual, for example, required painstaking collation of various contradictory ritual codes. In the end, as is characteristic of empires, these codes assembled a new composite version that could achieve a generally accepted compromise.44 Buddhism provided an alternative model of universal rulership that was more transnational in its community and cosmic in its ideology. Especially important for the Jiankang empire, Buddhism provided an ideology that was not spatially tied to historical precedents in the Yellow River plain, the region that its primary rival problematically occupied. As such, it provided a useful ideology to help relocate traditional Sinitic notions of geopolitical centrality and universal rulership to this frontier of the Sinitic ecumene. Jiankang’s focus on Buddhist ritual and literature parallels its aforementioned focus on Sinitic ritual and literature, both of which affirmed the universal rulership of this “ritual state.” Just as Han officials had described court rituals situating the Son of Heaven at the center of the world, Buddhist rituals situated the chakravartin (wheel-turning) king at the center of the cosmos. In sum, both the Tabgatch and Jiankang empires, each in its own way, sought to lay claim to universal rulership and geopolitical centrality. In pursuit of legitimation, each focused on different components of the traditional Han imperial ideology that best played to its respective

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strengths. The Tabgatch empire, possessing the Sinitic heartland, tried to root centrality to that specific space. The Jiankang empire, displaced from that heartland, sought to root centrality in an aspatial ritual culture, thereby transcending any specific space. Both empires attempted to augment traditional Sinitic imperial ideology with Buddhism, and each empire’s unique implementation of Buddhist ideology mirrored that empire’s distinct appeals to traditional Sinitic imperial ideology. The strengths in each empire’s claims to inheriting Han authority also meant that each had its own weaknesses, which its rival could—and did—take advantage of as they attempted to depict one another as the real barbarian outsider.

Competing Outer Realms The weaknesses in both the Jiankang and Tabgatch claims to centrality often made it easier (and more convincing) to articulate those claims through negation, in opposition to the outer realm of the barbarian other. Although classical Zhou texts conceptualized the outer realm as being inhabited by “the barbarians of the four directions” (siyi 四夷), the Han often simplified this model along a north-south axis. The Xiongnu (or Hu 胡) of the north and the Yue 越 of the south surrounded the Han of the middle, a middle that avoided extremes in both environmental temperature and human temperament.45 Both the Jian­ kang and Tabgatch empires affirmed their own centrality through appropriating the four barbarians and the north-south models in their own outer realm discourse.46 For the Jiankang empire, this meant equating the southerners of the Pearl and Red River basins with the ancient Yue peoples and equating the Tabgatch empire with the ancient Xiongnu tribes. For the Tabgatch empire, this meant associating the Rouran 柔然 with the Xiongnu tribes and associating the Jiankang empire with the ancient Yue peoples.47 Contrary to the northern and southern dynasties model articulated in the Tang, neither of these states is structurally prioritized by the other in its own outer realm metageography.48 To the Tabgatch empire, the Jiankang state was nothing more than the contemporary manifestation of the sultry Chu or Yue southern frontier culture, and, to the Jiankang empire, the Tabgatch state was merely the most recent appearance of the chilling Xiongnu

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military threat from the north. Although it is true that each empire was described as a northern or a southern state, this terminology was generally used by its rival as a term of derision, employing the same northern Hu–southern Yue axis model inherited from the Han. This north-south model can be seen in the contrasting accounts of the outer realms in the official histories of the Song and Wei dynasties. Despite its label as a “foreign dynasty,” the Northern Wei regime had the easier time appropriating traditional geographical concepts in its assertion of imperial suzerainty over the Jiankang empire. There was a long tradition, dating back to the Spring and Autumn period, of Yellow River plain literati describing secondary state formation in the Yangzi basin as crude mimicry of central realm civilization, built by barbarian peoples living in an untamed wilderness.49 The Wei shu account of the Jiankang empire makes abundant use of tropes of southern barbarism in an exotic southern wilderness and adheres closely to the traditional use of local customs in imperial metageography. All of the southern states are categorized under the rubric of “coastal barbarians” (daoyi 島夷)—a term for frontier peoples from the canonical “Yu gong.”50 The southern environment was described as being inhospitable for human habitation in almost every respect. Its terrain was filled with mountains and rivers, its climate was hot and humid, and its land was muddy and of low quality for agriculture. Its animals and even the very air were poisonous to humans. This foreign environment induced local customs that were contrary to the “teaching of ritual” (lijiao 禮教). “Customs there are light and hurried. . . . They ornament their sons and daughters in order to attract visitors” 俗氣輕急盛. . . . 飾子女以招遊客, and “they are clever in pursuing profit” 機巧趨利. These southern people were feminized and compared repeatedly to aquatic animals, especially in their language and desires.51 Although the state institutions and ethnic makeup of the Jiankang empire differed from those of the ancient southern frontier states of Chu, Wu, and Yue, the Wei shu depicts them through the same essentializing lens. Wei Shou 魏收 (506–72) mused in concluding his evaluation of the Song state: “I wonder whether it was their intense fiendishness or their extreme misguidedness that made them the laughingstock of the world. Is this not the enduring nature of the Yi and Chu peoples?” 疑窮凶極迷，為天下笑，其夷、楚之常性乎.52

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Throughout the Wei shu account of the Eastern Jin to Liang dynasties, the centrality of the Tabgatch empire and the peripherality of the Jiankang regime are emphasized repeatedly. Jiankang was “2,700 li from Luoyang” 去洛二千七百里, a “distant and remote corner of the earth that does not maintain communication with the Hua land” 僻 遠一隅，不聞華土.53 (Note here the equation of the “Hua land” with the Yellow River plain.) The Wei shu affirms the traditional spatial relationship between capital and province, between center and periphery: tribute moved into the center, and elite culture and political authority emanated outward. It cites the Zhouli 周禮 on the southern barbarians (Man, Min, Yi, and so on) submitting tribute of cash, grain, and livestock. It states that the Eastern Jin’s “court ceremonies and capital administration all were modeled after the standards of the king and mimicked the decisions of the central realm” 其朝廷之儀，都邑 之制，皆準模王者，擬議中國.54 According to the Wei shu, Liu Yu’s 劉 裕 (later Song Emperor Wu, r. 420–22) primary motivation for invading the Yellow River basin in 409–10 was that this alone would grant legitimacy to his planned usurpation of the Jin throne. Immediately upon gaining the throne, according to the Wei shu, Liu Yu “urgently requested that there be harmonious relations” 頻請和通, and in the following year he submitted tribute to the Wei court.55 The Song shu’s account of the Tabgatch empire also makes ample use of Han imperial concepts of barbarism. The account derogatorily calls the Särbi rulers of the Wei state “top-knotted caitiffs” (suolu 索 虜) and dismisses them as nomadic barbarians who “rely on their fine horses” 負駿足 and are “accustomed to cavalry and carriages” 悉車騎. It equates the Tabgatch empire to the Xiongnu empire of the Han era, a comparison that equates the Song dynasty favorably to the Han dynasty but that also admits the military might of the nomads against both. “The Xiongnu were a match for the central realm” 匈奴之與中 國並也. “It is just as [the Eastern Han official] Yu Xu 虞詡 said: ‘Those who run cannot chase down those who fly.’ This should be understood as our walking and their riding horses” 虞詡所謂「走不逐飛」，蓋以 我徒而彼騎也.56 The Song shu also employs Han era diplomatic language to describe Song relations with the Tabgatch regime, vacillating between policies of a “loose rein” (jimi 羈縻) and “harmony and kinship” (heqin 和親).57

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Not only does the Song shu equate the Tabgatch and Xiongnu people, but it also claims environmental degradation of the Yellow River heartland into a peripheral wasteland like the Mongolian Steppe. In the Yellow River plain, the Song shu describes, the prefectures were made “desolate” (xiaoran 蕭然), towns were “annihilated” ( jian 殲), fields went unsown, and “villages and wells became empty wildernesses, never to regain the crowing of roosters or the barking of dogs” 村井空荒，無復鳴雞吠犬. “The six regions were entirely wasted, never to repossess the remnant buildings covered in abundant tendrils. . . . Alas, that the collapse could reach this extent!” 六州蕩然，無復餘蔓 殘搆. . . . 覆敗之至於此也.58 This description of a postapocalyptic Yellow River plain combines imagery of fallen capitals with visualizations of the extreme northern steppe. Although these descriptions are hyperbolic, the Yellow River plain did indeed experience considerable depopulation in the fourth century due to a combination of climate change, conquests, state failure, migration, and deforestation (originating much earlier but exacerbated by the introduction of large herds of pastoral livestock during this period).59 Building on the idea of a natural link between local environment and human character, Shen Yue’s argument is that, since the Sinitic heartland had been transformed into a barbarian wasteland, it was no longer suitable for civilization. Even the formerly civilized Han subjects of the Wei state are folded into this barbarization of the Yellow River heartland.60 The authority of the Tabgatch and Jiankang empires depended on the idea that proper rituals transcended time, space, and ethnicity, but each empire was self-servingly selective about which limiting factors to emphasize and which to obfuscate. The Tabgatch claim depended on highlighting imperial authority transcending ethnic difference, but not geography, and the Jiankang claim relied on the transcendence of geography but not ethnicity. If one looks at the imperial rhetoric that the Tabgatch and Jiankang empires each used to describe itself, one comes away with an image of a Sinitic ecumene with two centers. But if one looks only at their negative depictions of the north and south respectively, one comes away with the image of a Sinitic ecumene swallowed up by its northern and southern barbarian bor­ derlands. Combining all of these descriptions creates an image of the Sinitic world as, at the same time, both polycentric and centerless.

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Provincialized Empires Despite the Tabgatch and Jiankang empires’ concerted efforts to depict themselves as the sole successor to the Han world-empire and to dismiss their rival as frontier barbarians, the Tabgatch and Jiankang empires were still two empires within the same cultural ecumene, tied together by a common elite culture rooted in Sinitic script. This meant that, in order to distinguish themselves from each other, they needed either to claim greater fidelity to the same Han universalist model or else to articulate difference and superiority within a nonuniversalist framework. The latter of these two approaches gained cultural traction with the prolonged military stalemate beginning in the late fifth century, the weakening of the two empires in the mid-sixth century, and the increasing number of officials moving between the Jiankang and Tabgatch courts. The exchange of these officials facilitated a reframing of the north-south conceptualization slightly, but significantly, from an imperial to a regional framework.61 As officials moved between the Luoyang and Jiankang courts, they often encountered considerable prejudice from their new colleagues who believed the imperial rhetoric that dismissed the newcomers’ homeland as a barbarian periphery. These turncoats still ardently defended their homeland, working hard to dispel imperial myths of barbarism and exclusive cultural superiority. The debates about the merits and shortcomings of the Jiankang and Tabgatch empires reveal a rather different north-south conceptualization than that presented in the ­official geographies. Within these dialogues, concepts of imperial geography, ethnocentrism, and jingoism still abound, but they also show a comparison of northern and southern customs as being equal in kind but different in degree. In these cultural exchanges, officials employed the concept of local customs in a radically different way from its use in Han imperial metageography. Rather than claiming authority by asserting that the transcendent rituals of the imperial court were categorically different from the local customs of provincial and foreign lands, officials began to build a case for the legitimacy of their own state based on the superiority of their own local customs and products over their rival state’s

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local customs and products. In this they implicitly accepted a categorical parity between the two states. Northern and southern customs, in this development of the metageography, were still asymmetric and adversarial (as described in imperial geographies), but they were not yet equal and complementary (as described by Tang officials). The claim to authority because “our local customs are better than your local customs” had no place within traditional imperial metageography, where there could be no equal to the universalist empire. Yet the antithetical nature of these two paradigms did not seem to stop fifthand especially sixth-century literati from employing both paradigms in the same conversations. Despite the apparent contradictions, the Jiankang and Tabgatch empires both claimed to be the single and absolute universal center as well as the best regional state within a polycentric cultural ecumene.

Imperial Ideology and Geographical Realities As is the case with all empires that claim universal rule, ideology inevitably meets the hard limitations of reality. The Roman notion of orbis terrarium and the Han notion of tianxia have an inherent spatial tension in the multiple meanings of these terms: the world, the civilized world, and the world-empire. Despite imperial ideology, these three spaces were not and never could be the same. To reconcile the differences, the imperial court had to claim that it ruled over all the parts of the world that mattered. But, because the court determined what parts of the world mattered, it conveniently mapped each space onto the other.62 So it was with the competing fifth- and sixth-century Jiankang and Tabgatch courts of the Sinitic ecumene. To the casual observer, China’s “geographic connectedness and only modest internal barriers” facilitated political unity throughout its history.63 The reality was quite the contrary: there were topographical, climatological, and geostrategic forces that pulled apart the states of the Yellow and Yangzi River basins. The Yellow River basin was temperate, dry, and mostly flat. Cavalry armies (especially steppe nomads) operated quickly and effectively here. The Yangzi basin, however, was a warm and wet subtropical climate, with a hilly landscape crisscrossed by a vast network of large tributaries that eventually fed into the Yangzi

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River. Here, control of the waterways, not the land, was the tactical necessity. Marines moved with, fought from, and were supplied via naval vessels. The environmentally determined and locally effective nature of these two military regimes was widely recognized in the early medieval period.64 Even the dogmatic Song shu explains that “the Hu barbarians rely on fine horses, so the plains are a land familiar to horse and carriage; southerners are accustomed to fighting on water, so the rivers and lakes are a country secured by boat and oar” 胡負駿足，而 平原悉車騎之地，南習水鬭，江湖固舟檝之鄉.65 Both military regimes were well suited for fighting within the confines of their own regional landscapes but were significantly handicapped as they sought to project power beyond these environmental limitations. This difficulty, in both directions, is captured well in the Northern Wei official Cui Hao’s 崔浩 (d. 405) advice not to invade the Jiankang empire during the summertime: In past years, our state has crushed these wriggling worms. The power of our horses is abundant, and the southern bandits quake with fear. Always afraid that our agile troops will come upon them, they sleep without unrolling their mats. Hence, at the first signs of their troop movements, we are prepared for any contingency. We do not fear them making the first move. Furthermore, southern lands are low and wet; the summer months are steamy and hot. Torrential rains at this time are numerous, and the vegetation is deep and dense. Illness will surely arise. It is not the time to dispatch an army. Moreover, the enemy will make strict preparations in advance; they are certain to strengthen their city walls and secure their defensive positions. If we encamp the army to attack them, our provisions will not be supplied. But, if we divide our troops to pillage, then we will be unable to withstand the enemy. I have not yet seen the advantage in this [southern invasion].66 往年國家大破蠕蠕，馬力有餘，南賊震懼，常恐輕兵奄至，臥不安席，故 先聲動眾，以 備不虞，非敢先發。又南土下濕，夏月蒸暑，水潦方多，草 木深邃，疾疫必起，非行師之時。 且彼先嚴有備，必堅城固守。屯軍攻 之，則糧食不給；分兵肆討，則無以應敵。未見其利。

There was good cause for either side not to “fear [the other] making the first move.” The mobility of Tabgatch horses was nullified in the

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southern wetlands, where Jiankang marines aboard their swift ships could easily outmaneuver the Tabgatch armies, cutting their supply lines and choosing the most advantageous time and place for battle, which is exactly what happened at the Battle of Fei River in 383.67 Even more insurmountable was the climatic divide, which provided inadequate fodder for horses and gave rise to subtropical diseases that infected soldier and horse alike.68 But northern expeditions were equally difficult. In the openness of the Yellow River plain, the swift Tabgatch cavalry easily outmaneuvered Jiankang forces, making surprise attacks, countering moves, and cutting off supply lines. The inability to access supplies beyond the riverine transportation network of the Yangzi was a major obstacle for Huan Wen’s 桓溫 (312–73) northern expeditions of 354–69.69 Various tactics were attempted to bridge this environmental and topographical divide, but truly successful invasions required a massive investment of resources to build an entirely new kind of military machine that could operate effectively in enemy environments—as was the case with the large navies built by Jin and Sui along the northwestern reaches of the Yangzi network in 280 and 589, respectively.70 In addition to the topographical and environmental division between the Yellow and Yangzi River basins, the larger geostrategic context of each region worked against full-scale conquest of one or the other. The Tabgatch empire, which controlled greater military potential, often had to prioritize its northern rather than its southern border. Sinitic historiography prioritizes relations with the Jiankang empire, but it was probably nomadic confederations to the north (particularly the Rouran) that posed the greater existential threat to the Tabgatch regime. This geostrategic threat from the north coupled with the unstable confederation of various competing nomadic tribes nominally under the leadership of the Tabgatch clan made large-scale investment in a difficult southern campaign very risky. Defeat would mean the destabilization of the tenuous coalitions that held the empire together, as is revealed in the swift collapse of Fu Jian’s 苻堅 (338–85) confederation after his defeat at the Battle of Fei River.71 The Jiankang empire, by contrast, had only the one heavily militarized border to its north. But it also had a smaller resource base. Like the Tabgatch empire, the Jiankang empire was hindered by

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factionalism between the various protoethnic groups that made up the empire, the most important of which were Yellow River plain Han émigrés, Wu people, Chu people, and Man tribespeople. Because ambitious generals used northern expeditions to gain power at the court (and possible regime change), the court often withheld support for these campaigns and even actively worked against them.72 Thus, external threats from Central Eurasian nomads and internal threats from regionally based factions were sufficient to prevent either empire from fully committing itself to risky campaigns that would have required a costly transformation of its military machine in order to be successful. Defense and stalemate became the most reasonable strategy and the norm from the mid-fifth century to the late sixth century. Physical barriers to the realization of the imperial ideology of universal rulership had to be accounted for somehow within the imperial metageography of the Jiankang and Tabgatch empires. Although the Wei shu maintains the Han notion that only illegitimate regimes needed to rely on geography for protection, the Song shu embraces the geographical reality that each of the two empires appropriately relied on its own environment for protection. In a balanced assessment of the situation, it states that “both terrains have what works there, and both military systems have their own advantages and disadvantages” 地勢 有便習，用兵有短長.73 Furthermore, attempting to provide some sort of justification for the seeming impossibility of conquering the other core region, both imperial geographies articulate the divide as set by “heaven and earth.” Violating this natural barrier “is like saying that the people clad in felt garments [i.e., northerners] can be certain of victory in Jing and Yue [regions of the Yangzi basin], but they surely cannot be. Or saying that the men of turreted boats [i.e., southerners] can win in Yan and Ji [regions of the northern uplands of the Yellow River basin], but how could this be possible?” 若謂氈裘之民，可以決‌勝於荊、越，必 不可矣；而曰樓船之夫，可以爭鋒於燕、冀，豈或可‌乎.74 After the mid-fifth century, the lack of campaigns of a scale sufficient to reunite the former Han territory reveal an ambivalent commitment to the rhetoric of Han imperial metageography—the chief cornerstone of which was the idea of a single and universal state. Although the physical geography of the old Han territory had not changed, its human geography had transformed significantly. With

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sufficient populations in the Yangzi basin now, the costs of transcending that topographical and climatological barrier were now much higher than they had ever been before. Early medieval states, equipped with fragile political institutions, were incapable of stabilizing frontier threats and internal divisions sufficiently to make reunification a realistic objective, and for some it was not even a desirable one. The environmental divide between the two river basins incentivized a political divide. As the stalemate persisted, literati in both cores tried to negotiate the unsettling tension between the idea of universal rulership and the reality of a rival state or, in other words, between imperial and regional identities.

The Encounter at Pengcheng The encounter of Wei and Song representatives at Pengcheng serves as an instructive example of the uncomfortable dissonance of a state identifying itself as the only legitimate political order on earth while at the same time having to define itself against a rival state within a common cultural ecumene. In such a situation, differences rooted in regionalism are highlighted and exaggerated. These exaggerations are then reified within the self-identity of this provincialized imperial state. In the spring of 451, Wei Emperor Taiwu 太武 (Tuoba Tao 拓拔燾, r. 424–52) launched a southern campaign that caught Song Emperor Wen’s 文 (Liu Yilong 劉義隆, r. 407–53) son and brother in the city of Pengcheng, where they had a sizable force but insufficient supplies to withstand a siege. Each army dispatched an aide to negotiate, Northern Wei official Li Xiaobo 李孝伯 (d. 459) and the Song official Zhang Chang 張暢 (408–57), respec­ tively. These two men met in a market outside the city gates and engaged in rhetorical posturing and gift exchanges. As Albert Dien has pointed out, because the encounter at Pengcheng is recorded in both the Song shu and the Wei shu, the two histories provide competing perspectives on the exchange, each declaring their own representative the victor in this repartee. Whereas Dien explores the historiographic implications of these two accounts, I will use the contrasting accounts here to peel back the imperial rhetoric of the dynastic histories to reveal competing regional appeals to authority by the envoys of both empires.75

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As representatives of the Wei emperor and the Song princes met, they exchanged gifts. These gifts consisted of local products (tuchan 土‌產), distinct commodities produced from the natural resources within their own lands. In the imperial metageography, these are markers of the limitations of regionalism, but here they are presented as evidence of the superiority of each one’s distinctive environment and therefore state. The Song princes gifted subtropical foodstuffs such as tangerines, oranges, pomegranates, and sugarcane, as well as southern manufactured products such as brocade, candles, and a drinking vessel made from a spiral shell. Zhang Chang expressed southern pride in these local products, stating that “these are highly valued in the southern lands” 南土所珍. They even sent Emperor Taiwu “a beauty of the lands south of the Yangzi” 江南之美, skilled in the playing of musical instruments.76 None of these gifts or the praises for them are mentioned in the Wei shu account. Emperor Taiwu’s gifts to the two Song princes were likewise symbolic local products that marked his origin on the borderlands with the Eurasian Steppe. He gave them livestock such as horses, mules, and camels; clothing of felt and martin fur; and cuisine items of grape wine, nomadic salt (huyan 胡鹽), western barbarian salt (rongyan 戎鹽), and nomadic fermented soybeans (huchi 胡豉).77 Since the Northern Wei at this time controlled the Yellow River plain, the control of which was vital to their claim to authority, they might have given local products from the heartland of Sinitic civilization. But instead they favored the more exotic and ethnically symbolic products of the steppe frontier, clearly marking the ruling elites as from that region. The gifting of these local products was an expression of pride in the localized geography of the borderland regions from which the two states originated, independent from any claims to the transcendent central realm culture. This discussion of regional products shifts the geographic conceptualizations in the direction of the idea of north and south as parallel halves. The Song shu moves further in this direction, largely because the Song state had less to gain from the traditional central realm model. According to the Song shu, both Li Xiaobo and Zhang Chang referred to the territory of their own states as northern and southern lands. Zhang Chang’s gifts were products that “are highly valued in the south,”

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and Li Xiaobo’s gifts were products that “emerge from the northern realm” 是北國所出. In comparison, the Wei shu makes ample use of the idea of southernness but only rarely acknowledges the northernness of its own state. It briefly does so in referring to Li Xiaobo’s gifts as being from “northern lands” (beitu 北土) and the Wei army as composed of “northern men” (beiren 北人).78 Finally, both accounts openly recognize the geographically based military divide between them; both note the Wei state’s reliance on horses in open fields and the Song state’s reliance on waterways, boats, and city walls.79 Thus, although still nascent and often interspersed amid imperial rhetoric, the provincializing of these two competing imperial states is apparent even in anecdotes within the dynastic histories themselves. Each historian cast this exchange of local products in a way intended to situate his own state and his own state’s products as superior to his rival’s. The Song shu repeatedly indicates the need or desire of the northerners for the Song’s local products and minimizes the Song officials’ desire for northern products. It records Emperor Taiwu as constantly “requesting” (qiu 求), “begging for” (qi 乞), and “requiring” (xu 須) southern products. Conversely, when Li Xiaobo suggested that the prince might “require” a horse and that such could be provided to him, Zhang Chang retorted that the prince “did not lack fine horses” 不乏良駟.80 Here the esteem for characteristically southern local products held by the Northern Wei ruler is a political statement by the Song shu on the superiority of the Song state. The Wei shu is more careful in presenting the gift exchange in traditional terms of tribute. Although the Song shu describes the gift giving in both directions with neutral terms for giving such as song 送, yu 與, and gei 給, the Wei shu describes gifts from Song to Wei with the hierarchical term xian 獻 (to offer upward) and from Wei to Song with ci 賜 (to bestow).81 But the dissonance of “bestowing” quintessentially nomadic products like horses, felt, barbarian salts, and nomadic fermented beans is quite jarring. As has been described, the Tabgatch empire was more invested in central realm metageography, but it was straining here to recast this exchange of local products as something resembling Han imperial tributary relations. The Jiankang and Tabgatch states were large and multiethnic empires, but the rivalry between the two forced them to define themselves

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and defend their legitimacy in opposition to each other. Given the shared Sinitic elite culture and political ideology that they both inherited from the Han empire, the obvious points of difference through which to draw out a competitive contrast were in local customs and products. These localisms were therefore brought into the political rhetoric in ways antithetical to their use in traditional Han imperial metageography. These two provincialized universal empires were wrought with ideological contradictions. As with the Three Kingdoms in the previous chapter, the Jiankang empire (with its base in the former southern frontier) was more willing to embrace regional rhetoric to make political gains, but the Tabgatch empire (with its origins in the northern frontier but its subsequent base in the Yellow River heartland) was less willing to do so. Both began adopting such language in the fifth century, however, and, as the political division between the Yellow and Yangzi River basins persisted into the sixth century, the use of local customs to assert superiority over their primary Sinitic rival amplified.

Regional Cuisines Cuisine is a profound marker of regional identity. Necessarily part of one’s daily rituals, tied to communal activities, and made from foodstuffs provided by a local environment, cuisine inevitably connects every person to a land and to a people.82 The consumption of locally grown food is a literal realization of the traditional geographical concept that the qi of the natural environment enters into the bodies of the people who reside there and affects their physical and mental state. It should not surprise us then that regional cuisine would become a focal point of the developing regional discourse of north and south. Also, because of its necessarily local supply network and its practice-based vernacular culture, cuisine lends itself to regional discourse without the prescriptive universal standards of an ancient canon. We have already seen agricultural products and local delicacies figure prominently in regional characterizations in Zuo Si’s “Sandu fu” and in the exchange of northern and southern products at Pengcheng. In these examples and in the anecdotes that will be presented in this section, one sees each side praising its own local foods and insulting its enemy’s.

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But this argument for superior cuisine required not only delegitimizing the enemy state by equating it with provincializing local customs (consistent with Han imperial ideology), but also equating one’s own state with its own regional foods. Even if one’s own foods were superior to those of other regions, they were still markers of regionalism. The drier and colder north was strongly associated with livestock meats and dairy products, whereas the wetter and warmer south was associated with aquatic foods, tropical fruits, and tea.83 In these northernsouthern dichotomies, these foods should be understood as symbols of special regional cuisines that map onto simplified characterizations of northern and southern environments, not as descriptions of actual diets.84 Contests over northern or southern foods were not new in the fifth century. From the Western Jin, there is the anecdote of Wang Ji 王濟 (ca. 240–85) (a native of Taiyuan in modern Shanxi) offering Lu Ji 陸機 (261–303) (a native of Wu) goat-milk yoghurt (yanglao 羊酪) on his visit to Luoyang. Wang Ji inquired if Jiangnan had anything to rival it, and in response Lu Ji identified the Wu delicacies of water-lily soup (chungeng 蓴羹) and salted black bean sauce (yanchi 鹽豉).85 The expan­ sion of pastoral agriculture in the Yellow River basin after the immigration of Central Eurasians in the fourth century is evidenced in the considerable attention given to it in the sixth-century encyclopedia of agricultural products and preparation, the Qimin yaoshu 齊民要術 (Essential techniques of the common people).86 The politicization and comparisons between northern and southern cuisines are clearly articulated in a series of anecdotes from the Luoyang qielan ji 洛陽伽藍記 (Record of the monasteries of Luoyang), a work classified in the Tang as geographical writing owing to its spatially structured text.87 Although Wei Shou was very careful in the Wei shu to downplay the notion of the Wei state as northern or barbarian, his contemporary Yang Xuanzhi was far more willing to engage in this regionalizing dichotomy of north versus south. Such regionalizing ­anecdotes from the Luoyang qielan ji center on the brilliant literatus Wang Su 王肅 (463–501), who left his home in the south and service at the Jiankang court and defected to the Tabgatch Empire. There he served Wei Emperor Xiaowen 孝文 (Yuan Hong 元宏, r. 471–99) and became instrumental in the reconstruction of Luoyang, which won

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him the affection and admiration of the emperor. When he first moved to the Yellow River basin, Wang Su refused to adopt the foreign northern diet of mutton and yoghurt, preferring instead to maintain his familiar, native diet of fish and tea. He was so well known for his prolific tea consumption that his fellow courtiers nicknamed him “Leaking Goblet” (Louzhi 漏卮).88 After having lived in Luoyang for several years, he was unexpectedly discovered consuming a great deal of mutton and yoghurt at a palace banquet. Emperor Xiaowen was surprised and questioned Wang Su about his change in taste. “You, my dear sir, of the foods of the central realm, how does mutton compare with fish stew or tea with yoghurt?” 卿中國之味也，羊肉何如魚羹，茗飲何如酪漿. Wang Su responded, “Mutton is the finest product of the land and fish the best of aquatic foods. Their fine qualities are different, but each in its own right can be called a delicacy. But, as far as flavor goes, there certainly is an excellent and an inferior. Mutton is like the large countries of Qi or Lu, and fish is like the small states of Zhu and Ju.89 Tea is way off the mark and is the very slave of yoghurt” 羊者是陸產之最，魚者 乃水族之長。‌所好不同，並各稱珍。以味言之，甚是優劣。羊比齊魯大 邦，魚比邾莒小國，唯茗不中，與酪作奴.90 In private, the emperor’s brother Yuan Shao 元劭 (d. 528) further pressed Wang Su, “You do not really esteem the big countries of Qi and Lu as much as you prefer the small states of Zhu and Ju?” 卿不重齊魯大邦，而愛邾莒小國. Wang Su then admitted that, in fact, “one cannot help liking best the things of one’s own home” 鄉曲所美，不得不好.91 Regional cuisines were treated here as categorically similar but qualitatively different. Neither cuisine was being contrasted with ritual food of the civilized center. Each was local spawn of essentialized environments of either wetlands or steppe, and the people of these local environments were so immersed within their qi that they were inevitably coupled to the food-land matrix. Within this profoundly local framework, both regional cuisines were the finest products of their own land and were excellent in their own distinct way. Even the Wei emperor presented them as options on the common table of the central realm (the term here is used in an expansive way that seems to refer to the entire Sinitic ecumene). He also responded to Wang Su’s

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statement in a way that affirms the difference as a matter of personal taste or acculturation.92 But, within this categorically similar status that provincializes both empires, political superiority is still asserted through a qualitative difference in the local products. Despite regional cuisine consisting of the finest products of their respective lands, one land’s products were still better than the other’s. The provincializing model is furthered in Wang Su’s allusions to Spring and Autumn geopolitics, analogizing northern and southern cuisine to a political comparison between very small states that were incorporated into the southern state of Chu and larger northern states that were renowned for their high cultural achievements.93 The rising popularity in Luoyang of southern foods was interpreted as a political threat, inspiring a jingoistic campaign against the infiltration of subversive foreign influences. Defectors from the Jiankang empire had become numerous enough to populate their own ward, the Wu Quarters 吳人坊 on the south side of Luoyang. Initially catering to these immigrants, the “Fish and Turtle Market” 魚鱉市 and the “Four Directions Market” 四方市 were established, selling aquatic delicacies and other southern products. Southern foods from these markets became popular among “gentlemen and commoners” (shishu 士庶) alike, so much so that a common saying spread throughout the capital that “Luo carp and Yi bream are better than beef and mutton” 洛鯉伊魴，貴於牛羊. Even court officials began drinking tea “out of admiration for [Wang] Su’s manner” 慕肅之風.94 Within the competitive regional framework that was being developed, winning over the other region’s officials was evidence of one’s own superiority, but being corrupted by the foreign cuisine that these officials brought with them would have proved just the opposite. A number of leading officials in Luoyang therefore waged a cultural campaign against such foreign infiltration. During the short-lived occupation of Luoyang by the southern general Chen Qingzhi 陳慶之 (484–539), Wei loyalist Yang Yuanshen 楊元慎 (fl. early sixth c.) “cured” the occupying general by exorcising his “Wu devil” back to Jiankang, where it could subsist on a lengthy enumeration of aquatic plants and animals.95 Yuan Shao was particularly aggressive in his implementation of this antiforeign campaign. He would ridicule Wei officials who mimicked Wang Su, comparing them to the unattractive Dongshi

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東施 who imitated Xishi’s 西施 beautiful frown but only made herself appear more ugly in doing so.96 From Wang Su himself to the southern slaves working in his household, Yuan Shao mocked and intimidated southerners living in the north into abandoning their native food and drink.97 According to Yang Xuanzhi, this antisouthern food campaign worked: “From then on, even though tea was served at the banquets hosted by the court and nobility, everybody was shamed out of drinking it anymore. Only the refugees from the other side of the Yangzi who had come from afar to submit still liked it” 自是朝貴宴會，雖設茗 飲，皆恥不複食，唯江表殘民遠來降者好之.98 Although successful at preventing the spread of Yangzi basin customs into the Yellow River plain, these campaigns turned around the traditional geopolitical model. Authority was not claimed through insisting that local customs be corrected by the transcendent imperial principles of the court. Instead it was claimed by articulating cultural distinctiveness, hailing one’s own local customs and demeaning another’s so as to accentuate difference. But making this regional appeal to authority required provincializing one’s own imperial state as well. I have described in this section a growing provincialization of imperial metageography. Initially, the Tabgatch and Jiankang empires both claimed to be the sole and universal imperial state. After conquest failed and a stalemate between them calcified along topographical and climatological boundaries, each had to modify its geopolitical model to explain the continued existence of a rival empire on its frontier—a rival empire that was too similar in elite culture and political institutions to simply dismiss as barbarian, although this method was attempted. Each empire had to articulate meaningful differences between the two regimes. This was done through local customs. But it is important to reiterate that the Jiankang and Tabgatch empires were not actually regional regimes like those of the Warring States period. They were far larger and more ethnically diverse, and their supposed local customs were a selective and essentialized assortment from across their vast domain—hardly local. They were not regional states so much as imperial states that adopted competitive regional rhetoric from the Warring States as the only model for a multistate ecumene. These two metageographies, one imperial and the other regional, coexisted awkwardly alongside each other despite their obvious contradictions.

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The Jiankang empire, with less to gain from traditional central realm metageography, adopted regionally based arguments for superiority earlier and more frequently. But, even with two provincialized imperial states within a common Sinitic ecumene, the Jiankang and Tabgatch empires still did not conceive of themselves as equal and complementary halves of one greater whole. Although they accepted certain regional characteristics as part of their own self-identity and were willing to contrast their own regional characteristics with those of their rival, each still very clearly saw itself as superior, not complementary, to its provincialized imperial rival. It would take military conquest and a subsequent unification ideology before north-south metageography would develop into one of equality and complementarity.

Equal and Complementary Halves Closely connected with the provincializing of imperial metageography during the sixth century was the increased mobility of literati-officials between the Tabgatch and Jiankang courts. These officials strengthened old ecumenewide networks that had been strained during the fourth and fifth centuries, when relations between the north and south were most strained. On the eve of the Sui conquest of the Jiankang empire, literatiofficials who had served in courts across the Yangzi–Yellow River basin divide were already reconstructing an elite ecumenical culture that transcended regional customs and political instabilities. This was not accomplished by the correction of local customs by a single elite court standard (as is prescribed by the Han metageography), but by the juxta­ position and reintegration of the competing court cultures of Jiankang and Luoyang. Since the competition had not been settled by one conquering the other through force of arms, literati instead were making cultural compromises, acknowledging the good and the bad from both courts (and regions), evaluating one against the other, and from that constructing ecumenical standards that supposedly aligned with lost canonical ideals. These efforts shifted the north-south metageography toward a framework of equality and complementarity but initially only within the realm of culture, not politics.

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The idea of north and south as complementary political halves developed only after the Sui-Tang conquest of the Jiankang empire in 589. After a short-lived retribution period toward the south, the latter Sui and Tang courts took a concerted reconciliatory policy that lauded southern cultural achievements.99 The pairing of northern and southern culture and statecraft was constructed so as to make eventual unity seem, in retrospect, like a foregone conclusion. Just as the vast array of local customs was essentialized in the sixth century into a north and south cultural binary, so too were the several short-lived dynasties simplified in the seventh century into the political binary of the Northern Dynasties and the Southern Dynasties. These sets of dynasties were presented as legitimate but incomplete without each other, both awaiting eventual and inevitable reunification.

Ecumenical Literati-Officials The life and writing of Yan Zhitui 顏之推 (531–91+) encapsulate two historical processes that facilitated the development of the north-south metageography from one of adversarial provincialized imperial states in the sixth century toward one of equal and complementary halves in the seventh century. First, he was part of a general increase in the number of officials at the sixth-century Jiankang and Tabgatch courts who hailed from their rival’s territory or who had previously served in their rival’s court. Second, he lived to see the conquest of the Yangzi basin by the Sui-Tang empire. Yan Zhitui’s life and his Yanshi jiaxun 顏‌氏家‌訓 (Mr. Yan’s family instruction) thus capture a pivotal moment in history, a crucial transition in the spatial conceptualization of the ­Sinitic ecumene. This text’s north-south metageography affirms the notion of north and south as two complementary halves of one Sinitic whole, it compares and contrasts northern and southern customs with conspicuous equanimity, and it advocates for the construction of an ecumenical elite culture that draws on the admirable practices from both halves. Yan Zhitui, like Wang Su and Chen Qingzhi of the previous anecdotes, was part of a growing body of literati who had moved between the Jiankang and Tabgatch courts. Some of these literati were military

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captives, some chose to move for the promise of “high office and great fame without the actual work of military service” 無汗馬之勞，高‌官 通‌顯 , and some were driven away by factionalism in their home courts (especially during the heightening instability in both courts during the sixth century).100 Yan Zhitui grew up in Jiangling 江陵 (in modern Hubei), served the Liang state in the middle Yangzi region, was captured in 554 and taken to the Western Wei capital at Chang’an, escaped in 556 and served in the Northern Qi capital of Ye, and then was once again captured in 577 and taken back to Chang’an, where he served in the Northern Zhou and Sui courts.101 He described himself as “three times over a man of a fallen state” 三為亡國之人.102 His mobility highlights how Sinitic script unified (at the elite level) the Jiankang and Tabgatch empires within a single ecumene—despite their considerable differences in environment, ethnic makeup, political institutions, social customs, vernacular languages, and cuisines. One skilled in this archaic script, like Yan Zhitui, could readily find home and employment as he moved about this “kanji sphere,” to use Charles Holcombe’s term. This reality frames the primary advice that Yan Zhitui gave to his sons: whatever happens in this tumultuous age, “those who are learned and skilled can settle down anywhere” 有學藝者，觸 地而安.103 It is hard to determine whether the rates of defection accelerated in the sixth century, but, even if they did not, the accumulated number of defectors at each court almost surely increased. These ecumenical literati, who had lived in both the Tabgatch and Jiankang empires, played an important role in overcoming the antagonism and prejudices that had developed throughout the more jingoistic fourth and fifth centuries. Albert Dien characterizes Yan Zhitui as cautious in his political entanglements, pragmatic in his official service, pluralistic in his ideology, and deeply committed to the written word. These qualities made men like Yan Zhitui into cultural mediators between the Tabgatch and Jiankang empires, correcting the outer-realm clichés presented in imperial rhetoric.104 For example, when Chen Qingzhi returned to Jiankang after his short stint at Luoyang, he brought with him northern styles of dress (which became popular throughout Jian­ kang) and began favoring northern officials. He had to explain to his indignant Jiankang colleagues that, although “Luoyang has been called

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a desolate region, and here we say that everyone north of the Yangzi is a barbarian,” in fact “on my recent visit to Luoyang I found out that scholarly gentlemen live in the Central Plains. Ritual flourishes and fine people abound there, such that your eye cannot perceive it and my mouth cannot describe it” 號洛陽為荒土，此中謂長江以北，盡是夷 狄，昨至洛陽，始知衣冠士族，並在中原。禮儀富盛，人物殷阜，目所 不識，口不能傳.105 As liminal figures like Chen Qingzhi, Wang Su, and Yan Zhitui increasingly moved between the Jiankang and the Tabgatch courts in the sixth century, the imagined otherness of the rival empire was mollified, preparing the way for a new and less polarizing northsouth metageography. Yan Zhitui advocated for a cultural ecumenicalism grounded in early medieval geographical thought. As described in chapter 2, during the fragmentation of the Han sociopolitical world order, the conceptualization of local customs had subtly shifted away from ­environmentally determined local practices that were to be corrected everywhere by the refined standards of the court. Literati understood them instead as local practices that sometimes and in some places pre­ served refined standards that had long ago been abandoned at the court. This early medieval conceptualization of local customs allowed Yan Zhitui to advocate a transcendence of regionalism that was independent of the imperial state or the orthodox interpretation of the classics that it controlled. Classical texts, according to Yan Zhitui, provided a pivotal standard for correct behavior, but they were also limited in their applicability because of their “incompleteness” (canque 殘缺) and because “the affairs of the world have changed” 世事變改. Local customs filled these gaps as “learned gentlemen made their own rules, which have been passed down and acted upon” 學達君子，自為節度，相 承行之.106 Local customs were therefore depicted as a mixture of both good and bad practices, and ecumenical literati were encouraged to draw out correct standards through observational juxtaposition and com­ parative evaluation of local customs from various regions. “Since every household is rather different,” he wrote, “those who are observant can evaluate the mutual strengths and weaknesses, and the underlying structures can indeed be known” 而家門頗有不同，所見互稱長 短，然其阡陌，亦自可知.107 Instructing his sons to thus transcend the

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regionalism of the “area of military horses” 戎馬之間 in which they were raised, Yan Zhitui advocated an à la carte approach that is one of the earliest articulations of a north-south metageography of equal and complementary halves. As Jessey Choo has aptly observed, Yan Zhitui’s work was “to define through seemingly unbiased evaluations a trans­ regional high culture” that “anticipates the culture embraced by the members of the great clans and revered by the people in the unified Sui and Tang dynasties.”108

Metageography of Complementarity Even across a broad spectrum of social and literary topics, Yan Zhitui consistently used “north” and “south” as operative spatial units and an enduring constituent binary.109 This north-south model required the subordinating of dynastic states under regional continuities. He made regular use of dynastic names, such as Wei and Liang, to identify people and states. However, when he wanted to contrast customs and enduring practices—especially in his chapter on “customs and manners” (fengcao 風操)—he shifted to the language of northern and southern regions (fang 方), customs (su), manners (feng 風), lands (tu 土), and people (ren 人). But the terminology he most commonly employed identified the spatial binaries according to their natural features—“south of the Yangzi” (Jiangnan 江南) and “north of the Yellow River” (Hebei 河北). (It is noteworthy that the Huai River borderland from the Yangzi River to the Yellow River is eliminated from this spatial polarity.) Terri­ torial complexities like the division of the north into eastern and western halves throughout the mid-sixth century or the incorporation of ­Sichuan by the Northern Zhou regime in 553 did not seem to dissuade him from the enduring consistency of this north-south binary. For Yan Zhitui, these geographically defined and culturally reified spatial units revealed an enduring reality that transcended the local parochialism and ephemeral dynasties of the age. Yan Zhitui’s remarks on local customs are strikingly positive given the negative associations of customs in Han, Tabgatch, and Jian­ kang imperial rhetoric as well as Yan Zhitui’s own commitment to clas­ sical scholarship. Although Yan Zhitui acknowledged that “customs

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and manners” from various regions all have their own “strengths and weaknesses,” he spent far more ink lauding positive customs than condemning negative ones, leaving most of the negative evaluations merely implied (with two important exceptions to be discussed). In evaluating local customs, he sometimes appealed to classical texts or a vague notion of “the way of antiquity” (gu zhi dao 古之道), but, more often than not, his assessments were based upon pragmatic utilitarianism or even “my personal preference” (wu shan 吾善). He embraced the idea from geographical writing that customs preserved, at least in part, classical standards—what Yan Zhitui called “the lingering influences of antiquity” (gu zhi yifeng 古之遺風).110 In contrasting northern and southern customs, Yan Zhitui was conspicuously evenhanded.111 Even when he preferred a certain practice from one region, he often paired it with another practice concerning the same general topic in which he favored the other region. The result is that, on most general topics, Yan did an almost equal amount of approving and correcting of both the north and the south. On the topics of mourning practices, child raising, treatment of guests, and language, his assessment is almost perfectly split down the middle.112 On topics such as writing, clan solidarity, and family naming practices, he revealed only a moderate preference for his homeland of the south.113 According to Yan Zhitui, neither side had a monopoly on best practices, and as he articulated in the introduction to his chapter on customs and manners, “underlying structures” were only going to be discovered through juxtaposing the good and bad of northern and south­ern customs. Only then would the “strengths and weaknesses” of each become apparent.114 Yan Zhitui’s analysis of northern and southern languages is an especially instructive example. Yan Zhitui identified language as one aspect of regional customs and affirmed the traditional notion that regional customs originate from the qi of local environments. But he conceptualized this notion within his own complementary northsouth metageography. The southern environment is mild and agreeable, so the sounds [of these people] are clear, melodious, and fast. Its shortcoming is that it

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is shallow, so words are often vulgar. But northern topography is deep, so the sounds [of these people] are sonorous, loud, and articulated. When it is unadorned, [northern] speech is full of ancient expressions. In general, a gentleman official of the south speaks better [than a northern gentleman]; but a common villager of the north speaks better [than his southern counterpart]. . . . Southerners have been affected by Wu and Yue, whereas northerners have mixed with barbarian caitiffs. Both have such profound defects that they cannot be fully discussed.115 南方水土和柔，其音清舉而切詣，失在浮淺，其辭多鄙俗。北方山川深 厚，其音沈濁而鈋鈍，得其質直，其辭多古語。然冠冕君子，南方為 優；閭里小人，北方為愈. . . . 南染吳、越，北雜夷虜，皆有深弊，不可 具論。

Yan Zhitui acknowledged that “the people of the Nine Regions speak different languages; since the beginning of humankind it has always been so” 九州之人，言語不通，生民已來，固常然矣. But he confidently condensed this pluralistic complexity into his dualistic spatial model. “Since [the Three Kingdoms period] many works on sounds and rhymes have emerged. Each maintained its own local style and criticized the others. . . . But, if one takes together the imperial capitals, comparing their local customs and examining their ancient and current pronunciations, then one can come to a middle course. Examining and evaluat­ ing in such a way can only be done with Jinling [Jian­kang] and Luoxia [Luoyang]” 自茲厥後，音韻鋒出，各有土風，遞相非笑. . . . 共以帝王 都邑，參校方俗，考覈古今，為之折衷。搉而量之，獨金陵與洛下耳.116 Besides essentializing a north-south dichotomy ­centered on the imperial capitals of each, Yan Zhitui was perfectly evenhanded in his evaluation. Gentlemen were superior in the south, but commoners were superior in the north. Both had been negatively influenced by bar­ barian customs in their own way, and both in the end were judged wanting. Only through “comparing their local customs” (literally, to proofread by referring to each other) could the correct “middle course” be discovered. In the entire work, there are only two general topics on which Yan Zhitui strongly sided entirely with one region over the other, and even in these cases he maintained his equanimity by denouncing one

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set of practices from the north and one from the south. Furthermore, Yan Zhitui explained these regional failings of the north and the south respectively as a direct result of the migrations of the fourth century. For the north, Yan Zhitui thoroughly denounced the active role that women played in the public sphere there. He recounted how women in the Northern Qi capital of Ye managed all household ­a ffairs, were free to receive guests and visit others, and filled the streets and government offices advocating on behalf of their husbands and sons. Yan cautioned that, “in the state, women should not be allowed to participate in politics; in the family, they should not be permitted to manage affairs. . . . No hen should herald the dawn lest misfortune follow” 國不可使預政，家不可使幹蠱. . . . 必無牝雞晨 鳴，以致禍也. He contrasted these customs with the correct practice of cloistering women within the home, as was the norm in the south. Yan Zhitui speculated, rightly, that this practice in the north had been introduced into the Yellow River plain with the immigration of nomadic tribes, bringing with them nomadic customs of greater gender egalitarianism.117 For the south, Yan Zhitui berated southern literati for their incompetence in practical matters. Many southern gentlemen, he decried, were so obsessed with frivolous personal adornment such as clothes, perfume, makeup, and clogs that their bodies and minds had become soft, and they had lost the ability to walk by themselves, to endure variations in temperature, or to maintain composure on seeing so ordinary a thing as a horse. These dandies could engage in “haughty talk and hollow discussions” 高談虛論 but knew nothing of the fundamental pursuits of agriculture. “In managing official responsibilities, they could achieve nothing; in taking care of household affairs, they could manage nothing” 治官則不了，營家則不辦.118 Yan Zhitui explained that this was a product of the fourth-century southern migration and the efforts of the newly reestablished Jin court in Jiankang to claim legitimacy by attracting literati-officials to its service. In so doing it accepted “literati who were to a great extent absurd, pompous, and ignorant of world affairs” 文義之士，多迂誕浮華，不涉世務 but then refused to punish them for their incompetence and instead “placed them in high honorary positions to conceal their shortcomings” 處於 清高，蓋護其短也.119 Even these two uncharacteristically negative

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assess­ments of northern and southern customs, taken together, affirm Yan Zhitui’s commitment to maintaining a balanced evaluation of northern and southern virtues and vices as well as his keen observations of social practice and his geographically based explanations for human behavior. The evenhanded magnanimity with which Yan Zhitui evaluated the competing customs of the north and the south as equal and complementary is a significant departure from the asymmetric and adversarial conceptualization of the fourth and fifth centuries. His ideal was an ecumenical literatus who could rise above his regional origins and thrive anywhere in the (Sinitic) civilized world through his literary skills, which made him indispensable at any court. This ideal is predicated upon his understanding of a textually based ecumene divided into northern and southern halves that were equally deviant from ­canonical norms and complementary in their usefulness in synthesizing new standards for the world. This model resembles the cooperative aspect of ecumenical regionalism described in contemporary geographical texts, with different regions each having some unique virtue to contribute to the civilized ecumene.120 This discursive shift situates Yan Zhitui as an early precursor to the Sui-Tang reconceptualization of the north-south metageography, but his conceptualization still differed in important ways. His was the pursuit of cultural unity, a middle course, through a synthesis of competing regional practices. This message of cultural ecumenicalism could fit well into an ideology of political imperialism, but Yan Zhitui never made explicit moves in that direction. Quite the contrary, his advice to his sons assumed the continuation of an uncertain and multipolar political landscape. Although he did not finish Yanshi jiaxun until after the Sui conquest of the Yangzi basin in 589, he made only one fleeting reference to Sui “unification” (datong 大同), in a conversation with other Sui officials about salaries. It would be naïve to believe that he authored the work, as he claimed, only “to advise my sons and grandsons” 提撕子孫, but whatever other “standard for the age” (fanshi 範世) he might have had in mind seems not to have been about imperialist ideology.121 He was more concerned with the construction of a cosmopolitan literatus than the building of a cosmic empire.

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Histories of the Northern and Southern Dynasties Sui and early Tang literati were deeply ambivalent about how to deal with the north-south divide and the cultural divergence that had developed since the classical Han empire some four centuries earlier. There were many who continued the northern tradition of asserting the inferiority of southern culture, now articulated mostly in terms of decadence and extravagance rather than of barbarism. Such was the case with the opposition to southern palace-style poetry and the moralizing explanations for the defeat of the Jiankang empire.122 Others among the Sui and early Tang elites were quite taken with the brilliance of southern culture. Sui Emperor Yang 煬 (Yang Guang 楊廣, r. 605–16) is perhaps most famous for his work to integrate the vanquished southern elites and southern culture into the victorious northern-based empire. But the early Tang court also drew much from the literary and religious traditions of the south.123 The imperial need to transcend regional factionalism with inclusive, big-tent ideologies of universal rulership won out.124 Spatially, this took two different approaches. The first was to reassert and standardize the administrative geography of prefectures, commanderies, and districts. This spatial structure was constructed by imperial fiat with the original intention of dividing up large and topographically defined regions that could rival the imperial court.125 Emphasizing this administrative geography exaggerated Tang continuity with the classical Han empire and sidelined the regionally based north-south metageography that had developed during the intervening four centuries. This approach is articulated in the geographical monograph in the Sui shu and is evident in the newly developing tujing (map-treatise) tradition of geographical writing.126 The second approach of the Tang empire to transcending a history of regional divisiveness followed the model articulated by Yan Zhitui a generation earlier: simplifying the polycentric political landscape of the fifth and sixth centuries into a diametric binary and then articulating the two poles as equal and complementary halves of one greater whole. This approach can be seen in a number of literary projects of

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the early Tang court. For example, the official exegesis of the Confucian canon, the Wu jing zhengyi 五經正義 (Correct interpretation of the Five Classics), blended the factual commentary tradition of the north with the metaphysical commentary tradition of the south. In the words of David McMullen, this resulted in a “compendious approach” that drew the different traditions together even if in so doing it “sacrificed intellectual consistency to their loyalty to their chosen authorities.”127 This ecumenicalism is also manifest in the writing of the official histories for the five preceding dynastic states (Liang, Chen, Northern Qi, Northern Zhou, and Sui), all completed in 636. The quick composition of the official histories from both the north and the south was merely the finalization of pre-Tang drafts, which meant that much of the legitimizing structure and narrative bias of each state’s own officials was preserved. Yet these contradictory accounts were all given the status of official histories, granting historiographic legitimacy to the regional regimes of both north and south, while at the same time affirming the Tang court’s inheritance from and transcendence over both of these regional states.128 The two texts that most firmly entrenched the conceptual northsouth divide within Sinitic historical metageography were the officially commissioned Bei shi 北史 (History of the Northern Dynasties) and Nan shi 南史 (History of the Southern Dynasties), written by Tang historians between 630 and 650. This pair of texts simplifies the history of the entire Sinitic ecumene for over two centuries and eight dynasties into two simplified narratives of “the north” and “the south” and then affirms the equal and complementary relationship between these parallel regional regimes. As the editor of the Bei shi and the Nan shi, Li Yanshou 李延壽 (fl. 618–76), explained, “in all, eight dynasties are made into the two histories” 凡八代，為北史, and “for the fundamental chronicle we used the format of Sima Qian’s [Shiji] to tie it all together” 本紀依司馬遷體，以次連綴之.129 In terms of encompassing several dynasties in one official history, this modeling after Sima Qian is accurate. But, in terms of metageography, Li Yanshou set aside the world model of the Shiji and all other dynastic histories after it with their single imperial center and employed instead a north-south division of tianxia. The Nan shi and the Bei shi take these constructed “northern” and “southern” regimes and, through the texts’ structure and narrative,

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articulate a retrospective political parity between them. This unprecedented approach contrasts with what the various dynastic histories of the Jiankang and Tabgatch empires said about themselves as well as with how all previous dynastic histories treated their own periods of political fragmentation. Following the model set by the Shiji account of the Eastern Zhou (770–256 BCE), the Sanguo zhi and the Jin shu prioritize the benji (fundamental chronicles) of just one court, granting it alone historiographic legitimacy and relegating the accounts of all the rival “regional” regimes of the Three Kingdoms and Eastern Jin periods to the zhuan 傳 (commentary or memoir) section. As described earlier, this is precisely how the dynastic histories of the Jiankang and Tabgatch empires asserted supremacy within their own multipolar political landscape. The alternative historiographic model was that of “hegemonic histories” (bashi 霸史), or “histories of illegitimate states” (weishi 偽史). That genre describes a multipolar political landscape of equally illegitimate regional states, none of which could pass on the Mandate of Heaven.130 But the Bei shi and the Nan shi, with their equal claims to legitimacy, fall outside either of these historiographic precedents. In addition to granting both the northern and the southern courts simultaneous fundamental chronicles, the two accounts also diminish the otherizing of the rival regime in accounts drawn from the earlier eight histories. The derogatory terms “island barbarians” and “top-knotted caitiffs” were replaced with dynastic names. The accounts of these states were removed from the memoirs section of their rival regime, where accounts of all the other barbarian tribes were still recorded. Instead of being referred to by their given names, rival emperors are identified by their more respectful posthumous names or temple names. Besides employing this kind of respectful terminology toward each rival regime, the Nan shi and the Bei shi also record fewer military engagements between the two empires. This terminology and narrative content construct a revisionist historical reality in which the rivalry between these two regimes was not nearly as virulent or as violent as had been recorded in the original dynastic histories.131 This manipulation of history was explained as correcting the shortcomings of the original histories of each of these two halves. Li Yanshou’s introduction to the work and Tang Emperor Gaozong’s (r. 649– 83) edict of acceptance assert that the eight dynastic histories of the

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period presented an erroneous depiction of the past but that there was still considerable merit to these histories. They could be compared, combined, and condensed to reveal true patterns of history and principles of rulership. The shortcomings of these histories, according to Li Yanshou and Emperor Gaozong, were that their content was redundant and superfluous. But more damning was that they were biased and maintained an imperial metageography that labeled the other as barbarian. This, from the perspective of Tang unification ideology, could not be right. In his postface to the Bei shi, Li Yanshou described his father’s, Li Dashi’s 李大師 (570–628), motivation for beginning the work on these parallel histories. “Southern histories called northerners top-knotted caitiffs, and northern histories referred to southerners as coastal barbarians. Each entirely understood its own state, but their writing on the other state was by no means complete. Hence there were frequent inaccuracies. He always wanted to correct these and was going to employ the annals format of the Wu Yue chunqiu to complete the account of north and south” 南書謂北為「索虜」，北書指南為「島夷」。又 各以其本國周悉，書別國並不能備，亦往往失實。常欲改正，將擬吳 越春秋，編年以備南北.132 Note the similarities here with Tang critiques of local geographies: “frequent inaccuracies” are tied to a lack of “completeness” (bei), and fixing these inaccuracies is accomplished by combining regional accounts into a totalizing whole. Li Dashi died before he could complete this historical reconciliation, and so Li Yanshou continued his father’s work, compiling the political and intellectual diversity of the past into a single whole, structured around Tang imperial claims to universality. To do this, Li Yanshou adopted a new and unique metageography. The north and the south were made politically equal, culturally and spatially complementary, and incomplete by themselves, waiting for an eventual and inevitable unification by the true Son of Heaven who would draw out from these two halves of tian­xia the transcendent imperial precepts of universal rulership. Early Tang scholars saw potential in the eight dynastic histories of the fifth and sixth centuries, despite their shortcomings. These histories were seen as a mixture of both exemplary models and dangerous warnings. Li Yanshou wrote that, “in the Northern Dynasties since the Wei and the Southern Dynasties since the Song, the movements of fate continually changed, and the customs of the age were both base and

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grand. Each dynasty has its written records of people who often did good things” 然北朝自魏以還，南朝從宋以降，運行迭變，時俗污 隆，代有載筆，人多好事. He continued, “The Way of the King was both obtained and lost; the imperial capital exchanged hands. With the sun having lost its perfection, how is light and darkness obtained?” 王道 得喪，朝市貿遷，日失其真，晦明安取.133 From this mix of both positive and negative historical lessons and through his use of historical perspective, he was able to “remove the things that were superfluous and lengthy and select the things that were essential and magnificent” 除其冗長，捃其菁華.134 Emperor Gaozong’s responding edict affirms the superseding of the eight dynastic histories by the Nan shi and the Bei shi and asserts that combined the two reveal correct principles of government. “After the Song, histories became tedious and overelaborate, superfluous and lengthy. I beseech you to inquire only after the reasons for the successes and failures of governmental principle, or after the rise and fall of people within their contemporary dynasty. Anything besides these should not be inquired after” 自宋以後，史書煩碎冗長，請但問政理成敗所 因，及其人物損益關於當代者，其餘一切不問.135 Emperor Gaozong continued, explicitly placing these two histories within the line of official histories from the Shiji to the Sui shu. He affirmed that those who are familiar with the Bei shi and the Nan shi—not any of the eight far more comprehensive histories from which they drew—will completely understand all they need to know from the period.136 Although later historians until the Ming did not classify the Nan shi and the Bei shi as official histories, it is clear that at least in the Zhao Song (960–1279) these paired histories were far more read than the eight individual dynastic histories that they replaced. Sima Guang 司馬光 (1019–86) compared the two histories favorably against the eight original histories, and Chao Gongwu 晁公武 (1105–80) stated that “scholars of today only read [Li Yanshou’s] works, and the works of Shen Yue and Wei Shou and the others do not circulate” 今學者止觀其書，沈約、魏收等所撰皆不行.137 Just as Yan Zhitui described the regional customs of the north and south as each having both virtues and vices, evenly distributed between the north and the south, from which upright cultural practices could be culled, Li Yanshou and Emperor Gaozong made the same case in the realm of political history. The histories of the Northern and

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Southern Dynasties presented a hodgepodge of positive and negative “principles of government,” without a clear primacy of the northern or the southern court. Although Li Yanshou’s comments focus on custom and moral leadership and Emperor Gaozong’s on statecraft and political conduct, they both were articulating the same metageography of a north and a south that were equal and complementary halves, brought together into a single unified whole. This political equality was possible only by disregarding what fourth- and fifth-century literati had written about their own geopolitical landscape and through careful manipulation of the geographic concept of tianxia. According to Han imperial geography, ruling all of tianxia was the marker of legitimate rule and heaven’s approval. But Tang officials could still construe the northern and southern courts, ruling over the northern and southern halves of tianxia, to be legitimate if they were understood as complementary halves that facilitated an eventual and inevitable unification though the great Tang empire.

Conclusion The natural geography of the Yellow and Yangzi River basins had always been divided by topographical, climatological, and environmental differences. Dramatic shifts in the human geography within these lands during the fourth century transformed the significance of this much older natural geography. The conquest of the Yellow River basin by nomadic armies from the northern frontier, the sizable migration of elites and commoners alike from the more urbanized Yellow River basin core to the Yangzi River frontier, and the subsequent establishment of states centered on each of these two drainage basins created an evenly matched two-state system within the postimperial ecumene of the Han world. The influx of immigrants into the Yangzi basin from the more urbanized and culturally developed Yellow River basin gave the Yangzi basin state sufficient human resources to capitalize on the nascent economic potential of this ecological frontier and withstand conquest from the north. This combination of natural and human geography allowed the Jiankang empire to engage in imperialist expansion on its southern frontier and the Tabgatch empire to do so on its

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northern frontier, but neither could make permanent headway on the border between them, creating a prolonged stalemate between these two imperial states. Although the Tabgatch and Jiankang empires consolidated control over the two cores of the Sinitic ecumene, the empires originated from the unique sociopolitical fluidity of the northern and southern borderlands, respectively. This political standoff endured for nearly two centuries, allowing plenty of time for the literati at both courts to construct their own intellectual justification for the continued existence of a rival imperial court within the Sinitic ecumene and to assert the superiority of their own position in that rivalry. Initially, the north-south metageography was profoundly adversarial, developed by the Jiankang and Tabgatch empires as they each adopted traditional Han imperial metageography and asserted their own centrality in the world through dismissing the other as peripheral and barbarian. Each empire claimed to be the sole source of refined culture derived from canonical principles and asserted that the other was limited by provincial or barbarian customs derived from its frontier environment. Furthermore, they both supplemented traditional Sinitic concepts of universal rulership with Buddhism, which provided an alternative ideology for overcoming the assumed geographical and ethnic limitations of traditional Sinitic universal rulership. Literati also experimented with asserting superiority within a ­regionalist framework, maintaining the adversarial rivalry between north and south but accepting a degree of implicit parity. So as to articulate the difference between the two empires, literati began arguing for the suzerainty of their own state through the superiority of their own local customs and products. Although this premise is antithetical to Han imperial metageography, the two arguments regularly appeared together, straining under the imperative to claim any possible advantage over their imperial rival. The so-called northern and southern customs that the literati articulated were usually essentialized simplifications that prioritized the northern and southern frontiers from which the two empires had originated. This provincializing of competing imperial claims accelerated in the sixth century as the military stalemate continued, political instability magnified, and movement of literati between the two courts increased.

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Gradually increasing exchange between the Yellow River and Yangzi basins shifted the model from adversarial regionalism toward collaborative ecumenicalism and shifted the rhetoric of north and south from one of political competition and hierarchy toward one of cultural equality and complementarity. After the Sui conquest of the Yangzi basin, this north-south metageography of equal and complementary cultural halves fit nicely into Sui-Tang political unification rhetoric. The history of this period was rewritten at this point so as to claim greater mutual respect and less violent conflict between the two regimes than had been described in preunification histories. These new histories constructed a dual narrative of two half-empires that made up one greater and self-evident whole, which would inevitably be reunited by the great Tang dynasty. The metageography of northern and southern dynasties changed considerably between the fourth and seventh centuries, and, further com­ plicating the development, each conceptual innovation was accretive— each new layer being added to existing concepts, never fully displacing the older ideas. It is essential to our historical understanding of the fifth and sixth centuries that we think of the “Northern and Southern Dynasties” the way that literati of that time predominantly thought of their own geopolitical landscape—as two competing imperial centers. This view contrasts sharply with the way that Tang literati depicted the Northern and Southern Dynasties—as two equal and complementary regional halves of a unified empire that did not yet (but one day inevitably would) exist.

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Mountains and Rivers

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he previous two chapters have explored two prominent metageographies, describing a roughly chronological development of ecumenical regionalism in the third through sixth centuries and then northern and southern dynasties in the fifth through seventh centuries. Both chapters dealt, in different ways, with the inherent tensions between concepts of regionalism and imperialism. Chapters 4 and 5 will focus on two additional metageographies that were articulated throughout early medieval geographical writing but that are most clearly preserved in Li Daoyuan’s Shuijing zhu. This text, completed sometime between 515 and 524, is the sole extant comprehensive geography from the period. This chapter examines the metageography of the hydrocultural landscape. The hydrocultural landscape model prioritizes river systems as the foundational organizing framework for all other natural and human geographical patterns. This model examines the dynamic and dialectic relationships between the natural environment and human societies. It explores the interrelatedness and codependences of mountain ranges, river systems, demographics, agriculture, state authority, and divine forces, and it reveals the inability of humans to control these relationships fully.1 Such a hydrocultural metageography argues against the Han imperial metageography that espoused the anthropocentric ideal of state mastery over the natural world. Although several natural geographies were written during the fourth through sixth centuries, Li Daoyuan’s sixth-century Shuijing

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zhu was the most spatially and topically comprehensive. Despite residing in the Yellow River plain, Li Daoyuan adopted the Yangzi basin style of naturally structured geographical writing. His hydrocultural metageography allowed him to take the terse third-century Shui­jing sketch of the courses of the major rivers of the Sinitic ecumene and transform it into a massive geographical tome on both natural and human geography of the entire known world (including lands far beyond the spatial confines of the original Shuijing). In the copious commentaries that he attached to the hydrological outline of the Shuijing, Li Daoyuan quoted from hundreds of literary texts, stone inscriptions, personal anecdotes, and vernacular traditions to construct an encyclopedic account of human history, elite culture, folklore, and the sociopolitical landscape.2 But this diverse array of information was all structured according to river systems. Throughout Chinese history, the Shuijing zhu has been employed mostly as an encyclopedia of geographical factoids with little regard for its organizing spatial structure.3 But Li Daoyuan was quite explicit in his articulation of the hydrocultural model and its advantages over alternative spatial frameworks. The hydrocultural model frames the context and significance of each geographical factoid. Throughout his text, anecdotes of nature shaping human societies and human societies shaping nature abound. Of the four metageographies explored in this book, this hydrocultural metageography is the most self-consciously articulated in early medieval sources. I begin by outlining the place of nature in the Han imperial metageography and Li Daoyuan’s theoretical justification for using natural geography as his primary spatial structure, noting the implicit challenges his text makes to the orthodox imperial metageography. The two topics that dominate the Sinitic discourse on natural geography are mountains and rivers. Within this geographical literature, rivers both provided life-giving resources to human civilization and posed a risk of life-threatening destruction of it. Accounts of rivers tend to highlight the human capacity to domesticate natural forces, albeit in limited and tenuous ways. Mountains were just the opposite; despite significantly increased human inhabitation of mountains and hillsides during the early medieval period, mountains remained resoundingly beyond

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the power of human societies to control. Mountains were liminal spaces that divided human societies from each other and connected humans with the divine. The two spaces, therefore, confined and shaped and channeled human societies in ways that only a naturally structured historical geography could reveal.

Nature in the Imperial Metageography A hydrocultural metageography of interacting, reciprocal human and natural forces was actually a more novel idea in the fourth century than is often thought. Popular understanding of Eastern philosophy emphasizes the idea of a oneness of the universe—a holistic, harmonious, empathetic relationship between human and nature to the extent that an equivalent to the Western concept of “nature” does not even exist in the East. This simplistic and idealized depiction of Eastern phi­ losophy has been criticized for its essentialism and Orientalism, its ­disregard for the wide range of Sinitic thought on the issue, and its inconsistency with the lived experience of Sinitic society. Robert Marks has shown how Sinitic societies have exploited their ecology and objectified its natural resources for millennia. This idealized Eastern foil, Heiner Roetz has argued, “belongs in the romantic realm of counterimages.”4 Actually, the Daoist-inclined human-nature holism that is traditionally assumed to be the hallmark of the Sinitic understanding of nature does not become a significant part of geographical writing until about the fourth century.5 Instead, the Han imperial metageography primarily employed a Confucian-Legalist understanding of the relationship between human societies and the natural environment. Xunzi articulated a “weak anthropocentrism” in which “‘domesticating’ of nature confers upon it a new order tailored to man and reaching perfection in terms of human needs, but only while at the same time being mindful of nature’s own structure and unwieldiness.”6 Legalism went further, promoting the primacy of the state over people and nature. Although Han officials criticized the First Emperor of Qin for his megalomaniacal hubris in trying to impose imperial will on the natural world, these aims actually

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became an “unacknowledged aspect of emperorship” as Han emperors emulated this model “in muted, disguised versions.”7 In the Han imperial model, natural environmental forces (described in terms of qi [pneuma] or feng [aura]) created localized patterns in the crude and chaotic characteristics of human and natural geography: the parochialism of provincials, the regionalism of the Warring States, the barbarism of foreign peoples, the impishness of nature deities, and the viciousness of natural disasters. The Han empire assumed the civilizing mission of the ancient sage-kings. It expanded agricultural lands, channeled rivers, defeated local nature deities, subdued barbarism, “transformed the people through refined literature” (wenhua 文化 or jiaohua 教化), imposed a canonically prescribed capital on the landscape, and restructured the countryside according to imperially decreed, intentionally artificial, centrally administered, and strictly hierarchical administrative districts.8 It is true that correlative cosmology of the Han period sought, as Henderson articulates, “to model and legitimize the new imperial order itself ” through “the discovery of macro-microcosmic correspondences linking aspects of the larger universe, especially the astronomical heavens, with the emerging political or imperial microcosm.”9 This thinking did indeed emphasize the oneness of the universe and an interconnectedness between culture and nature. But the empire’s relationships to celestial and terrestrial natural phenomena were understood to be quite different. Celestial nature was perfection to be emulated, but terrestrial nature was crudeness to be corrected. This understanding is evident in the contrasting depiction of natural forces in Ban Gu’s paired essays on astrology (tianwen 天文, lit. “patterns of heaven”) and geography (dili, lit. “structures of the earth”) from the Han shu, completed in 92 CE. The essay on astrology repeatedly admonishes the enlightened ruler to look to the heavens for guidance, for there are found “the signs of nature [lit. ‘that-which-is-self-so’]” 自然之符也.10 But the essay on geography describes terrestrial nature not as a guide to follow, but as an obstacle to be overcome. In this essay, the sage-kings (and their successors in the Han imperial state) triumphed over a terrestrial nature of vast distances, numerous polities, and threatening natural disasters as they tamed the environment, subordinated it to state authority, cultivated the land, and refined its crudeness.

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Primacy and Omnipresence of Water A hydrocultural metageography allowed Li Daoyuan to transcend the spatial and topical limitations of imperial metageography and to compose a work that was both “all-encompassing in scope” (zhou) and “complete in detail” (bei). In his preface and opening lines of the first fascicle of the Shuijing zhu, Li Daoyuan presented three theoretical justifications for establishing hydrology as the foundational structure from which to organize all other patterns of social, cultural, and political geography. He asserted water’s cosmogonic primacy, terrestrial omnipresence, and arterial vitality.11 First, in cosmogonic narratives, water was a primal element from which the myriad things were created. Hydrology therefore undergirded the human geography that it ultimately spawned. In the very first line of his preface, he asserted, “The Yijing states that heaven took the One and brought about water. Therefore, its qi being most subtle in the north, [water] became the beginning of physical things”《易》稱天以 一生水，故氣微於北方，而為物之先也.”12 At the beginning of the first fascicle, Li Daoyuan returned to this idea in his explanation of the meaning of the word “river” (he 河). “The Yuanming bao (Bud of the orig­inal mandate) says, ‘The five phases begin with [water]. Through it the myriad things are born’”《元命苞》曰：五行始焉，萬物之所由‌生.13 The cosmogonic primacy of water is consistent with the most complete known creation account, the newly excavated Guodian text “Taiyi sheng shui” 太一生水 (Great Unity gives birth to water). In this account, the Great Unity first created water; water then became the material incarnation of the Great Unity itself and proceeded to create heaven, then earth, and then all other things.14 Li Daoyuan did not cite this text, but Wei Qipeng argues for consistency between the “Taiyi sheng shui” and the Yuanming bao, which Li Daoyuan did cite.15 Second, hydrology is a useful organizing structure because it was omnipresent. Its ubiquity was described in two different ways: water touched all of the physical things of this world, and it reached all places across this earth. “The Xuanzhong ji (Records of within the obscure realm) says: ‘The thing that is most abundant in all the world is water. It buoys up the heavens and carries the earth. High and low, there is

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nowhere that it does not reach; of the myriad things, there is nothing that it does not moisten.’ When its qi flows against stone or its essence meets the gathering clouds, in no time at all it gathers into pools on the earth. Even spirits cannot be compared to it”《玄中記》曰：天下之多 者水也，浮天載地，高下無所不至，萬物無所不潤。及其氣流屆石，精 薄膚寸，不崇朝而澤合靈宇者，神莫與竝矣.16 And, in his discussion of rivers, Li Daoyuan quoted the Shiming 釋名 (Explaining words): “Rivers move downward. They flow all the way through, conforming to the landscape as they descend toward lower places” 河，下也，隨地 下處而通流也.17 Third, in its role as the primal element that reached all the myriad things, water was a life-granting, vital force of nature. The intricate and pervasive network of river systems was compared to the circulatory system of the earth. Water was “the arterial fluid of the primal qi” 元氣之 腠液也. Li Daoyuan quoted the “Shuidi” 水地 (Water and earth) chapter of the Guanzi: “Water is the blood qi of earth, like what flows through tendons and veins. Thus it is said, ‘Water unifies all materials’” 地之血氣，如筋脈之通流者，故曰水具財也.18 Li Daoyuan described his task as a geographer as metaphorically “taking the pulse of tributaries’ inhalations and exhalations” 脈其枝流之吐納.19 Hydrology was the best spatial structure because it preceded all others in creation, flowing everywhere through a thoroughly integrated network of arteries, reaching and giving life to all things on the earth. Such a structure was uniquely suited to organize a comprehensive geography that sought to extend to all places and penetrate all topics. The hydrological system of the Shuijing zhu demonstrates the omnipresence of water and its utility in structuring a world geography. This system begins with Mount Kunlun as the axis mundi and source of the great rivers of the earth. Li Daoyuan first described the lands fed by rivers flowing to the south and the west of Mount Kunlun—India, Persia, and Transoxiana—incorporating them into a bipolar world model of the earth that will be described in chapter 5. The far more detailed account of the eastern half of the world is centered on the only eastward flowing river with its source from Mount Kunlun, the Yellow River. The account first traces the length of the Yellow River, then its northern tributaries, followed by the rivers to its north that empty into the Bohai Sea. Next, the account pivots around the Yellow

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River, tracing its southern tributaries, followed by the rivers to the south that empty into the South China Sea, reaching as far south as modern-day central Vietnam. The only areas known in Sinitic literature at this time that were not included in this web of rivers were the Central Eurasian Steppe (which lacks significant river systems) and a few Pacific islands, like the Japanese and Indonesian archipelagos (which are separated from this river system by sea).20 This hydrological network of rivers provides a spatially extensive, arterially organized, and internally consistent framework for a world geography that could far exceed the boundaries of imperial geography. The hydrological structure also facilitates a topically comprehensive description of each place in the Shuijing zhu. As the account travels along waterways to each new location, it consistently presents information first on the natural environment and then on the human-made structures of the landscape—cities, tombs, shrines, and so on. The histories of these sites recount the human agents whose residual feng ­continued to affect each place. For Li Daoyuan, the natural geography, the human-made physical geography, and the human-made cultural geography, in that order, constituted a thorough depiction of a place’s distinctiveness within the structures of the earth. Li Daoyuan was explicit about the limitations of trying to rely on transient vicissitudes in human geography as an organizing structure. “Thus, there are discrepancies in the geography. The land does not have permanent territorial boundaries. According to whether [states] were strong or weak, they gobbled each other up, and their boundaries drifted about. How could there be just one [account]?” 然地理參差，‌土 無常域，隨其強弱，自相吞并，疆里流移，寧可一也.21 Political geography and human institutions would have looked ephemeral indeed from his perspective in the early sixth century. But, by anchoring his descriptions of human geography to enduring natural features, he avoided the incessant updating in administrative boundaries and nomenclature that were so common in geographical literature of his time. Instead, his human geography was situated within longue durée patterns of human-environmental interaction, weaving together historical anecdotes from over a millennium of history.22 In his vast expansion of the original Shuijing text, Li Daoyuan added many more lands and even more topics of geographical inquiry.

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But the original hydrological structure of the Shuijing was useful to him. Water’s role in cosmogenesis justified his use of it as a starting point for a general investigation of all other geographical patterns, both natural and cultural. If water was the beginning of all things and extended its reach to all things, then it provided an ideal framework through which to achieve his stated objective of writing a geographical tome that was both all-encompassing in scope and complete in detail. As Prudence Jones observes about rivers in Roman culture, “rivers contribute to defining personal identity with respect to one’s immediate society (ethnography), to the gods (ritual), and to one’s temporal position within the universe (cosmology). Thus, rivers provide a means of translating abstract ideas about the physical, metaphysical, and temporal structure of the world into a concrete and comprehensible framework.”23

Realignment of Natural Geography What are the implications of Li Daoyuan’s use of hydrological systems to structure the Shuijing zhu? It is first important to note that, although the Shuijing zhu’s use of natural features to structure its spatial text was not unprecedented, it was still uncommon. The norm in geographical writing was to structure an account according to political units of space—the empire, its capital, or regional administrative units. As discussed in chapter 1, this is largely a product of the continuing influence of the Han imperial metageography, especially Ban Gu’s “Dili zhi.” Even local geographies were still mostly written within the structure of prefectures and commanderies. Li Daoyuan’s work must be understood in contrast to this far more dominant mode of constructing space. Li Daoyuan made a deliberate choice to challenge this norm. What, then, did a hydrocultural metageography allow him to do that he could not accomplish with a traditional administrative structure?24 The first significant spatial realignment necessitated by a hydrocultural metageography was the decentering of the imperial capital. Most classical spatial constructions accepted that the center of the earth lay at the court of the Son of Heaven, but the ancient capitals of Chang’an and Luoyang were given no structural prioritization within the spatial model of the Shuijing zhu.25 Li Daoyuan instead centered

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the earth at Mount Kunlun, far to the west of the Sinitic heartland. The significance of this center point will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 5, but suffice it to say for now that Mount Kunlun held this prized position as the topographical apex, hydrological origin point, and divine nexus for the world. It was the court of the Supreme Godon-High (Taidi 太帝, also called Tiandi 天帝), not the court of the Son of Heaven, that truly deserved centrality in this all-encompassing spatial model. This axis mundi relegated the central realm (as well as the parallel western central realm of Buddhism) to a second-tier status. The loss of absolute centrality for the capital not only challenged the political authority of the imperial court as affirmed in Han imperial metageography, but also threatened the cultural superiority of the central realm implicit in other texts such as the Shanhai jing. The idea of Mount Kunlun as the center of the earth was by no means new; Zou Yan (ca. 250 BCE), Mu Tianzi zhuan, and Huainanzi had all described it as such. But the idea was given new life in the late third and early fourth centuries through the rediscovery of the Mu Tianzi zhuan text and especially the introduction of Buddhist geographies, which also described a central peak from which flowed the great rivers of the earth.26 These geographies were given greater credence as new firsthand accounts by trans-Asian travelers reported that the major rivers of Asia did indeed flow out from the awesome mountain ranges surrounding the Tibetan Plateau. The second realignment caused by prioritizing natural over administrative geography is the effacement of a clear Sinitic and non-Sinitic geographical dichotomy. The idea of “China” has been expedient for historians (and politicians) but is often elusive in the primary sources. Most classical geographies did, however, have a sense of an inner and an outer realm, although they were defined in various ways.27 There is no such line-in-the-sand distinction in the Shuijing zhu, as there certainly was not in real life. Rivers flow irrespective of imagined political boundaries. For example, as the Yellow River flows east from the Tibetan Plateau, markers of Sinitic culture gradually increase—symbols of imperial authority, density of administrative units, Sinitic placenames, and accounts of familiar mythic and historic figures drawn from classical Sinitic literature. 28 The Shuijing zhu does describe non-Sinitic lands and people, but the important spatial divide was not

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between inner and outer realms but between agricultural societies that existed within river lowlands and the nonnormative, barbaric, or divine realm of mountain highlands. Agricultural lowlands, no matter how distant from the Yellow River heartland, had more in common with Sinitic civilization than did any of the nonnormative highlands closer to it. This reformulated spatial logic, structured by mountains and rivers rather than by inner and outer realms, is important in Li Daoyuan’s depiction of Sinitic and Indic civilizations as fundamentally parallel, which will be discussed in chapter 5. Scaling downward from this global vision, a focus on natural geography shifts the chorographic analysis from administrative units to watershed regions. Individual drainage basins constructed meaningful spatial units. The advantages of this regional spatial model have been most powerfully argued by G. William Skinner. He observed that, because of the high cost of premodern transportation, regional economic systems developed mostly independently of each other and that, because of the efficiency of river transportation, these regional systems “without exception” matched physiographic drainage basins. These “first order regional units,” or “macroregions,” did not align with provincial administrative boundaries but were far more meaningful units for analysis of economic development.29 Administrative units of the early imperial period were smaller than those of the nineteenth century discussed by Skinner and were purposefully designed to have too small of a resource base with which to challenge imperial authority.30 The networks within larger drainage basins were therefore far more meaningful than administrative units for a study of regional history and culture. Politically, many of the ephemeral regimes of the third through sixth centuries consistently fit within these predictable macroregions. Culturally, each drainage basin encompassed a consistent environment and therefore common customs (su). Just as moving the center of the earth from an imperial capital to Mount Kunlun was an implicitly anti­ political overture, replacing prefectures with watershed regions further pushed the state out of Li Daoyuan’s geography. Finally, similar to how a prioritization of nature obscured the difference between Sinitic and non-Sinitic realms, attention to regional differences within the Sinitic ecumene further complicated any notions of a coherent Sinitic unity in the early imperial period.31

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Scaling down to even smaller spatial units, Li Daoyuan’s focus on waterways facilitated a considerable level of spatial specificity that penetrated into subdistrict spaces. All the information in his commentary was spatially linked to short segments along the river’s path, such as a particular bend in the river. His commentary constructed a spatial narrative that chronicled each river segment as it proceeded downstream. Since major cities had canals running through them, this hydrologically structured text even allowed for detailed descriptions of the interior of cities—a distinctly unnatural space.32 Li Daoyuan described the significance of very specialized, localized environments. He noted several examples of plants or animals that thrived within particular environments but would perish or behave strangely if moved even so short a distance as across the river.33 About this environmental specificity, Li Daoyuan mused, “It is the nature of heaven and earth that interdependencies are hard to investigate; surely one cannot exhaust their inherent disposition and structures” 天地之 性，倚伏難尋，固不可以情理窮也.34 A localized environment affected not only plants and animals but also people. The Shuijing zhu tells of Yu Fan 虞翻 (164–233) instructing from the peaks of Mount Zhe 赭 that his descendants should live only on the northern banks of the Yangzi and that those dwelling on the southern banks would fall into ruin. Li Daoyuan confirmed that this was indeed the case for many generations.35 The text frequently comments on the tight bonds that held people, plants, and animals to their native lands: “Longing for one’s beloved homeland is extremely grievous; honoring one’s native place is intrinsic to custom” 此戀鄉之思孔悲，桑梓之敬成俗也.36 His hydrological structure allowed for a level of spatial specificity that could highlight the significance of local communities within their unique localized environments. The preceding implications of a hydrologically based geography— focusing on its global, regional, and local aspects—combine to make this final point: a river-based geography allows for a smooth scaling up and down through various spatial units. Through Li Daoyuan’s hydrological structure, local communities were given place and meaning within an encompassing riverine pattern, then within an entire drainage-basin system, and then within a global hydrological network that originated from the center of the earth. Imperial geographies used

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a spatial hierarchy that similarly embedded smaller units into larger units, from a district to the world-empire. But the Shuijing zhu’s alternative embedded spatial hierarchy allowed for a system that could ­better incorporate the two extremes of this spatial scale—the entire world and the local community. At the largest scale, the Shuijing zhu disrupts the classical conflation of the empire and the world, effaces the imagined inner and outer realm divide, and decenters the Sinitic central realm, thereby integrating legitimate spaces for foreigners, barbarians, and frontier people to be meaningful historical agents. At the smallest scale, the Shuijing zhu penetrates into subdistrict local communities, revealing the agency of local elites and commoners. Both of these groups of people at the two extremes of this spatial continuum are traditionally marginalized in imperial histories.

Natural Spaces: Mountains and Rivers Throughout the development of geographical writing, mountains (shan 山) and waterways (shui 水) are the two natural features that have dominated Sinitic conceptual structuring of the natural world. Sarah Allan describes water and mountains in Sinitic thought as signifying the whole cosmos, embodying time and space: “Mountains are static; rivers move. Both endure through the generations. Mountains stand for what is permanent; rivers for transience—but also for continuity because their water is continually replenished.”37 The binome constructed by combining these two words (shanshui 山水 or shanchuan 山川) came to mean “natural landscape” or “natural environment.” In geographical literature, the “Yu gong” describes the sage-king Yu the Great quelling the primal flood by pushing up mountains and carving out rivers, and then using both of these landmarks to demarcate the boundaries of his new world order.38 In the catalog of geographical writing in the Sui shu, there are twenty-one texts on natural landscape, all of which take either mountains or rivers, or both, as their organizing structure.39 The hydrocultural landscape of the Shuijing zhu built on this literature but surpassed most of it in its integration of human culture onto a foundation of natural geography, which accentuated the different relationships that human societies had with mountains and

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rivers respectively. Rivers, although at times dangerous, were primarily spaces for civilized and normative human society; mountains were liminal spaces between the seen and unseen realms, a space that defied human domestication. Mountain highlands and river lowlands were antagonistic but deeply connected spaces.

Mountains If waterways are the arteries of the earth, then mountains are the generative points at which water is created. As the Shuowen jiezi 說文 解字 defines: “Mountain means to defuse; this means that they are able to defuse and spread qi and thereby give life to the myriad things” 山：宣也。宣气𢿱，生萬物.40 Or, as Gil Raz elaborates, mountains were “crucial conduits between heaven and earth allowing for the circulation of the vital essences through the cosmos.”41 Mountains are therefore the starting off point of each hydrographic artery, the boundaries between hydrographic units, and the secondary structuring pattern of the Shuijing zhu. Mountain geography is the negation of lowland sociopolitical geography that usually dominates geographical writing. Although mountains are described in a variety of different literary genres, the Shuijing zhu (with its spatial structure, global scope, and varied source base) presents an especially broad spectrum of early medieval Sinitic ideas about and practices on mountains. In these anecdotes, mountains are a confusing mix of both the sacred and the barbaric, the moral and the lawless, and the therapeutic and the deadly. This section presents the broad range of social, political, and religious interactions with mountains as described in the Shuijing zhu. The underlying logic of this diverse range of activities is that mountains were liminal spaces where the normal boundaries between the seen and unseen realms were permeable. But there was no ontological divide in Sinitic thought between the “natural” mountain and the “supernatural” spirits who dwelt on them. All were part, with humans, of the natural cosmos; all were made up of qi of varying degrees of refinement. The liminality of mountain space made spiritual beings there more accessible and physical things there more numinous.42 In preHan art and text, mountains were solid and prominent markers of

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space. Mountains had animistic spirits of their own that were the object of worship and sacrifices. Their peaks and caves also housed dangerous beasts, scary demons, powerful spirits, and high gods. The numinous qi of mountains produced strangely efficacious natural products such as rejuvenating flora, bizarre fauna, precious minerals, and geothermal springs. This liminality made mountains wondrous and special places, but they were also decidedly nonhuman spaces, unsafe and unsuitable for humans. In the Han dynasty, the idea of mountain transcendents (xian 仙) became popular, and worship at or of sacred mountains was systemized and brought into the service of the imperial state. But these early human inroads into mountains still reaffirmed their nonhuman nature.43 Like these earlier texts, the Shuijing zhu uses mountains as boundaries and markers of space and describes mountains as liminal spaces of great numinous power.44 But, unlike these earlier texts, the Shuijing zhu (and most of the third through sixth century natural geographies on which it draws) depicts a significantly greater human presence on mountains.45 Mountains were also described as more positive and less dangerous spaces. This cultural reinterpretation of mountains was driven by spatial shifts in early medieval sociopolitical practice that did indeed push more humans up into previously uninhabited highlands. The fragmentation of imperial authority led scholars to retreat to mountains for moral reclusion and peasants to flee to highlands for protection. The large-scale colonization of the Yangzi basin led to the clearing of hillsides for agriculture, the pushing of non-Sinitic populations farther up into the mountains, and a new mountain aesthetic. Buddhist monasteries took root in East Asia on available land in the mountains, where they then pioneered techniques of hillside agriculture and watermills. Never before had mountains attracted so many visitors for such varied reasons. The liminal nature of mountains between the seen and unseen realms is foundational to understanding this new varied human traffic on mountains. Like the cultural borderlands described in the previous chapter, these cosmic borderlands were also zones of interaction, fluidity, and opportunity, neither fully this-worldly nor otherworldly. I divide human engagement with mountains into two modes. First, ­humans fled to mountains to escape the human realm in the lowlands.

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Some (such as bandits, criminals, and tribespeople) fled the coercive controls of the state; others (such as recluses, monks, and transcendents) fled the corruption and immorality of normal human society. Second, humans were drawn to mountains to access their numinous forces. Sometimes this meant interaction with divine beings, and sometimes this meant availing oneself of the strangely numinous natural elements of the mountain (water, rocks, flora, and fauna). Whether one was fleeing from the human realm or trying to access a more numinous realm, the mountain’s liminal nature animates its physical properties and human interactions. Li Daoyuan wrote of Mount Huo 霍: “Above, this mountain infringes upon the divine qi; below, it is secured in the underworld” 其山上侵神氣，下固窮泉.46 He also equated “great mountains” (dashan 大山) with the human-made liminal space of “temples” (gong 宮). “Mountain temples are especially spiritually efficacious; they are able to split the wind and divide the streams” 山廟甚神，能分風擘流.47 The qi and the feng of mountains were natural forces that defined the unique qualities of a place and acted on the people residing there just as anywhere else, but on mountains the qi and the feng were infused with spiritual and numinous power that made mountain activities very different from normal human experiences in the lowlands.

Mountain Escapes Biological, environmental, and economic limitations have always made mountains inhospitable spaces for large human populations. These physical realities make it difficult for states and societies to assert control over mountains spaces. As such, mountains attracted many who sought to escape state authority and societal norms. A diverse assortment of people with varying motivations escaped to the mountains, but col­ lectively they constructed a common spatial dynamic: an antithesis between the liminal mountain and the normative lowlands (especially the dynastic court). The appropriate use of natural topography in military engage­ment had been a long-contested issue in Sinitic culture. The Sunzi 孫子 describes the significant advantages that commanders can gain by controlling strategic ground. However, the Zuo zhuan 左傳 (Mr. Zuo’s

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commentary [to the Spring and Autumn Annals]) expresses the Confucian position that battles should be won through morality and heaven’s aid, not by base reliance on earthly topography.48 The Shuijing zhu describes many examples of militaries relying on strategic mountains and passes to win battles and wars. One of these examples reads as follows: In a strategic break along the mountain chain [between the Sichuan and Wei River basins], there is a thoroughfare of a flying cliffway. Hence it is called Jiange [sword cliffway]. The Inscription of Zhang Zai [ca. 250– ca. 310] states: “With one man defending this strategic point, ten thousand men would hesitate to advance.” This is indeed true. Hence, Li Te [ruler of the Sichuan-based state of Cheng-Han (304–47)] visited Jiange and sighed, “If the Liu clan could hold a [strategic] land like this and still surrender to others, then how could they not have become slaves?”49 連山絕險，飛閣通衢，故謂之劍閣也。《張載銘》曰：一人守險，萬夫 趑趄。信然。故李特至劍閣而歎曰：劉氏有如此地而面縛于人，豈不 奴才也。

The inaccessibly of mountains made them natural boundaries of state authority and power. The boundaries of regional states during periods of imperial fragmentation consistently aligned with these topographical barriers—Sichuan being the best-known example. Mountains constructed boundaries between two states, but they also imposed boundaries between state and stateless spaces. Rebels, refugees, criminals, and barbarians all made use of mountains to escape from the coercive powers of state authority, what Fernand Braudel called “mountain freedom,” where “men can live out of reach of the pressures and tyrannies of civilization.”50 More recently, James Scott has described hill peoples in terms of “marronage, as runaways from state-making projects in the valleys”; their cultural, social, and political structures, he continues, “in general bear strong traces of state-evading or state-distancing practices.”51 Rebels and bandits in the Shuijing zhu are strongly associated with mountains. The term “mountain bandits” (shanzei 山賊) is frequently employed. The mountain bandits of Yi “had a stronghold on Mount Linli of Yi [in modern Anhui Province]. This mountain was especially precipitous and steep” 固黟之林歷山，山甚峻絶. So defensible was this

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position that, in order to conquer it, the Wu army drove iron pegs into the cliff face so that they could scale the mountainside and take the bandits by surprise.52 Generally, rebel victories against state armies were in mountains, and defeats were in lowlands. When rebels were defeated in their mountain strongholds, rebels were usually making a last stand and state armies needed to employ extraordinary measures—like those at Mount Linli. The Red Eyebrows and the Yellow Turbans figure prominently in these tales and fit well into this general pattern of defeats in the lowlands and strongholds and last stands in the mountains.53 Some of the tales of mountain rebels highlight the liminal nature of mountains as rebels interacted with divine beings. For example, in 465, Song Emperor Ming 明 (Liu Yu 劉彧, r. 465–72) sent his general to Mount Qinglin 青林 (in modern Anhui) to suppress the rebellion raised in the name of his nephew. When the army reached the mountain and began chopping down trees, a beautiful young lad appeared and questioned what they were doing with the trees. “We are going to punish rebels” 欲討賊, they responded. The boy implored them, saying, “During the last ten days of the month, there should be peace; why labor felling these [trees]?” 下旬當平，何勞伐此. After saying this, he suddenly vanished from their midst, and the forests were left alone.54 In this liminal space between the seen and unseen realms, the interests of spirits, trees, and state intersect. The idea of bandits hiding out on mountaintops to escape state authority is inverted at exceptional moments in history when the world was turned upside-down, that is, when state authority had collapsed and banditry had free rein throughout the lowlands. At these times mountains granted defensive positions for armies attempting to regain authority or for defenseless peasant communities just trying to survive. Speaking of the Yinshan Pass 陰山關 at the watershed between the Huai and Han River basins, Li Daoyuan explained that “in the past, whenever there was a scourge of bandits, this is where the army camped and defended” 舊有賊難，軍所頓防.55 The Shuijing zhu reports several communities of mountain refugees. For example, on the northeast face of a mountain next to the Yi River (in modern Hubei), there was a cave big enough for several hundred people. “Every time calamity struck, the people would enter it to escape the bandits. It was impossible to attack or harass them [there]”

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每亂，民入室避賊，無可攻理.56 Although not quoted in the Shuijing zhu because it had no set geographical location, the backstory to Tao Qian’s 陶潛 (365–ca. 427) famous “Taohua yuan” 桃花源 (Peach blossom spring) affirms this same geographic pattern: a community flees the chaos of the Qin period and establishes a utopian community in the mountains where none can find them.57 Even non-Sinitic tribespeople used the mountains as a refuge from lawless banditry. Mount Yiwang 夷望 (in modern Hunan) was a prominent peak with cliffs on all four sides, and “from ancient times the Man tribespeople lived there to avoid bandits” 昔有蠻民避寇居之.58 But this anecdote of Man 蠻 communities hiding in the mountains from bandits is unusual. More commonly, the Man people were depicted as permanent residents in mountains, protected there from assimilation into the Sinitic sociopolitical order of the lowlands. The association between mountains and southern “barbarians” was strong. One local geography describes the lower Yangzi regions thus: “There are mountains on all four sides, with tribespeople living on these many mountains” 四面是山，眾山夷所居.59 The barbarian-mountain versus Sinitic-lowland dichotomy is explicit in Li Daoyuan’s description of how Sinitic settlers in Rinan 日南 (modern northern Vietnam) began to adopt customs of the local native population. “They turned their backs [on civilization] and were no longer set firm. Human nature being cruel, they became fixed on fighting. They became accustomed with the mountains and familiar with the waters, and no longer comfortable with the open plains” 迴背無定，人性凶悍，果于戰鬭，便山 習水，不閑平地.60 The identifier “Man” was originally a general designation for all non-Sinitic peoples living to the south of the Yellow River plain.61 But by the early medieval period the term was being used more narrowly to refer to tribespeople inhabiting the mountains surrounding the middle Yangzi basin, and especially two concentrations in the Dabie Mountains and the Wuling Mountains.62 The region of the Dabie Mountains (which separates the middle Yangzi and Huai River basins) was called Manzhong 蠻中 (“amid the Man barbarians”) and was the home of the Man Barbarians of the Five Rivers (Wushui Man 五水蠻). These non-Sinitic peoples figure prominently because of their (by the early medieval period) central location in the Sinitic ecumene, surrounded

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by agricultural lowlands. They “were dependent on their mountains and rivers” 阻藉山川.63 Li Daoyuan recorded of the Wuling Mountains (which separate the Xiang River basin and the Sichuan basin): “This land is thick with ferocious Man barbarians; one should not lightly go there” 地密惡蠻，不可輕至.64 Several origin myths of these tribes­ people are retold in the Shuijing zhu. For the current discussion, it is noteworthy that mountains, cliffs, caves, and separation from Sinitic civilization all figure prominently in these origin tales.65 The Man peoples’ conflict with lowland Sinitic states was as characteristic as their affinity to the mountains. Most references to Man in the Shuijing zhu are descriptions of Sinitic states sending punitive expeditions against them.66 The Man people’s relationship to the court was similar to that of the aforementioned mountain bandits. Despite not infrequent efforts to suppress Man “rebellions,” Li Daoyuan noted the state’s consistent inability to gain real control over the intractable mountain spaces. The origin myth of the Panhu tribe explicitly addressed why states were unable to exert control over the mountains. Freedom from the state was an imperial reward to the dog Panhu (founding ancestor of the tribe) and his descendants from the sage-king Di Ku for Panhu’s saving of the state from Rong barbarians. Panhu was given a princess to marry, and the couple retreated together to a cave in the southern mountains, “a place that is dangerous and remote, where the traces of men have never reached” 所處險絕，人跡不至. They multiplied and their descendants became the Panhu tribe, but Di Ku and his officials were never able to find this remote place.67 The mountain-lowland divide halted incursions in the other direction as well, inhibiting tribespeople from conquering the lowlands. The Ailao 哀牢 chiefdom of the Jiulong 九隆 tribes of the Yunnan highlands had “many generations pass without contact with the central realm” 世世不與中國通. But, in the year 47, the Ailao sallied forth down the rivers in armored boats to attack the Han settlement of Luduo 鹿茤. The Ailao easily gained control of this lowland, but then a great storm arose that sunk their fleet and drowned several thousand of their men. A few years later, they again tried to take the same Han settlement, but their army was defeated and their leaders killed, buried, and then dug up by tigers during the night and eaten, leaving behind only a pile of bones. The next morning, the remaining Ailao leaders

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exclaimed in fear, “Ailao has violated the boundary that has existed since ancient times. Now we attacked Luduo and for it have been punished by heaven. Is it not that the central realm has a king who has received the mandate? Why has heaven so clearly assisted them?” 哀牢 犯徼，自古有之，今此攻鹿茤，輒被天誅，中國有受命之王乎？何天祐 之明‌也？68 The general inability of Sinitic states to impose order on the mountains is most powerfully articulated in tales that combine the mountaincourt polarity of uncivilized tribes with that of escaping criminals. Li Daoyuan reported that criminals would flee up into the western mountains of Sichuan to live with the barbarians and avoid arrest. The criminals were safe there from the not-so-long arm of the law. “Between the countryside of Yong Prefecture and the Rong kingdoms, it is said that people who have issues with the capital should come to this region” 雍、戎二野之間，人有事于京師者，道當由此州而來.69 The village of Shiniu 石紐, along the western mountains of the Sichuan basin, was the birthplace of Yu the Great but was at that time inhabited by Yi barbarians. “Criminals escape to these wilds, and those who are sent to capture them do not pursue them there. They are able to hide for three years without being caught. After this everybody has forgiven them. They say that it is the spirit of Yu the Great that aids them” 有罪 逃野，捕之者不逼，能藏三年，不為人得，則共原之，言大禹之神所祐 之也.70 These anecdotes once again blur the boundaries between divine, barbarian, and state actors. Tribespeople and criminals both maintained the mountain-court spatial dichotomy in similar ways, affirming the polarity between the normative and lawful lowlands and the uncivilized and lawless mountains. The difference was that criminals, as the last account described, returned to the lowlands after having been reprieved. The mountains, although safe for a time, were still not their permanent residences. For the Man tribespeople, though, mountains were their natural environment or at least had become so in the centuries since the Sinitic sociopolitical order had pushed them out of the lowlands. Both categories of mountain dwellers affirm increased human presence in the mountains and the inability of the state to gain control of these people.71 Quite different from those who ascended mountains to escape state coercion, a second set of mountain dwellers ascended peaks to escape

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the crudeness, corruption, and suffering of the mundane world. These included transcendents, recluses, and monks. Transcendents (xian, also called “immortals”) were the earliest of these groups, and their goal to transcend their corporeal existence reaffirmed the Han notion of mountains as liminal spaces between the seen and unseen realms. Transcendents were “extraordinary long-lived if not deathless beings to whom godlike powers and celestial status were attributed and memory of whom was preserved in oral and written narrative and at cultic sites.”72 Although they could live in various isolated spaces, the association between transcendents and mountains was especially strong.73 The very etymology of the word “transcendent” ties them to mountains, as the Shiming explains: “Transcendent means to relocate; to relocate means to enter into the mountains” 仙，遷也；遷，入山也.74 According to Li Daoyuan, the transcendent Wang Fangping 王方平 “was by nature fond of mountains and streams” 性好山水. The transcendents Juanzi 涓子 and Zhuzhu 主柱 together hid where the “mountains are firm and pools deep” 山澤深固, “embraced the divine wisdom” 懷神智, and “obtained the Dao.” Transcendents’ presence on mountains was attuned closely to the mountain environment. For example, Mount Lu’s “loftiness of layered peaks reaches ten thousand fathoms high. It encircles the numinous and surrounds the extraordinary; it contains the traces of many transcendents” 疊鄣之巖萬仞，懷 靈抱異，苞諸仙迹.75 The idea of transcendents originated anciently, when mountains were understood to be the realm of divine, not human, beings. As such, they are the least humanlike of the people described in this section and the people who most blur the boundaries between escaping the profane world of the lowlands and accessing numinous powers atop the mountain. Although hagiographies recount the lives of transcendents in great detail, the Shuijing zhu (and the geographical literature from which it draws) primarily emphasizes two aspects of the transcendent’s repertoire. The first was local products (tuchan) of mountains that could either heal the body or grant immortality. These included special mountain plants, minerals, and springs.76 As in geographical literature more generally, these local products are manifestations of the local environmental qi. In this case, mountain products revealed the liminal and numinous qualities of these natural spaces.

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The second topic that fascinated geographical writers was the shrines, tombs, and local cults that communities built to revere these transcendents. This too was consistent with the geographical tradition of anchoring locality tales to physical structures and recounting the local customs about them. It also confirms Robert Campany’s argument about the social context of transcendents as audiences for performative mystique.77 Shrines to transcendents were recorded as being built and paid for mostly by commoners and local elites, and their veneration was explicitly described as being part of “local custom.”78 Several accounts even describe the great importance of having the deeds of these transcendents made known. In one, the transcendent appeared to a local man “just so that you will cause people to know who I am” 故使 人知我耳.79 Transcendents, therefore, like recluses and monks, were strongly associated with the ethos of the mountain as the antithesis of the mundane world but were in practice still linked to and in some ways dependent on the mundane world that they sought to escape. Recluses (yin 隱) escaped to the mountains not to achieve a spiritual state of being but to display moral superiority over the political arena. The iconic figure of Sinitic reclusion was the “man of the cliffs and caves” 巖穴之士 or the “man of the mountains and forests” 山林 之士 who retreated to the mountains in a moralizing repudiation of court corruption. Vervoorn and Berkowitz, however, both point out that reclusion included a much wider array of characters, including the notion of “reclusion in the court” (chaoyin 朝隱), wherein officials would affect a moral distance from the court while still continuing to serve in it. This practice became particularly prevalent in the Eastern Han, when the “phenomenon of idealized abstract nominal reclusion . . . played a noticeable role in nearly every facet of life.”80 Yet in geographical literature, with its emphasis on the relationship between people and place, the spatial polarity between mountain recluses and court officials is clearly articulated—and probably exaggerated. The natural purity of mountains was equated with moral purity and contrasted with court corruption. “Gentlemen in retirement” 嘉‌遯 之‌士 resided at Mount Lu because “its mountains and streams are bright and clean; its winds and pools are pure and vast. The air is fresh and the seasons harmonious, the land is fertile and the people are free” 其山川明淨，風澤清曠，氣爽節和，土沃民逸. This mountain

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was a reservoir of “worthies of hidden dragons and colorful phoenixes” 龍潛鳳采之賢.81 Elsewhere, Li Daoyuan made this moralizing spatial polarity between mountain worthies and a corrupt court more explicit. “In the mountains are perched gentlemen who seek escape, and in its valleys are hidden the people who refuse to be controlled. When [the court] possesses the Way, these people then manifest themselves” 然山 栖逐逸之士，谷隱不羈之民，有道則見.82 The mountain recluse’s moral judgment was contrasted with the state’s violent coercion in an altercation between the recluse Huo Yuan 霍‌原 and the Jin general and official Wang Jun 王浚 (fl. 306–14). At Mount Guangyang 廣陽 (in modern Hebei), Huo Yuan taught “several thousand” people at two schools there. He was asked what he thought about Wang Jun, but he refused to answer. Even the implications of this nonresponse from such a revered figure were sufficient reason for Wang Jun to execute the recluse. Although Wang Jun had the power to kill Huo Yuan, Huo Yuan’s moral potency endured on this mountain far longer than could the political regime that did him in. “Although count­ less ages have passed, the names of [Huo Yuan’s] two schools are still manifest” 雖千古世懸，猶表二黌之稱.83 As Buddhism entered Sinitic culture during the early medieval period, it developed its own traditions of sacred mountains, combining Buddhist doctrine with Sinitic traditions of mountain escapes. James Robson has shown that Buddhist mountain cults were not inherited from India but “developed as a response to (or in relation to) local or indigenous Chinese concerns.”84 Buddhist traditions of asceticism with its renouncing of the worldly ties that bound humankind to sam ․­ sāra (cycles of reincarnation) aligned nicely with Sinitic ideas of mountain transcendence and reclusion. As Li Daoyuan wrote in connection with the Seven-Level Monastery 七級寺 (along the upper reaches of the Zhuo 濁 River in modern Shandong): “The prudent monk is the one who meditatively perches in remote seclusion” 脩脩釋子，眇眇禪 棲者也.85 The metaphysical understanding and aesthetic appreciation of mountains in Sinitic culture actually contradicted Buddhist ideas about the illusory and impermanent nature of the physical world, attachments to which should inhibit the pursuit of nirvana. And yet one finds in Buddhist hagiographies much of the same language describing

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mountains as found in biographies of transcendents and recluses, particularly regarding fondness for mountains and seclusion there.86 This is consistent with James Robson’s and Raoul Birnbaum’s arguments that Sinitic monks were attracted to mountains for far more than just their physical separation from human society. They were drawn to the sacredness, special qi, spiritual beings, wondrous phenomena, pharmacopeia, and natural beauty of mountains. Monks expressed this in both poetry and painting.87 This multifaceted use of mountains is hinted at as well in the Shuijing zhu’s description of a few mountain monasteries. In particular, the landscape around Huiyuan’s meditation hut on Mount Lu is described thus: “Its peaks and slopes are precipitous and precarious; human tracks rarely reach it. . . . This place is like a work of art” 峰隥險峻，人跡罕及. . . . 有若畫焉.88 Buddhism introduced new ideas into the Sinitic understanding of the human relationship to mountains, but it could only do so by building on the long-standing Sinitic traditions of mountain transcendence and reclusion. What distinguished mountain monasteries from other mountain dwellers was their sizable and permanent community and their maintained relationship with lowland society. Transcendents and recluses were individual people, but monasteries were communities of monks. And, unlike the shrines that will be discussed in the following section, the community of monks resided and lived in mountain monasteries on a permanent basis. The cultural association between monasteries and mountains was strong, but recent scholarship has challenged the cultural ideal of “monasteries as ‘worlds apart’ that are inhabited solely by religious virtuosi” as spatial reduction that obscures “sociohistorical realities.”89 The Shuijing zhu does describe religious virtuosi, such as those living atop the monastery at Mount Tianmen 天門 (in modern Henan). The monastery was perched atop the flat peak of a mountain, surrounded by cliffs on all sides with no paths leading up to it. This isolating geography was such that “the monastery has more than ten monks, but it was difficult for the place to be fully provisioned, and therefore many leave to head down into the plains. Only the strongwilled live there” 寺有十餘僧，給養難周，多出下平，有志者居之.90 But accounts like this of extreme examples of mountain monasteries are balanced by ones of far more common monasteries in towns and other rural, nonmountain settings.

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The relationship between mountain monasteries and these lowland monasteries, however, is essential in understanding either one individually. Although monastic communities established themselves in the mountains in order to separate themselves from attachments of human society, they never severed their ties with the rest of the sangha, or com­ munity of believers. They maintained a network of monastic communities that in many ways uniquely transcended the mountain-lowland cultural divide.91 What was not stated in the description of Mount Tianmen was that the continued survival of the religious virtuosi atop Mount Tianmen was made possible only through regular provisions from the lowlands supplied through this monastic network. As such, monks, more so than any other group discussed in this section, established enduring human colonies on mountains that both reaffirmed the mountain-lowland antithesis and transcended it.

Numinous Mountains As liminal zones between the human and spirit realms, mountains were not just escapes from the mundane world; they were also access points for those seeking divine interventions into the mundane world. The liminality of mountains was manifest in a variety of ways both to make spiritual beings more accessible and to make natural objects more numinous. These manifestations were sought after by a variety of actors, both state and religious, both elite and common. As discussed above, transcendents and monks ascended mountains both for isolation from humans and to access the numinous. The state’s relationship with numinous mountains was quite different from that with mountain escapes, however. In this formulation, mountains were not obstacles to be overcome; they were sources of divine power and legitimation. Mountains were home to a wide variety of divine beings. On Mount Kunlun, for example, Li Daoyuan described almost every spiritual ­being imaginable. He included named high gods such as Supreme Godon-High (Taidi), the Yellow Emperor, the Queen Mother of the West 西王母 (Xiwamgmu), Luwu 陸吾, and the Yellow River Earl Fengyi 河‌伯 馮夷. He also described countless less powerful and unnamed beings such as spirits, transcendents, perfected beings, sages, dragons, and

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strange beasts.92 As the central and highest peak of the world, Mount Kunlun was unique in its cornucopia of divine inhabitants. (I will return to this topic in the next chapter.) Second-tier mountains (such as Mounts Hua 華, Tai 泰, Heng 衡, Mao 茅, and Lu 盧) also had a consider­ able divine presence and a variety of spiritual beings dwelling on them. Although these mountains did not house the high gods that Kunlun did, they did include named transcendents and the spirits of mythic and historical figures—including sage-kings and their relatives, emperors and their relatives, officials, and recluses.93 These divine beings tied ­second-tier mountains more intimately to the mundane human realm than did the numerous high gods and nameless beings of Kunlun. Literary attention to these few great peaks (especially the marchmounts) often overshadows the significance of the ubiquitous third-tier mountains with their innumerable lower-level spirits. Although each of these mountains individually housed fewer and less famous spirits, collectively these spirits far outnumber those of the great mountains. Sometimes they had named transcendents or the spirits of historical figures and local heroes, but often the spirits (shen 神) and numinous beings (ling 靈) here were left nameless (at least in the existing literary record). Even the nameless spirits were sufficiently important to inspire the construction of devotional shrines to them. Although some wrote of dangerous demons atop mountains, Li Dao­ yuan tended to focus more on benign spirits that would inspire human devotion.94 The Shuijing zhu’s comprehensive spatial structure, hydrocultural metageography, and eclectic source base make it useful in revealing the ubiquity of these mountain gods and human interactions with them.95 Divine beings were integral components of the natural environment of the mountain. A good example of this is Mount Wu 巫 (in modern Sichuan) and the divine presence of Yaoji 瑤姬. Yaoji was the youngest daughter of the sage-king Yandi 炎帝. She died before marriage and was buried on Mount Wu. “Her soul became the plants; she became the numinous exudations. She is known as ‘the woman of Mount Wu among the defiles of Gaotang.’ ‘Mornings I am the rolling clouds; evenings I am the pouring rain. Dawn after dawn, dusk after dusk, below the Sun Terrace. The next morning [the king] looked there, and it was just as she had said. Thus, he established a temple in her

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honor, which he named Dawn Cloud’” 精魂為草，寔為靈芝。所謂巫 山之女，高唐之阻，旦為行雲，暮為行雨，朝朝暮暮，陽臺之下，旦早 視之，果如其言，故為立廟，號朝雲焉.96 The natural environment of mountains was infused with the numinous power of divine spirits such as Yaoji who resided there. There the natural and the supernatural were inseparable. Mountains were a place one could go to commune with these divine beings. Such communications often resulted in the reception of some sort of revealed text, chart, or talisman that gave the recipient special knowledge or power. Several variations exist within the Shuijing zhu of the story of Yu the Great ascending a mountain (different passages disagree as to which mountain) and receiving some sort of divine text of gold strips and jade writing that gave him knowledge of and power over the hydrological structures of the earth.97 King Mu 穆 of Zhou traveled to Kunlun and made offerings to the River Earl Fengyi, who allowed him to look at “The River Chart” 河圖.98 Li Daoyuan also noted the initial mountaintop revelations that initiated Celestial Masters Daoism, as Zhang Daoling 張道陵 (fl. 142) “learned the Way atop Mount Heming in Shu” 學道于蜀鶴鳴山.99 The liminality of mountains set them apart as spaces for divine communication between humans of the seen realm and deities of the unseen realm. Temples, shrines, tombs, and steles were human-made physical monuments atop mountains that constructed a specific place at which spiritual and human realms could link.100 As access points for humans to the unseen realm, they provided a permanent site to which humans could come, perform the appropriate rituals, and depart. These people entered into this liminal space and interacted with its numinous powers but did not become part of its nonhuman environment. The physical monuments anchored spiritual beings within the physical landscape in two different ways. First, spirits could be very mobile, but shrines and tombs tethered spirits to a particular site through their corporeal remains or regular offerings to them. Second, shrines provided the physical landmark that allowed geographical literature to recount the stories of the divine beings worshiped there. The spatial structure of geographical writing required this landmark, and the physical landmark embodied the spirit’s ethereal presence within the geographical character of the mountain.101

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Such shrines provided interaction between the two realms, but they could not allow humans to colonize these mountains and thereby destroy the liminality of the space. The Shuijing zhu regularly describes people—local officials, local elites, or “the people” (min 民)—erecting shrines in the mountains and making offerings at them. But the people are almost always temporary sojourners in a foreign and nonhuman mountain realm. This can be seen in the description of visitors to a shrine atop Mount Lu: “Whether stopping their boats or dispatched as messengers, all travelers who passed by had to make offerings and afterwards take their leave” 住舟遣使，行旅之人，過必敬祀，而後 得去.102 Shrines allowed a constant flow of humans into a liminal space but restricted each individual to a fleeting experience. This maintained the liminal balance between the two realms, thereby preserving human access to numinous forces without ruining their numinous quality. The copious and ubiquitous mountain shrines to assorted divine beings reveal the localized, vernacular, and noninstitutionalized religious devotions that would have been the norm for most people.103 Although mountains did have Buddhist, Daoist, and imperial edifices, these pale in comparison to the number of local cultic sites (at least in the Shuijing zhu). Most common is something resembling the simple description of a Mount Gaoting 高亭 (in modern Hubei) cult: “The mountain has numinous beings on it; gentlemen and commoners all make offerings to it, and what they request is sometimes granted” 山有 靈焉，士民奉之，所請有驗.104 Such a site met the basic religious needs of average people, both local elites and commoners alike, and did so without scriptures or hierarchies. Unfortunately, such religious practices are maligned and obfuscated in imperial, Buddhist, and Daoist sources alike. This relationship is not dissimilar to Fernand Braudel’s description of the “separate religious geography” of the “mountain world,” a world that was “very little influenced by the dominant religions at sea level.”105 Mountain shrines were strongly associated with local customs and local communities—made up of both local elites and commoners alike. Many shrines were described as being built specifically by “the people” or “the hundred surnames” (min 民 or baixing 百姓, terms that usually refer to commoners but in this context probably include local elites as well). They were built as an expression of the people’s traditional belief

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in locally significant divine beings. The shrine complex to the transcendent Tang Gong 唐公 (also known as Tang Gongfang 唐公房) and his son-in-law is an example of this phenomenon. After recounting Tang Gong’s miraculous ascension and his son-in-law’s continued divine protection, Li Daoyuan wrote that “it is local custom to believe that these things are true” 其俗以為信然 and that “the common people established a shrine for him at this place; they cut stone and erected a stele to make known these numinous wonders” 百姓為之立廟于其 處‌也。刊石立碑，表述靈異.106 Similarly, atop Mount Maling 馬嶺 (in modern Zhejiang), “the people” not only erected a shrine in Su Dan’s 蘇眈 honor but also “made annual offerings of their harvest” 民安歲 登 to him.107 The ubiquity of these local, vernacular cults—especially in the mountains—and their strong association with ordinary people are an important corrective to the exaggerated importance of elite, institutional religions that dominate the literary record but probably did not dominate the lived experiences of ordinary people. Mountains were more than just access points to the unseen world; their liminal nature also made the physical environment atop mountains more numinous. Mountains were good places to find springs, plants, and minerals that could heal sickness and even prolong life indefinitely. Mount Kunlun had more of these than anywhere else. According to the Shuijing zhu, drawing mostly from the Huainanzi, atop Mount Kunlun there were “trees of immortality” (busi shu 不‌死‌樹), “cinnabar water” that made one “immortal” (busi), and the “sacred springs of God-on-High from which can be concocted the hundred medicines” 帝之神泉，以和百藥.108 But scattered across lesser mountains could be found other healing springs, plants, and minerals. For example, atop Mount Tai, the transcendent Duke Deer Skin (Lupi gong 鹿皮公) “ate plant exudations and drank of the divine spring for more than seventy years” 食芝草，飲神泉，七十餘年. He eventually left his family, draped himself with a deer skin, ascended, and then returned over a hundred years later to sell medicine in the market of Qi.109 Hot springs were one particular type of natural mountain feature with special healing properties. Anecdotes describe people gathering at hot springs in the hundreds to partake of their power to heal all kinds of ailments. As with shrines, the natural springs provided a site at which numinous powers could be accessed without domesticating the space.

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Visitors remained sojourners in a strange land, seeking the natural healing powers at this unique crossroads of life-giving water and numinous mountains. For example, Li Daoyuan reported about a hot spring that feeds into the Han River 漢水: “The fountainhead boils and gushes. In the winter and in summer it surges and rushes. Gazing upon it, the water vapor plumes into the air. It is said that it can heal all kinds of diseases. Those who bathe in it all have the qi of sulfur [all over their bodies]. Those who go to this place and gather there constantly number in the hundreds” 泉源沸湧，冬夏湯湯，望之則白 氣浩然，言能瘥百病云。洗浴者皆有硫黃氣，赴集者常有百數.110 Most of the hot springs mentioned in the Shuijing zhu are not quite as dramatic or as popular as this geyser. But Li Daoyuan identified many other hot springs and consistently reiterated their power to heal all sorts of ailments.111 How does one make sense of mountains as both escapes from the mundane and access points to the numinous? The liminal nature of mountains is fundamental. This section has explored two modes of human interaction with this liminal space. Mountains were boundaries that limited the human realm and therefore attracted people who sought to flee state control, social corruption, or the human immorality of the mundane and lowland world. Mountains were also porous boundaries that allowed human access to numinous beings and forces and therefore attracted people who sought to obtain divine interactions, transcendent powers, and physical healing. In conclusion, I will explore two additional considerations that are woven throughout these two modes of human interaction with mountains. The first regards the multidimensional nature of mountains. This quality is captured nicely in a short passage from the Shuijing zhu about the mountains between Mang 芒 and Dang 碭 Districts (in modern Anhui). “The mountains are firm and the pools are deep; many [here] have embraced the divine wisdom. There are the transcendents: Juanzi and Zhuzhu, both of whom hid in the Dang Mountains and obtained the Dao. Han Emperor Gaozu also hid here, and Empress Lü would gaze upon the qi in order to divine where he was” 山澤深固，多懷神 智，有仙者涓子、主柱，竝隱碭山得道，漢高祖隱之，呂后望氣知之，即 于是處也.112 Hiding from the world and embracing the divine, ruling this world and transcending it, natural landscapes and natural

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divinations all comingle together within this liminal zone on mountains. Dichotomous labels such as natural versus supernatural or religious versus political fail to elucidate these activities. Mountains were natural spaces, but their nature was especially numinous. Therefore, on mountains, divine beings or hot springs could perform healing miracles, and divine beings or sheer cliffs could protect mountain dwellers from harm. Mountains were foundational to Sinitic sacred geographies, but their liminality also made them profoundly important political, military, economic, and social sites.113 Anecdotes reveal everyone from emperors, officials, generals, local elites, recluses, transcendents, monks, priests, commoners, women, rebels, criminals, and tribespeople all engaging with mountains for both their natural and numinous properties. The second consideration is how a mountain metageography inverts traditional state-centered metageographies. There is a spatial antithesis between mountains and lowlands, especially the lowland state. This relationship is obvious in the tales of recluses and transcendents, contrasting mountain purity with worldly corruption. In less moralizing terms, the antithesis is apparent in the practical inability of premodern states to extend control into the mountains, leading nonSinitic tribes, criminals, and bandits to gather there. The antithesis is also affirmed in the inverse situation, where perfectly normal human communities were forced to flee to the hills for protection when the state had lost control. Finally, mountains housed the courts or the palaces of high gods, but capital cities in the lowlands held the courts of men. This mountain-lowland antipathy constructs a natural metageography that inverts the basic structures of traditional state-centered geographies. The seriousness of Shuijing zhu’s inversion of state-centered geographies is apparent when one contrasts its mountain metageography with the other popular mountain metageography of medieval China, the five marchmounts. Given the common focus on mountains, one might expect Li Daoyuan to have embraced this model, but in fact he rejected it. Instead of inverting traditional state-centered geographies, the five marchmount model actually worked together with the imperial metageography to affirm imperial authority and central realm ideology. The central peak of Mount Song 嵩 is adjacent to the canonical

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imperial capital of Luoyang, and the four marchmounts of the cardinal directions surround the Central Plains; emperors repeatedly made use of these mountains to legitimize their rule.114 Li Daoyuan’s mountain metageography was entirely different. Mount Kunlun (beyond the western limits of Sinitic imperium) was made the undisputed center of the world and the most numinous of all peaks.115 Even within the Sinitic ecumene, the five marchmounts were abandoned in favor of a greater inclusion of Yangzi basin peaks. Considerable attention was still given to the marchmounts Mount Tai, Mount Hua, and Mount Heng 衡 as foci for divine habitation and ritual performances, but Mount Heng 恒 and Mount Song were barely mentioned, and the precise identification of the southern marchmount remained ambiguous.116 Instead, new peaks of the Yangzi basin (such as Mounts Min 岷, Lu, and Mao in the upper, middle, and lower Yangzi basin, respectively) were given far greater attention than Mount Song and Mount Heng 恒. Li Daoyuan explicitly acknowledged this transition away from the marchmount model in his account of Mount Lu: “Even if it is not numbered among the five marchmounts, it is arched and angled, jutting and jagging; indeed it is a famous mountain that is extremely precipitous” 雖非五嶽之數，穹隆嵯峨，寔峻極之名山也.117 In addition to this southern shift, the Shuijing zhu mountain metageography elevates the status of all minor mountains as well. Finally, although Li Daoyuan did not ignore political relationships with mountains, he did not make them as prominent as was traditional with the marchmount model. In sum, Li Daoyuan’s mountain metageography was far more global, decentralized, apolitical, and inclusive of the Yangzi basin than the Han marchmount model.118 Li Daoyuan’s effacement of the five marchmounts, therefore, is consistent with his general postimperial prioritization of natural over political structures and his inversion of imperial metageography. It was the populating of mountains with human beings (non­ normative people but still people) that made this inverted geography a meaningful and radical challenge to traditional state-centered geographies. Li Daoyuan’s mountain model (far more than his river model) established a diametric opposition to the spaces, structures, and actors of the imperial metageography. For states and the normative people usually written about in official histories, mountains imposed

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obstacles, boundaries, and limitations. They divided human societies and limited state control into isolating drainage basins. But, for the enemies of the state, for the nonnormative people who were marginalized in official literature, mountains were refuges and gathering points. As a component part of the encompassing hydrocultural metageography, mountains played an important role by constructing spaces in which the agency of these marginalized minorities could be explored.

Rivers Unlike mountains, rivers have been intimately tied to human societies, especially since the rise of agriculture and cities. Rivers embody the inherent instabilities in the ecology of civilization. On the one hand, rivers allowed for denser population by delivering a reliable supply of water for drinking and irrigation, supplying valuable protein through fishing, and providing a means of waste extraction. Furthermore, transportation along rivers facilitated network exchanges, commercial integration, and state expansion.119 On the other hand, rivers are fickle benefactors, issuing too much or too little water irrespective of human needs. Population densities, resource surpluses, and state capacities were made possible only through proper management of rivers. But dependencies built on the river’s beneficence made human societies all the more vulnerable to its unpredictable floods or longer-term climate changes. The same rivers that fed cities also flooded them. Irrigated rivers led to erosion, silting, salinization, and disease. Early Eurasian civilizations balanced these beneficent and maleficent aspects of rivers in regionally distinct ways.120 The Yellow and Yangzi Rivers in mainland East Asia were not as benevolent to the inhabitants along their shores as the Nile, but they were kinder than the capricious Indus, Tigris, and Euphrates Rivers. The Yellow River deposited and replenished fertile loess soil across the alluvial Yellow River floodplain. These deposits were vital for the existence of agricultural societies there. But the same silty water constantly threatened to raise the river floor and overflow its banks, submerging the entire plain in water.121 The Yangzi River provided the transportation network necessary for the market integration of the medieval

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economic revolution during the Zhao Song dynasty. But spring runoff raised the water levels dramatically every summer, flooding its banks. This discursive tension between hope and fear, of rivers bringing life and bringing death, is a dominant theme in the Shuijing zhu and nature geographies more generally. Thus, although the natural-cultural relationship atop mountains was antithetical to Han imperial ideology, the natural-cultural relationship along rivers usually aligned with it. Rivers were dangerous places, but if these dangers could be managed through public works projects and by defeating unruly river spirits, then those dwelling along the river could prosper. But the hydrocultural model also tempered imperial ideology, emphasizing the uncontrollability of nature and highlighting the pivotal role of local imperial officials in managing this relationship at the local level.

Violent Rivers Rivers were dangerous places primarily because of the threat of flooding. In his theoretical discussion of rivers at the beginning of his account of the Yellow River, Li Daoyuan affirmed that, “of the categories of the five disasters, flooding is the worst” 五害之屬，水最為大. He then continued, describing in evocative language how the Yellow River’s “flowing water surges from precipitous peaks so its current is swift” 水流激 峻，‌故其流急 and how its “billowing waves are abundant and fierce, its floating froth rising quickly” 驚波沛厲，浮沫揚奔.122 Descriptions of the Yangzi’s seasonal flooding were less poetic but more explicit about the destruction it caused. In the Sichuan basin, “during the summer, the water level increases to fullness. [The residences along the shore] are destroyed and submerged. Those that drown are without number” 夏 ‌‌水 增盛，壞散顛沒，死者無數. Similar scenes of destruction are recounted across the entire length of the Yangzi River.123 Several southern cities sunk into their adjacent rivers.124 Armies laying siege to a city would divert a river so as to destroy the city in a torrent of water. In one of these stories, the water was turned back onto the besieging forces themselves. In another, the commanding general exclaimed, “Before, I did not know that water can destroy the states of men, but now I know that it is so” 吾始不知水可以亡人國，今乃知之.125

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Besides flooding, the Yangzi and Pearl River systems were dangerous for the subtropical diseases that they harbored. Similar to flooding, miasmic air (zhangqi 瘴氣) was seasonal, being most severe in the summer. Unlike the threat of floods, miasma was described as localized in specific areas around warm and semitropical rivers with enclosed topographies.126 Getting sick in these places at such times was inevitable, so that a local magistrate could send criminals to one such location along the Lancang 蘭倉 River as a form of execution: Adjacent to this river the miasma is especially vile. There is something in the air. One cannot see its form, but it does make a noise. If it gets inside a tree, it will wither; if it gets inside a person, he will become sick. It is called a “demon pellet.” Only during the eleventh and twelfth months can one pass through here. If one travels through between the first and the tenth month, he will invariably get sick. For this reason, when the commandery has criminals, they take them to this forbidden area, and within ten days they are always dead.127 此水傍瘴氣特惡，氣中有物，不見其形，其作有聲，中木則折，中人則 害，名曰鬼彈。惟十一月，十二月差可渡，正月至十月逕之，無不害人， 故郡有罪人，徙之禁旁，不過十日皆死也。

Unlike the problem of flooding that could be ameliorated with waterworks projects, there was no solution to this terrifying and invisible killer. There was no way to manage the natural dangers to reap potential benefits. So people stayed away, even if that meant building a road over the mountains in order to avoid the sickening route through the natural ravine.128 The only “usefulness” of these miasmic river sites was as an execution ground. Rivers were not only deadly for their uncontrolled natural dangers; rivers were also a place of intentional suicide. Suicide by drowning was primarily a Yangzi River tradition, with Qu Yuan’s 屈原 (ca. 340–​ 278 BCE) moralized suicide being the archetypal model. Li Daoyuan identified the Qu Pool 屈潭 along the Mi 汨 River (a tributary that feeds into the Xiang River just south of Dongting Lake) as the site at which his famed suicide occurred. There was much to anchor the classical story to this precise location: the pool was named after Qu Yuan,

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and on the north bank of the pool a temple and stele were erected in his honor.129 Besides this famous example, Li Daoyuan recorded accounts of a series of virtuous women drowning themselves in the Yangzi as acts of loyalty to their husbands or fathers. Most of these recorded suicides were set in Sichuan, but all were along rivers of the Yangzi drainage basin. The most complete of these tales is as follows: District Chief Zhao Zhi dispatched his clerk Xian Nihe. In the twelfth month of the first year of the Yongjian reign period [126 CE] he arrived at Ba Commandery. He drowned in the Chengrui [Becoming Swift] Rapids. His son, Xian, searched for the corpse but could not find it. His daughter, Luo, was twenty-five sui old and had two sons under five sui. By the fifteenth day of the second month of the second year [March 15, 127], they still had not obtained the body. Luo then rode a small boat out to the place where her father had drowned. With tears of grief, she drowned herself. In a dream, she appeared to Xian saying: “When the twenty-first day [March 21] arrives, I will emerge together with our father.” When the day arrived, father and child emerged as predicted, floating atop the Yangzi. Commandery and district officials submitted a request that a stele be erected in her honor as an emblem of her filial piety and sincerity.130 縣長趙祉遣吏先尼和，以永建元年十二月，詣巴郡，沒死成湍灘，子賢 求喪不得，女絡年二十五歲，有二子，五歲以還，至二年二月十五日，尚 不得喪，絡乃乘小船至父沒處，哀哭自沈，見夢告賢曰：至二十一日與 父俱出。至日，父子果浮出江上，郡縣上言，為之立碑，以旌孝誠也。

This tale pairs the two different kinds of river deaths. The clerk accidently perishes because of the rapids, and his daughter intentionally throws herself into the rapids. The first death reveals the capriciousness of unintended dangers along the river. The second death affirms the morality of intentional suicide along the same river. Pervasive throughout all of these tales of death along rivers—be it through floods, miasma, or suicide—is the human capacity to interpret or redirect their deadly power toward culturally motivated goals. Torrential rivers could be turned to besiege city walls, pestilential streams could serve as an execution ground for local authorities, and Yangzi

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rapids could reliably facilitate performative and moralized suicides. Yet the certainty of a river’s deadly qualities was constrained to specific locations and times. Beyond these specific situations, rivers were a fickle master, sometimes bringing death but often bringing a great flourishing of life and prosperity.

Vital Rivers Rivers had both a life-threatening and a life-giving nature. This natural ambivalence is apparent in Li Daoyuan’s polarized description of the Gan 贛 River. “From winter to summer [the water level] does not increase or decrease. The water arrives pure and deep, and the fish are fat and delicious. But, in the summer months, every year the Yangzi overflows its banks and floods. Most people’s residences are wrecked in the flood” 冬夏不增減，水至清深，魚甚肥美，每于夏月，江水溢塘而過，民 居多被水害.131 If the natural dangers inherent in rivers could be tamed, as they would be at the Gan River, then rivers could become spaces of life and human prosperity. With the artificial manipulation of waterways through dikes, canals, sluices, irrigation, and dredging, human societies were able to manage these powerful and dangerous forces of nature. But the geographical literature did not present this type of manipulation as humankind’s conquest of the natural world, imposing their control over water and land, as imperial geographies commonly did. In local and natural geographies, the tone was one of constant accommodation with natural forces, trying to survive adjacent to these awesome and powerful rivers. One anecdote explicitly labels a failed attempt at building embankments as “contrary to the intentions of heaven and earth” 逆天地之心.132 Indeed, the consistent maintenance and upkeep of waterworks projects fell squarely upon the state. Failure to maintain such projects was traditionally interpreted as a lack of moral virtue on the part of the ruling dynasty and a loss of heaven’s mandate. The centrality of the state in managing the hydrocultural relationship is abundantly clear, even in a geographical text that in most other ways decenters the state from its spatial narrative. Although imperial accounts of waterworks—like the “Hequ shu” (Monograph on rivers and canals) in the Shiji and the “Gouxu zhi” 溝洫志 (Record of canals

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and ditches) in the Han shu—emphasize the actions of the imperial court in bringing prosperity to the land through state public works projects, the Shuijing zhu focuses its attention on the provincial governor as the primary protagonist in accounts of waterworks projects. He was the one who assessed the needs of the local area, submitted a memorial to the imperial court requesting funds for public works, oversaw the project itself, received the acclaim of the people, and was immortalized with a stele erected in his honor by the local great families of the area. He was also the one who vanquished malevolent spirits that dwelt in the rivers. As discussed in chapter 1, this relationship between the imperial court and the local community was a unique element of early medieval local geographies. Unlike imperial geographies with their global scope, local geographies show locally great families cooperating with imperial officials, and, unlike local compilations of biographies, local geographies acknowledge that imperial agents contributed to the building up of local communities. Before the life-giving potential of the river could be realized, its violent nature needed to be tamed. This was accomplished in two ways: through the spiritual conquest of unruly river gods and dragons and through the physical construction of dikes, canals, and sluices to manage the natural threat of flooding. A variety of divine beings made their homes in rivers and threatened the safety of human inhabitants around them. Li Daoyuan recorded numerous dragon sightings along rivers. Usually these sightings were auspicious omens, but sometimes dragons and especially lamias ( jiao 蛟) could be troublesome, causing the people to “constantly suffer” (changku 常苦). River spirits (heshen 河神 or jiangshen 江神) appear frequently in the Shuijing zhu, smashing boats and drowning people. Some of these spirits required sacrifices from local communities in order to propitiate them.133 It was the duty of local officials to make the rivers within their administrative units safe from these tormentors and to put an end to such “licentious sacrifices” (yinsi 淫祀). Sometimes simply scaring off the divine beings with fire was sufficient. But sometimes these spirits or dragons had to be slain, and a local official would have to enter the water personally to do battle with it. In the Shuijing zhu, such battles were mostly in southern rivers. The prominence of troublesome river spirits and dragons in the south is probably a product of its larger and faster-moving rivers as well as

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its less distant history as a wild frontier. The most famous of such tales were those of Li Bing 李冰 (fl. ca. 306–251 BCE), governor of Shu. In one tale he lured the river spirit out by “dispatching troops to chisel smooth the Hun Cliff” 發卒鑿平溷崖, which made “the river spirit extremely angry” 河神贔怒. Thereupon “Li Bing drew his sword and dove into the water to battle the spirit” 冰乃操刀入水與神鬭.134 One of Li Daoyuan’s most detailed accounts of a governmental official pacifying a river deity is set in the Warring States kingdom of Wei (403–225 BCE). Along the Zhang River, there was a custom (su) of sacrificing young women from the local community to the River Earl (Hebo 河伯). Unlike in the tales of Li Bing in Shu, this custom was supported by the local power network of the community’s civic and religious leaders. Pacifying the river therefore required subduing both the river spirit (as a manifestation of nature) and local community leaders (as a manifestation of crude folk customs). This instructive story merits telling in its entirety: The Zhang River then turns north, passing west of Jimo [Sacrifice Road]. During the age of the Warring States, it was custom for a spirit medium to take wives for the River Earl and sacrifice them at this road. During the time of Marquis Wen of Wei [r. 424–387 BCE], Ximen Bao became the magistrate of Ye District. He made an agreement with the elders, saying: “When you have selected a wife for the god, please come and let me know, because I would like to send the woman off [to be sacrificed].” They all responded, “So be it.” When the time arrived, the elders and head­ quarter clerks levied taxes on the common people, obtaining one million cash.135 When the spirit medium came walking into the village, there was a beautiful woman, and [the spirit medium] intoned that [the beauti­ ful woman] should be the wife for the River Earl. [The local leaders] paid a bride price of thirty thousand cash for the woman. They bathed her and applied rouge and powder as if she were getting married. [Ximen] Bao went to meet with them. The elders, spirit medium, headquarter clerks, and the people all gathered to observe. The spirit medium was seventy years old and was followed by ten female disciples. [Ximen] Bao summoned the bride to examine her. He commanded that the spirit medium go and report to the River Earl that he did not think the woman pretty enough, and then he threw [the spirit medium] into the river. After a little while, he asked, “Why has it been such a long time?” He

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commanded that three of the disciples and elders also enter and report [to the River Earl]. He then threw them all into the river as well. [Ximen] Bao bent over, saying, “The elders have not returned. What is going on?” And then, as he was about to have the headquarter clerks and village elders thrown in after them, they all kowtowed until they were bleeding, begging that they would never again give wives to the River Earl. Although these licentious sacrifices have been discontinued, the land still retains the name of Jimo [Sacrifice Road].136 漳水又北逕祭陌西，戰國之世，俗巫為河伯取婦，祭于此陌。 魏文侯 時，西門豹為鄴令，約諸三老曰：為河伯娶婦，幸來告知，吾欲送女。 皆曰：諾。至時，三老、廷掾賦斂百姓，取錢百萬，巫覡行里中，有好女 者，祝當為河伯婦，以錢三萬聘女，沐浴脂粉如嫁狀。豹往會之，三 老、巫、掾與民咸集赴觀。巫嫗年七十，從十女弟子。豹呼婦視之，以 為非妙，令巫嫗入報河伯，投巫于河中，有頃曰：何久也，又令三弟 子及三老入白，竝投于河。豹磬折曰：三老不來，奈何？復欲使廷 掾、豪長趣之，皆叩頭流血，乞不為河伯取婦。淫祀雖斷，地留祭陌之 稱焉。

Ximen Bao’s solution to this problem encapsulated the life and death duality of the river. Instead of diving into the river and slaying the malevolent spirit as Li Bing did, Ximen Bao executed those among the community who were sacrificing their young maidens to the river spirit. With poetic justice, the district magistrate subdued the river god by executing these local figures in the same manner that they had sacrificed young women to the river god for generations. Also noteworthy in this tale is the distinctly local character of this “licentious sacrifice.” It was described as a “local custom,” and it was supported by noninstitutional religious practitioners and subofficial community leaders. Making the community safe by rooting out this local custom required much more than just vanquishing a divine being. An entire network of vernacular religious practitioners and local leaders who supported the custom also needed to be eliminated. For his service to the community, a shrine was erected here so members of the local community could make offerings to the spirit of Ximen Bao. Stories of quelling river spirits were not uncommon from the Warring States and Han periods, and they affirmed the same message about the state’s relationship to nature as did Ban Gu’s “Dili zhi”: that state

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administration, not natural phenomena or local customs rooted in natural phenomena, should order the structures of the earth. The river spirits were embodiments of the river itself, its natural processes, local scale, and destructive tendencies. In slaying this imagined embodiment, like the ancient Cifei 佽非 of Jing 荊, officials demonstrated great virtue in “safeguarding” (shou 守) the river so that “from this time on there were rarely any more disasters” 自後罕有所患矣.137 In contrast to subduing divine beings, which was an otherworldly approach to managing the threatening nature of the river, the physical construction of waterworks was a this-worldly approach to mitigating its destructive tendencies. It transformed riverine areas into usable spaces for human activity. Stories abound in the Shuijing zhu of lands that “constantly had floods” 常有水患 but were then made safe through public works projects to block out, store up, and channel through the unpredictably excessive or insufficient supply of water.138 This process is clearly described in a memorial to the throne from Sima Fu 司馬孚 (d. 272), prince of Anping, who had been sent to Yewang 野王 District (in modern Henan) as agriculture office leader of court gentlemen (diannong zhonglang 典農中郎) to assess the local waterworks. After an inspection of the Qin 沁 River and the dangers that it posed, he memorialized the throne requesting laborers from the Grand Agricultural Administration to aid in the construction of a sluice. He reported that the headwater area was a land of “layered cliffs and lofty peaks” 層‌巖 高‌峻 with “continuous rain” 霖雨, creating “rapidly flowing ­water” 走‌水 that washed away all embankments of wood and small stones. He proposed that a sluice be built with large stones that had been discovered nearby. “Then, if the weather is severely dry, we will expand the embankment to channel the water. But, if the weather is continuously raining and the wetlands are overflowing, then we will close the dike and cut off the water so that the empty canal will fill with water sufficient to make a river” 若天暘旱，增堰進水，若天霖雨，陂澤充溢，則閉防斷 水，空渠衍澇，足以成河. Sima Fu concluded his report with an appeal to the moral imperative of the state to protect its subjects from these natural disasters: “Royal favors bestowed upon the people; this is a plan for the ordering of the state. Temporary labor that brings perpetual ease; this is the kind of thing that a sagely king approves” 雲‌雨由‌人，經 國之謀，暫勞永逸，聖王所許.139

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Once the river was tamed by waterworks projects, life and prosperity along the river were realized through irrigation. Irrigation was the norm for the Yellow River basin and had been for a long time by the early medieval period. The irrigation projects in the uplands of Guanzhong and Sichuan built by the Qin state are the most prominent in the Shuijing zhu, but many other such projects were described.140 Accounts consistently articulate how irrigation projects transformed the landscape, resulting in the expansion of tens of thousands of acres of “cultivated fields” (tian 田) and transforming the land into “fertile soil” (worang 沃壤). The Yizhou ji’s description of the massive irrigation project in Shu during the Qin dynasty especially emphasizes the human transformation of the Sichuan landscape. “Now flood and drought obey humankind. People do not know famine, and fertile lands extend thousands of miles. People today call it ‘a sea of land’ [i.e., land that is as productive as the sea]; they also call it ‘the storehouse of heaven’” 水旱從人，不知饑饉，沃野千里，世號陸海，謂之天 府也.141 Note that this “storehouse of heaven” was the same land on which Li Bing had battled the dangerous river gods in order to make safe the construction of dikes and irrigation. Only after both taming the river and completing the waterworks projects could such prosperity be enjoyed. Thus, the state was pivotal in the transformation of rivers into zones of safety and prosperity, even in the Shuijing zhu with its spatial schema that generally decentered the state. Yet in these state-led transformations, the Shuijing zhu focuses, once again, on the local aspects of this story—that is, on the local governor. In some of the aforementioned accounts, the central court and its resources played an impor­ tant role. One anecdote notes, for example, the importance of having the minister of public works (sikong 司空) be someone “fond of study and skilled at many things, adept at managing water control” 好學多 藝，善能治水.142 But provincial governors were the link between local communities and the world-empire, and in the Shuijing zhu it was these provincial governors, men like Li Bing, who were the heroes of waterworks projects. The prominence of local administrators in the Shuijing zhu is largely influenced by Li Daoyuan’s regular use of steles as primary sources. It was a common practice for members of local elites to erect

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steles in honor of governors who constructed large waterworks projects in their locality. These steles would begin by identifying the governor’s name and titles and then proceed to describe the problems of either flooding or drought, the accessing of imperial resources, the construction process, and the thousands of now-fertile fields made available through his meritorious service. The steles sometimes explicitly spoke of the governor’s calling down of resources from the imperial capital— occasionally quoting the actual memorial that he wrote to the court in order to obtain the laborers and funds necessary for the project.143 But it was the governor, not the emperor, who received the credit in the eyes of the local community. “[The governor] fixed the embankments to make it flow without obstruction, in order to correct the waterway. His meritorious achievement was complete, and the people praised and put their trust in him” 脩防排通，以正水路，功績有成，民用嘉賴. Other steles repeat a similar refrain: “The people relied on the benefits [of the waterworks] and eulogized him on engraved stone” 民賴其利，刻石 頌‌之. “The people relied on its usefulness . . . and commoners sang about it” 民賴其用 . . . 百姓歌之.144 These steles were paid for and erected by local elites, a physical manifestation of mutually advantageous relationships between imperially appointed local officials and local community leaders, between imperial state and local society. Finally, the maintenance of these waterworks projects was interpreted as a moral imperative of the state. Especially in the Yellow River basin, canals were in need of regular dredging to prevent them from silting up. Li Daoyuan recorded numerous cases of canals having already run dry: “Even though sand banks have completely clogged [the canal], remnants of it still exist” 沙漲填塞，厥迹尚存.145 Although the lack of infrastructural maintenance could be explained by the limited resources and labor force of a state stretched thin by competing crises, moral explanations were more prevalent than this economic rationale. Either way, ecological disasters undermined confidence in the state. But, when waterworks were maintained, memorials and stele inscriptions would consistently praise the successes of the state. As his memorial described, Sima Fu affirmed that investing in waterworks projects was a sign of a true sage-king. Elsewhere it is stated that successful waterworks brought “enduring praise for a humane government” 遐慕仁政.146 The connection between water and good governance

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is encapsulated in a peculiar phenomenon of the Nü River 女水: “It surely had a spirit in it. When cultural transformation is flourishing, the river comes to life. But, when government is shallow, the river is exhausted” 甚有神焉，化隆則水生，政薄則津竭.147

Conclusion Like other forms of geographical writing with a spatially structured text, early medieval natural geographies were able to assemble information and anecdotes from a wide range of literary and nonliterary sources. They could therefore present a more multifaceted and complex depiction of the natural world than any one of these sources could on its own. In particular, natural geographies combined both natural and human structures of the earth into a single account. By presenting both together and prioritizing the natural, an intimate, interactive, and reciprocal relationship between the two structures is constantly implied and sometimes explicitly explained. Natural qi from the environment shaped local customs, but human influences from civilization, the imperial state, or even local worthies could transform those customs. Rivers could destroy cities, and armies could move rivers. Hot springs could heal people, but human immorality could render the healing power of hot springs inert. The hydrocultural metageography depicted a relationship between the natural and human worlds that transformed each of these worlds in a dynamic and dialectic process that was vital to the flourishing of each. Although human geography would make up the majority of the content of the Shuijing zhu, it was the structuring natural geography that was more primal, foundational, and enduring. Natural geographies present a fundamentally different vision of the world from that of the imperial metageography. Even local geographies, with their threatening localistic orientation, uphold the anthropocentric perspective and administrative units of imperial metageography. Li Daoyuan’s hydrocultural metageography, in contrast, entirely decenters the state. It relocates the world center from the most powerful city (the imperial capital) to the highest mountain (Mount Kunlun), and it restructures political units of states and provinces into drainage basins. It thereby incorporates foreign lands on an equal footing, effaces the

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inner and outer dichotomy of imperial metageography, and highlights regional difference within the Sinitic ecumene. It surpasses the imperial metageography at both the local and global spatial extremes. Rather than merely dismissing environmentally derived local customs as something to be corrected or transcended by imperial elite culture, the hydrocultural metageography uses the concept of custom to link the foundational natural landscape to the complex and expansive cultural structures of human geography. Within this hydrocultural framework, descriptions of rivers in geographical literature focus on the tension of rivers as both providers and takers of life. Rivers were naturally dangerous—powerful, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. They were homes to divine beings with different goals from those of humans. But rivers provided an essential element to life and sometimes even had healing powers. If a river was tamed or managed correctly, its vital natural endowment could be put to work for humans. Agricultural fertility and prosperity could be achieved through waterworks projects. But the river’s lethal natural endowment could also be put to work for humans, for purposes of executions, suicides, and sieges. Although the notion of domesticating nature fits generally into the imperial metageography, Li Daoyuan’s approach emphasizes (1) the pivotal role of local officials and great families in the managing of rivers and (2) the continuing resistance of nature to being controlled for human purposes. The Yellow and the Yangzi Rivers were very different kinds of rivers, threatening distinct kinds of dangers and requiring discrete kinds of management technologies. But each affirmed, in its own way, this tension between its vital and violent natural endowments. Mountains, in contrast, were liminal spaces, boundaries between the seen and unseen realms. As such, they defied the normative standards of lowland civilization. This created a spatial antipathy between numinous mountains and normative lowlands. Humans could ascend a mountain in order to gain access to its numinous environments and divine inhabitants. They could also ascend a mountain in order to escape normal human society with its coercive state, civilizational standards, continuous warfare, corrupt court, and immoral practices. Mountains therefore created boundaries to sociopolitical order, dividing civilized society into drainage basins, both within the Sinitic ecumene

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and beyond. But, as boundaries, these liminal mountains created a multivalent space of marginalized groups of people, including monks, transcendents, worshipers, criminals, bandits, barbarians, recluses, and refugees—groups traditionally excluded from normative society and the official histories that reaffirm that sociopolitical order. These disaffected mountain dwellers are far more important to understanding Sinitic civilization than imperial officials would have us believe, both in their own right and for what they reveal about the imperial state. As James Scott observes, “State-making cannot be understood apart from . . . the history of those who got away.” Mountains were “the pole of comparison” for the normative, civilized world and “at the same time, the antidote.”148 The hydrocultural model is a metageography that highlights the spaces in which these mountain actors lived and worked. It is useful, therefore, in histories that seek to illuminate the con­ tributions of these marginalized groups of people to Sinitic civilization.

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East and West

E

mbedded within the hydrocultural metageography of the Shuijing zhu is a second organizing metageography: an Indo-Sinitic bipolar world model. Building on earlier fifth-century syncretistic conflations of Mount Kunlun with Mount Anavatapta, Li Daoyuan was able to synthesize Sinitic and Buddhist geographies into a hydrologically structured world model that was internally consistent and spatially all-encompassing. From Mount Kunlun/Anavatapta (which he located somewhere around the Tibetan Plateau), the great rivers of the earth issued forth, creating a consistent hydrological system that connected the world into a single organizing structure, but also dividing it between (south)eastward and (north)westward flowing halves. This topographical-hydrological division laid the foundation for a cultural divide between the Indic ecumene in the west and the Sinitic ecumene in the east.1 These two ecumenes had parallel “central realms” (Ch. zhongguo; Skt. madhyadeśa), each with its own distinctive high culture, spatial markers, and cultural and political peripheries surrounding it. Although Li Daoyuan did not explicitly lay out an Indo-Sinitic bipolar metageography in his preface (the way he did with his hydrocultural metageography), the Indo-Sinitic model is a clear outgrowth of the hydrocultural framework. In both, mountains separate and rivers connect human communities and cultures. Li Daoyuan was explicit in his critiques of other so-called world geographies for not truly being all-encompassing. He was explicit in his equation of Mount Kunlun

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and Mount Anavatapta, an equation that forms the linchpin connecting Sinitic and Buddhist geographies. Furthermore, he cited several sources that explicitly asserted a parallelism between Indic and Sinitic civilizations. Thus, the Indo-Sinitic bipolar model is an etic label for a metageography that was operative in Li Daoyuan’s work and was apparent in explicit and implicit statements in the text itself. The intentionality of this grand synthetic metageography and the importance that Li Daoyuan placed on Kunlun and the western lands are evident in how he superseded the spatial confines of this base text (the Shui­ jing) in order to include these lands. He transformed a terse fifty-onecharacter statement about the source of the Yellow River into an exhaustive nearly 6,700-character description of the natural, supernatural, and human geography of Kunlun and the Western Regions. This account of the West was far more than a mere appendage on some peripheral frontier lands.2 Because of the geographic isolation of Sinitic civilization from the other core civilizations of Eurasia (which are, themselves, far less isolated from each other than they are from East Asia), Sinitic civilization grew up thinking of itself not as a civilization (among others) but as the civilization (incomparable and absolute). This assumption was justifiable throughout the ancient period, when none of its immediate neighbors demonstrated literacy or a social organization of comparable size and complexity. But this foundational idea of “Chinese exceptionalism” survived in literature and political rhetoric long after it was demonstrably untrue. Imperial and nationalistic metageographies preserved this idea because it served their goals of achieving unity through asserting exceptionalism. Indic civilization posed the first great challenge to Sinitic literati’s exclusive claim to civilization, especially in the late fourth through sixth centuries as descriptions of India infiltrated Sinitic literature. With its institutional religion; sophisticated philosophy; refined literature; intensive agriculture; and large cities, states, and empires, India matched Sinitic achievements on all the defining markers of civilization (or even surpassed them, as some at the time argued).3 Thus, at the same time that political fragmentation undermined the imperial claim to unity, new geographical knowledge about India undermined the imperial claim to centrality and universality. Li Daoyuan’s Indo-Sinitic

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bipolar worldview can therefore be understood as an attempt to salvage the spatial concept of the Sinitic central realm in the face of mounting empirical counterevidence. By subordinating the Sinitic central realm to Mount Kunlun and balancing it against the Indic central realm to the west, he was able to incorporate new geographical knowledge, encom­ pass an expanded vision of the world, and still preserve the centrality of the Yellow River plain over at least the eastern Sinitic half of the world. In so doing, he asserted the superiority of the Tabgatch empire that controlled the Central Plains (and which Li Daoyuan served) over its primary cultural rival in East Asia, the Jiankang empire.4

Grand Objective or Minor Interests In attempting to write a geography that was true to his espoused goal of being “all-encompassing in scope” and “complete in detail,” Li Dao­ yuan faced several epistemological problems. These problems center on two themes: (1) the lack of sources describing the complexity of natural and human geography, and (2) the disagreement between sources when they did exist. Li Daoyuan was conscious of these problems, often noting his scant and contradictory evidence. The Shuijing zhu employs a consistent pattern in dealing with these epistemological problems: it synthesizes on the grand structural scale and juxtaposes at the smaller scale of details. This strategy allowed him to include a vast array of contradictory sources without their undermining the cohesiveness of his grand synthesizing structure. Because these epistemological problems were especially pronounced in the less-­familiar Western Regions (as recorded in the first and second fascicles of the text), it was here and in his preface that Li Daoyuan revealed his under­ standing and resolution of these problems most clearly. Li Daoyuan attributed much of the missing and contradictory ­evidence to the complexity, imperceptibility, and changeability of the structures of the earth. Although his hydrological foundation was far more enduring than ephemeral human structures, he acknowledged that even waterways changed their courses. Because waterways formed his organizing structure, he was especially attentive to these complications. Li Daoyuan commented that river systems reach everywhere,

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forming an intricate network of intertwining and crisscrossing paths that were “surely difficult to differentiate and investigate” 固難辨究.5 Some rivers were mistaken for others. “What is apparent does not necessarily exist, and what is hidden is not necessarily nonexistent” 存非為有，隱非為無.6 Generalizing this problem of imperceptibility, he stated that “the obscure principles are abstruse and subtle; it is difficult to get to the bottom of the actual conditions. The myriad phenomena are so distant and deep that our contemplations are cut off when their roots are sought after” 幽致沖妙，難本以情，萬像遐淵，思絕根 尋.7 The fact that the structures of the earth changed over time complicated Li Daoyuan’s task still further. “The distant past is dim and obscure,” he reported. “Civilized and barbarian peoples have alternated in an unbroken fashion. Cities and towns empty and collapse; waterways change their course, taking on unique names and distinct labels. So in every generation such things are different” 綿古芒昧，華戎代 襲，郭邑空傾，川流戕改，殊名異目，世乃不同.8 His sources were there­ fore limited and contradictory. Nowhere in Li Daoyuan’s account are his sources more limited and contradictory than in his attempt to construct a coherent account of Mount Kunlun and the Western Regions. The problems of Kunlun and the West acted as an irritant that forced these epistemological issues to the surface of his metanarrative. “These several accounts are all different,” Li Daoyuan complained, because “the way is obstructed and far, and records were lost a long time ago. Routes along water and land are distinct, and the paths back and forth are not the same” 數‌說 不同，道阻且長，經記綿褫，水陸路殊，徑復不同.9 Hence “there are different places with the same names. These designations are all confused and are not few in number” 同名異域，稱謂相亂，亦不為‌寡.10 In his preface, he criticized other texts for being too scanty on details, too limited in scope, and too contradictory. “Even after thoroughly understanding the Twelve Classics,” he bemoaned, “there are still some things that are difficult to describe”《十二經》通，尚或難言.11 Li Dao­ yuan’s account of Kunlun is an especially good place to examine his methodology, because the place was especially problematic but also very important—though far away it was also the center point of Li Dao­ yuan’s world model.

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Before explaining how Li Daoyuan went about reconciling his sources on Kunlun, let us take a closer look at the kinds of sources he was trying to reconcile. It is helpful to divide the various sources into three categories: anomaly accounts, imperial records, and Buddhist geographies. Each of these categories had its own literary style and cul­tural objectives. Each located and defined the center of the world by different standards. They also differed in their use of either extraor­ dinary or empirical descriptions, aiming to either astound or normalize. The first of these three categories of texts on the West features anomaly accounts of Kunlun as the axis mundi, the residence of a whole range of spiritual beings and all sorts of fantastical phenomena.12 The authors of these texts, although purportedly describing things as they really were, did not base their accounts on empirical experience but on imagined tales of a wondrous and faraway land. These accounts described Kunlun as inhabited by bizarre and divine beings, and they situate Kunlun (not the Central Plains) as the center of the earth.13 Second, imperial geographies record the earliest empirical accounts of these western lands.14 These accounts normalize the West into the human realm but assert the West’s political and cultural marginality and backwardness. They affirm the purpose of imperial geographies to demonstrate the centrality of the imperial court and the universal rule of the Son of Heaven. They show the limitless diversity of his subjects and justify tributary relations with or imperial expansion over barbarian kingdoms. Thus, Sinocentrism is affirmed, but the foundation of experiential and firsthand evidence consistently contradicts anomaly accounts.15 The third category of texts on the West is Buddhist geographies. These texts balanced a depiction of the West as both this-worldly and otherworldly. They describe the life and traces of the Buddha, miracles, and sacred sites—building on the tradition of anomaly accounts and their awe-inspiring depictions of foreign lands. But Buddhist geographies were also empirical, usually having been written by people who had traveled personally through these lands. The tone shifts from depicting these lands as strange to describing them as special, supporting faith in this new religion. At the same time, religious phenomena were embedded within a particular human society that was normalized by

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these firsthand accounts. Western society was depicted as surprisingly similar to that of the Sinitic ecumene. These accounts, although largely firsthand, were still contextualized within a uniquely Buddhist metageography that centered the world on South Asia rather than East Asia.16 How did Li Daoyuan deal with the abundant contradictions of his varied sources about a faraway land? Sometimes he went to great efforts to resolve them, and at other times he did not. A reasonably consistent heuristic becomes evident as one examines both his textual practices and his terse metacomments. As a general rule, at the scale of grand structures that order his vision of the world, he worked very hard and was quite successful at constructing consistency and unity.17 The smaller scale of distances, nomenclature, and other such details was a lesser priority. He sometimes reconciled contradictions involving such details but more commonly merely juxtaposed inconsistencies in the sources. On the difficulty of identifying the correct distance of Mount Kunlun from the Yellow River plain, he modestly stated that he could “do nothing more than just describe what I have heard and seen and in doing so record differences and contradictions” 不能不聊述聞見，以 誌差違也.18 Such examples of juxtaposing without resolving contradictory sources in the Shuijing zhu are abundant, and his comments on his inability to resolve these competing sources appear frequently.19 But this attention to geographical factoids—by both Li Daoyuan and most modern Sinologists—has distracted scholarship from the considerable accomplishment of Li Daoyuan’s synthetic organizing structure. He did far more than just append geographical information to the Shuijing text. He took its hydrological structure, expanded it into new spaces, and spent considerable effort evaluating contradictory sources on rivers to construct a consistent, coherent, and comprehensive hydrological structure. The hydrology had to be right because e­ verything else (no matter how varied the sources or contradictory the information) had to be cataloged and presented according to these waterways. Besides his own resolving of contradictions, Li Daoyuan’s methodology is apparent in several metacomments he made about other geographical texts. In his preface, Li Daoyuan evaluated past works according to the standards of being both “all-encompassing in scope” and “complete in detail.”20 One without the other was insufficient. In his

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first fascicle Li Daoyuan reproved another writer for violating the precise methodology that I have just outlined. The author did not, Li Dao­ yuan wrote, “trace to the root the numerous endpoints of the grand objective [of his sources], but presented instead things of minor interest just to single out their errors” 根其眾歸之鴻致，陳其細趣，以辨其 非，非所安也.21 In other words, by focusing on the contradictions in trivial details, the author had lost sight of the more pivotal overarching pattern. For Li Daoyuan, copious geographic minutiae had little significance without being organized within a comprehensive spatial structure. This metacritique aligns well with Li Daoyuan’s practice of prioritizing his efforts at resolving contradictions for his grand organizing structure. Another way in which Li Daoyuan synthesized at the grand scale and juxtaposed at the small scale is his spatialization of distinct literary genres. Maps 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3, respectively, reveal how Li Daoyuan especially used anomaly accounts to describe the Kunlun region, imperial records to describe the Tarim basin, and Buddhist geographies to describe India.22 Because each genre focused on different spaces and different kinds of details, Li Daoyuan could rely on the genre that was dominant for that region and mostly not have to negotiate intergenre differences within these prescribed regional units. This regional separation was not absolute, but it did, whether intentionally or not, ameliorate the large-scale contradictions in the worldviews inherent in each of these three genres. Admittedly, contradictions remained, but these were mostly intragenre contradictions that represented differences in details rather than in the grand metageography. One thing all the texts agreed on was the inescapably prominent Tibetan Plateau as an important spatial marker for situating their own respective spaces. With this point as a linchpin, intragenre details could remain unresolved without undermining the grand organizing structure. Although this methodology of grand-scale synthesis and smallscale juxtaposition is especially apparent in Li Daoyuan’s account of the West, this metageography is employed throughout the rest of his work as well. The West brings the issue to the fore because of its importance to his structuring metageography, the considerable limitations in his sources, and the relatively tidy boundaries around these three distinct genres. Although his account of the heartland of Sinitic

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[COM

[COM

[COM

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Map 5.1.  Number of citations from anomaly accounts on the West quoted in Shuijing zhu (per 10,000 citations, by drainage basin).

Map 5.2.  Number of citations from imperial sources on the West quoted in Shuijing zhu (per 10,000 citations, by drainage basin).

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Map 5.3.  Number of citations from Buddhist geographies on the West quoted in Shuijing zhu (per 10,000 citations, by drainage basin).

civilization drew from far more numerous texts and presented far more reliable details, the general methodological approach remains the same. Inconsistent and unknowable details abounded but did not undermine the metageography of the text. The text’s overarching structure worked as a container that could hold contradictory information. As long as this container remained watertight, the Shuijing zhu would remain useful and meaningful.

Center of the Earth The opening line of the Shuijing asserts unambiguously the center of the world and the spatial relationship of the Yellow River plain to it. “Mount Kunlun is in the northwest. It is 50,000 li from Mount Song

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and is the center of the earth” 崑崙墟在西北，去嵩高五萬里，地之 中也.23 This was by no means an uncontested claim. According to most Sinitic worldviews, the area of Luoyang or nearby Mount Song marked the center of the earth. Luoyang was the canonically prescribed Eastern Han capital—as well as the capital of the subsequent Jin and Tabgatch empires. Mount Song was the central peak of the five marchmounts and part of the “Central Mountains” of the Shanhai jing. Either the mountain, the capital adjacent to it, or the “Central Plains” (Zhongyuan 中原, i.e., the Yellow River plain) surrounding them marked the center of the world according to most traditional geographies.24 Although Kunlun had long been recognized as the terrestrial habitation of powerful deities, the idea of it as the center of the earth was usually sidelined by the imperial metageography, which required the centrality of the capital in the empire and the conflation of the empire with the world (tianxia). According to Sinocentric models, Kunlun was situated in the distant West, a marker (paired with the Isles of the Immortals in the distant East) of the most extreme peripheries of the world, where the normative boundaries between gods, men, and animals blurred.25 Given the profound influence of imperial geographic paradigms, this assertion in the Shuijing was politically charged, and Li Daoyuan had to defend it. The innovative strength of his defense was in synthesizing certain native Sinitic conceptualizations of a non-Sinocentric world with new accounts of the world from Buddhist literature. Through syncretistic conflations and convenient misinterpretations, Li Daoyuan synthesized a model of the world centered on a cosmic mountain that was inhabited by great deities, that was situated halfway between Sinitic and Indic civilizations, and that was the source of the great rivers of the world. Li Daoyuan’s argument for Kunlun’s centrality prioritized topographical and spiritual structures over cultural and political structures. The Kunlun-centered model of the earth had long been the primary alternative to the court-centered Han imperial metageography within Sinitic spatial theory. The earliest articulation of Mount Kunlun as the center of the earth is Zou Yan’s Great Continents model. In this worldview, the earth was made up of nine great continents in a threeby-three grid. The central great continent, called the Red District (Chi­ xian 赤縣), was similarly divided into another three-by-three grid. At

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the center position of the Red District grid rested Mount Kunlun, and in its southeast corner lay the central realm (the Sinitic homeland), called the Divine Continent of the Red District (Chixian shenzhou 赤縣 神州). The nine regions of the “Yu gong,” according to this theory, were merely one of eighty-one such divisions of the world. This worldview figures prominently in the Huainanzi and prophetic apocrypha (chenwei 讖緯) texts of the Han period. Although it never gained canonical status, this world model was employed regularly throughout the Han by those who espoused a wider vision of the world or who sought to challenge the dominance of the Confucian tradition. They pointed out the spatial limitations of the clas­ sical “Yu gong” in light of recently discovered lands far beyond the traditional nine regions—thereby undermining the appeal to canonical texts as the ultimate source of knowledge (especially geographical knowledge).26 Li Daoyuan never cited Zou Yan directly, but he made considerable use of the Han dynasty expression of Zou Yan’s ideas (the Huainanzi and chenwei texts) as he argued for Mount Kunlun as the spiritual and topographical center of the earth. Through syncretizing this worldview with new Buddhist geographies, Li Daoyuan presented a convincing account of the world, the center of which was far removed from the Sinitic “Central Plains.”

Topographical Apex and Hydrological Source The physical centrality of Kunlun in the natural world was asserted primarily through two ideas. First, the most central point on earth was also the highest in elevation—a mountain so high it could reach the heavens. Second, this supremely high mountain was the source of the greatest rivers of the earth. These rivers spread out from this central point, flowed through the myriad states of the earth, and emptied into the four seas that circumscribed the land. These two ideas were related, since all rivers “flow all the way through, conforming to the landscape as they descend to lower places.”27 For these physical qualities, Li Dao­ yuan made Mount Kunlun the center point of his primary organizing structure. Kunlun was imagined to be an enormous mountain, including multiple layers of peaks. Accounts of its height ranged from the vague

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“myriad fathoms” (wan ren 萬仞); to the incredible 11,000 li; to the very precise 1,000 li, 114 paces, three feet, and six inches.28 Although these imagined measurements varied considerably, the message was the same: Kunlun was astronomically high, sufficiently elevated to reach the heavens. Several accounts describe Kunlun as a series of mountain peaks, although they are inconsistent about how these multiple peaks fit together. Many accounts report a mountain of three layers, each increasing in height, and each with its own name and peak.29 Others describe Kunlun being connected to or made up of three or four peaks at the cardinal directions.30 This multiplicity of peaks that are somehow part of a greater Kunlun mountain complex allowed Li Dao­ yuan the flexibility to equate or associate various places with Kunlun or its nearby surroundings. In so doing, he consolidated disparate accounts of mythic, spiritual, topographical, and hydrological centers of the world into a single, encompassing central mountain complex. Mount Kunlun’s topographical centrality in the world was also asserted through the idea that Kunlun was the hydrological center, the source from which the great rivers of the earth spread outward. Although the details on this idea varied from source to source, Li Dao­ yuan assembled them in a way that emphasized two consistent ele­ments: atop or near Kunlun there was some sort of numinous spring or pool, and the greatest rivers of the world flowed from this pool. As will be discussed later, this particular collection of details about Kunlun matched nicely the Buddhist geography of Anavatapta Pool feeding the great rivers of the continent of Jambudvipa. The preeminence of the Yellow River in Sinitic civilization is hard to overstate, and it was therefore essential in Li Daoyuan’s structures of the earth for the Yellow River to be connected to the world’s hydrological center point. Li Daoyuan cited several sources affirming that the Yellow River was “the most senior of all rivers” (shui zhi bo 水之伯) and “the highest and farthest” 最高而長 of East Asia’s four great rivers (sidu 四瀆).31 It was a longstanding idea, although not undisputed, that the source of the Yellow River was indeed at Mount Kunlun. The Erya (Approaching elegance), Mu Tianzi zhuan, Shanhai jing, and Huainanzi all make this claim.32 But the canonically recognized “Yu gong”—not cited by Li Daoyuan—states that the Yellow River’s source was at Mount Jishi 積石, a much closer mountain just west of the Ordos

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Bend.33 To resolve the contradiction, Li Daoyuan relied on Gao You’s 高誘 (ca. 168–212) commentary to the Huainanzi, which explains that “the Yellow River emerges from Mount Kunlun, but it then flows under­ ground for 13,000 li. Yu guided and cleared a way through for it. Then it emerges from Mount Jishi” 河出崑山，伏流地中萬三千里，禹導而 通之，出積石山.34 Li Daoyuan thereby, with his characteristic synthesizing tendencies, could reconcile the correctness of both sources. For the organizing structure of his text, he accepted Gao You’s explanation and traced the upper reaches of the Yellow River from Kunlun, through the Tarim basin, into the inland sea of Puchang 蒲昌, through a subterranean channel from the bottom of Puchang to the top of Mount Jishi, and finally (once atop the earth’s surface again) around the Ordos Bend and through the Yellow River plain.35 Although Kunlun was described in a number of sources as containing gardens, wells, springs, pools, and riverheads, the Huainanzi provided Li Daoyuan the most complete and coherent description of Kunlun hydrology. The account begins with a description of a paradisiacal forest atop Kunlun with colorful trees of pearl, jade, and gemstone, as well as a tree of immortality. Next to the forest were a series of gates, and next to the gates were nine wells. This is the Dredged Garden. The pools of the Dredged Garden flow with yellow water. The yellow water circles three times around its source. This is called the Cinnabar River; if you drink it, you will not die. The Yellow River issues from its [Kunlun’s] northeast corner. The Vermillion River issues from its southeast corner. [The Weak-Water River issues from the southwest corner.] The Yang River issues from its northwest corner. All four rivers [originate from] the sacred springs of God-on-High, from which can be concocted the hundred medicines and from which come benefits to the myriad things.36 是其疏圃，疏圃之池，浸之黃水，黃水三周復其源，是謂丹水，飲之不 死。河水出其東北陬，赤水出其東南陬，[弱水出其西南陬]，洋水出其 西北陬，凡此四水，帝之神泉，以和百藥，以潤萬物。

Although the number, names, and orientation of the rivers issuing from the peaks of Kunlun varied in classical literature, the basic spatial structure was reasonably consistent.37 From the enormous heights of a

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central mountain, the great rivers of the earth issue forth. They spread across the entire earth, “benefiting the myriad things” and eventually making their way to the outer seas. Li Daoyuan did not make a rigor­ ous attempt to resolve the differences in accounts conclusively. What was important for his geographical structure was the remarkable consistency among Sinitic and Buddhist sources on this basic hydrological structure of the earth. For a geographer who wanted to structure space through the tracing of waterways, establishing this origin point was of the utmost importance. It marked the center of his spatial structure and the beginning of his sequential narrative.

Nexus between Heaven and Earth In most accounts of Kunlun, it was its numinous qualities that were of prime importance. In contrast, for Li Daoyuan these qualities were of secondary significance, but important nonetheless. The divine centrality of Mount Kunlun was asserted through its role as the link between heaven and earth. It was the site for the terrestrial courts of the most powerful deities, the epicenter of a spiritual bureaucracy on earth, and a path to immortality for those who could ascend it. Most mountains were understood in Sinitic mythology to be the dwelling place of spiritual beings, but Kunlun stood apart as the preeminent peak. Although none of these ideas was new, Li Daoyuan did assemble them together into a spectacular concentration of divine presence on earth. According to Li Daoyuan, Kunlun was the terrestrial capital of the most powerful celestial beings. In the very first line of his commentary on the mountain, he asserted that the third of the three layers that make up Mount Kunlun “is also called the Celestial Court” 一名天庭, where the “Supreme God-on-High resides” 太帝之居. This god’s presence atop Kunlun and that of his palace or “lower capital” (xiadu 下‌都) were repeatedly affirmed throughout this section.38 From this lower capital, “the god Luwu presides over the nine departments of heaven” 其神陸吾，是司天之九部.39 Also atop Kunlun were the Palace of the Yellow Emperor 黃帝之宮 and the Burial Mound of the Lord of Thunder Fenglong 雷公豐隆之葬.40 Directly connected to the source of the Yellow River was the capital of the Yellow River Earl Fengyi at the Deep Pool of the Central Ultimate 中極之淵.41 The Queen Mother of the

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West also figured prominently in Li Daoyuan’s description of Kunlun, drawing from the Mu Tianzi zhuan and the later third-century descriptions in the Shizhou ji 十洲記 and the Shenyi jing 神異經. Her palace had “the Watchtower of Profound Essence, the Hall of Splendid Jade, the Chamber of Beautiful Gems, and a cinnabar room of purple and green. Grand candles shine like the sun, and vermilion clouds reflect all the colors. This is where the Queen Mother of the West rules, where perfected officials and transcendent spirits revere her” 淵精之闕，光碧 之堂，瓊華之室，紫翠丹房，景燭日暉，朱霞九光，西王母之所治，真 官仙靈之所宗. Perched atop the Celestial Pillar on Kunlun was a giant bird on whose back the Queen Mother of the West would ride to the King Lord of the East as a symbolic confluence of yin and yang forces.42 Besides these powerful deities, Kunlun was also the residence of a plethora of other divine beings, including various kinds of spirits, dragons, sages, transcendents, and perfected beings. It was “the place where a hundred spirits reside” 百神之所在, and “all living and inanimate things that are special and extraordinary are at this place. The heavenly beings are so numerous they cannot all be recorded” 品物群 生， 希奇特出，皆在于此，天人濟濟，不可具記.43 These lesser beings sometimes functioned as attendants to or administrators for the higher gods, but many accounts describe them simply as residing on Kunlun. The celestial qualities of this terrestrial palace were reinforced by its cosmological centrality. “It penetrates upward to the second and third stars of the Big Dipper, and primal qi spreads forth from it. The constant pattern of the fifth star of the Big Dipper directs the Nine Heavens and harmonizes yin and yang” 上通旋機，元氣流布，玉衡常 理，順九天而調陰陽.44 Relevant but not quoted in the Shuijing zhu is the affirmation of Kunlun’s divine inhabitants and cosmic centrality from the Bowu zhi 博物志 (Records of diverse matters): “It is where spiritual beings are born and where sages and transcendents gather. . . . The center of this mountain accords with heaven. It resides at the very center. Eighty walls encircle it. The central realm is at its southeast corner” 神物之所生，聖人仙人之所集. . . . 期山中應於天，最居中，八 十城布繞之，中國東南隅.45 These cosmological connections led to a clear articulation that Kunlun was a pathway to the heavens and that ascending it was a process of apotheosis. Myths of Hou Yi 后羿 the archer, King Mu of Zhou,

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and Han Emperor Wu have long associated Mount Kunlun with the pursuit of immortality. It was believed that atop this mountain one could obtain immortality-granting waters, trees, elixirs, documents, or charts.46 The Shuijing zhu, aligning the topographical and divine qualities of Mount Kunlun, quotes from the Huainanzi’s narrative of ascension as deification. “As for Mount Kunlun, if one ascends twice as high, this [peak] is called the Cool Wind Mountain. If one climbed to it, he would become immortal. If one ascended twice as high again, this [peak] is called Hanging Garden Mountain. If one climbed to it, he would become numinous and would be able to control the wind and the rain. If one ascended twice as high again, it reaches up to heaven itself. If he climbed to it, he would then become divine. This place is called the Abode of the Supreme God-on-High” 崑崙之丘或上倍 之，‌是謂涼風之山，登之而不死；或上倍之，是謂玄圃之山，登之乃 靈，能使風雨；或上倍之，乃 維上天，登之乃神，是謂太帝之居.47 As a link between heaven and earth, Kunlun was not only the conduit through which celestial beings could make terrestrial habitation, but it was also the path by which humans could access the divine, gain immortality, and ascend into heavenly realms. Although not the primary focus of Li Daoyuan’s description of Kunlun, its numinous qualities served two purposes. First, they reaffirmed the centrality of the mountain on the earth, and, second, they paralleled the wondrous qualities of Buddhism’s central mountains.

Equating Anavatapta and Kunlun Li Daoyuan’s hydrology-based and Kunlun-centered metageography was strengthened by the remarkable consistency between traditional Sinitic geographies and newly introduced Buddhist geographies. Li Daoyuan developed this syncretistic conflation in two ways. Most straightforwardly, he cited earlier works that had already explicitly equated Mount Kunlun with Mount Anavatapta—Kang Tai’s third-­ century Funan zhuan 扶南傳 (Account of Funan) and Master Monk’s (Shi­shi 釋氏) fourth-century Xiyu ji 西域記 (Record of the Western ­Regions). More subtly, he compiled descriptions of Kunlun and Ana­ vatapta in such a way so as to highlight similarities. Indeed, the seemingly self-evident resemblance between these two mountains was

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the product of Li Dao­y uan’s careful curation of details from Sinitic and Buddhist literature that worked favorably for his syncretistic comparison. Buddhist conceptualizations of world geography first entered the Sinitic ecumene, in a limited way, through Sanskrit sutras. The earliest description in Sinitic script was probably introduced in Daoan’s 道‌安 (d. 385) fourth-century work the Sihai baichuan shuiyuan ji 四海百川 水源‌記 (Record of the sources of the hundred rivers within the four seas). Although this work does not survive, given the title and Daoan’s familiarity with Sanskrit texts, Cao Shibang (Tso Sze-bong) has argued that it was a presentation of Buddhist hydrological geography, reasonably consistent with extant Sinitic accounts from later periods.48 The first extant description comes from the fifth-century translation of the Chang ahan jing 長阿含經 (Dīrghāgama). In this account, cosmology and geography were not separate. Rather, the earth was physically connected to heavens and hells as well as a myriad other worlds, each with identical geographies that combined to make one great chiliocosm (sanqian daqian shijie 三千大千世界), or a Buddha universe. At the center of each of these worlds was the enormous mountain Mount Sumeru 須彌山, reaching 84,000 yojanas above sea level. This central mountain was adorned with verdant vegetation, gates, walls, windows, railings, and stairs of precious metals and gems. Various elevations of Mount Sumeru housed ghosts and spirits (guishen 鬼神), at its four corners the Four Deva-Kings (Sitian wang 四天王) who guard the universe resided, and at its peak was the palace of the thirty-three devas.49 Ascending the various peaks was an ascension to heavenly realms. Sumeru was surrounded by four continents (zhou 州 or tianxia 天下), at each of the four directions. The known world was situated on the southern continent of Jambudvipa. This continent was wide in the north and narrow in the south, creating a tear shape or a shape similar to that of the human face.50 Amid the “Snowy Mountains” (Xueshan 雪山; Himalayan Mountains) north of India was the Anavatapta Pool 阿耨達池.51 From this bejeweled pool, the four great rivers of Jambudvipa spread: the Ganges River 恒伽河 flowed out from a cow’s mouth toward the Eastern Sea, the Indus River 新頭河 flowed out from a lion’s mouth toward the Southern Sea, the Oxus River 婆叉河 (Amu Darya) flowed out from a horse’s

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mouth toward the Western Sea, and the Sītā River 斯陀河 (Syr Darya) flowed out from an elephant’s mouth toward the Northern Sea. The name of the pool was explained “in the language of Qin” (Qin yan 秦‌言) as meaning “to be without vexation and distress” (wu naore 無‌惱‌熱). The account explained that only the dragon king (Ch. longwang 龍 ‌‌王; Skt. Nāgarāja) who dwelt within the pool was free of the worries and distress that torment all other dragon kings of Jambudvipa.52 But Li Daoyuan gave no indication of drawing information from translated Buddhist sutras or from the Buddhist cosmologies of heavens, hells, and multiple universes that framed their geographies of this earth. Instead, his sources on Buddhist geography were a handful of texts written in Sinitic script about the West, by both Sinitic and Indian authors, for Sinitic audiences. These cultural mediators were already making syncretistic conflations of the Sinitic Kunlun and the Buddhist Anavatapta long before a comprehensive Buddhist worldview was presented in Sinitic literature through translation. It was the conflations by these cultural mediators, rather than Buddhist orthodoxy, that were most useful in the composite structure of the Shuijing zhu. From the outset of his account of Kunlun (which is also the beginning of the entire work), Li Daoyuan structured his description of Kunlun in such a way as to highlight similarities between Kunlun and Anavatapta. Selectively drawing on descriptions of Kunlun from traditional Sinitic sources, he pieced together an image of a greater Kunlun complex with multiple peaks so as to incorporate the varying accounts into one location. He tied these together by focusing on four spatial markers common to most accounts: (1) there was an extremely high peak at the center of the inhabited continent, (2) on that mountain was a palace or capital of a high deity, (3) near that palace was a pool or spring of water, and (4) from that pool originated the great rivers of the earth. Although Sinitic descriptions of Kunlun varied considerably, Li Daoyuan worked to link them together using these four points in particular. For example, on the issue of the pool atop Kunlun, the Kuodi tu 括地圖 (Chart of the whole earth) states that the Yellow River emerges from the Yangyu 陽紆 Wetland, located somewhere to the west of the Sinitic ecumene. Although Gao You’s commentary on the Huainanzi places this marshland in the land of Qin, Li Daoyuan

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rejected that claim as false. Instead, he located Yangyu at the capital of the god Fengyi, citing the Mu Tianzi zhuan as evidence, and thereby conflated the Yangyu marshes with the Deep Pool of the Central Ultimate 中極之淵, which was also said to be next to the capital of Fengyi and just to the south of Kunlun, according to the Shanhai jing.53 By focus­ ing on these four points of mountain, palace, pool, and rivers (rather than some of the other details he might have emphasized), Li Daoyuan articulated a model of a greater Kunlun complex that could tie together a variety of accounts of Kunlun and, of equal importance, set the stage for a comparison with Buddhist descriptions of Anavatapta. This particular description of Kunlun was used to equate it with Mount Anavatapta, which also was described as a mountain with palace, pool, and headwaters. With the two similar descriptions juxtaposed, Li Daoyuan was confident in asserting that Mount Anavatapta as described in the fourth-century Xiyu ji “is precisely Mount Kunlun” 即崑崙山也 and that the Palace of the Yellow Emperor described in the Mu Tianzi zhuan “is precisely the Palace of Anavatapta” 即阿耨達 宮也.54 As Li Daoyuan moved on to his account of the Ganges River, he cited Kang Tai’s Funan zhuan to again affirm the syncretistic linchpin connecting Sinitic and Indic geographies: “The origin of the Ganges River is in the extreme northwest [of India]. It emerges from the middle of Mount Kunlun, where there are five major sources. All of the various rivers [of the earth] flow separately from these five major sources” 恒水之源，乃極西北，出崑崙山中，有五大源，諸水分流，皆 由此五大源.55 At the end of his account of Kunlun and the Western Regions, Li Daoyuan returned to the Kunlun/Anavatapta issue, this time quoting more extensively from the syncretistic meta-argument provided in the Xiyu ji. Its author, identified only as Master Monk, developed his argument by drawing from Kang Tai’s Funan zhuan and an account by an earlier Indian Monk named Fotudiao 佛圖調 (Skt. Buddhadeva).56 Fotudiao, Master Monk wrote, relied on the Shanhai jing’s description of Kunlun in his travel account, the Fotudiao zhuan 佛圖調傳 (Account of Fotudiao).57 Master Monk then noted how the record of Kunlun in Kang Tai’s Funan zhuan “accorded perfectly with that of Fotudiao” 正與調合. He went on to assert that Kang Tai “already knew that Mount Anavatapta was in fact Mount Kunlun” 亦知阿耨達山是

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崑崙山. Therefore, Master Monk concluded, “Relying on both [Fotu] diao and the [Funan] zhuan, I suddenly came to this realization” 賴得 調《傳》，豁然為解 that the two mountains from Buddhist and Sinitic geographies were one and the same. Master Monk shared this syncretistic insight with his Indian friend Zhu Fatai 竺法汰 (320–87), who dismissed it as “taking something ordinary to be spectacular” 以常見怪. 58 Disparaging Sinitic geographical knowledge, Zhu Fatai continued that “eminent men from the Han did not agree that the Yellow River was several thousand li south of Dunhuang and did not know the location of Kunlun” 漢來諸名 人，不應河在敦煌南數千里，而不知崑崙所在也. Master Monk defended his epiphany by contrasting the inconsistencies (and inaccuracies) ­between the Mu Tianzi zhuan and the Shanhai jing with the consistent (and accurate) description from Fotudiao and Kang Tai. “Today,” Master Monk proclaimed, “you can read Kang Tai’s Funan zhuan. It was not something unknown to our predecessors, but from today onward [because of Fotudiao] we therefore know that Kunlun is the Heatless Mound [an alternative name for Anavatapta]” 子今見泰《傳》，非為前 人不知也。而今以後，乃知崑崙山為無熱丘. 59 According to Master Monk, Fotudiao had successfully syncretized Sinitic imperial and anomaly accounts (from the Shanhai jing and Funan zhuan respectively) into his Buddhist account of the West. This discussion between Master Monk and Zhu Fatai contrasts the confusion and errors of past Sinitic texts with the clarity of this new syncretistic insight that Buddhist and Sinitic geographies could fit together. Traditional Sinitic geographies served a dual role in the argument. On the one hand, texts that aligned with this spatial schema were taken to affirm the validity of the new realization. On the other hand, passages that contradicted it were cited as evidence of past Sinitic ignorance. If this realization was nothing more than “taking something ordinary to be spectacular,” Master Monk argued, then why do so many Sinitic geographical accounts get things wrong? But “from today onward” a new synthesis was asserted, pioneered by Buddhist monks writing for a Sinitic audience: that Buddhist and Sinitic geographies could be aligned, that they were linked at the Anavatapta/Kunlun nexus, and that the great rivers described in both Sinitic and Indic literature originate from this common source at the center of the inhabited world.

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Although Li Daoyuan was critical of Master Monk’s nitpicking of Han geographical texts, Li Daoyuan ultimately accepted his syncretistic conclusion, as is evident in the prominence of the Kunlun/Anavatapta conflation in Li Daoyuan’s own account and its use in the organizing structure of his text.60 Although Buddhist and Sinitic geographies aligned primarily along topographical and hydrological similarities, divine inhabitants were also important parallels. In the Buddhist worldview, Mount Sumeru was the center of the earth and the cosmic link to the heavens, and Mount Anavatapta was the center of the human-inhabited Jambudvipa continent.61 But the two mountains became conflated as the Buddhist worldview was introduced into Sinitic culture. Both mountains were equated with the Sinitic vision of Kunlun. For example, Wang Jia’s 王嘉 (d. ca. 390) fourth-century Shiyi ji 拾遺記 states that, “as for Mount Kunlun, in the West they call it Mount Sumeru.”62 Although Li Daoyuan was clear that he thought Kunlun and Anavatapta were the same, he never mentioned Mount Sumeru. This is somewhat curious since his descriptions of Mount Kunlun’s divine palaces, high gods, verdant forests, and bejeweled structures would imply a comparison with Sumeru more so than Mount Anavatapta for anyone familiar with Buddhist geography. The decision to equate Mount Kunlun explicitly with Mount Anavatapta but only implicitly (or perhaps unknowingly) with Mount Sumeru seems motivated by the prioritization of the hydrological over the spiritual structures of the earth in the Shuijing zhu. Whether intentional or not, this decision alleviated the need for Li Daoyuan to parse out the Sinitic conflation of the two Buddhist mountains, while still reinforcing his use of Kunlun as the starting point of his geographical text and as the center of the world. In sum, Li Daoyuan assembled a convincing (and mostly consistent) argument in defense of the Shuijing’s original assertion that Mount Kunlun, not the imperial capital or its topographical markers of Mount Song or the Central Plains, was the center of the earth. This argument was largely the product of the structures of the earth that Li Daoyuan chose to prioritize—topographical and spiritual rather than political and cultural. The latter structures were included, but they were subordinated to the organizing structure of waterways. The highest mountain, from which the most important rivers issued, was an

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obvious choice for the center of his world and the beginning of his world geography. Li Daoyuan bolstered the Kunlun-centered model of the earth from traditional Sinitic literature by incorporating the Anavatapta-centered model from Buddhist literature. To make this syncretistic conflation, Li Daoyuan constructed a composite greater Kunlun complex that highlighted four (mostly) consistent elements from existing accounts of Kunlun: a cosmic mountain, a divine palace, a deep pool, and great rivers issuing from the mountain. With these four essential markers of Kunlun identified, the few statements that Li Daoyuan could find from earlier texts explicitly equating Kunlun and Anavatapta with one another seemed self-evident. But the obviousness of these parallels was in fact the product of a carefully collated description that highlighted similarities. This composite account of Kunlun/ Anavatapta was replete with contradictions in the details—such as which palaces of which gods were there or how many rivers issued forth and what the names of the rivers were. But the equation of Kunlun with Anavatapta was clear, and it was sufficient to enable the Shuijing zhu to do a rather remarkable thing. It was able to incorporate India and the Western Regions within a hydrological structure that was continental in its scope and still internally consistent, a structure that did not dismiss India a priori as a periphery to Sinitic centrality or as a land categorically different from the Sinitic heartland.

Bipolar World: Buddhist West and Sinitic East From the Kunlun center, Li Daoyuan structured a model of the world that was “all-encompassing in scope.” This schematic model is sketched out in map 5.4. Kunlun (and a series of mountain ranges along with it) divided the world into two halves. This topographical continental divide was manifest in separate river systems flowing in opposite directions from this elevated center point of the earth. According to this model, the old civilizational core regions of the Yellow River and Ganges basins were each “central realms” (zhongguo) for their own halves of the world. Each central realm was surrounded by peripheral states that were culturally and politically subordinate to it. As was his pattern throughout the Shuijing zhu, Li Daoyuan mapped human and cultural

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Map 5.4.  Schematic outline of the Indo-Sinitic bipolar metageography.

geography onto the structuring patterns of natural geography. Eastwardflowing rivers fed the lands of the Sinitic ecumene centered on the Yellow River, and westward-flowing rivers watered the lands of the Buddhist-Indic ecumene centered on the Ganges River. The spaces of each of these cultural halves were marked by a unique set of sites, monuments, and stories.63 In literature up through the Han dynasty, there was little to distinguish India from the many other lands of the Eurasian continent.64 By the sixth century, when Li Daoyuan authored the Shuijing zhu, this situation was drastically different. By that time, Sinitic society was in regular contact with the Indian subcontinent, and Buddhism had ­become a prominent institutional religion within Sinitic territory. Geographical texts authored by Buddhists were not uncommon.65 Past scholarship on the Buddhist worldviews within Sinitic culture has been focused on the polemical debates between Buddhist and either imperial

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or Daoist worldviews.66 But the Shuijing zhu offers something quite distinct. Rather than defending a particular side of this polemical debate, Li Daoyuan’s goal was to reconcile the differences and amalgamate them into a common structure of the earth, which could organize the entire world, containing both Sinitic and Indic realms.67 In order to achieve his grand objective of comprehensiveness and completeness, he necessarily had to subordinate, or provincialize, the Sinitic and Indic worlds and their associated cultural manifestations to his larger Kunlun/Anavatapta-centered hydrological system.

The Indian “Central Realm” Li Daoyuan presented the western world beyond Kunlun, although vast and varied, as having a clear center. The (cultural, not physical) middle of the western world was India, and the center of India was called Madhyadeśa, literally meaning “the central realm.” This was translated into Sinitic script with the same word used for the Sinitic central realm, zhongguo.68 According to Sinitic accounts, ancient India was divided into five parts, corresponding to the five cardinal directions. Madhyadeśa, also called Central India (Zhong Tianzhu 中天竺), was the center of these and was made up of the Ganges basin down to the Aśokan capital at Pataliputra (modern Patna).69 Most important, this was the homeland of Shakyamuni Buddha—where he was born, taught, and finally achieved parinirvana—and therefore was home to the highest concentration of Buddhist relics, monuments, and sacred sites.70 Of secondary importance, though certainly not insignificant, this was also the seat of power for Emperor Aśoka, the Mauryan emperor who ruled much of the Indian subcontinent in the third century BCE and was revered as the great model of the chakravartin king.71 Yet, in a pattern characteristic of Li Daoyuan’s account of India (and his sources), religion was prioritized over politics. Aśoka was primarily mentioned for his erection of monuments marking the sacred spaces of the Buddhist faith. Kapilavastu (Ch. Jiaweiluowei 迦維羅衛) was the hometown of Prince Siddhārtha, and Li Daoyuan described it as a cosmic, cultural, economic, and political center. He narrated the significant events in

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the Buddha’s early life and described the physical monuments that marked these sacred events (including some accounts that do not survive in any other texts). At the conclusion, Li Daoyuan quoted the Indian monk Zhu Fawei 竺法維, who stated that “the state of Kapilavastu is the Indian state where the Buddha was born. It is the center of three thousand suns and moons and of twelve thousand heavens and earths” 迦維衛國，佛所生天竺國也。三千日月、萬二千天地之中央 也.72 Li Daoyuan then continued with an anecdote from Kang Tai’s third-century Funan zhuan in which Fan Zhan 范旃 (r. ca. 243), king of Funan (in the lower Mekong River basin), encountered a merchant who had visited India. He described to Fan Zhan “the local customs of India [Tianzhu], the expansion of the [Buddhist] religion, the accumulation of wealth, and the fertility of its land—[sufficient for people] to have what they please” 天竺土俗，道法流通，金寶委積，山川饒沃，恣 所欲. “In this age,” the merchant continued, “all the neighboring great states revere it” 左右大國，世尊重之. Fan Zhan thereupon visited India himself, after which he “considered it to be the center of heaven and earth” 以為天地之中也.73 The primary justification for the centrality of Kapilavastu specifically, or Central India more generally, is its status as the homeland of the Buddha and as the site of origin of the Buddhist faith. Several other justifications are also presented to bolster this claim to centrality. ­Central India was a cosmic center, encircled by celestial bodies. It was a land of immense prosperity, which allowed people to follow their own desires. Faxian and Li Daoyuan both conjured images of great prosperity in the Indian ecumene. From Li Daoyuan: “Its land is temperate, and there is nothing that they do not have. Its wealth and treasure, its remarkable animals and peculiar things, all surpass those of the Sinitic realm. It is a great state” 土地平和，無所不有，金銀珍寶，異畜奇物，踰 于中夏，大國也.74 And, finally, India held special place at the center of an international political system in which neighboring states paid ­tribute to it. The third-century Nanzhou yiwu zhi 南州異物志 (Record of the peculiar things of the southern regions) reports that “there are as many as sixteen great states all around [India (Shendu)] that pay tribute to it, thinking that it is the center of heaven and earth” 左右諸 大國凡十六，皆供奉之，以天地之中也.75 In toto, Central India held

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special claims to religious, economic, cosmological, and political centrality in the world, at least in the western world. The geographical claims for Indian centrality included in the Shuijing zhu were echoed throughout contemporary nongeographical literature as well, especially in Buddhist apologia. Such spatialized claims—equating centrality with authority—were common in texts like the Mouzi lihuo lun 牟子理惑論 (Master Mou’s essay on removing doubts) and the sixth-century series of essays titled “Rong Hua lun” 戎‌華‌論 (Essay on the western barbarians and Sinitic people).76 The corollary to Indian centrality—the peripheral status of Sinitic civili­ zation—was most poignantly articulated by Faxian (in passages not quoted in Li Daoyuan’s summation of his work). On finally reaching the Buddha’s homeland, Faxian and his travel companion Daozheng 道‌整 “agonized over being born in a peripheral land” 自傷生在邊地. Reflecting over the extreme difficulties that they had passed through to get there, “their hearts grieved sorrowfully” 愴然心悲. Repeatedly, they were met with surprise and pity from Indian monks who found it difficult to believe that they had traveled from such a distant and peripheral land.77 Later, as Faxian was preparing to return home, Dao­ zheng announced his intention to remain in India: Since Daozheng had arrived in Madhyadeśa [zhongguo], he had observed the rules and regulations of the śraman.a and the deportment of the monks, notable in all circumstances. He reflected with a sigh how in that peripheral land of Qin the precepts and rules [Skt. śīla and vinaya] of the monks were incomplete. He swore an oath, “From right now until I become a Buddha, I will not live in a peripheral land.” He therefore remained and did not return home. But Faxian’s original desire was to diffuse knowledge of the precepts and rules throughout the land of Han, so he returned home alone.78 道整既到中國，見沙門法則，衆僧威儀，觸事可觀，乃追歎秦土邊 地，‌衆僧戒律殘缺。誓言︰「自今已去至得佛，願不生邊地。」故遂停不 歸。法顯本心欲令戒律流通漢地，於是獨還。

Two centuries later, a very similar sentiment would be recorded in the biographical account of Xuanzang’s 玄奘 (ca. 600–664) pilgrimage through India.79 Antonino Forte and Tansen Sen have labeled this

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feeling of inferiority due to having been born so far away from the center of the Buddhist world as “the borderland complex.”80 This complex involved an inner tension between Sinitic and Buddhist identities, each with contradicting claims to authority through centrality. Nowhere was the argument for Indic centrality and Sinitic marginality made more thoroughly than in Daoxuan’s early-seventh-century Shijia fangzhi 釋迦方志 (Gazetteer on the land of Shakya[muni]). In his chapter “Center and Periphery” (“Zhong bian” 中邊), Daoxuan synthesized a five-point thesis, making arguments based on nomenclature, geographical measurements, climatological harmonization, the enlightenment of the people, and (with clear parallels to the Shuijing zhu) hydrology.81 It is hard to know how widespread this “borderland complex” was among Sinitic Buddhists, but it had gained sufficient prominence to have to be dealt with in anti-Buddhist literature and, more important for our purposes here, in geographical writing.

The Western, Indian, Buddhist World In this Indo-Sinitic bipolar world model, Central India lay at the heart of the wider western world. This western half of the world was defined by its physical geography of westward (and southward) flowing rivers from the continental divide and by its human geography of cultural ties to the Buddhist homeland of Central India. In his attempts to assimilate a variety of texts on the headwater of the Yellow River, Li Daoyuan moved from a single central peak to an entire continental divide. Although his sources disagree over the origin of the Yellow River, they all agreed that whatever mountain the Yellow River came from also separated eastward- and westward-flowing drainage systems that each eventually flowed into an eastern or western sea, respectively. This description was used not only for Kunlun (which Li Daoyuan located somewhere in the Tibetan Plateau south of the city of Qiemo 且末), but also for the Pamir Mountains (Congling shan 蔥嶺山) west of the city of Kashgar (Shule 疏勒) and the Southern Mountain(s) (Nanshan 南山) south of the city of Khotan (Yutian 于闐).82 For example, “The waters of the Cong­ ling Mountains divide and flow separately east and west. To the west, they enter the Great Sea, and to the East they become the source of the Yellow River” 蔥嶺之水，分流東西，西入大海，東為河源.83 In his

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characteristic synthesizing approach, Li Daoyuan combined the multiple accounts together, asserting that there were in fact three distinct sources of the Yellow River and that all collectively created a hydrological divide that bisected the continent.84 This bipolar worldview had some basis in the actual physical geog­ raphy of the Himalayan, Kunlun, and Pamir mountain ranges—still referred to today as the “Roof of the World.” Glaciers atop these high ranges do indeed feed the great rivers of Asia. The linking of physical and cultural geography was not wholly imagined either. These are mountains of considerable height, creating a significant natural barrier to transportation, exchange, and cultural diffusion. But Li Daoyuan’s worldview was far more than just a reflection of physical realities organized in a hydrological structure; it was a cultural construct of the unique historical period in which he was writing. Buddhism, in Li Daoyuan’s model, was the defining cultural characteristic of the western half of the word; India, and especially Central India, was its preeminent cultural core. This is largely the product of the flood of new geographical information about India and the West that Buddhist monks introduced into Sinitic literature in the two ­centuries preceding Li Daoyuan’s authoring of the Shuijing zhu. These sources significantly filtered Sinitic understanding about the West through a Buddhist lens. That Buddhist framework worked well enough within the Indian subcontinent encircling Central India. Those lands housed numerous monasteries, stupas, and other markers of Buddhist space, and Li Daoyuan’s sources intentionally ignored descriptions of the many other non-Buddhist cultural sites that existed there. As for western and non-Indian lands, Li Daoyuan crafted his ­description in such a way as to highlight (and maybe exaggerate) their commitment to Buddhism and their ancillary position to India. Like the Sinitic and Indic realms, the countries of the Persian Plateau and Transoxiana (Persia [Anxi 安息], Bactria [Da Xia 大夏], Da Yuezhi 大月氏, and Ferghana [Da Yuan 大宛]) were described as having prosperous agricultural societies, organized into powerful states and located along large rivers.85 Li Daoyuan repeatedly described Persia as an “exceedingly great state” 最大國. “Its household registration approached one million” 戶近百萬, “its land extended several thousand square li” 地方數千里, it was the center of a commercial network, its

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inhabitants were literate, and its customs were shared by the other states of Transoxiana.86 Given the information culled from his sources on the Persian cultural realm, Li Daoyuan might have conceived of the world as divided between multiple civilizational centers, as Xuanzang would do in the seventh century in his introduction to the Da Tang Xiyu ji 大唐西域記 (Great Tang record of the Western Regions), dividing the world between Sinitic, Indic, Persian, and nomadic civilizations, at each of the cardinal directions.87 Instead, Li Daoyuan chose to maintain an east-west cultural dichotomy that reaffirmed his east-west hydrological structure. He ignored nomadic societies, since the arid steppe to the north lacked the rivers he needed to structure his account. But Persian and Transoxianan civilizations were structured by the Amu Darya River, which flowed westward from the Congling Mountains and could conceivably fit into Li Daoyuan’s hydrological model. The geographical subordination of Persia and Transoxiana within a Buddhist West was primarily accomplished by the sheer overshadow­ ing of these realms by India in Sinitic sources on the western world. Map 5.5 is a simple visualization of character count per region. It shows that Li Daoyuan wrote far more about the Ganges basin than about any other land west of the continental divide, just as the Yellow River plain eclipses his account of the East. Ferghana and Yuezhi had been the object of Western Han interest in the West—so as to gain allies and horses for their war against the Xiongnu. But, since the introduction of Buddhism into Sinitic culture, India had displaced Transoxiana as a destination for travel, an object of geographical inquiry, and the civilization for comparison.88 The result of regular exchange by Buddhist monks between the cores of Sinitic and Indic civilizations created an epistemological disparity between these two lands and all others, thereby reinforcing a worldview that prioritized these two places. In the Sui shu catalog of geographical texts, for example, two-thirds of the pre-Sui accounts of foreign lands were about the West, and half of these accounts were about India and written by Buddhist monks.89 So, when Li Daoyuan dedicated one-twentieth of the amount of text spent on India to Persia and Transoxiana combined, he was not displaying ignorance of these lands. He was synthesizing the available information on the West into an organizing structure that reflected the focus of

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Map 5.5.  Character count of the Shuijing zhu text describing respective regions (by drainage basin).

5.5

available geographical knowledge, which at this time subordinated all other western lands to India. Li Daoyuan also confused the river systems of the West in such a way that ascribed greater continuity between Transoxiana and Northern India than his sources actually reported. He pieced together several rivers that were in fact unconnected, mistakenly joining the Gandhāra (Jietuowei 捷陀衛) region (the Peshawar Valley in modern northern Pakistan) with Transoxiana as part of the same drainage basin. He described a river by the name of Iluochidi 蜺羅跂禘, which has no mention in Sanskrit sources, as originating from Anavatapta Pool, passing Khotan, flowing near the northern bend of the Indus River but not joining it, heading west through the Gandhāra region, and then joining the Amu Darya as it flows through Transoxiana and into the Aral Sea.90 Although Transoxiana lacked Buddhist edifices (at least according to his sources), connecting its natural geography with the

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Gandhāra region in Northern India, which was full of classic Buddhist spatial markers, strengthened the claim to its inclusion in an Indo-­ Buddhist ecumene. Li Daoyuan was able to highlight a few anecdotes that suggested cultural ties between Transoxiana and India. For example, from the very little information conveyed about Da Yuezhi, Li Daoyuan abridged a story from Faxian about how its king had raised an army to take the Buddha’s alms bowl from the Gandhāran state of Purus․apura (Fulousha 弗樓沙). After being thwarted by divine forces in his attempts to seize the relic, the king “realized that the karmic relationship between him and the bowl had not yet arrived. So he erected a stupa and left some men behind [in Gandhāra] to make offerings to the bowl” 知鉢 緣未至，于是起塔留鉢供養. Although the stupa and the relic (traditional markers of Buddhist geography) remained in Gandhāra, offerings to it were regularly sent from this Transoxiana kingdom.91 The devotion of this country to Buddhism is even more pronounced in Faxian’s original account of this tale, in which he stated that “the king of Yuezhi and his men were sincere believers in Buddhism. They wanted to carry the alms bowl away, and so they presented their offerings on a grand scale” 月氏王等篤信佛法。欲持缽去。故大興供養.92 In the com­ paratively sparse attention Li Daoyuan granted Persia and Trans­ oxiana, in his hydrological structure, and in the few locality stories that he actually recounted on these lands, he affirmed their inclusion within the Indian orbit.

Parallel but Different Worlds Although Li Daoyuan acknowledged that some texts argued for the spatial centrality and authority of Central India, he ultimately subordinated these arguments to the broader hydrological Kunlun/Anavataptacentered schema. The result was a provincializing of both Sinitic and Indic civilizations, making Central India the core of the western world, parallel to the Yellow River core in the eastern world. New Buddhist descriptions of India as a religious, cosmological, economic, and political world center paralleled traditional accounts of Sinocentrism. Li Daoyuan’s balancing of these two perspectives within a single work resulted in a polarized worldview that exalted the virtues of these two

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lands and subordinated all other lands to one or the other of these poles. Divided by a central mountain chain, each world had its own center, defining characteristics, and spatial markers. Yet these worlds were not diametrically opposed, the way some Han officials had described the Han and Xiongnu north-south dichotomy. Instead, they were strangely parallel—similar in core structure yet different in cultural manifestations.93 In the words of Li Daoyuan’s contemporary Gu Huan 顧歡 (fl. 483), “[Sinitic and Indic] sages accord with each other; it is only in their traces [i.e., that which they have left behind] that they contradict each other” 其聖則符，其跡則反, and Sinitic and Indic cultural elements “are not completely the same but not completely different either” 既不全同，又不全異.94 Li Daoyuan’s hydrological model provided an organizing structure that both highlighted similarities between the Indic and Sinitic civilizational cores and differentiated them from other lands. Map 5.4 above is a schematic map of this metageography. The core regions of both civilizations were structured as large drainage basins fed by rivers flowing oppositely from the earth’s central divide along the Tibetan Plateau. Along these South and East Asian rivers were fundamentally similar ecological and social systems: broad river basins, agricultural lands, ancient civilizations, large cities, and manifestations of elite culture. In both the Sinitic and Indic realms, the rivers flowed past historic ruins, ancient traces (guji), and sacred sites that served as anchors creating a consistent format in the text’s geohistorical account. These sites anchored anecdotes that humanized Li Daoyuan’s account of natural geography. As was articulated in chapter 4, his choice to employ hydrological structures to organize his geography—as opposed to the more traditional political structures—allowed him to incor­ porate foreign lands outside the Sinitic realm into a consistent and non-Sinocentric framework. The parallels in physical and human geography between the Sinitic and Indic realms are highlighted by considering the lands that Li Dao­ yuan purposefully excluded from his so-called comprehensive geography. He wrote nothing of the Mongolian Steppe, for example, even though he had sources available to him on these lands.95 These arid plains have rivers, but the rivers do not originate from the Tibetan

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Plateau and therefore undermine the Kunlun-centered hydrological network. If he had wanted to, he might have overcome this problem with a bit of imaginative geography—just as he connected the Yellow River to Kunlun through an imagined underground channel that linked the Tarim and Yellow River basins.96 Instead, he seemed completely uninterested in the northern steppe, despite its significance in Han geographical texts and its continued importance in state formation in the Yellow River basin throughout the early medieval period. The Eurasian Steppe did not fit into the larger east-west, Sinocentric-­Indocentric structures that he was developing. It could not be subsumed under the Sinitic or the Indic cultural sphere of influence nor could it create a third central realm that paralleled the Yellow River basin in the ways that the Ganges basin did.97 The similarities in natural geography between the heartlands of Sinitic and Indic civilization mirrored similarities in their cultural geography. This cultural parallelism is asserted audaciously through their common identification as “central realms” and through the description of these two parallel central realms as having similar customs. As his account, based primarily on Faxian’s Foguo ji, first enters Central India, Li Daoyuan provides this explanation of the meaning of Central India: To the west of the [Punaban 蒲那般] River [modern Yamuna River], there are the various states of India [Tianzhu]. To its south, it is all called the central realm. The people here are thriving and prosperous. As for the central realm, the dress and cuisine are the same as of the [Sinitic] central realm; hence it is called the central realm. Since [the Buddha] achieved nirvana, the practices of the holy multitude [i.e., the Buddha’s disciples]—their deportment and regulations—have been passed down directly without interruption.98 自河以西，天竺諸國，自是以南，皆為「中國」，人民殷富。「中國」者，服 食與中國同，故名之為「中國」也。泥洹已來，聖眾所行，威儀法則，相 承不 絕。

Chen Qiaoyi, with his nationalistic inclinations, writes that these two central realms were “definitely not the same” and that the conflation was “obviously a far-fetched comparison.”99 A closer reading

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and greater historical context, however, would indicate that this comparison was not just a simple mistake. This description of Central India was based primarily on the Foguo ji but departed from it in specific ways. Although Faxian’s account emphasized the greatness and centrality of India, Li Daoyuan constructed a parallelism between eastern and western core regions. Faxian pointed to how the Central Indian climate was “harmoniously balanced” (tiaohe 調和), its people “prosperous and happy” (yinle 殷樂), its government generous and light, and its rulers deferential toward and great patrons of Buddhism.100 In India, he reported, the state had no household registrations, and the people did not have to pay taxes. State punishments were mild, never employing corporal punishment, and still the people lived moral, prosperous, and joyful lives.101 Much of Faxian’s “geographical” account of his pilgrimage was in fact a polemical argument for the superiority of Buddhism over Sinitic culture.102 As Eric Zürcher points out, “We find among the cultured devotees [of Buddhism] a tendency to idealize a foreign civilization—a novum in Chinese history. . . . To them, China was no longer an island of culture surrounded by barbarian wastelands. They learned—and used this knowledge as a counterargument—that the true ‘Middle Country’ was India.”103 Although Li Daoyuan drew heavily from Faxian’s account, he omitted much of this idealization of India, making India a parallel rather than superior land. He left out references to India’s harmonious climate and light-handed government. Most tellingly, the line about the dress and cuisine being the same as those of the Sinitic central realm was not originally part of Faxian’s introduction to Madhyadeśa. Li Daoyuan plucked the line from Faxian’s account of Wuchang 烏萇 (Skt. Ud.d.yāna, in the modern Swāt Valley), which in the original text was quite clearly stating that the customs and language of Wuchang (in Northern India) were the same as those of Central India, the Indic zhongguo and not the Sinitic zhongguo.104 It is not clear whether the change in the location and meaning of this particular line was a misinterpretation or a purposeful reinterpretation of Faxian’s original meaning.105 In either case, Li Daoyuan’s reworking of Faxian’s text highlighted the similarities between the Indic and Sinitic central realms, moving away from using India as the ideal other with which to criticize the Sinitic homeland and instead presenting India as a parallel rather than

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an opposite or superior land. This reinterpretation altered the meaning of Faxian’s positive remarks about India, even when quoted directly. For example, the statement quoted from Faxian that “the people here are prosperous and wealthy” was no longer being contrasted with a Sinitic population weighed down by taxation from the heavy-handed state but was instead being equated with Sinitic society, with both Indian society and Sinitic society being compared favorably against the less civilized frontiers surrounding each of these two cores. Despite their broad parallels, Li Daoyuan still described these two lands as different in important ways. The most prominent difference was his culturally essentialist depiction of India as a purely Buddhist land compared to his heterogeneous and multifaceted depiction of the Sinitic ecumene, which lacked any parallel essentializing cultural system. He included a wealth of information on nonreligious charac­ teristics of India—such as local customs, economic activities, and historical anecdotes—but they tended to be mentioned only insofar as they related to Buddhism. Only Central India contained the sacred sites of the Buddha’s life. The locations of his birth, childhood, awakening, home, and even something so prosaic as where he laundered his clothes were identified by the numinous traces he left behind. They were set apart as sacred spaces with pillars, statues, monasteries, and stupas.106 These were the sites that Faxian and Daozheng repeatedly marveled at, inciting their “borderland complex.”107 Also distinctive to these sacred sites in India was the faithful patronage from lay rulers, first and foremost Emperor Aśoka—an exemplar whom Sinitic Buddhists invoked at every opportunity to encourage patronage from the elites in their own land. It was reported multiple times that Aśoka commissioned the construction of (an exaggerated) 84,000 stupas.108 Although other places had some Buddhist sacred sites and even relics of the Buddha’s body, no place had such a dense concentration of these sites, in every variety, as did Central India.109 Li Daoyuan presented Buddhism as the essential character of the West, but this did not mean that Buddhism was absent in the East. The transplantation of Buddhism into Sinitic civilization is one of the defining spatial transformations of the age, and James Robson is certainly right about the transposition of Buddhist sacred sites from South Asia to East Asia at this time.110 But Li Daoyuan depicted the

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Map 5.6.  Number of references to stupas (ta) in Shuijing zhu (by drainage basin).

presence of Buddhism in the Sinitic ecumene differently from that in the Indic ecumene in two important ways. First, unlike his depiction of an essentially Buddhist India, Li Daoyuan presented Buddhism in the Sinitic ecumene as merely one part of a complex cultural heritage that did not prioritize any single ideology, be it Confucianism, Daoism, or Buddhism. This contrasted, for example, with the view of the Daoist priest Gu Huan, who was a contemporary of Li Daoyuan. In his formulation of this bipolar world (which will be discussed below), Gu Huan asserted that the East and the West were essentially Daoist and Buddhist realms respectively. In Li Daoyuan’s less polemical work, the essentializing of a Buddhist India was maintained, but a Buddhist presence in the Sinitic ecumene was also openly recognized—even if muted by Li Daoyuan’s antiquarian inclinations. Second, Li Daoyuan differentiated the religious edifices of Sinitic and Indic Buddhism. Stupas (ta 塔) were a uniquely Indian marker of

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Map 5.7.  Number of references to temples/monasteries (si) and pagodas (futu) in Shuijing zhu (by drainage basin).

space. As shown in map 5.6, this type of religious edifice was mentioned twenty-eight times in the section on India and only once within the Sinitic ecumene. Pagodas (sometimes called ta in texts other than Li Daoyuan’s) were built throughout the Sinitic ecumene by this time, but Li Daoyuan’s account refers to them by other names, as si 寺 (temple or monastery) or futu 浮圖 (pagoda) rather than ta. Although an imperfect measurement of spatial discourse, the distribution of these edifices was focused in the Yellow River basin, as can be seen in map  5.7. The single reference to a ta within the Sinitic ecumene is an exception that proves the rule. It was part of the exclamation about how Buddhist the old Northern Wei capital of Pingcheng was, as quoted in chapter 3; hence the term maintained its distinctively Indian association. “At the capital city, the imperial town, Buddhism flourished. Divine pagodas and magnificent stupas stood erect facing each other. The dharma wheel turned east, right here more than anywhere else.”111

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Map 5.8.  Number of unique sources quoted in Shuijing zhu (by drainage basin).

The separation between eastern and western halves of the world was clearly not absolute. The spatialized description of the spread of Buddhism as the dharma wheel turning east marked Buddhism as a specifically western phenomenon that was in the process of rolling into eastern lands. This transition can be seen in the historical layers of Li Daoyuan’s sources, which tend to be ancient and therefore severely underrepresent the Buddhist presence in East Asia at the time he authored the Shuijing zhu in the sixth century. According to the Shuijing zhu, the Buddhist presence was noteworthy but limited. In describing the towering pagoda of the Yongning Monastery in Luoyang, for example, Li Daoyuan exclaimed that Sinitic capitals of the past “never had a structure like this” 未有若斯之搆 but then quickly added that a comparable pagoda could be found in Kucha, in the Tarim basin.112 Indeed, the Tarim basin and Southeast Asia can be seen as middle grounds that were pulled between the Indic and Sinitic civilizational

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Map 5.9.  Number of citations from Buddhist geographies quoted in Shuijing zhu (per 10,000 citations, by drainage basin).

cores. He described these two middle grounds as having cultural markers of and relational ties to both the Sinitic and Indic central realms— revealing some flexibility within his east-west paradigm.113 This essentialist vision of a Buddhist India was a reflection of the geographical information on India available in Sinitic literature at the time, which overwhelmingly came from Buddhist monks who themselves were only interested in writing about India as the homeland of Buddhism. This epistemological limitation can be seen in maps 5.8 and 5.9. Map 5.8 shows the number of unique sources that Li Daoyuan cited to describe each region. The lighter-colored West indicates that he relied on far fewer texts for his description of these regions. Map 5.9 presents the number of texts written by Buddhist monks about each region. The darker West reveals Buddhist monks as the overwhelming source of information on these lands. By combining these two maps, one can see that descriptions of India and the West came from only a few texts that

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were almost exclusively written by Buddhists, but descriptions of the Sinitic ecumene drew from a wide array of literary genres. It is not surprising, then, that Li Daoyuan ended up describing an essentialist Buddhist India and a complex and multifaceted Sinitic ecumene. Li Daoyuan’s articulation of a bipolar world model dominated by Sinitic and Indic civilizations was innovative in its geographic formulation, but the basic concept was apparent in the religious polemics of his contemporaries. Although Buddhist apologia and anti-Buddhist literature continued to defend the centrality and therefore the authority of either Central India or the Central Plains respectively, others took a more balanced position.114 As Buddhism continued to grow in popularity into the fifth century, Sinitic literati like Li Daoyuan were faced with increasing evidence that India was special and distinct from the rest of the uncivilized world and that pigeonholing it into traditional imperial concepts of a barbarous outer realm was neither useful nor convincing. Gu Huan’s 顧歡 (fl. 483) late-fifth-century anti-Buddhist essay the “Yi Xia lun” 夷夏論 (Essay on the barbaric and Sinitic peoples) as well as the debates and counter essays it inspired reflect a bipolar world model structurally similar to that articulated by Li Daoyuan.115 Even though the essay was written by a Daoist priest arguing that Buddhism had no place in the Sinitic ecumene, his comparative structure still granted special status to the homeland of Buddhism, apart from the rest of the barbarian world. The essay constructs a dichotomy between a Buddhist-barbarian West and a Daoist-Sinitic East. At face value, the essay argues that both the Buddhist and Daoist religions ultimately derived from a single transcendent Dao: “Buddhism and Daoism are equivalent in reaching this endpoint” 佛道齊乎達此. But, although “the Dao is the Buddha and the Buddha is the Dao” 道則佛也，佛則道也, the principles of this original transcendent Dao needed to be adapted to the different customs of the peoples to whom Buddhism and Daoism were being taught. Therefore, both Buddhism and Daoism were combinations of transcendent principles and local customs (su), making each best suited for the people of its own homeland and inappropriate to be proselytized abroad. Foreign Buddhism, therefore, in this nativist argument, should stay out of the Sinitic realm. Through this guise of evenhandedness, Gu Huan took every opportunity to subtly assert

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the superiority of Daoism and Sinitic culture. He employed something resembling the modern rhetoric of “separate but equal” to achieve his goal—rhetorical equality that is used to hide real inequality. As his official biography explains, “Although [Gu] Huan said that the two religions are equal, his purpose was really to favor Daoism” 歡‌雖同二法，而意 黨道‌教.116 Regardless of his position, the metageography that Gu Huan used to frame his argument resonated with geographical literature in two important ways. The first was a provincializing of Buddhism and Daoism as manifestations of culture (su) rather than universal truths. Although both religions originated from the same transcendent Dao, “among the birds, [the sages] chirp like a bird, and, among the beasts, they roar like a beast. In teaching Sinitic people, they speak in the Sinitic language, and, in transforming the barbarians, they talk in the barbarian language, and that is all there is to it” 在鳥而鳥鳴，在獸 而獸吼。教華而華言，化夷而夷語耳.117 Each religion, according to Gu Huan, was a patchwork of transcendent principles and local customs uniquely suited to the customs of its own homeland. The traces of transcendent principles in these religions distinguished Sinitic and Indic civilization from the rest of the world, and the ways these religions were enmeshed with local customs distinguished the two from each other. Therefore, much of the essay is an examination not of theological doctrines, but of cultural practices—a topic of primary concern within geographical texts. For example, Daoism is “incisive” (qie 切) because Sinitic people are “humble and meek” (qianruo 謙‌弱) and need to be pushed forward, but Buddhism is “extravagant” (she 賒) because western barbarians are “strong and proud” (kuaqiang 夸‌強) and need to be restrained. Through focusing on local customs and quasi-ethnic characteristics in this way, Gu Huan abandoned the universalizing claim to transcendent authority in favor of nativist defensiveness. This move mirrors the contemporary trend in geographic literature away from the universalizing claims of the imperial metageography in favor of increased attention to the diversity of local and regional customs across the earth. The second key geographical concept of Gu Huan was that the world should be divided into Buddhist and Daoist halves. The transcendent principles of the Dao elevated Buddhism and Daoism above

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all other religions of the world. Gu Huan’s religious dichotomy between barbarian Buddhism and Sinitic Daoism is spatially grounded in the West and the East. His division into eastern and western poles is explicit, and he ardently advocated for the two halves to remain separate. “If we observe the lasting influence of these teachings, their ways are certainly different. Buddhism is not the way of the eastern Sinitic people, and Daoism is not the law of the western barbarians. Fish and birds have different realms and never exchange relations. How could it be that the two teachings of Laozi and Shakyamuni have interchanged across the eight extremities? Today, Buddhism has already flowed eastward, and Daoism has stepped westward” 又若觀風流教，其道必 異，佛非東華之道，道非西戎之法，魚鳥異淵，永不相關。安得老、釋 二教，交行八表，今佛既東流，道亦西邁.118 According to Gu Huan, ­neither Buddhism nor Daoism (but especially not Buddhism) was capa­ ble of transcending the limitations of regionalism and parochialism inherent in the local customs of its own distinctive eastern and western homelands. This east-west polarity model did not replace the Sinocentric or Indocentric models, but the continuing debate along all three of these positions tended to affirm a composite discursive east-west dichotomy. Gu Huan’s essay highlights how the geographic relationship between Sinitic and Indic civilizations had changed in the centuries since the first introduction of Buddhism. In order to assert Daoist superiority over Buddhism, Gu Huan abandoned the unmitigated Sinocentrism of Han imperial metageography and accepted at least a rhetorical parity between Sinitic and Indic civilizations. The several polemical Buddhist responses to his essay maintained Gu Huan’s spatial framework of parallel Sinitic and Indic realms, even though they argued for the superiority of India in this polarity. Whether Sinitic civilization was better than Indic civilization or vice versa, the two cultural cores eclipsed the rest of the world, marking the two centers of this new bipolar worldview. Although this bipolar division of the world was described primarily in hydrological and cultural terms, this metageography had impor­ tant political implications within the Sinitic ecumene as well. As discussed in chapters 2 and 3, regimes of the Yellow and Yangzi River basins throughout the early medieval period employed a variety of

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geographical arguments to assert their own authority over rival Sinitic states. Li Daoyuan’s world model can be read as another attempt at a spatial claim to authority for the Tabgatch empire, in which Li Dao­ yuan served as an official. A world model that subordinates all western lands to a Ganges River central realm and all eastern lands to a Yellow River central realm could easily be employed to assert political preeminence of the Tabgatch empire (with its home in the eastern central realm) over the Jiankang empire (with its home outside of the central realm but within its eastern orbit). Through provincializing the claims of universal centrality for Sinitic civilization vis-à-vis Indian civilization, Li Daoyuan was able to strengthen the claim of ecumenical centrality for the Yellow River plain vis-à-vis its Yangzi basin rival. It was the Yellow River, not the Yangzi, that originated from the axis mundi of Kunlun. Li Daoyuan centered his account of East Asia on the Yellow River and described it as “the most senior of all rivers” and “the highest and farthest” of the (Sinitic) four great rivers.119 This political interpretation must, however, remain tentative, since much of the Shuijing zhu’s account of the lower Yangzi region, where the capital of the Jiankang empire would have been described, has been lost. Still, metageographies are not thought up within a vacuum. They organize one’s knowledge of the world according to culturally prescribed values and political motivations that are unique to the historical actors constructing them. Li Daoyuan—and early medieval geographical authors more generally—were surrounded by cultural contestations regarding competing imperial claims and the new role of Buddhism within Sinitic civilization. The Shuijing zhu with its IndoSinitic bipolar worldview is a spatialized response to these pressing issues of the age.

Conclusion At the end of his study of traditional Chinese cartography, Cordell Yee laments over the regrettable lacunae in research on Buddhist influences on the Chinese geographical and cartographical traditions. This chapter is not the “systematic account of Buddhist influence” that Yee calls for, but it does bring together previously disparate conversations on

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geographic thought, Sinitic literature, imperial ideology, and Buddhist teachings.120 The existence of the idea of an Indian “central realm” in Sinitic literature is well known. But the cultural traction that this idea might or might not have gained outside of specifically Buddhist intellectual circles is less clear. Eric Zürcher has described a “Chinese Buddhist sub-culture” that existed alongside and mostly independent from official Sinitic thought, especially in matters of “cosmology, cosmography, and ideas concerning the physical world.”121 Instead, the Shuijing zhu reveals the first extant attempt by a non-Buddhist Sinitic literatus-official to take Buddhist geographical literature seriously and to incorporate it into a new totalizing vision of the world. This vision provincialized the traditional imperial metageography that asserted Sinitic centrality in the world. Contrary to usual readings of the Shuijing zhu, Li Daoyuan did far more than merely compile geographical minutiae and “record differences and contradictions.” He developed a syncretistic linking of Sinitic and Buddhist geographies and thereby synthesized a grand metageography within which he could structure available knowledge of the world. Li Daoyuan’s Buddhist-Sinitic synthetic metageography was centered on Mount Kunlun/Anavatapta. Topographical accounts of Mount Kunlun as the highest peak and the source of the great continental rivers confirmed its equation with Mount Anavatapta. This conflation along with the empirical evidence of the Tibetan Plateau as the center of the Eurasian continent constructed a convincing world model that decentered the Sinitic ecumene and prioritized natural and spiritual geographies over political and cultural geographies. Watershed drainage basins flowing east and west from the Kunlun/Anavatapta/Pamir mountain ranges established a topographical foundation for a cultural division of the world between a Buddhist West and a Sinitic East, each with its own central realm in the Ganges or the Yellow River basin. These two core civilizations stood apart from the rest of the world as the two foci of this bipolar worldview. Li Daoyuan’s description of the Sinitic East was far more comprehensive than that of the Indic West, but this does not change their structural parallelism, each with river valley civilizations, empires, elite cultures, and subordinate periph­ eries. Furthermore, this model might have had the added benefit of asserting the dominance of the Yellow River plain (and the Tabgatch

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empire that ruled over it) over the rest of East Asia, especially the Yangzi River basin–based Jiankang empire. The Kunlun-centered world model was the primary emic alternative to the Sinocentric worldview of official imperial ideology, and the metageography of the Shuijing zhu reveals a pivotal development in the formulation of this model.122 The model already existed in classical literature, but Li Daoyuan was the first—at least in extant texts— to strengthen its cultural weight by combining it with newly introduced Buddhist models. He synthesized a new Sinitic-Buddhist metageography that was distinct from its antecedents but could still be compelling to both Sinitic Buddhists and non-Buddhist literati alike.123 This metageography of a Buddhist West and a Sinitic East, even within its early emic articulation, was profoundly comparative in its thinking. It recognized obvious cultural differences but acknowledged a foundational societal parity between the two civilizations. To describe Sinitic civilization today as “the East” seems either banal or Orientalist, but it was revolutionary for early medieval Sinitic literati. It was a comparative mode of thinking that was directly antithetical to the orthodoxy of imperial metageography. Nevertheless, Li Daoyuan’s basic model of a world divided between the eastern Sinitic civilization and an alternative western civilization would persist within Sinitic world models until the present, although the definition of “the West” would change considerably in the modern age.

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M

etageographies matter because they effect change in spatial ­practice. The cultural manipulation of spatial perceptions was a useful tool of premodern sociopolitical structures. As Fernand Braudel articulated, in describing the sixteenth-century Spanish empire, distance was “ennemi numéro 1” for state administration. He ­observed that today we have “too little space,” but in premodern times “there was too much of it.” Faced with the difficulties of moving information, people, and resources through this abundance of space with limited transportation technology, Spain (and all other premodern states) “waged an unremitted struggle against the obstacle of distance.”1 Although Braudel was primarily referring to the physical struggle of transporting things across space, all premodern states also constructed cultural representations of space through court literature, histories, edicts, and monuments. They did so in particular ways that made the functioning of the state more tractable. The limitations of premodern transportation technology made it difficult for courts to extend real and consistent control across their domains, but the limitations of premodern information technology made it far easier for a court to exert inordinate influence over the textual-based cultural paradigms of the elites living within its domain. Through literature, courts had greater power to impose orthodox cultural interpretations of ennemi numéro 1—provinces and frontiers and other such spaces beyond their consistent control—and to present cultural interpretations of space that

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were related to geophysical realities but were filtered through the lens of state power and ideology. As Han officials constructed an imperial metageography, they exaggerated the spaces inhabited by the people they wanted to empower and marginalized the spaces of the people who threatened their control of the state. The court and capital with its emperor, courtiers, and officials were magnified and centered. The rural countryside with its provincial elites (who wielded the most direct control over agricultural wealth) was divided up and subordinated to the court through district seats with their court-appointed officials. Frontiers (where much of the military was inevitably stationed) with their mixed-­ heritage elites (who hybridized innovative cultural and economic systems) were marginalized and otherized. Natural landscapes (on which human societies were entirely dependent for energy and materials) were colonized but never consistently controlled and therefore were often supernaturalized. Foreign lands (with their alternative models of civilization and independence from the supposedly universal rule of the Son of Heaven) were dismissed as uncivilized and inhuman— quite literally written off the map. It behooved the Han empire to assert that such places and people were not powerful and that they had no place challenging the authority of the court. The choice to magnify the court, capital, and realm and to minimize these other spaces was an act of power that facilitated state centralization and authority as it weakened potential rivals across its vast domain. It drew attention to the grandeur and monumentality at the capital to distract the viewer from seeing the inability of the court to actually impose consistent and effective control over distant spaces. Although imperial courts certainly sought to impose physical control over provincials, frontier people, natural forces, and foreigners—and were sometimes successful at doing so (Sinitic states more successfully so than most)—still the technological limitations of premodern society ensured that distance could only be managed, not conquered. The imperial metageography has wielded great influence on historians’ understanding of Chinese history. It was the orthodox spatial framework for the most powerful people and institutions throughout Chinese history and as such deserves attentive study. However, because of its orthodox status and its pervasive expression in most of the sources

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handed down to us, this imperial metageography is often the unconscious spatial framework employed by historians and Sinologists alike, even in their studies of topics that were deliberately marginalized within this metageography. This assumed spatial model still insidiously focuses our attention toward the spaces that affirmed imperial authority (such as the court and capital) and away from the spaces that threatened that authority (such as provinces, frontiers, mountains, and foreign lands). This metageography is useful for some studies of Chinese history, but it must not be employed indiscriminately or unconscientiously. In the historical context of one of the “cultural crises in the history of Our Country [i.e., China],” early medieval literati questioned the validity and utility of the Han imperial metageography they had inherited.2 This crisis was fueled by dramatic shifts in the spatial structure of Sinitic civilization: the fragmentation of the first imperial order, the transformation of the Yangzi basin from a southern frontier into a secondary civilizational core, and the transplantation of the foreign religion of Buddhism into mainstream Sinitic culture. In the flourishing of geographical texts from the third through sixth centuries, authors experimented (both implicitly and explicitly) with a variety of alternative metageographies—spatial frameworks that could make better sense of the political instability, cultural complexity, and natural diversity they observed in the postimperial world. In this book, I have examined four of these metageographies: ecumenical regionalism, the northern and southern dynasties, the hydrocultural landscape, and the Indo-Sinitic bipolar worldview. These alternative metageographies highlight the places—and hence the actors and ­institutions—that are intentionally obfuscated in the spatial framework of imperial texts. But the significance of these alternative metageographies was not limited to the early medieval period. They have been employed at various times and places throughout the history of the Sinitic ecumene to make sense of spatial practices that did not conform to the monolithic imperial metageography. Furthermore, modern adaptations of these metageographies can be used—fruitfully, I think—by Sinologists and historians today to frame their studies of historical actors who were intentionally marginalized in the official

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imperial histories, even if the actors never explicitly employed these metageographies themselves.

Ecumenical Regionalism Although the metageography of ecumenical regionalism was first developed in the wake of Han imperial fragmentation, the framework is useful for examining regionalism throughout Chinese history, even during periods of imperial unity that claimed monolithic uniformity across the entire domain. Perhaps the most concise way to encapsulate the enduring influence of early medieval local geographies and the metageography of ecumenical regionalism that they espoused is to trace the development of the dominant forms of local writing throughout Chinese history and the sociopolitical contexts that facilitated this development. Throughout the late imperial period, local gazetteers were the dominant form of both local and geographical writing. The long-term developmental narrative of these gazetteers is often presented as a linear evolution from the earliest forms of local writing in the Han (ignoring contributions from early medieval literature), jumping straight to the Tang tujing genre and then to the late imperial gazetteer. This narrative suggests far greater continuity over time and alignment between local and court structures than was actually the case. Instead, one might imagine the long-term development of the late imperial gazetteer as a sinusoidal wave oscillating up and down along a centralizing versus localistic vertical axis. At its highest point, the Han imperial metageography presented the most centralized ideal (espoused but never achieved). At its nadir, early medieval local geographies presented the most localistic ideal. Over the centuries, the amplitude of the wave gradually diminished as late imperial gazetteers eventually found common ground and common interests between these two spatial extremes of centralization and localization. After the Sui-Tang empire had conquered sufficient territory in the late sixth century to be able to reclaim the conflation of world-empire and civilized world, court officials reasserted the dominance of imperial metageography, but not without having to accommodate some

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elements of ecumenical regionalism. The privately authored local ­geographies of the preceding centuries were replaced with officially authored tujing texts, or map-treatises. Tujing contained up-to-date and utilitarian information that was important for administrative and military purposes. The imperial court standardized the format across the empire and regularly compiled all district and prefectural tujing into a single imperial compilation. Thus, tujing subordinated markers of regionalism (such as customs or environment) to administrative units, effaced the cultural and political bifurcation of the Yellow and Yangzi River cores that had developed over the preceding centuries, and affirmed a distinct inner and outer realm.3 Despite reaffirming the imperial metageography, tujing were still very much an outgrowth of early medieval local geographies. They relied heavily on these early medieval texts for information. Imperial compilations of the Sui-Tang court were a systematized, politicized adaptation of the comprehensive geographies of the late fifth and early sixth centuries. Indeed, it was actually the Jiankang empire that first initiated officially authored, empirewide compilations of local geographies as symbols of imperial unity.4 Although Sui-Tang officials claimed to be entirely rejecting the chaotic geographical literature of the Age of Disunion and re-creating the Han imperial metageography, they were actually making compromises with the tradition of early medieval local geographies, constructing a new Tang imperial metageography that was more tolerant of elite regionalism within its domain than the Han imperial metageography had been. This is at least partly because the Tang empire was, in fact, far more ethnically diverse and demographically dispersed than the Han empire had been. Moderating the Han centralization and unification ideals, tujing provided a public literary forum for the expression of local distinctiveness and cultural contributions. But they did so within a prescribed and standardized format that still affirmed imperial authority over these local communities as well as the conflation of empire and ecumene.5 Tujing texts reached their highest level of production in the continued imperial unity of the Northern Zhao Song dynasty (960–1127). The pendulum swung back toward localism in the Southern Zhao Song dynasty (1127–1279), with its political loss of the Yellow River heartland (resembling the geopolitics of the Jiankang empire), unprecedented

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economic prosperity, growing gentry class, and technological breakthrough of print publishing. It was at this time that the local gazetteer (fangzhi) developed. In this new style of local geography, authorship returned to the hands of private, local gentry, who described in copious detail local communities, their distinctive characteristics, and their contributions to the larger civilized ecumene and empire. Gazetteers shifted focus from functional information for official purposes toward literary articulations of local interests. Even the very few comprehensive, empirewide gazetteers that were written during the Southern Zhao Song period were privately authored and did not reflect the needs or perspectives of the imperial court.6 Several historians have connected the emergence of the gazetteer with a general “local turn” in the Southern Zhao Song social structure. In this period, Peter Bol writes, “elite families shifted from a national to a local orientation as they sought for ways to defend the privileged position of their families in society.” But this local turn still tied the locale to cultural traditions that were national in scope, “a sign,” Bol continues, “that Song literati had begun to reconceptualize the nation as something less imperial, less derivative of court culture, and less centralized.”7 The Mongol conquests ushered in an unprecedented six centuries of nearly continuous political unity between the Yellow and Yangzi (and Pearl) River basins. Although much of the format and style of individual gazetteers continued to follow Southern Zhao Song models, the Yuan (1279–1368), Ming (1368–1644), and Qing (1644–1911) governments folded local gazetteers back into a centralized metageography that affirmed imperial unity. After conquering the Southern Zhao Song state, the Yuan dynasty issued an edict for the composition of the first empirewide gazetteer (called yitong zhi 一統志 [unification treatise] or zongzhi 總志 [comprehensive treatise]) that would encompass both the former Jin and Zhao Song territories. The imperial court imposed the first official empirewide standardization of gazetteer format so as to facilitate its empirewide compilation. The Ming and Qing dynasties would continue this practice, making regular updates to their own comprehensive imperial gazetteers.8 The success of this particular form of local geographical writing was no doubt tied to the political unity and continuity of the late imperial period. But it also effectively balanced the centralizing and localizing structures of geographical

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writing from the past, achieving the goals of sociopolitical actors at various spatial scales. As Joseph Dennis has shown, late imperial gazetteers provided local gentry (the authors of the texts) a way to enhance the reputation of their home locale across the empire and also to elevate the social status of their own extended family network within their local communities. Gazetteers provided non-Han administrators on the borderlands of the empire a way to legitimize their rule within their local community and to justify their inclusion within the imperial state. Gazetteers provided provincial officials valuable information as they moved into their new provincial offices, but they also allowed these officials to show off their accomplishments while in that office, including the construction of public works and the invigorating of local literary culture. Finally, gazetteers also provided the imperial capital a powerful symbol of unity, standardization, centralization, and good government.9 As a platform for accomplishing the goals of so many different sociopolitical actors operating at distinct spatial scales, late imperial gazetteers represent the culminating compromise between the oscillating extremes of the centralizing Han imperial metageography and the localizing early medieval local geographies. In the political context of unprecedented imperial size, unity, and continuity from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, local gazetteers gave literary expression to a powerful alignment of local, national, imperial, and civilizational identities. This alignment would facilitate the modern construction of Han nationalism out of considerable regional and linguistic diversity and the transformation from the early modern, Manchu-led Qing empire into the modern Han-led, Chinese multination state.10 Throughout this process, the modern Chinese state has rewritten its histories and recharted its maps so as to make this modern alignment of local, national, imperial, and civilizational communities seem natural and self-evident throughout its five thousand years of history. Contrary to this nationalistic paradigm, a metageography of ecumenical regionalism disaggregates these spatial units and facilitates a historicizing of the development of regionalism in an imperial, ecumenical, or national context. It articulates the distinctiveness of local communities and highlights the unique contributions they make to the larger spatial superstructures.

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Northern and Southern Dynasties As Sui-Tang officials developed the idea that the Northern and Southern Dynasties were equal and complementary halves of one inevitable whole, they accepted a rather radical idea: that two competing imperial courts could simultaneously have equal claims to the Mandate of Heaven. Although this expedient model served their immediate goal of reconciling a four-centuries-old divide between the competing Yellow and Yangzi River cores, it established a historical precedent for legitimizing future multistate systems within the Sinitic ecumene. The northern and southern framework furthermore emphasizes how cultural, political, and economic innovations in society often originate from its frontiers rather than from its conservative core, thereby sometimes pulling the core in opposing directions. This perspective reframes the northern and southern dynasties as two Han successor empires driven toward divergent military and economic institutions by the very different northern and southern borderlands from which the two regimes emerged. The most prominent adoption of the northern and southern dynasties metageography in Sinitic history was in the “China among equals” diplomatic relationship between the Khitan Liao (916–1125) and Zhao Song (960–1279) states. Especially within diplomatic exchanges after the Treaty of Chanyuan 澶淵 in 1005, these two Tang successor empires acknowledged their political parity, referred to each other as “the Northern and Southern Dynasties,” and adopted fictive kinship terms between their emperors. Zhao Song officials made consistent ideological distinctions between the Sinitic “northern state” of the Great Liao and the “barbarian” kingdoms of the past or their contemporary west (such as the Tangut Xi Xia state). Although they did also at times apply “barbarian” epithets to the Khitan (especially in official documents not intended to be read by Khitan audiences), this was always tempered by the realpolitik of the military superiority of the northern Khitan state— another parallel with the Tabgatch and Jiankang empires. The metageography of equal northern and southern dynasties provided the Liao and Zhao Song states a historical precedent and pre-prepared

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framework for legitimizing the political reality of having two equally matched imperial states within a single Sinitic ecumene in ways that the traditional imperial metageography could not do.11 The metageography of northern and southern dynasties has also been used across the frontiers of the Sinitic ecumene. Various kingdoms throughout history in what is now Vietnam referred to themselves as the “Nam quốc” 南國 (Southern State) and to China as the “Bac quốc” 北國 (Northern State)—suggesting if not political parity, then at least cultural parallelism.12 Japan had a Nanbokuchō 南北朝 (Northern and Southern Dynasties) period in the mid-fourteenth century, and Vietnam had a Nam-Bắc triều 南北朝 (also Northern and Southern Dynasties) period in the mid-sixteenth century. In both cases, the metageography provided a pre-prepared spatial framework for recasting historical periods of political fragmentation in such a way as to still assert the normalcy and legitimacy of the subsequent unifying regime.13 But the early medieval northern and southern dynasties framework is more than a mere political or historiographic idea; it is founded in natural geography and evident in cultural and economic realities as well. It can therefore be useful for historians studying periods other than those in which historical actors themselves employed the model. Indeed, one of the most enduring geographical patterns of Chinese history is the environmentally structured divide between the northern and southern cores of Sinitic civilization. The north is made up of the ancient civilizational heartland of the Yellow River basin and its northern and western borderlands with Central Eurasia. Contrary to the imperialistic or nationalistic narratives, state formations in this civilizational core have largely been shaped either by the conquest or the threat of conquest by hybridized Sino-nomadic societies on its northern and western borderlands.14 Victor Mair has argued persuasively that the “north(west)ern peoples” were not only “responsible for the creation of the first states in the East Asian Heartland” (i.e., the Zhou conquest of the Yellow River plain) but also, “more often than not, were responsible for the building of vast empires in the Extended East Asian Heartland.” Rather than seeing this frontier as foreign to Sinitic civilization and threatening to imperial order, creating “conquest dynasties” that would inevitably be Sinified, Mair continues, “the

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histories of the Chinese state and of the north(west)ern peoples are so intimately interwoven that, were it not for the north(west)ern peoples, there would be no China.”15 The significance of this northern and northwestern borderland and its non-Sinitic actors has been especially articulated by New Qing historians in their effort to recover the Manchuness of the Qing dynasty.16 Again and again, one sees that the hybrid Sino-nomadic borderland societies wielded a disproportionately large influence on the sociopolitical structures of the Yellow River basin. Indeed, this longue durée pattern of sociopolitical interconnection between the Yellow River plains and the Mongolian Steppe is part of an even larger pattern that spans all of Eurasian history. Victor Lieberman paired China with other lands that bordered the Central Eurasian Steppe in the “exposed zone” of Eurasia. These are “regions whose political history of much of the second millennium was shaped substantially by actors, generally Inner Asians, originating outside of the regions in question.”17 Across Eurasia, peoples along the steppe borderlands combined military traditions from neighboring nomads with technologies of statecraft from neighboring sedentarists and synthesized highly effective hybrid sociopolitical systems that, according to Peter Turchin’s calculations, created over 90 percent of all premodern empires.18 To the southern borderland, the Yangzi basin (and later the Pearl River basin, as the frontier continued to expand southward) was shaped instead by its lack of military threats, its distance from the imperial capital, its rich agricultural production through rice paddies, its riverine transportation network, and its maritime trade through the South China Sea into the Indian Ocean. These geographic characteristics resulted in a south that was usually on the forefront of economic rather than military development.19 Just as Sinitic culture in the north hybridized with Central Eurasian nomadic cultures, Sinitic culture in the south hybridized with native Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian cultures. Whenever ecumenewide empires fragmented, Yangzi basin states would consistently separate themselves from northern occupation. But even when unified under a single imperial order, the Yellow and Yangzi basins were often administered under distinct systems or as separate peoples. For example, the late Tang administered the north through the Public Revenue Department and the south through the Salt

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266 Conclusion

and Iron Commission, and the Yuan dynasty legally differentiated the hanren 漢人 of the north and nanren 南人 of the south.20 Even after modern nation-building efforts by the People’s Republic of China, this geographic polarity of a political-military north and a cultural-economic south is still evident in contemporary tensions between Beijing and Shanghai.21 Many of the basic tenets of this north-south divide, its cul­ tural clichés, and its geographical underpinnings were already articulated within the metageography of the northern and southern dynasties as it was developed throughout the third to sixth centuries, long before the seventh century, when the label was retroactively applied to explain the preunification geopolitical landscape.

Hydrocultural Landscape Rivers have figured prominently in both regional and world maps throughout Chinese history. This is evident in maps from the earliest excavated examples from the Han period (such as the Fangmatan and Mawangdui maps) to the monumental Zhao Song stele maps such as the famous Hua Yi tu 華夷圖 (Map of Sinitic and barbarian lands) or the Yuji tu 禹迹圖 (Map of the traces of Yu [the Great]) (fig. C.1).22 Indeed, the natural structures of the hydrocultural landscape undergird all three of the other metageographies. The hydrocultural model also highlights other longue durée patterns throughout Chinese history. Interestingly, in a hydrological metaphor that resembles Li Dao­ yuan’s theoretical explanation for prioritizing water, Fernand Braudel describes the “long-furling waves” of geographic history that give meaning and shape to the “crests of foam” that are the history of individual historical actors.23 The physiographic drainage basins of mainland East Asia repeatedly gave shape to predictable economic and political boundaries. Densely populated agricultural societies thrived in the fertile river ­valleys and plains of East Asia, but the aridity and elevation of the deserts and mountains that surrounded them created natural boundaries. These drainage basins formed natural containers within which sociopolitical systems would be repeatedly created and re-created over the longue durée. Whenever empires fragmented, regional states

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Fig. C.1.  Yuji tu 禹迹圖 (Map of the traces of Yu [the Great]). Stone stele engraved in 1136. Rubbing dated ca. 1933. 84 x 83 cm. Forest of Stone Steles Museum, Xi’an, People’s Republic of China. Courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library. A high-resolution version of this i­ mage is available online at http://hollis.harvard.edu, record number 1002799.

consistently took shape along physiographic drainage basins. During the Six Dynasties period (220–589), the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (902–979), the Jin-Yuan and Southern Zhao Song division (1127–1278), and even the warlord period (1916–1928), state boundaries have been remarkably similar. The Sichuan basin with its protective mountain bulwarks is a quintessential example. An early Qing official’s assessment of the region has become a popular adage: “When the empire

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has not yet fragmented into rebellions, Shu is the first to rebel; when the empire is already united in good order, Shu is the last to be set in order” 天下未亂蜀先亂，天下已治蜀後治. 24 Although Confucian ideology claims that legitimate rulers need only rely on heavenly favor rather than earthly topography for their defense, the reality of very consistent political boundaries along topographical and environmental divides suggests otherwise. These physiographic drainage basins and the rivers at their centers also profoundly shaped the economic structure of the Sinitic ecumene. The ease of transportation along rivers created internally networked drainage basins, each with its own “central place” and its own distinct economic developments. These patterns are most thoroughly articulated in G. William Skinner’s analysis of China’s nineteenth-century economic development, but the model has been useful in thinking about regional patterns throughout premodern China.25 Robert Hartwell has described the Zhao Song commercial revolution as interrelated “histories of regional cycles of growth” and of “internal dynamics of ecologically diverse physiocratic regions.”26 The particularly vast riverine transportation network of the Yangzi basin enabled cheaper trade, market specialization, cash cropping, and economic integration.27 This natural endowment of river networks (including the Pearl River system by the late imperial period) continued to facilitate economic development in the south into the modern age. Both Skinner and Li Daoyuan (in admittedly more embryonic form) saw enduring geographical patterns creating a foundational structure within which human actions took place, positing that this foundation substantively shaped what was possible for humans to do as it channeled their behavior into consistent political, cultural, and economic spatial patterns. The hydrocultural metageography highlights not only how geography has shaped human history, but also how humans have transformed their natural environments. Contrary to the supposed Eastern philosophy of living harmoniously with the environment, “China’s environmental history,” Robert Marks argues, “is a story of the simplification of environments, peoples, and institutions,” a “remaking of the environment in a particular Chinese way, marked by settled agriculture based on farming families tilling the land and paying taxes to a central state.”28 In the Shuijing zhu, this story is mostly manifest in

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hydraulic projects (such as irrigation and canals) that transformed the lowlands into fertile farms and in mountain colonization (by monasteries, shrines, recluses, and so on) that brought human communities up into the highlands. Sinitic elites (as part of these ecosystems), Marks continues, were also “transformed by other peoples and environments” through this process. The general transformation of land from one of “the most biologically rich and diverse places on earth” into farmlands provided the agricultural foundation for unparalleled population density and civilizational achievements. But it imposed great costs on the environments of East Asia and the world. Today, an industrialized China has continued this strained relationship with its natural environment, benefiting much from its rich natural resources but also destroying much of that natural endowment in the process.29 In sum, the histories of economic development, environmental changes, and even political formations are often far better analyzed through a spatial framework that prioritizes the natural landscape of drainage basins than through one of imperially decreed administrative districts.

Indo-Sinitic Bipolar Worldview Li Daoyuan’s Anavatapta/Kunlun-centered Indo-Sinitic bipolar world model survived, in modified forms, for over a millennium, and it remained throughout this time the primary alternative to the Sinocentric imperial worldview. It is hardly the case, therefore, that the introduction of Buddhism “by no means fundamentally shook the Chinese worldview” or that “after Buddhism was Sinified, Chinese Buddhists rarely brought up this subject again.”30 It may be true that the bipolar world model never displaced the Sinocentric imperial metageography as state-sponsored orthodoxy. But the Anavatapta/Kunlun-centered ­Indo-Sinitic worldview was consistently employed whenever someone wanted to write about or map out the whole world and not just the world-empire. The continued influence of the Indo-Sinitic bipolar world model is first evident in Xuanzang and Bianji’s 辯機 (fl. 646) very similar world model presented in the introduction to their famous Da Tang Xiyu ji.31 Although Li Daoyuan primarily fit India into Sinitic geographies and

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270 Conclusion

Xuanzang added the Sinitic realm into Buddhist geographies, still, ­Xuanzang repeated many of the same syncretistic conflations that Li Daoyuan had developed in the Shuijing zhu a century earlier. According to Xuanzang, Anavatapta lay at the center of the inhabited con­ tinent of Jambudvipa. Although it was not overtly equated with Kunlun in his text, Anavatapta was identified as the ultimate source of the Yellow River. The river was described as issuing from this peak, flowing through the Tarim basin, emptying into an inland sea, and then coursing through a subterranean channel to Jishi Mountain, just as Li Dao­ yuan had described.32 Although Xuanzang divided Jambudvipa into four realms associated with the rulers of the four cardinal directions, he gave priority in both structure and content to just two: the Ruler of Men in the East (Dong renzhu 東人主; i.e., the Sinitic realm) and the Ruler of Elephants in the South (Nan xiangzhu 南象主; i.e., the Indic realm).33 The result of this prioritization was a maintenance of the Indo-Sinitic bipolarity articulated by Li Daoyuan. For example, at the conclusion of his discussion of the Four Lords, Xuanzang set the lands of the Ruler of Men and those of the Ruler of Elephants apart from the rest of the world as special, each in its own distinctive ways. The other three lords [aside from the Lord of Men] hold the east as the superior direction. . . . In the land of the Lord of Men, the people respect the southern direction. As regards the etiquette observed between a monarch and his subjects and that between the superior and the inferior, and the cultural institutions and political systems, the land of the Lord of Men excels all the other countries; while as to instructions concerning the purification of the mind, and liberation from worldly burdens, as well as teachings to relieve one from birth and death, the theories are the best in the country of the Lord of Elephants.34 三主之俗，東方為上。 . . . 人主之地，南面為尊。方俗殊風，斯其大概。 至於君臣上下之禮，憲章文軌之儀，人主之地，無以加也。清心釋累之 訓，出離生死之教，象主之國，其理優矣。

Even though Xuanzang’s motivation for syncretism was quite different from that of Li Daoyuan, they ended up presenting many of the same conclusions. The Shuijing zhu and the Da Tang Xiyu ji both present (1)

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Fig. C.2.  Sihai huayi zongtu 四海華夷總圖 (General map of the Sinitic and foreign lands within the four seas). Each page is 22.5 x 14.5 cm. From Zhang Huang, Tushu bian (1613), vol. 10, 29.39b–40a. Reprint: Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1971.

syncretistic notions of a central peak adorned with jewels and divine beings, (2) Sinitic and Indic rivers both originating from this point, (3) Sinitic and Indic realms standing apart from all other world regions, and (4) the relationship between these two realms as being parallel or complementary rather than opposite and antagonistic. After Xuanzang, these syncretistic geographical principles became mainstream in East Asian Buddhist and non-Buddhist world geographies and can be seen in world maps throughout East Asia as late as the nineteenth century, an example of which is the Sihai huayi zongtu 四海 華夷總圖 (General map of the Sinitic and foreign lands within the four seas) (fig. C.2).35

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272 Conclusion

The early medieval Buddhist challenge to Sinocentrism in many ways prefigures the modern European challenge to Sinocentrism. Indeed, Lynda Shaffer has drawn parallels between the “Southernization” of early medieval China and the “Westernization” of modern China. In both cases, Sinocentrism was threatened by merchants, missionaries, diplomats, and armies bringing with them new ideologies, elite literature, sophisticated technologies, and agricultural products. 36 And, in both cases, Sinitic elites responded with a mix of uneasiness, jingoism, and selective adoption that was initially very disruptive but ultimately strengthening. The Westernization of China in the modern age was probably more transformative, but its Southernization (sometimes also called Buddhacization) in the early medieval period was still substantial and established several underrecognized patterns for the later Westernization. From this modern encounter between China and Europe, a reinvented version of an east-west bipolar world model has been constructed, now with all kinds of modern ideologies attached to it.37 The animating idea throughout all four of these metageographies has been that spatial frameworks are powerful and that through manipulating perceptions of space they empower certain people and suppress others. Everyone unavoidably employs a metageography, even if unintentionally. Being conscientious of the metageographies embedded in our primary sources and in our own secondary scholarship exposes the power dynamics embedded within the historical-spatial structures being analyzed. Doing so reveals spatial orthodoxies as constructed ideas rather than physical realities, and it opens our eyes to alternative historical perspectives and previously marginalized historical actors. The imperial metageography, through amplifying the importance and centrality of the imperial court, also empowered those who worked there: the emperor, the imperial family, imperial affines, high officials, regents, and eunuchs. Many excellent histories of these people have been written using the imperial metageography to provide its spatial framework. But it is a mistake to think that the histories of these few people at the court are the equivalent of a history of Sinitic society,

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culture, empire, or civilization in toto. These topics are much too spatially complex for a myopic view of the court to adequately elucidate. To plumb these social and cultural complexities effectively, one needs alternative spatial frameworks that are less politically structured, less court-centric, more varied in their scope, and more inclusive of alternate agencies. It is the conclusion of this book that these four early medieval metageographies (ecumenical regionalism, northern and southern ­dynasties, the hydrocultural landscape, and the Indo-Sinitic bipolar world­view) provide such spatial frameworks. Instead of constructing space so as to highlight the deeds of courtiers, these four metageog­ raphies foreground the agency of provincial elites, frontier people, nonSinitic tribes, military dynasts, religious professionals, foreigners, and even nature itself. These people (and natural forces) are absolutely crucial in understanding how the history of Sinitic civilization actually played out, yet they are intentionally obfuscated in traditional imperial histories structured by the imperial metageography. These alternative metageographies can structure new histories that reveal the significance of these marginalized actors. Although the four metageographies were first developed to meet the unique cultural needs of an early medieval historical context, they have proven enduring because the historical actors they illuminate have never really gone away, even during periods of supposed “grand unity.” They continue to be useful for historians and Sinologists in our research today as we strive to rescue Chinese history from the empire.

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Abbreviations FXZ Faxian, Gaoseng Faxian zhuan HHS Fan Ye, Hou Han shu HS Ban Gu, Han shu HTDLSC Wang Mo, comp., Han–Tang dili shuchao HTFZJY Liu Weiyi, comp., Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi HYGZ Chang Qu, Huayang guozhi jiao bu tu zhu JS Fang Xuanling, Jin shu LYQLJ Yang Xuanzhi, Luoyang qielan ji jiaojian SDF Zuo Si, “Shu du fu” SJ Sima Qian, Shiji SJZ Li Daoyuan, Shuijing zhu jiaozheng SJZS Li Daoyuan, Shuijing zhu shu SoS Shen Yue, Song shu SuS Wei Zheng, Sui shu T. Taishō shinshū daīzōkyō TD Du You, Tongdian WeiDF Zuo Si, “Wei du fu” WS Wei Shou, Wei shu WuDF Zuo Si, “Wu du fu” XYJ Xuanzang and Bianji, Da Tang xiyu ji YSJX Yan Zhitui, Yanshi jiaxun jijie

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Notes

Introduction 1 SJ 53.2014; HS 39.2006. 2 TD 171.4450–51. Similar sentiments from Tang literati will be explored in chapter 1. 3 Lewis and Wigen, Myth of Continents, ix–xii, 1–19. 4 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 26–46. For explanations of Lefebvre’s theory, see Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 218–25; White, “What Is Spatial History?” See also Sack, Conceptions of Space; Giddens, “Time, Space, and Regionalisation”; Soja, Postmodern Geographies. 5 Wood and Fels, Power of Maps, 1–3. Italics in original. What Denis Wood has adroitly described about the “power of maps” is applicable to other forms of spatial representation, including geographical texts and metageographies—or, in other words, culturally established, collective mental maps. 6 For examples of the adoption of imperial metageography in modern Western scholarship, see Fairbank, Chinese World Order; Fairbank and Têng, “On the Ch’ing Tributary System”; Yingshi Yu, Trade and Expansion; Schwartz, “Chinese Perception of World Order.” This approach to Han foreign policy has been criticized in Eberhard, “Trade and Expansion”; Pulleyblank, “Trade and Expansion”; and Selbitschka, “Early Chinese Diplomacy.” The dominance of the imperial metageography can also be seen in Richard J. Smith, Chinese Maps; and Q. Edward Wang, “History, Space, and Ethnicity.” Tang Xiaofeng presents a summation of dynastic geography in its fully developed form in the Qing and its final overturning by modern scientific geography in the twentieth century in From Dynastic Geography, 23–52. 7 For studies on this nationalistic historical geography in China, see Wu Ming and Peng Minghui, Lishi dilixue, chap. 5; Nuo Ge, Minzu zhuyi. For some recent examples of nationalist historical geography, see Ni Jianmin and Song Yichang, Guojia dili; Xu Jieshun, Xueqiu; An Jiesheng, Lishi minzu dili. In English, see Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization”; Jieshun Xu, “Understanding the Snowball

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Notes to Pages 5–9

Theory,” 113–27. Tan Qixiang described the spatial conceptualization of “China” for his Zhongguo lishi ditu ji collection of maps as comprising anything that would one day be contained within the Qing dynasty. Tan Qixiang, “Lishi­ shang de Zhongguo,” 34, 41. This nationalistic historical geography has been criticized in Bovingdon, “Contested Histories,” 355–58; and Kim, “Critique of the Chinese Theory.” 8 On spatial history, see White, “What Is Spatial History?”; Knowles, “Historical GIS”; Baker, Geography and History; Warf and Arias, Spatial Turn; Guldi, “Spatial Turn in History”; Dear, GeoHumanities. Excellent examples from premodern Chinese studies that analyze space as it is perceived and lived include Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space; Robson, Power of Place; and Mostern, Dividing the Realm. 9 On the significance of the early medieval period for the rest of Chinese history, see Mair, “North(west)ern People,” 77; Rogers, Chronicle of Fu Chien, iv; Li Yuan, “Woguo lishi shang,” 3. 10 Recent comparative history has revealed the institutional similarities between the Roman and Han empires. See Scheidel, “From the ‘Great Convergence,’” 11–20; Scheidel, Rome and China; Scheidel, State Power; Auyang, Dragon and the Eagle; Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, chap. 2; Poo, Drake, and Raphals, Old Society, New Belief. 11 Holcombe, Genesis of East Asia, 8–11; Clark, “What’s the Matter with ‘China’?” 296. On the shifting meaning of zhongguo, see Yang Jianxin, “‘Zhongguo’ yici”; Hu Axiang, Wei zai si ming; and Bol, “Geography and Culture.” On the lack of a premodern equivalent to the term “China,” see Fitzgerald, “Nationless State,” 66–67; Mair, “North(west)ern People,” 46, 51–53. On the problems of the centered, monolithic idea of China throughout history, see Blum and Jensen, China Off Center. For a defense of the continuity of a Chinese national identity, see Ge Zhaoguang, Zhai zi Zhongguo; Ge Zhaoguang, Here in “China” I Dwell. 12 In these geographical terms, “Yellow River basin” will refer to the entire drainage basin of the Yellow River, including the Guanzhong region. “Yellow River plain” will refer to the lower Yellow River flatlands east of the Hangu Pass, often called the Central Plains or the north China plain (although I will avoid these latter terms because of their inherent spatialization of “north” and “central”). 13 On the multiethnic character of the Han empire, see Holcombe, Genesis of East Asia, chaps. 2 and 5; Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 202–44; Hsieh, “Viewing the Han Empire.” 14 On “Sinitic” as a transnational, literary-based community of elites, see Chit­tick, Jiankang Empire, 18–22; Mair, “Buddhism and the Rise,” 707–13; Mair, “North(west)ern People,” 46–64; Lurie, Realms of Literacy, chap. 7; Wixted, “Literary Sinitic,” 1–14; Kornicki, Chinese Writing, chaps. 1–3. This should not be confused with the linguistic term “Sinitic,” which refers to a family of spoken languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, and so forth, and is one branch of the larger Sino-Tibetan language family.

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15 The terms hua and xia and the compound huaxia have been misinterpreted as ancient equivalents of “China.” The terms emerged in Eastern Zhou literature as autonyms for the collective cultural identity of literate elites who were inher­ itors of Zhou civilization. The Huaxia people were the inhabitants of Zhong­guo, the Central Plains. This cultural identity explicitly excluded the Wu, Chu, and Yue peoples of the Yangzi basin. Chittick, Jiankang Empire, chaps. 1–4; Behr, “Xia”; Uffe, Emergence of Civilizational Consciousness, chap. 5; Yang, “Becoming Zhongguo,” 22–48; Holcombe, “Re-Imagining China,” 1–14. In the medieval period, under certain historical settings, these autonyms would take on quasinationalistic connotations, but they continued to primarily refer to a community defined by mastery of Sinitic script and its canonical texts. For example, many people or peoples in the medieval period were “non-Chinese” in a nationalistic interpretation but were still identified as hua or xia in this cultural sense. Chittick, Jiankang Empire, chap. 9; Kleeman, Great Perfection, 11–60; Abramson, Ethnic Identity, 1–17; Sanping Chen, Multicultural China. Although hua and xia are usually translated as “Chinese,” this must be understood within the premodern cultural context and not as the ancient equivalent of the modern Han nationality. Chin, “Antiquarian as Ethnographer,” 128–46. 16 Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies, 88–92. This understanding of a cultural ecu­ mene defined primarily through its literary script has been further developed in Asian cases with Charles Holcombe’s “kanji sphere,” Joshua Fogel’s “Sinosphere,” and Sheldon Pollock’s “Sanskrit cosmopolis.” Holcombe, Genesis of East Asia, 60–77; Fogel, Articulating the Sinosphere, 4–5; Pollock, Language of the Gods, part 1. 17 Chittick, Jiankang Empire, 30–35, 39–43. This ethnic distinction made by Central Eurasian nomadic conquerors between inhabitants of the Yellow and Yangzi River basins is repeated by the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, who classified the “Han people” (Hanren) of the Yellow River basin as a different people ethnically from the “Southerners” (Nanren) of lands farther south. 18 On the flexible boundaries of Sinitic civilization and their inconsistency with ­modern nation-states, see Holcombe, Genesis of East Asia; Mair and Kelley, Imperial China; Ge Zhaoguang, Zhongguo de nei yu wai, chaps. 2–3. 19 This low survival rate is not uncommon for noncanonical texts in a manuscript culture. For example, Peter Bol has noted that by 1368, when the Ming dynasty was established, about two thousand local records of varying kinds had been written, but 99 percent of these have since been lost. Bol, “Rise of Local History,” 38. 20 Xiaofei Tian, “Remaking History,” 705–31. 21 Here I am following Hüsemann’s translation of the title. The Shuijing is a rather simple text that does not make any authoritative claims to canonical status. I understand jing here as defined by Paul Kroll: “Guideways, pathways, layout of rivers forming geographical organization of territory.” Hüsemann, Das Altertum vergegenwätigen, 11; Hüsemann, “Shuijing zhu,” 311; Kroll, Student’s Dictionary, 217. The Shuijing zhu is not actually entirely extant. Sometime between its

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authorship and the beginning of print publishing, five fascicles were lost. At that time editors brought the number of fascicles back to forty by reconstructing new fascicles or splitting existing ones. The missing section probably described the lower Yangzi region, which receives incomplete treatment in the received text. On missing portions of the Shuijing zhu, see Chen Qiaoyi, “Shuijing zhu” yanjiu, 433–47. For a more detailed account of the textual history of the Shuijing zhu, see Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan yu “Shuijing zhu,” chaps. 11–13; Wu Tian­ ren, Lixue yanjiu shi, chaps. 26–33; Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwär­tigen, chaps. 2–3. 22 On the great number and variety of texts cited in the Shuijing zhu, see Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan pingzhuan, 110–23; Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, chaps. 6–7. Forty percent of the geographical texts from the Sui shu catalog that can be identified as having been written before the early sixth century are cited within the Shuijing zhu. 23 The Shuijing zhu has been the object of many Chinese studies; indeed, there is an entire field of “Li studies” (Lixue 酈學). See Wu Tianren, Lixue yanjiu shi; Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan yu “Shuijing zhu,” chaps. 10–14; see also Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 30–33. On Li Daoyuan himself and his text, see Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan yu “Shuijing zhu,” chaps. 4–5; Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan pingzhuan; Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, chap. 1; Hüsemann, “Shuijing zhu,” 311–17. Chen Qiaoyi was the dominant figure in twentieth-century Li studies, producing numerous scholarly articles and a complete modern Chinese translation. Western scholarship on the Shuijing zhu was quite limited until Jörg Hüsemann’s excellent study. See Bielenstein, “Notes on the Shui Ching”; Nylan, “Wandering in the Ruins,” 63–64; Hüsemann, “Verortung der Vergangenheit”; Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen. 24 Legge, Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms; Jenner, Memories of Loyang; Yi-t’ung Wang, Record of Buddhist Monasteries. Michael Farmer’s translation of the Huayang guozhi is forthcoming. 25 Geographical essays written before the Sui dynasty can be found in the Hou Han shu, Jin shu, Song shu, Nan Qi shu, and Wei shu. 26 These fragments have been compiled in HTDLSC and HTFZJY. 27 SuS 33.987–88; Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 10.274–75; TD 171.4450–51. 28 Peter Bol has written extensively about Harvard’s CHGIS (Chinese Historical GIS): Bol, “China Historical GIS”; Bol, “Historical Geography”; Bol, “Historical GIS and China”; Bol, “Creating a GIS”; Bol, “Embracing Geographic Analysis”; Bol, “GIS, Prosopography, and History”; Bol, “On an Infrastructure for Historical Spatial Analysis”; Bol, “What Is a Geographical Perspective?” The CHGIS site can be found at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/. Another online source for GIS studies of Chinese history is Academia Sinica’s CCTS (Chinese Civilization in Time and Space), which can be accessed at http://ccts.ascc.net/intro.php ?lang=en. 29 On the use of GIS by historians, see Knowles, Past Time; Gregory and Ell, His­ torical GIS; Knowles, Placing History; von Lünen and Travis, History and GIS; White, “What Is Spatial History?”

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Chapter One 1 There are a number of texts in the Han shu bibliography that would one day be classified as geographical writing once this bibliographic category existed. The Sui shu bibliography lists 138 works of geographical writing. The Han–Tang dili shuchao lists 388 works (38 of which are local compilations of biographies, which the Sui shu classifies in a different category). The Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi includes 440 works of just local geographies, with 229 of them dated before the Sui dynasty. SuS 33.982–87; HTDLSC, 10–22; HTFZJY, 1–16. 2 Campany, Strange Writing, 199. On the “cultural work” of literature, see Tompkins, Sensational Designs, xi; Long, “Reading American Literature,” 87–104; Watts, Cultural Work of Empire, 9–16. 3 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 26–46; Wood and Fels, Power of Maps, 1–3. 4 Despite the pivotal development of geographical writing as an independent genre during the early medieval period, several general histories of Chinese geographical thought give it little attention, if any. For examples of this brief treatment, see Wang Chengzu, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 46–48, 57–58; Zhongguo gudai dilixue shi, 10–19, 338–39. 5 Tang descriptions of the genre of geographical writing can be found in SuS 33.987– 88; Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 10.274–75; TD 171.4450–51. 6 Mark Edward Lewis, China between Empires, 1–2. 7 Mark Edward Lewis, China between Empires, 1–27; Jin Fagen, Zhongguo zhonggu diyu guannian, 4–11, 170–90; Tang Changru, Wei Jin Nanbeichao Sui Tang shi, chap. 2. 8 “Provinces” and “provincial” in this book refer in the general sense to lands outside of the capital region, not to the administrative unit sheng 省 that came into use in the late imperial period. 9 Campany, Strange Writing, 21–24; Briggs and Bauman, “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power.” On the overlap of geographical and biographical writing, see Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 38–62. On the overlap of geographical writing and anomaly accounts, see Campany, Strange Writing, 34–37, 42–45, 47–48, 53–55, 98–99, 102–26. 10 For examples of the scientific approach to the history of geographical thought, see Zhongguo gudai dilixue shi; Tan Qixiang, Zhongguo lidai dili xuejia; Lu Liangzhi, Zhongguo dituxue shi. In Western scholarship, see Chavannes, “Deux plus anciens spécimens”; Needham and Wang, Mathematics and the Sciences, 533– 43. This approach has been criticized in Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, chaps. 3–9. On nationalistic geographies, see the introduction, note 7. On the origins of gazetteer writing in early medieval local geographies, see Zhu Shijia, “Zhongguo difangzhi”; Huang Wei, Fangzhi xue, 88–153; HTFZJY, preface, 1–3; Hargett, “Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers.” This idea has been criticized in Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 35–36, 61–62. 11 Hu Baoguo, “Wei Jin Nanbeichao shiqi,” 15–21; Campany, Strange Writing, 43–45, 53–54; Zheng Yuyu, “Shenti xingdong,” 80–97; Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 289–90.

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Notes to Pages 24–26

12 On locality stories, see Chittick, “Pride of Place,” chap. 5; Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 53–56. 13 This defining feature is most evident in the marginal subgenres that overlap with other literary genres. Travelogues structure their narrative as they move through both time and space together. They were excluded from Lu Cheng’s 陸澄 and Ren Fang’s 任昉 compilations but included in the Sui shu catalog. SuS 33.983, 984, 988. The Huayang guozhi is regional in its spatial scope, but its text is structured spatially only in certain chapters. The Sui shu excludes it from its bibliographic catalog, but Liu Zhiji and Du You (with their bias against regionalism) cited it as a prime example of geographical writing. Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 10.274–75; TD 171.4451. Anomaly accounts like the Shizhou ji 十洲記 or the Shenyi jing 神異經 were still classified as geographical texts in the Sui shu since they organized the anomaly tales spatially. SuS 33.983. 14 Wang Chengzu, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 1–4; Wang Yong, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 1–36; Yu Xixian, Zhongguo gudai dilixue, 8–59. 15 Mathieu, “Fonctions et moyens de la géographie.” 16 Wang Chengzu, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 4–13; Yu Xixian, Zhongguo gudai dilixue, 30–41. Despite its inclusion in the canonical Shangshu 尚書 (Hallowed documents), the “Yu gong” was probably not written until the late Warring States or even Qin period. Shaughnessy, “Shang Shu,” 376–85. 17 Wang Chengzu, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 33–42; Yu Xixian, Zhongguo gudai dili­ xue, 61–69. 18 See the following chapters: “Di tu” 地圖, “Di shu” 地數, “Di yuan” 地員, “Du di” 度地, and “Shuiji” 水地. See also Wang Chengzu, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 13–16; Yu Xixian, Zhongguo gudai dilixue, 52–59. 19 On the influence of the Shanhai jing on early medieval geographical writing, see Hu Baoguo, “Wei Jin Nanbeichao shiqi,” 16–19. On locality stories in the “Hai jing,” see Chittick, “Pride of Place,” 52–53. 20 In the bibliographic catalog of the Han shu, the Shanhai jing is classified under the category of “calculations and [mantic] arts” (shushu 術數), subcategory “methods of forms” (xingfa 形法), along with texts on physiognomy and geomancy. HS 30.1774–75. Sima Qian made disparaging remarks on the reliability of the Shanhai jing in SJ 123.3180. On the spatial structure of the Shanhai jing, see Unno, “Kodai Chūgokujin no chiriteki sekaikan”; Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, “Conception of Terrestrial Organization,” 61–63; Strassberg, Chinese Bestiary, 30–43; Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 284–303. 21 On the “Dixing” and “Qi su” chapters, see Huainanzi 4.311–78, 11.759–826; Major et al., Huainanzi, 149–81, 391–428. On the Huainanzi’s relationship to geographical writing, see Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 64–65. On the Zou Yan world model, see Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 249–60. 22 HS 28a.1523–28b.1671. The account of natural and cultural geography is in HS 28a.1543–28b.1640. The idea of the empire overcoming environmentally constrained warring states is evident in nongeographical literature as well, such as Jia Yi’s (201–168? BCE) “Guo Qin lun” 過秦論 (The faults of Qin). For more on the “Dili zhi” and the construction of Han imperial geography, see chapter 2.

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23 Although these two local geographies in many ways resembled early medieval local geographies in both structure and content, the cultural work of their ­encompassing text was to assert the inferiority of the regional, frontier regimes of Wu and Yue and the superiority of the transcendent Han empire, a goal quite different from the legitimizing of regionalism in early medieval local geographies. Schuessler and Loewe, “Yüeh Jüeh shu,” 490–93; Milburn, Glory of Yue, 56– 61; Milburn, Urbanization, 39–47. 24 The “Dili zhi” figures prominently in the preface to Li Daoyuan’s Shuijing zhu, the Sui shu’s bibliographic essay, and Du You’s geographical chapter of the Tongdian. The history of administrative districting is in HS 28a.1523–43. 25 The inclusion of geographical information but lack of a geographical monograph in the Shiji is noted in the Sui shu bibliographic essay on geographical writing. SuS 33.987–88. 26 Although the concept of a geographical genre is articulated in early medieval ­literature, these subgenres are not. However, many modern scholars have ­similarly divided the geographical texts into more manageable subcategories. HTDLSC, 11–22; Wang Yong, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 127–95; Hu Baoguo, “Wei Jin Nanbeichao shiqi,” 13. Wang Mo’s bibliographic list in HTDLSC is less restrictive than that of the Sui shu, including texts that are not spatially structured but are local in scope, bringing the number of his categories to twelve. 27 Local geographies make up 36 percent (141 texts) of the Han–Tang dili shuchao (combining the two categories of prefectures and commanderies/princedoms) and 26 percent (40 texts) of the Sui shu. The Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi contains fragments from 223 pre-Sui local geographies. 28 Wang Yong, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 127–43, 155–64. 29 Chittick, “Pride of Place,” chap. 5; Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 53–56. On the variety of sources assembled into the Shuijing zhu, see Hüsemann, Alter­ tum vergegenwärtigen, chaps. 6–7. 30 The Han–Tang dili shuchao and the Sui shu provide smaller catalogs but roughly accord with the developmental arc described here. See figures 1.3 and 1.4. The Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi reports a jump from nine local geographies in the Eastern Han to twenty-nine (possibly thirty-six) in the sixty-year-long Three Kingdoms period. HTFZJY, 17–68. Local geographies from the fifty-nine-year Song dynasty account for 21 percent of all early medieval local geographies. Throughout this book, “Song dynasty” will refer to the Song dynasty of the Southern Dynasties, ruled by the Liu family, more commonly referred to as the Liu Song dynasty. The more famous Song dynasty of 960–1279, ruled by the Zhao family, is referred to in this book as the Zhao Song dynasty. 31 About half of the Jin texts of the Han–Tang dili shuchao and the Han–Tang fang­ zhi jiyi cannot be dated as either Western or Eastern Jin. For this reason, I have not differentiated between Western and Eastern Jin in figures 1.4, 1.6, and 1.7. From the Jin texts that can be dated from the Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi, the rate of production appears to decline slightly in the Western Jin and then decline slightly more in the Eastern Jin. But this is a small enough subset of Jin texts that there is little reliability in this pattern.

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Notes to Pages 33–39

32 On the southern focus of local geographies, see also Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 59–62. 33 On the development of this subgenre, see Wang Yong, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 143– 55. For textual fragments of exclusively natural geographies, see HTFZJY, 57–65; HTDLSC, 62b–87b, 443a. For textual fragments of natural geographies that incorporate human geography, see HTFZJY, 103–6, 117–20, 335; HTDLSC, 57a– 60b, 354a–57b, 440a–41b. This includes Yu Zhongyong’s 庾仲雍 (fl. early fifth century) Hanshui ji 漢水記 (Record of the Han River) and Jiang ji 江記 (Record of the Yangzi), as based on fragments from the Shuijing zhu. The Shanhai jing also fits into this subgenre. 34 On cosmic comprehensiveness, such texts include the “Dixing” chapter of the Huainanzi, the “Dili zhi” chapter of the Han shu, and the Shanhai jing. On imperial authority over the natural world, there are the “Yu gong” chapter of the Shangshu, the “Hequ shu” chapter of the Shiji, the “Qi su” chapter of the Huainanzi, the “Gouxu zhi” 溝洫志 chapter of the Han shu, and the Han rhapsodies on hunting in the Wenxuan 文選 (Selections of refined literature). On relationships with divinities, there are the Shanhai jing and the Mu Tianzi zhuan. 35 Huainanzi 4.337–45, 352–54. For an especially clear articulation of the workings of fengsu to link natural and human geography, see the Shan shu 山書 in HTDLSC, 58. 36 The ratio of natural geographies about the Yangzi versus the Yellow River basins in the Sui shu catalog is three to one, in the Han–Tang dili shuchao it is two to one, and among the Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi fragments (if limited to pre-Sui texts) it is four to one. 37 Van Slyke, Yangtze, chaps. 1–2; Elvin, Retreat of the Elephants, chaps. 3–4. 38 For examples, see Liu Yiqing, Shishuo xinyu, 2.31, 2.102. 39 Liu Yiqing, Shishuo xinyu, 2.88; JS 62.2404. Translation from Shih-hsiang Chen, Biography of Ku K’ai-Chih, 13. 40 Xiao Tong, Wenxuan, 12.183a. 41 HTDLSC, 89a–b. 42 An example is Zhang Guanglu’s 張光祿 (Liang dynasty) Huashan jingshe ji 華山 精舍記 (Record of the monasteries of Mount Hua). See also SuS 33.982–87. 43 Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society, 116–52; Twitchett, “Monasteries and China’s Economy,” 533–41; Ch’en, Chinese Transformation of Buddhism, 125–32, 138, 151–58. 44 Geographical texts describe monasteries as located especially in either moun­ tains or capital cities. On the interconnectedness of these communities, see Robson, “Neither Too Far, nor Too Near”; Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society, pt. 3; Walsh, Sacred Economies; Kohn, Monastic Life, 98–103. 45 A number of literati who wrote natural geographies also contributed to these other related fields, including such luminaries as Guo Pu, Xie Lingyun, and Ge Hong. On early landscape poetry, see Chang, Six Dynasties Poetry, 47–62; Holzman, Landscape Appreciation; Frodsham, Murmuring Stream. On early landscape painting, see Shih-hsiang Chen, Biography of Ku K’ai-Chih; Sullivan,

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46

47

48

49 50

51 52

53

54

Notes to Pages 39–41

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Symbols of Eternity, chap. 1. On materia medica texts from this period, see SuS 34.1040–50; Needham, Lu, and Huang, Botany, 111, 114, 359, 381, 385, 445–59, 488, 520, 531, 541–42. For examples of how Li Daoyuan incorporated poetry into his hydrologically structured geography, see SJZ 9.234–37, 11.290–91, 19.452, 24.572, 24.580, 40.938. Chapter 4 will examine the depictions of the natural environment in the Shuijing zhu. An example is the Jiaozhou yiwu zhi 交州異物志 (Record of the peculiar things of Jiao Prefecture). See also SuS 33.982–87. On the development of this subgenre, see Wang Yong, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 164–70; Yu Xixian, Zhongguo gudai dili­ xue, 75–85. Comprehensive foreign accounts make up one of the ten foreign accounts in the Sui shu bibliography and three of the twenty in the Han–Tang dili shuchao. An example of a comprehensive foreign account is the Siyi zhi 四夷志 (Record of the barbarians of the four directions). See also HTDLSC, 19b–20a, 96a–b, 185a– b; SuS 33.982–87. Fifteen of the eighteen texts in the Sui shu catalog and thirteen of the twenty in the Han–Tang dili shuchao are of one of these two regions. See also Boulton, “Early Chinese Buddhist Travel Records.” On the mythic outer realm, see Mu Tianzi zhuan xizheng; Shanhai jing 14.337– 17.439. The Huainanzi also contains accounts of foreign lands, but these accounts are mostly quoted from the Shanhai jing. Major et al., Huainanzi, 152–53, 166–67, 169–70. On the outer realm in imperial metageography, see Mark ­Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority, 308–17; Rui Yifu, Niansan zhong zhengshi. On the difference between imperial ideology and practice toward foreign peoples, see Selbitschka, “Early Chinese Diplomacy”; Pulleyblank, “Trade and Expansion.” Di Cosmo, Ancient China, chaps. 7–8. Three Kingdoms accounts of Southeast Asia make up 30 percent of the datable foreign geographies of the Han–Tang dili shuchao. But the dating of foreign geographies is especially tentative since about half of these texts from both the Han–Tang dili shuchao and the Sui shu cannot be dated (a higher percentage than of any other subgenre). On diplomatic missions to South and Southeast Asia from the Jiankang court, see Chen Shou, Sanguo zhi, 60.1385, 47.1145; Yao Silian, Liang shu, 54.783, 789. Following these missions, emissaries Kang Tai and Zhu Ying wrote the Funan zhuan 扶南傳 (Account of Funan) and the Funan yiwu zhi 扶南異物志 (Record of the peculiar things of Funan), respectively. The Shuijing zhu relies heavily on the Funan zhuan for its account of Southeast Asia and India. The accounts of foreign lands from the dynastic histories of Yangzi basin states consistently discuss Southeast Asia in greater detail than those of the Yellow River basin. For example, the state of Funan is mentioned four times in the Bei shi 北史 (History of the Northern Dynasties) but forty times in the Nan shi 南史 (History of the Southern Dynasties).

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55 Eleven out of eighteen texts from the Sui shu and four out of twenty texts from the Han–Tang dili shuchao are about the Western Regions. Most of these were written during the Eastern Jin period. 56 Of the pre-Sui foreign geographies on the Western Regions with identifiable ­authors, monks authored six out of nine from the Sui shu catalog and two out of four from the Han–Tang dili shuchao. See HTDLSC, 19a–20b; SuS 33.982–87. In the eight texts that Li Daoyuan used for his sixth-century account of India, all were written in the third and fourth centuries, six by Buddhist monks, three of whom were Indians. Petech, Northern India, 4–9. 57 This challenge to Han imperial metageography will be explored in greater detail in chapter 5. 58 Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest of China, chaps. 5–6; Kohn, Laughing at the Tao, 8– 24, 79–83, 161–69; Keenan, How Master Mou Removes Our Doubts, 1–46. 59 Boulton, “Early Chinese Buddhist Travel Records,” chaps. 4–6; Petech, Northern India, 8. On Sinitic perceptions of India, see Mather, “Chinese and Indian Perceptions”; Kieschnick and Shahar, India in the Chinese Imagination. 60 FXZ, T. 2085:864b28–c4; Legge, Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, 99–100. Similar sentiments can be found in several early Tang texts. XYJ, T. 2087:869b–c; Huili, Da Tang Da cien si Sanzang, T. 2053:246a12–18; Daoxuan, Shijia fangzhi, T. 2088:948c27–950c7. 61 On the borderland complex, see Forte, “Hui-Chih,” 122–27; Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, 55–57. 62 Beginning with the Hou Han shu 後漢書, the official accounts of India in the ­dynastic histories made only minimal reference to Buddhism and were upated little over the centuries. Mather, “Chinese and Indian Perceptions,” 1–2. Conversely, the Shuijing zhu made extensive use of Buddhist-authored foreign geographies of India, along with their metageographies (see chapter 5). 63 World geographies make up 17 percent of both the Han–Tang dili shuchao and Sui shu bibliographic catalogs, making it the second largest subgenre. Fragments of geographies that take the cosmos, world, or world-empire as their scale can be found in HTDLSC, 33–205. Extant examples of imperial geographies can be found in the Han shu, Hou Han shu, Jin shu, Song shu, Nan Qi shu, Wei shu, and Sui shu. 64 Lewis and Hsieh, “Politics of Tianxia”; Wang Ke, Zhongguo, chaps. 1–3; Gan Huaizhen, Dong Ya lishishang, chaps. 2–3. 65 Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority, chap. 7. 66 Three commentaries on the Shanhai jing were written during the Jin period. The Huainanzi’s articulation of geographically determined local customs is ubiquitous in early medieval geographies. The influence of these two texts on the Shuijing zhu is considerable. The Huainanzi’s Kunlun-centered model is adopted by the Shuijing zhu, and the Shanhai jing is the third most cited text in the Shuijing zhu (138 times). 67 An example of imperial geographies as the summation of all administrative units is the Da Wei zhuzhou ji 大魏諸州記 (Record of all prefectures of the great Wei dynasty). See also HTDLSC, 136b–152a, 173b–177a; SuS 33.982–87. This

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68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77

78

79 80 81

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division between the inner and outer realms is apparent in their categorical separation in the dynastic histories as well as comprehensive works that focus on either one or the other of these spaces. For comprehensive foreign geographies, see HTDLSC, 19b–20a, 96a–b, 185a–b; SuS 33.982–87. HHS 109.3385. SJZ, preface, 1. An example of a comprehensive imperial geography is Kan Yin’s 闞駰 (Northern Wei) Shisan zhou zhi 十三州志 (Record of the thirteen prefectures). See also HTDLSC, 105a–b, 131a–33b, 140a–50b, 186a–205b; SuS 33.982–87. For examples of naturally structured comprehensive geographies, see HTDLSC, 59a–60b, 62b–87b; SJZ; SuS 33.982–87. This text does not survive, but Cao Shibang (Tso Sze-bong) has argued that it was a presentation of the Buddhist hydrological geography. Cao, Zhongguo Fojiao, 181–83. See chapter 5. Quotation from SuS 33.988. Only three short fragments from these two works are attributed to them rather than their component texts. HTDLSC, 184a–b. SuS 33.982. For examples of capital geographies, see HTFZJY, 52–53, 73–77, 80– 81, 316–18, 339–41; HTDLSC, 17b–18a; SuS 33.982–87; LYQLJ; Jenner, Memories of Loyang; Yi-t’ung Wang, Record of Buddhist Monasteries. On Han capital rhapsodies, see Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 169–86. On the connection between capital rhapsodies and geographical writing, see Xiao Tong, Wenxuan, 4.74a–b; Knechtges, Wen Xuan, 1:337–39. The Shuijing zhu cites several capital rhapsodies from the late Eastern Han through the Song in SJZ 1.2, 10.258, 10.259, 10.261, 25.593, 26.618–19, 26.622, 26.626, 27.645, 27.649, 29.686, 33.766– 68, 36.832, 36.839, 37.857, 37.859, 37.874, and 39.921. On early medieval transformations of the Sinitic cityscape, see Mark Edward Lewis, China between Empires, chap. 4; Liu Shufen, Liuchao de chengshi; Cui Yanhua, Wei Jin Beichao Peidu. This regionalization of capitals is also apparent in capital rhapsodies such as Zuo Si’s 左思 “Sandu fu” 三都賦 and Yu Chan’s 庾闡 (ca. 287–340) “Yangdu fu” 揚都賦 on Jiankang, which was so popular that “the price of paper in the capital soared out of sight” 都下紙為之貴. Liu Yiqing, Shishuo xinyu, 4.79; Mather, New Account, 134. These two clusters account for fourteen of the twenty-one datable capital geog­ raphies. Seven of the ten geographies from the Jin dynasty are about Luoyang, and seven of the eight from the sixth century are about the three other capitals. On the regional characteristics of early medieval cities, see Dien, Six Dynasties Civilization, chap. 2; Lu Xiqi, Chengqiang nei wai, chap. 1. Sui shu, Han–Tang dili shuchao, and Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi collectively identify a total of thirty pre-Sui capital geographies: twelve on Luoyang, nine on Chang’an, seven on Jiankang, and two on Ye. On the transposition of country villas and urban gardens, see Ōmuro, Enrin toshi; Ōmuro, Tōgen no musō. On multistoried buildings of the Han capital, see Hung Wu, Monumentality, 106– 8. On the size of Northern Wei Luoyang and the number of Buddhist edifices,

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Notes to Pages 47–51

see Jenner, Memories of Loyang, 117–19. On the enormous Yongning Pagoda, see Jenner, Memories of Loyang, 147–63. On the construction of semipublic spaces within Buddhist temples, see Yinong Xu, Chinese City, 180–99. 82 For other examples, see HTFZJY, 316; SuS 33.985. There was also a (Liang dynasty) Miao ji 廟記 (Record of temples) and a reference to a damiao 大廟 in the (Chen dynasty) Jiankang ji 健康記, but it is uncertain whether either of these is necessarily referring to Buddhist temples. 83 Although temples and monasteries were an important part of sixth-century capital geographies, it is unclear whether the miracle tales common in the Luoyang qielan ji were also found in contemporary capital geographies. 84 Tang literati say little of these minor subgenres, and there are no surviving examples from which to deduce general characteristics. The surviving fragments are small. For fragments of geographies of peculiar things or local products (tuwu 土物), see HTFZJY, 14–15, 40, 43–51, 151–63, 166–67, 327, 334, 361. For fragments of geographies on palaces, see HTFZJY, 73–77, 317–18. For fragments of botanical geographies, see HTFZJY, 156–63. For fragments of place-name texts, see ­HTDLSC, 94b–96b, 106a, 107a–19a. For examples of travel geographies, see HTDLSC, 19a–b; SuS 33.982–87. 85 On the development of travel literature in China, see Wang Zijin, Qin Han jiaotong shigao; Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes; Zhu Yaoting and Gong Bin, Zhongguo gudai youji; Hargett, Jade Mountain, 18–57. Like capital geographies, travelogues built on the Eastern Han rhapsody tradition, many of which take marches as their theme. For citations of travel rhapsodies in the Shuijing zhu from the Eastern Han to the Northern Wei, see SJZ 4.109, 4.111, 4.113–14, 5.130, 5.131, 6.158, 6.173, 7.193, 8.204, 8.206, 9.232, 9.236, 9.244, 10.257, 10.272, 11.820, 15.368, 15.379, 16.389–90, 16.393, 22.530, and 39.921. 86 An example of an early geography on peculiar things of the Yangzi basin is Xue Ying’s 薛瑩 (Three Kingdoms) Jing Yang yi’nan yiwu zhi 荊揚以南異物志 (Record of the peculiar things of Jing and Yang and farther south). See also HTDLSC, 21b–22a; SuS 33.982–87. Five of the six datable titles on the peculiar things of Lingnan were written during the Eastern Han and Three Kingdoms periods, reflecting a shift in the fourth century toward a more domesticated, internalized Lingnan region. 87 JS 35.1039. The preface also laments the loss of ancient maps, the failure to employ a grid system, and the inclusion of irrelevant or unreliable information. This preface is most famous among historical geographers for its articulation of a “scientific” grid system for accurate mapping. 88 SuS 33.988. 89 The Da Yu ji is an unknown text. For an argument that it is an alternative name for the Shanhai jing, see Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 115 n. 154. It is unclear whether “Basic Annals” refers to historical chronicles in general or the official dynastic histories specifically. On the aspatial nature of historical chronicles, see White, “Foreword,” ix–xi; Bol, “What Is a Geographical Perspective?,” 198. The “Zhifang” text describes an idealized Zhou official responsible for maintaining geographic knowledge. Zhou li zhushu 33.1020–34.

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90 SJZ, preface, 1. The concluding line is an allusion to The Analects (Lunyu 5.26). For alternative translations of this passage, see Yee, “Chinese Maps,” 93; Chen Qiaoyi et al., Shuijing zhu quanyi, original preface, 1–2. 91 Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, 218–19. 92 The work is still cited in the Jiu Tang shu 舊唐書, completed in 945, but not in the Xin Tang shu, completed in 1060. Liu Xu, Jiu Tang shu, 46.2015. 93 SuS 33.987–88. 94 SuS 33.988. 95 HTDLSC, 140–51, 186–205; SuS 33.987–88. The Da Wei zhuzhou ji in twenty-one fascicles is probably, given its size, also comprehensive in its geographical infor­ mation, but there are no surviving fragments with which to verify this. 96 The preface and table of contents of the Shijie ji are preserved in the Buddhist canon. Sengyou, Chu sanzang jiji, T. 2145:12.88a–c. 97 This argument will be further developed in chapter 5. 98 SJZ, preface, 1. 99 The use of hydrology to structure Li Daoyuan’s vision of the world will be discussed in greater detail in chapters 4 and 5. 100 SuS 33.988. 101 The Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍, written in the late fifth to early sixth century, has no literary category of geographical writing. The bibliographic catalog of the Sui shu (completed in 636) does, as does Liu Zhiji’s Shitong (written in 710). 102 Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 3.74. 103 On Tang accounts of geographical writing, see SuS 29.806–8, 33.987–88; Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 10.274–75; TD 171.4450–51; HS 28a.1543 n. 3. On the affirmation of imperial centrality and unity in the geographical monograph of the Sui shu, see Lycas, “Intertextuality, Customs and Regionalism,” 12–33. 104 Similarly, 10 of the 225 local geographies listed in the Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi are dated to the Han period, again about 4 percent. 105 SuS 33.987. 106 HS 28a.1522–28b.1674; SJZ, preface, 1. There is a similar disconnect between the introductory essay and geographical content in the Sui shu’s chapter on geography, the former emphasizing imperial unity and the latter revealing considerable regional variation. SuS 29.806–7; Lycas, “Représenter l’espace,” 127–33. 107 Li Jifu, Yuanhe junxian tuzhi, preface, 1. 108 Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 10.274–75. Italics added. The Tongdian gives the same five regional examples of geographical writing. TD 171.4450–51. 109 TD 171.4450–51. The derisive comment about not leaving out a single tree or rock might suggest specific disapproval of natural geographies. 110 On jing as a timeless organizing principle, see Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority, 297–302. 111 SuS 33.987–88. Hu Baoguo identifies the lack of accuracy and utility as the prime critique of early medieval geographical texts from Tang officials. Hu Baoguo, “Wei Jin Nanbeichao shiqi,” 22. 112 Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 10.276. The inaccuracy of early medieval geographical writing is also noted by Yan Shigu 顏師古 (581–645) in HS 28a.1543 n. 3.

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113 TD 171.4450–51. 114 “Peering through bamboo tubes” is a metaphor for narrow-mindedness. See Zhuangzi 17.146–47. 115 TD 171.4450–51. 116 SuS 33.988. See also Wang Yong, Zhongguo dilixue shi, chap. 3. The introduction of the geographical monograph of the Sui shu mirrors this focus on imperial geographies. SuS 29.806–8. 117 Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 10.276. 118 Hu Baoguo, “Wei Jin Nanbeichao shiqi,” 22–25. On the negative evaluation of the Shuijing zhu in Tang scholarship, see Chen Qiaoyi, Lixue zhaji, 56–58; Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, 96–102. 119 The profoundly spatial experience of this age is evident in some of the labels for this period such as the “Age of Disunion” or the “Northern and Southern Dynasties.” 120 SuS 33.988; Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 3.74.

Chapter Two 1 For geographers, the terms “local” and “regional” are flexible terms, with the former always smaller in scale than the latter. In this book, “local” will refer to spaces as small as individual villages and up to prefecture (zhou 州) size. “Regional” will refer to spaces between the prefecture and the Skinnerian “macro­ region” (Skinner, “Regional Urbanization”). Medieval writers, however, made no such distinction. 2 Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies, chap. 2; Russell, Medieval Regions, chap. 1; Giddens, “Time, Space, and Regionalisation,” 265–95; Skinner, “Regional Urbanization.” 3 Holcombe, Genesis of East Asia, chap. 2; Holcombe, “Re-Imagining China,” 12–14; Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority, chaps. 7–8; Connery, Empire of the Text, chaps. 1–2. Holcombe articulates early China as an imagined community shared among the shi 士 class, who defined their inclusion within the corporate identity by their commitment to the Confucian classics and their practice of ritual. 4 Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 189–90. Emphasis in original. See also Skinner, “Structure of Chinese History,” 271–92. 5 On the variety of scripts available in the Roman empire, see Harris, Ancient Literacy, chap. 7. On Roman local elite culture, see Varga and Rusu-Bolindet, Official Power and Local Elites; Haynes, Blood of the Provinces. 6 On regionalism in the early imperial period, see Jin Fagen, Zhongguo zhonggu diyu guannian. For studies of particular regions in the early medieval period, see De Crespigny, Generals of the South; Kleeman, Great Perfection; Farmer, Talent of Shu; Chittick, Patronage and Community; Chittick, Jiankang Empire; Robson, Power of Place; and Lycas, “Représenter l’espace.” On gazetteers, which continued the metageography of ecumenical regionalism first developed in

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local geographies, see Zhang Guogan, Zhongguo gu fangzhi kao; De Weerdt, “Regional Descriptions”; Ba Zhaoxiang, Fangzhixue xinlun. 7 Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 60. 8 Farmer, Talent of Shu, 143. This metageography of ecumenical regionalism is a ­spatialized synthesis of observations that Andrew Chittick, Michael Nylan, and Michael Farmer have all made about local and geographical texts of this period. Chittick, “Pride of Place,” chaps. 4–5; Chittick, Jiankang Empire, chap. 8; Nylan, “Wandering in the Ruins,” 63–101; Farmer, “Three Chaste Ones,” 191–202; Farmer, Talent of Shu, chap. 6; Farmer, “Person of the State,” 23–54. 9 Woolf, Rome, 285. 10 These officials are the managers of directions (zhifang) and the ministers of edu­ cation of the office of earth (diguan dasitu 地官大司徒). Zhou li zhushu 33.1020– 34, 10.284–90. 11 Ban Gu’s preface to the “Dili zhi,” Pei Xiu’s third-century preface to the Yu gong diyu tu, Li Daoyuan’s sixth-century preface to the Shuijing zhu, and the seventhcentury bibliographic essay on geographical writing in the Sui shu all cite these as the foundational texts before the growth of local geographies in the third century. HHS 28a.1523–42; JS 35.1039; SJZ, preface, 1; SuS 33.987–88. The Shanhai jing and the Huainanzi present non-state-centered alternative metageographies; see chapter 1. On the imperial metageography, see Wang Chengzu, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 4–16, 33–43; Aihe Wang, Cosmology and Political Culture; Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, chap. 2; Zheng Yuyu, “Shenti xingdong,” 68–80. 12 Campany, Strange Writing, 102–26. 13 Aihe Wang, Cosmology and Political Culture; Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 260–73. 14 On the dialectic relationship between spatial practice and spatial imagination, see Lefebvre, Production of Space, 38–39. On the Han capital, see Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 169–86; Yinong Xu, Chinese City, 56–66; Powers, Art and Political Expression, 171–80; and Nylan and Vankeerberghen, Chang’an. On provincial administration, see Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 243–44; and Loewe, Government of the Qin, 37–55. On understanding Han foreign relations in accordance to imperial metageography, see Yingshi Yu, Trade and Expansion, 36–64. More recent scholarship is critical of this approach, emphasizing rather the realpolitik of Han foreign relations. Di Cosmo, Ancient China, 93–126, 161–254; Hsieh, “Viewing the Han Empire”; Selbitschka, “Early Chinese Diplomacy,” 61–114. 15 This is Xie Lingyun’s characterization of the topics of Han rhapsodies from his preface to the “Shanju fu” 山居賦 (Rhapsody on dwelling in the mountains). Xie Lingyun, Xie Kangle ji, 1.1. On rhapsodies and imperial authority, see Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority, 317–25; Zheng Yuyu, “Guifan de huiyin,” 198–99; Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 234–39. 16 Ge Zhaoguang, Zhongguo de nei yu wai, chap. 1; Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority, 308–17; Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, 42–60. 17 On the capital region, see HS 28a.1543–47. On the eighty commanderies, see HS 28a.1548–28b.1630. On the twenty-one feudatory states, see HS 28b.1630–40. On

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Notes to Pages 71–74 the thirteen lands of the Warring States, see HS 28b.1641–71. On the artificiality of administrative geography, see Mostern, Dividing the Realm, 35–46; Loewe, “Structure and Practice,” 470–79; Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 213–15. HHS 109.3385. The essay was preserved in Fan Ye’s Hou Han shu, completed in 445. HHS 109.3385–113.3534. On the several histories of the Eastern Han dynasty besides that of Fan Ye, including Sima Biao’s, see Zhou Tianyou, Bajia Hou Han shu jizhu. On the “Dili zhi” asserting imperial unity and establishing the model for subsequent official geographical treatises, see Lycas, “Intertextuality, Customs and Regionalism,” 7–12. HS 94a.3743–96b.3910. On the development of landlordism and the great families, see Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 212–29; Ebrey, “Economic and Social History,” 617–48; Jin Fagen, Zhongguo zhonggu diyu guannian, 93–98. On the changing role of regional prefectures in the Han, see Hucker, Dictionary of Official Titles, 13–14, 178; Loewe, Government of the Qin, 42–46, 53–55. On the development of the Yangzi basin, see Jin Fagen, Zhongguo zhonggu diyu guannian, 131–69, 176– 82; De Crespigny, Generals of the South, chaps. 1, 8. This pattern is also apparent in the catalogs in the Sui shu and Han–Tang dili shuchao; see figures 1.3 and 1.4. Hu Baoguo has argued that the defining feature of early local geographies was peculiar things (yiwu). Hu Baoguo, “Wei Jin Nanbeichao shiqi,” 13–19. Although this was no doubt an important theme in local geographies, I counter that descriptions of strangeness were counterbalanced by descriptions of the familiar—a balancing act facilitated by the unique spatial structure of this literary form. Furthermore, the prominence of peculiar things varied considerably by region, being more prominent in frontier provinces. The multidirectionality in the ecumene-region relationship can be seen in Andrew Chittick’s distinction between “classized” and “vernacular” local culture. Chittick, Jiankang Empire, 239–43. Imperial catalogs of the Sui and Tang use both the names “history of hegemonic regimes” (bashi 霸史) and “history of illegitimate [regimes].” These local compilations also “profiled men who had spoken out against [imperial] authority while in office, or whose behavior while out of office served as local role models that could at least potentially justify a kind of local separatism.” Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 61. Chronicles or biographies employed at the local scale could only incorporate ­certain kinds of information that could fit into the court-centered or personal narrative format. Local biographies could not, for example, describe the influences of a visiting official on the local community. Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 59–60. An exception to this general rule can be found in Jiaobu Xiangyang qijiu ji, 76–85. Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 59–60. Michael Farmer has observed how regional arguments for cultural legitimacy might have been appreciated both by regional rulers to justify their campaigns

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against their rivals and by outsiders to justify their efforts to reunite the region into a larger empire. Farmer, Talent of Shu, 142–43. Jörg Hüsemann has observed how Li Daoyuan’s focus on ancient history distanced his text from the political dangers of his own age. Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, 204–15. 29 Chittick, “Pride of Place,” chap. 5; Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 53–56. On locality stories in the writings of Qiao Zhou 譙周, see Farmer, Talent of Shu, 128–36. 30 HS 28b.1640. 31 Ying Shao, Fengsu tongyi, preface, 8. A very similar definition is presented in Liu Zhou’s 劉週 (514–65 CE) Xinlun 新論. Ying Shao, Fengsu tongyi, preface, 9 n. 8. 32 In Liu Zhou’s definition of fengsu in the Xinlun, he explained that “ feng is qi” 風者，氣也. Ying Shao, Fengsu tongyi, preface, 9 n. 8. This environmental ­u nderstanding of human behavior is also present in the “Dixing” chapter of the Huainanzi. Huainanzi 4.337–41, 4.352–54; Major et al., Huainanzi, 157–59, 164. On the place of qi in Sinitic cosmology, see Jeeloo Liu, “Qi-naturalism,” 38–49. 33 HS 28b.1640. This reciprocal quality of feng is discussed in Mark Edward Lewis, Sanctioned Violence, 214–21. 34 It should be noted that historical villains could also pass on licentious customs through their residual feng. For example, this was said of King Zhou 紂, the final king of Shang. Yue Shi, Taiping huanyu ji, 56.3a. 35 Ying Shao, Fengsu tongyi, preface, 8. This moral ambivalence of local customs is also affirmed in Liu Zhou’s Xinlun. Ying Shao, Fengsu tongyi, preface, 9 n. 8. 36 Campany, Strange Writing, 139–42, 336. Jörg Hüsemann’s study of the Shuijing zhu emphasizes the discontinuity with antiquity, a theme that is certainly present in this work, especially in Li Daoyuan’s own metacomments. Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, 129–40. But the Shuijing zhu and the local geographies cited in it also highlight the enduring influence of antiquity on the present, as will be described in the subsequent sections. 37 The late Eastern Han link between dili and fengsu can be seen in the emergence of geographical texts that include fengsu in their titles, for example, the Chenliu fengsu zhuan (Account of the customs of Chenliu). There are also texts that combine the two terms into a single title, for example Ying Shao’s own Dili fengsu ji 地理風俗記 (Record of geography and local customs). On the rising significance of fengsu during this period, see Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 48–52. 38 For examples of old homes, see SJZ 7.196, 28.662, 34.791. For examples of tombs, see SJZ 5.145–46, 8.216, 22.518, 24.569–70, 26.625, 28.663, 31.723–34. 39 HTFZJY, 21–22. 40 Xu Jian, Chuxue ji, 8.176. See also HTFZJY, 20–21. 41 This is recorded in the Shishuo xinyu as an exchange between Wang Ji 王濟 and Sun Chu 孫楚, but Liu Jun’s 劉峻 (462–521) commentary points out that the same text is found in the San Qin ji and the Yulin 語林 (Forest of speech). The dating of this San Qin ji is uncertain, since it does not appear to be the Han

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text of this same name written by Mr. Xin 辛氏. Mather suggests a fifth-century authorship. Liu Yiqing, Shishuo xinyu, 2.24; Mather, New Account, 44, 687. 42 Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 10.276. 43 HTFZJY, 54. In the Han, Guiji was divided into three commanderies, Wu, Wu­ xing 吳興, and Danyang 丹陽. These were collectively called the “Three Wu,” making up modern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang. Locality stories of women also highlight the patrilineal kinship networks of the great families that dominated local society during this period. For example, see HTFZJY, 77. 44 HYGZ 1.180–81, 10b.594; SJZ 33.771, 772–73. The tale is also recorded in the Yi bu qijiu zhuan 益部耆舊傳 (Record of the elders of Yi region). For further examples of local tales of virtuous women, see SJZ 15.368, 24.571, 33.771, 33.767, 34.795, 34.791, 40.947. Similar tales of women committing suicide in a river are especially common along the Yangzi River. 45 Farmer, “Three Chaste Ones,” 191–202; Farmer, “Person of the State,” 34–36, 50. 46 On the relationships between gender, writing, and customs, see Mark Edward Lewis, “Writing the World,” 33–80. 47 HTFZJY, 2, 35, 37, 81. 48 SJZ 9.239, 22.514. Michael Farmer notes a number of critical tales of officials from the “Ba zhi” 巴志 chapter of the Huayang guozhi in Farmer, “Person of the State,” 32–33, 37–39, 49–50; and Farmer, “Three Chaste Ones,” 194–95, 198, 201–2. 49 Mark Edward Lewis, Flood Myths, 28–33. 50 Although I focus in this section on sage-kings, a wide range of people from within classical literature were anchored in this way to provincial spaces in order to assert local inclusion within the textually defined Sinitic world. For a few examples, on Laozi, see Laixiang ji 瀨鄉記 (Record of Laixiang) in HTFZJY, 30. On Bian He 卞和, see Han Fei zi 13.95–97; SJZ 40.955; HHS 22.3481 n. 13; Yue Shi, Taiping huanyu ji, 145.301b. On Jiaofu 交甫 of Zheng 鄭, see Liu Xiang, Lie xian zhuan, 52; WuDF 6.69; SJZ 28.662–63; HHS, “Zhi,” 22.3481 n. 9. 51 This detail is first given in Shuwang benji 蜀王本紀 (Fundamental chronicles of the Shu kings), quoted in SJ 2.49–50 n. 2. It is then repeated and given greater spatial specificity in HYGZ 3.190; Li Fang, Taiping yulan, 531.2410; and SJZ 36.827. See also Tian Xiaolin, “Huayang guozhi.” Shiniu is identified as the home of Gun’s 鯀 wife in Wu Yue chunqiu 6.101. 52 The Shangshu, Lüshi chunqiu, and Shiji all identify Yu’s wife as being from Tushan but do not explain where this is. Shangshu zhengyi 5.147; Lü Buwei, Lüshi chunqiu, 6.139–40; SJ 1.80. In the commentaries to the Lüshi chunqiu and the Shiji, Du Yu 杜預 (222–84) and Huangfu Mi 皇甫謐 (215–82) both identify Tushan with the Anhui location. Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhengyi 58.1890; Shiji 1.81 n. 3. Li Daoyuan noted the discrepancy in his sources and considered the Anhui location to be correct. SJZ 30.709. On the Sichuan location, see the Shuwang benji, Yu Zhongyong’s Jiang ji, and the Huayang guozhi as cited in Li Fang, Taiping yulan, 531.2410; HYGZ 1.4; SJZ 33.774; SJZS 33.2796. On the Zhejiang location, see Yue jue shu 8.63.

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53 SJZ 35.802; SJZS 35.2877. 54 The name of this text and the location at which he received it vary greatly. On the Tao River location, see SJZ 2.46, 5.128–29; SJZS 2.152. This is an example of anchoring. Warring States and Han texts describe Yu the Great receiving such a document somewhere in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, but none specify the Tao River as the Shuijing zhu does. On the Mount Wanwei location, see HTFZJY, 183; SJZ 40.942; Wu Yue chunqiu 6.102; Li Fang, Taiping yulan, 47.228b. Mount Wanwei (also known as Mount Shikui 石匱) is sometimes conflated with the adjacent Mount Guiji. On the Mount Heng location, see SJZ 38.894, 40.955. 55 The gathering of lords, death, and burial at Guiji is described in earlier texts including Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhengyi, 58.1890; SJ 2.83, 2.89; Yue jue shu 8.57; and Wu Yue chunqiu 6.108. Additional details are provided in the Huayang guozhi, Kong Lingfu’s 孔靈符 (Song dynasty) Guiji ji 會稽記, and the Shuijing zhu. HYGZ 1.4; Li Fang, Taiping yulan, 47.227; HTFZJY, 99, 183, 186; SJZ 40.941; SJZS 40.3308–9. 56 HYGZ 3.190. 57 HTFZJY, 54. 58 SJZ 30.709; SJZS 30.2531. 59 This process of relocating the traces of sage-kings into new territories in the Yangzi basin is similar to the process that James Robson describes with the transposition of Buddhist sacred geography from South to East Asia through the “discovery” of new “traces” of former buddhas. Robson, “Buddhist Sacred Geography,” 1359–61. 60 Sima Qian similarly asserted ties between the royal families of frontier regimes (like Chu, Wu, and Yue) and the singular and absolute line of authority from the sage-kings to the Shang and Zhou courts. In his case, the ties affirm the imperial metageography. SJ 31.1445, 40.1689, 41.1739. This is an example of how regional claims to ecumenical inclusion could be used by both imperial and regional authorities to support their own distinctive goals. 61 This assertion is not recorded in local geographies, which were less common in the northern portions of the Yellow River plain, but is recorded in their northern counterpart, the chronicles of regional states. Cui Hong, Shiliu guo chunqiu, 11.65; WS 1.1; Linghu Defen, Zhou shu, 1.1. 62 This myth is preserved in the Hou Han Shu, Huang Min’s 黃閔 (Qi dynasty) Wu­ ling ji 武陵記, and the Shuijing zhu. In the dynastic history, the geography is vaguely described as the “Southern Mountains.” Geographical literature gives the more precise location (along the Wu Stream 武溪 atop the Wu Mountain 武山 in the western portion of Yuanling 沅陵 District [Hunan]). Its juxtaposition in geographical literature with other local sites suggests greater normalcy of interactions between Sinitic and non-Sinitic communities. HHS 86.2829–30; HTFZJY, 294–96; SJZ 37.869; Li Fang, Taiping yulan, 49.239. Other Man origin myths can be found in SJZ 34.789, 37.858–59, 37.862–63. 63 Shared values also bridge this cultural divide. For example, see SJZ 25.593, 33.770.

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64 SJZ 23.562. On the earlier texts, see SJZS 23.1991–92; SJ 40.1691 n. 4; HS 28b.1638. 65 HYGZ 3.172, 175, 217; HHS, “Zhi,” 23.3510 n. 1; HTFZJY, 148, 312; SJZS 33.2771; SJZ 33.770. It is unknown whether the note in the Hou Han shu is referring to the Yizhou ji by Li Yong 李庸 (Liang dynasty) or Ren Yu 任預 (Song dynasty). 66 SJZS 33.2771. 67 For comparison with imperial memory of Rome, see Davis, “Middle Ages”; ­Gabriele, Empire of Memory; Walker, “Shadows of Empire.” 68 On the focus on Han and Zhou history and their crumbling ruins in the Shui­ jing zhu, see Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, 133–40, 211–15. 69 At least in the textual fragments available in the Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi and the Shuijing zhu, tales of unjust officials tend to be the exceptions rather than the norm. It is virtuous officials who have monuments erected to them, thereby imprinting their stories on the local landscape itself. 70 Woolf, Rome, chap. 11. 71 For examples of emperors building edifices across the provinces, see HTFZJY, 4, 5, 29, 92, 96, 97. On the First Emperor of Qin disfiguring the landscape, see HTFZJY, 169, 174. I will return to this topic in the chapter conclusion. 72 For examples, see HTFZJY, 94, 124; Yudi jisheng 190.912; SJZ 27.648–49. A particularly good example is the affection of Han Emperor Wu for the music and dance of the Zong 賨 people of the Yu 渝 River in Sichuan. Ouyang Xun, Yiwen leiju, 43.768; HTFZJY, 39; SJZ 29.688; HYGZ 1.14, 1.16 n. 7; Farmer, Talent of Shu, 137–38. 73 On the founding of dynasties, see HTFZJY, 8, 96–97; Ouyang Xun, Yiwen leiju, 51.930, 96.1666. On anomaly accounts, see HTFZJY, 2, 5, 11, 96, 97. Anomaly accounts affirm the divine qualities of the emperor. Also, as a topic considered improper to be recorded in official histories, these anomaly-locality stories could be more flexibly anchored in local geographies away from the court. 74 On the Hanzhong ji fragment, see Yudi jisheng, 190.912; SJZ 27.648–49. Dating and authorship of this text are uncertain, but it is probably from the Wei-Jin period. HTFZJY, 33–34. The two names of the river, Yang (meaning “stretching on and on,” Middle Chinese: yang) and Xiang (meaning “auspicious,” Middle Chinese: zjang), are a play on words. Both are graphically and phonetically very similar. Cheng Dachang 程大昌 tried to explain this discrepancy between the Dingtao and Yang River birthplaces by proposing that the instability of the age encouraged the Qi family to move from Dingtao to Hanzhong. But, as Yang Shoujing pointed out, there is no evidence for this. On this and several other textual problems of this passage, see SJZS 27.2329. For the official biography of Lady Qi, see HS 97a.3937. 75 On suppressing crime, see SJZ 5.148, 10.261, 22.531. On disaster relief, see SJZ 10.264, 22.514. On waterworks projects, see SJZ 7.190–91, 10.258, 10.264, 24.571, 33.767, 33.768. On subduing malicious river deities, see SJZ 10.260, 28.663, 33.767, 33.768, 33.770, 35.802, 36.828. Examples of other ways in which officials blessed local communities include SJZ 3.82, 14.338, 22.518–19, and 22.528. Tales of waterworks projects are more common in the drier, more civilized Yellow River ­basin, and the defeating of river gods is more common in the wetter and wilder Yangzi River basin.

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76 HTFZJY, 11. For other examples, see Farmer, “Person of the State,” 36–37; Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, 125–26. 77 SJZ 14.338; HHS 31.1100. See also SJZ 10.258. 78 For examples, see SJZ 8.215, 7.190–91, 24.571, 24.569–70. 79 SJZ 38.897, 31.724. For more on the permanence of stone steles, see SJZ 28.662–63. 80 SJZ 15.368, 22.518–19, 22.528. 81 Nylan, “Wandering in the Ruins,” 63–64. See also Chittick, “Pride of Place,” 68–70. 82 Farmer, Talent of Shu, 142–43. 83 For an overview of the differences between the Yellow and Yangzi basins in literature, see Wu Chengxue, “Lun wenxue shang de nanbei pai.” On the foreignness of the Yangzi basin during the Warring States period, see Cook and Major, Defining Chu. 84 On the development of the Yangzi basin during the Han, see Jin Fagen, Zhong­ guo zhonggu diyu guannian, 131–69, 176–82. On the demographic disparity ­between the two regions in the Eastern Han and early Six Dynasties, see Tan Qixiang, “Lun Liang Han,” 35–36; Lao Gan, Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, 2–3. On Yangzi basin society before the fourth-century migration, see Kanō, “Kan Bō to sono shūhen.” 85 The second flourishing of local geographies during the Song period will be discussed in the section “Southern Frontier to Secondary Core” below. 86 HTFZJY, 1–68. Here I differ from Hu Baoguo, who sees the driving force of Wei-Jin local geographies to be an articulation of the strange. Instead, I see the negotiating of similarities and differences in the Yangzi basin as the early driving force, a negotiation that initially leaned toward the differences (as Hu describes) but then shifted more toward similarities. Hu Baoguo, “Wei Jin Nanbeichao shiqi,” 13–19. The early southern focus of local geographies on peculiar things is also noted in Wang Yong, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 133–43. 87 On the vibrancy and distinctiveness of the literary traditions of Shu and Wu, see Farmer, Talent of Shu, chap. 1; Xiaofei Tian, “Remaking History,” 705–31. 88 An example is the Yuankang liunian hukou puji 元康六年戶口簿記 (Population records of the sixth year of the Yuankang reign period [296]), in three fascicles. SuS 33.984. 89 HTDLSC, 165–70. 90 For natural world geographies, there is the Shuijing. Though structured by river systems instead of administrative districts, it fits roughly within the Jin imperial domain. For world anomaly accounts, there is the Shizhou ji (Record of the ten continents), which extends its coverage beyond the imperial domain. Li Fengmao, Liuchao Sui Tang xiandao, 125–85; Thomas E. Smith, “Record and the Shaping of Narrative,” 213–26, 379–80, 536–62. 91 HTFZJY, 71. 92 Fragments of several other Jin accounts of Luoyang can be found in HTFZJY, 69–77. The best known of these is Lu Ji’s 陸機 (261–303) Luoyang ji 洛陽記 (Record of Luoyang). 93 For the stagnation of local geographical production, see figure 1.7. For the spatial distribution of local geographies, see figure 1.8. As stated before, many of the

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Notes to Pages 97–99 lost geographical texts from the Jin period cannot be dated precisely between the Eastern and Western Jin, constraining my argument here about imperial unity during the Western Jin. The assertion here is based on the most comprehensive catalog available, the Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi. See chapter 1, note 31, for an explanation of the complicated evidence on this issue. Wang and Williams, Southern Identity, 11–12. Wang and Williams make this ­observation in trying to balance the contrasting views of Lu Ji’s work in Xiaofei Tian, “Fan Writing,” 43–78, and Knechtges, “Southern Metal,” 19–41. See also Xiaofei Tian, “Remaking History,” 705–31. Choo, “Between Imitation and Mockery,” 60–64. On the survival of Wu identity during the Jin occupation, see Jin Fagen, Zhongguo zhonggu diyu guannian, 176–82. This is the approach taken in the bibliography of the Jiu Tang shu (comp. 941– 45), which divides Chen Shou’s Sanguo zhi into three distinct histories. It ­categorizes the history of Wei as an official history and the histories of Shu and Wu as “chronologically arranged histories and miscellaneous histories of illegitimate states” (biannian 編年/zawei 雜偽). Liu Xu, Jiu Tang shu, 46.1992. Two and a half centuries after Chen Shou, Wei Shou 魏收 (506–72) would also take this approach in the official history of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534), dismissing the Southern Dynasties of the Yangzi basin as a barbarian periphery. Given the much smaller population of the Yangzi basin in the third century (compared to that of the sixth century), dismissing the Yangzi basin state in this way would have been much easier for Chen Shou than for Wei Shou, if he had desired to do so. The egalitarian tripartite geopolitical structure is never referenced in the “Wei shu” and is referenced only twice in Pei Songzhi’s commentary on the “Wei shu.” Chen Shou, Sanguo zhi, 8.260 n. 5, 10.326 n. 1. Michael Farmer has also shown how the Wei court referred to its rival Sichuan-based state as Shu (drawn from the Western Han administrative unit of Shu Commandery) rather than as Han (which is what Shu officials called their own state in order to assert direct succession from the Han dynasty through the Liu lineage). Farmer, “What’s in a Name?,” 50–51. On references in the “Wu shu” and the “Shu shu” to the tripartite power structure, see Chen Shou, Sanguo zhi, 35.915, 43.1047, 45.1072, 47.1149, 48.1165, 54.1268, 61.1401, 64.1441. On references in Pei Songzhi’s commentaries on the histories of Shu and Wu, see Chen Shou, Sanguo zhi, 35.924 n. 1, 35.936 n. 1, 37.955 n. 2, 43.1045 n. 2, 48.1180 n. 1, 52.1222 n. 1, 58.1357–58 n. 1. Similarly, Xi Zuochi’s 習鑿齒 (ca. 318– 95) history of the period (Han–Jin chunqiu 漢晉春秋 [Han–Jin spring and ­autumn annals]) employs the tripartite model frequently and even prominently in its introduction. This is consistent with Xi Zuochi’s perspective from the Yangzi basin–based Eastern Jin court and his assertion of Shu legitimacy over Wei. Xi Zuochi, Han–Jin chunqiu, 1.1, 2.17, 3.36–37. De Crespigny, Records of the Three Kingdoms, 2–14; Miao Yue, Sanguo zhi ­daodu, 5–11; Zhou Yiliang, Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, 435; Cutter, “Sanguo Zhi,”

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250–57; Cutter and Crowell, Empresses and Consorts, 65–66, 70–71; Farmer, “What’s in a Name?,” 51–55. On the microcosmic structure of imperial histories, see Mark Edward Lewis, Writing and Authority, 308–17; Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo, 42–60. Chen Shou has been criticized for being too generous toward his home region of Shu. Miao Yue, Sanguo zhi daodu, 8. Although he did clearly demonstrate his pride in his homeland in a local compilation of Shu luminaries, the Yi bu qijiu zhuan, one need not resort to mere personal bias to explain his inclusion of Shu within the civilized ecumene. The political reasons described here were probably more influential on his decision. JS 65.1471; Cutter and Crowell, Empresses and Consorts, 66–69. On the greater ambivalence of Pei Songzhi than of Chen Shou about the political legitimacy of Shu, see Farmer, “What’s in a Name?,” 57–58. On the sources that Pei Songzhi drew on for his commentaries, see De Crespigny, Records of the Three Kingdoms, 43–89; Yang Yaokun and Wu Yechun, Chen Shou, Pei Songzhi, 250–60. For a biographical sketch of Zuo Si and a fully annotated translation of the “Sandu fu,” see Knechtges, Wen Xuan, 1:337–477, 483–84. Characteristic of Sinitic geographical thought, the three capitals are equated with the regions of which they are the centers. Bol, “Creating a GIS,” 36–44; Mostern, Dividing the Realm, 73–90. Zuo Si, “Sandu fu xu,” 4.74a–b. Translation from Knechtges, Wen Xuan, 1:337–39. Knechtges translates fangzhi as “gazetteer,” which I have changed to “local geographies” for the sake of consistency. Huangfu Mi wrote an additional preface to the “Sandu fu,” praising it for its geographical accuracy. Huangfu Mi, “Sandu fu xu,” 45.641–42. Indeed, so enmeshed within geographical writing and so reliable was the geographical research for these poems that Li Daoyuan referenced them in his preface with other major works of geographical writing and cited them frequently throughout his commentary. SJZ, preface, 1. On ritual centrality, see WeiDF 6.96–97, 99–103. On the barbarian submission and feast, see WeiDF 6.104–5. WeiDF 6.109, 6.95. The people of Wu and Shu are similarly described as rejecting goodness and kingly propriety, as criminals, and as animals and barbarians in WeiDF 6.96, 6.108–9. On the normative climate and topography of the Yellow River plain, see WeiDF 6.96–98. Similar claims to Central Plains environmental harmony and centrality can be seen in Zhang Heng, “Dongjing fu,” 3.63b–64b; Huangfu Mi, “Sandu fu xu,” 45.641–42. On the caricatures of Wu and Shu environments, see WeiDF 6.108–9. For more on the assertion of Wei dominance over Shu and Wu in the “Sandu fu,” see Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 241–43; Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 165–70. SDF 4.75a; WuDF 5.82b. On Shu claims to the presence of Shennong 神農 and the Celestial God-on-High 天帝 in ancient Shu, see SDF 4.77a, 81a. On Wu, see WuDF 5.82a, 94a, 94b. On Yu’s gathering of the feudal lords and his burial in Guiji, see the section

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“Common Mythic Heritage” above. Shun is said to have been buried in Cangwu 蒼梧 on Jiuyi 九疑 Mountain (in modern Ningyuan 寧遠 District, Hunan). Shanhai jing 5.273; HTFZJY, 111. 111 SDF 4.78b; WuDF 5.87b, 88a. 112 SDF 4.81a. 113 WuDF 5.94a–b, 5.88b. On the wealth and fertility of the Wu land, see WuDF 5.87. On the fertility of the Shu land, see SDF 4.75a, 4.77a, 4.79a, 4.81b. 114 On the Shu market, see SDF 4.79a. On the Shu hunt, see SDF 4.80a–b. On the great families of Shu, see SDF 4.79a–b. On the Wu market, see WuDF 5.88b–89a. On the Wu hunt, see WuDF 5.90a–93a. On the great families of Wu, see WuDF 5.88b. 115 SDF 4.79b; WuDF 5.93b. 116 For more on the regionalism of the Wu and Shu rhapsodies, see Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 239–41; Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 170–81. 117 Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 242–43; Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 170–73. The final four sections of the rhapsody mirror the poem’s first four ­sections in a chiasmuslike structure, where the first half describes the imperial capital’s transcendence of time and space, and the final half (after the abdication of Jin and the move of the capital to Luoyang) places the now regional city within a local geography and a local history. On the local history and geography, see WeiDF 6.106–8. 118 Liu Shanli estimates two million migrants moved south before the Yongjia ­Disruption had even occurred. Liu Shanli, “Jin Huidi shidai,” 12. For the situation of the Yangzi basin up to the fourth-century migration, see Kanō, “Kan Bō to sono shūhen.” 119 Tan Qixiang estimates that about 900,000 émigrés moved to the Yangzi basin, about one-eighth of the total Yellow River basin population. Wang Zhongluo marks seven distinct migrations southward between 307 and 466. Tan Qixiang, Jin Yongjia sangluan hou; Wang Zhongluo, Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, 343–46; Tang Changru, Wei Jin Nanbeichao Sui Tang shi, 249, 252–58, 350; Wiens, Han Chinese Expansion, 168–80. On the interrelated migrations into and out of the Yellow River plain, see Ge Zhaoguang, Zhongguo de nei yu wai, 34–39. 120 Tang Changru, “Nanchao de tun”; Zheng Yuyu, “Shenti xingdong,” 74–80. 121 Marks, China, 119–21, 127–32. 122 Yano, “Tō-Shin ni okeru Nanbokunin,” 41–60. On the military stalemate between the north and the south, see pp. 136–40. 123 Chittick, Jiankang Empire, 142–50, 164–72. 124 Chittick, Jiankang Empire, chap. 5–7. 125 The southern dominance of local geographical production during the fifth and sixth centuries has been noted before in Wang Yong, Zhongguo dilixue shi, chap. 3; Hu Baoguo, “Wei Jin Nanbeichao shiqi,” 19–21. 126 The data from the Han–Tang fangzhi jiyi are confirmed in the Sui shu and Han–Tang dili shuchao catalogs as well. See figures 1.3–4, 1.9–10. 127 Both the nomadic tribespeople of the northern frontier and the peoples of the Yangzi basin were part of the self-consciously multiethnic, transregional Han empire. Central Eurasians had been an essential part of the imperial state since

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the incorporation of Xiongnu cavalry into the Han military, although their prominence is purposefully obfuscated in the official histories. 128 The trend toward naturally structured geographical units did not become the norm, but it was an important deviation from the vestiges of imperial meta­ geography. Examples include the HYGZ and Yu Zhongyong’s (Eastern Jin) ­Hanshui ji and Jiang ji. For fragments of these works, see SJZ 20.477, 484, 486; 27.642, 643, 646; 28.659, 671, 672; 29.689; 33.773, 774, 778; 35.805–7, 809; HTFZJY, 175–76. 129 Both of these topics will be addressed in greater detail in chapter 4. 130 Titles of Three Kingdoms texts on the Yangzi basin often highlight its peculiar things (yiwu). This practice is discontinued in the fourth and fifth centuries. Hu Baoguo has argued that the defining feature of local geographies after the Jin and Song periods was “landscape” (shanshui 山水). Hu Baoguo, “Wei Jin Nanbeichao shiqi,” 19–21. Landscape was indeed an important theme of these later, southern local geographies, but I hold that the modus operandi was the spatial structure that allows for the description of both uniqueness and commonality, in both natural and cultural patterns, and that the cultural work of local geographies was still to include this former frontier within an expanded Sinitic ecumene. 131 Zheng Yuyu, “Shenti xingdong,” 64–99; Yü-yü Cheng, “Bodily Movement,” 193– 219. Within the new geographical discourse, Cheng Yü-yü also traces a semantic shift from the term shanchuan 山川 (landscape that is administered) to shanshui 山水 (landscape that is experienced). 132 HTFZJY, 182. 133 SuS 33.983–84; HTFZJY, 191–92. On the influence of geographical literature on landscape poetry, see Chang, Six Dynasties Poetry, 47–62; Holzman, Landscape Appreciation; Frodsham, Murmuring Stream. 134 HYGZ, introduction, 2, 6–7. 135 Farmer, Talent of Shu, 142–43. On the historical background of the writing of the Huayang guozhi, see HYGZ, introduction; Kleeman, Great Perfection, 108– 12; Zhang Shichang, “Huayang guozhi” yanjiu, 65–84; Farmer, “Huayang Guo Zhi,” 125–26. 136 Wang Zhongluo, Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, 902–3. For more on the comprehensive characteristics of the Huayang guozhi, see Farmer, “Huayang Guo Zhi,” 123–25; Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 185–89. On the transdynastic, local quality of this work, see Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 141–42. 137 Because of this composite format, the Huayang guozhi has not always been ­classified as geographical writing. The bibliographic catalogs of the dynastic histories classify it as a regional history. But the Shitong and the Tongdian explicitly cite the Huayang guozhi as an example of geographical writing. SuS 28.963; Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 10.274–75; TD 171.4451; Liu Xu, Jiu Tang shu, 46.1992; Ouyang Xiu and Song Qi, Xin Tang shu, 58.1461; Tuotuo, Song shi, 203.5095, 204.5166. Along with the Yue jue shu (compiled in 52 CE), the Huayang guo­ zhi has been identified by many modern Sinologists as among the earliest ante­ cedents of the Song gazetteers. Zhu Shijia, “Zhongguo difangzhi,” 1–2; Hargett,

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“Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers,” 406. But it is important to note, as Chittick points out, how unique this work is, even in its own time. Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 61–62. 138 Farmer, Talent of Shu, 121–43. 139 On the cultural work of local histories in general and the Huayang guozhi specifically, see Farmer, “Three Chaste Ones,” 200–203; Farmer, Talent of Shu, 121–43; Farmer, “Person of the State,” 42–50. 140 HYGZ 3.132–34. Two dates are traditionally given for the Qin conquest of Sichuan: 329 BCE and 316 BCE. Sage argues for 316 BCE. Sage, Ancient Sichuan, 199–201. For more on the development of Shu during the Qin and Han dynasties, see Jin Fagen, Zhongguo zhonggu diyu guannian, 131–54; Sage, Ancient Sichuan, 119–92. 141 HYGZ 8.440. 142 HYGZ 1.5. Emphasis added. Ren Naiqiang identifies these xianmin as “the lasting influence of earlier people from the Central Plains.” HYGZ 1.8 n. 9. 143 HYGZ 10a.521. 144 HYGZ 10a.532, 10a.534, 10c.618. This phrase originated in Liji zhengyi 52.1662. 145 HYGZ 3.113. The Kun hexagram states that “literature is in the center” (wen zai zhong ye 文在中也). Zhou yi zhengyi 1.28–38. The eighth (wei) of the Twelve Celestial Bodies is associated with Yongzhou 雍州 (the western lands of Qin and Sichuan), with “delicious flavor,” with the high god Shaohao, and with bitter flavors. Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi, 14B.32a; JS 22.678; Liji zhengyi 16.606–8. On the Ghost Constellation, see HS 28b.1641. On the geographical connection between Qin and Shu, see HS 28b.1641. The people on the western edge of Ba were also said to be “ingenious and spry” ( jingmin qingji 精敏輕疾). HYGZ 1.20. 146 HYGZ 3.141, 3.180. Lu was the homeland of Confucius, and Qi housed the Jixia Academy during the Warring States. Together, this region formed the center of Confucian learning throughout early imperial history. For more on the connection between Shu local customs and the literary achievements of Shu scholars, see Liu Zhonglai and Xu Shiduan, “Huayang guo zhi” yanjiu, 227–35, 297–300, 302–5. On the environmental origins of this literary custom, see pp. 232–35. 147 HYGZ 3.146, 10b.618; Liu Lin, Huayang guozhi jiaozhu, 10b.830. On the eminent literary scholars of Sichuan, see Farmer, Talent of Shu, 121–28. 148 HYGZ 12.727. The Shu wang benji actually records that the reign of the kings of Shu lasted 34,000 years. Jingdian jilin 14.1a. On the tale of Bieling (also written 鱉令 and 鱉泠), see Shu wang benji in Jingdian jilin 14.1b. On the tale of Changhong, see Zhuangzi 26.237. On Du Yu and the Zijuan bird, see the Shu wang benji in Jingdian jilin 14.1b; on the non-Sinitic qualities of ancient Sichuan, see 14.1a. On Wen Weng, see HS 89.3625–27. 149 As evidence for this chronology, he cited from his own “Shu zhi.” HYGZ 3.118. 150 HYGZ 12.727. Ren Naiqiang points out that Chang Qu’s counter to the story of Changhong is inconsistent with the Zhuangzi’s telling of it. HYGZ 12.728–9 n. 5. On the association between strange phenomena and foreign and frontier lands, see chapter 1.

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151 HYGZ 12.727. The well-fields system and local education are both practices ­advocated by Mencius for the cultivation of humaneness and righteousness in a state. On Confucius’s mentioning of Pengzu, see Lunyu 7.1. In the Lunyu, a “great man” is one of the three categories of the true “gentleman” ( junzi 君子). Lunyu 16.8. 152 HYGZ 12.727–28. Chang Qu sarcastically remarks here that, if Wen Weng had really introduced literacy to Shu, it would have predated literacy in Lu and Qi as well. 153 HYGZ 12.730, 732. The idea that only rulers without the Mandate of Heaven need rely on defensive geography traces back to the Zuozhuan and is cited by Chang Qu. Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhengyi 42.1370–73. 154 The earliest recorded telling of this story is in Gan Bao’s 干寶 (Eastern Jin) Soushen ji 搜神記 (cited in Li Xian’s 李賢 commentary on the geographical essay of the Hou Han shu). The story is also recorded in fragments of two Song dynasty local geographies of the Wu region as well as in the dynastic histories of the Jiankang empire—the Jin shu (in its description of the Eastern Jin period), Song shu, and Nan shi. Tellingly, this story is introduced immediately in the basic annals of the Nan shi. HHS, “zhi,” 22.3490 n. 8; HTFZJY, 169, 174; JS 6.157; SoS 27.780; SJZ 37.873; Li Yanshou, Nan shi, 1.1. On the physical landscape surrounding the city of Jiankang, see Yifeng Yao, Nanjing, 49–88. 155 In Han texts, there are vague references to “the qi of a Son of Heaven” in the Southeast and the First Emperor suppressing the region because of it (but not specifically disfiguring the landscape). SJ 8.348; HS 1a.8. 156 On claims of a region having “the qi of a Son of Heaven” in the Yangzi basin, see Chen Shou, Sanguo zhi, 31.865; HHS 82b.2734; JS 5.125, 53.1457; WS 97.2147; Li Yanshou, Nan shi, 34.899; Li Yanshou, Bei shi, 83.2792. On the Yellow River basin, see HS 8.236, 74.3142; HHS 12.491, 45.1527; Li Baiyao, Bei Qi shu, 1.6, 6.85, 14.183; Li Yanshou, Bei shi, 5.170, 6.214, 7.272, 35.1295, 53.1853.

Chapter Three 1 On the methodological framework of borderland studies employed in this chapter, see Cameron, Making Mesopotamia; Power and Standen, Frontiers in Question; Rieber, Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands; Giersch, Asian Borderlands. 2 Mark Edward Lewis, China between Empires, 1. See also Tang Changru, Wei Jin Nanbeichao Sui Tang shi, chap. 2; Jin Fagen, Zhongguo zhonggu diyu guannian, 170–90. 3 This differs, for example, with relations between the Liao and Song dynasties. ­A lthough not usually referred to as northern and southern dynasties by his­ torians, those two states actually did refer to each other in their own time by these terms, accepting an equal political status with each other. Jing-shen Tao, “Barbarians or Northerners,” 66–86. 4 On the “invisibility” of the Jiankang Empire in traditional Chinese history, see Chittick, Jiankang Empire, chap. 1; on the protoethnic factions of the Jiankang Empire, see chaps. 4 and 6. Han here should not be equated with the modern

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5 6

7 8

9

10

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Notes to Pages 120–121 Han ethnicity since it was limited primarily to the inhabitants of the Yellow River plain. The Wu people included Han people who had emigrated from the Yellow River plain but had long since assimilated to the Wu language and culture. The Chu people here are the Eastern Chu or Huai Chu people of the Huai River region. Chu people dominated the Northern Headquarters Army. The royal families of Liu and Xiao of the Song, Qi, and Liang dynasties were all Chu people. See also Chen Yinke, “Chuzi jituan,” 172–92. I adopt the term Tabgatch from Wolfram Eberhard. See Eberhard, Toba-Reich ­Nordchinas; Eberhard, History of China, chap. 7. Within this new Dai protoethnic identity, old tribal distinctions were broken down and a common Särbi-based creole vernacular was adopted. On the Tabgatch roots of the Northern Wei dynasty, see Pearce, “Northern Wei,” 155–64; Pearce, “Form and Matter,” 147–57; Pearce, Spiro, and Ebrey, Culture and Power, 4–10. On the hybrid state institutions of the Tabgatch empire, see Klein, “Contributions”; Pearce, “Yü-Wen Regime”; Eberhard, Toba-Reich Nordchinas, chaps. 14–15, 17, 23; Holcombe, Genesis of East Asia, 109–44; Graff, Medieval Chinese Warfare, 54–75, 97–120. Sanping Chen, Multicultural China, 1–38. Although I find Chen’s label compelling, since this later empire is not a focus of this study, for the sake of clarity I will generally use the more conventional terminology of “Sui-Tang empire.” On the continuity of the Guanzhong elites from Northern Zhou to the early Tang, see Chen Yinke, Tang dai zhengzhi shi; Chen Yinke, “Ji Tang dai.” On the ­preservation of nomadic culture throughout the Northern Dynasties and into the Tang, see Pearce, “Way of the Warrior,” 87–113; Sanping Chen, “Succession Struggle and Ethnic Identity”; Pan, Son of Heaven; Skaff, Sui-Tang China, 52–74, 115–26. A Central Eurasian inscription referred to the Tang empire as the Tabgatch. Tekin, Grammar of Orkhon Turkic. In his commentary to the Zizhi tongjian, Hu Sanxing 胡三省 (1230–1302) famously stated, “Alas! From the Sui era onward, 60 to 70 percent of those who were prominent in their times have been descendants of the Tabgatch.” Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian 資治通鑑, 108.3429. Morris, “Greater Athenian State,” 141. This is a concise restatement of Morris and Scheidel’s more lengthy definition in Dynamics of Ancient Empires, 17–27. For other definitions of empire, see Münkler, Empires, 1–17; Barkey, Empire of Difference, 9–15; Laitin, “Empires in Macro-Sociology,” 616; Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 8–17; and Bang and Bayly, Tributary Empires, 4–11. Turchin, “Theory for Formation,” 200–203. Even the Northern Qi and Northern Zhou states met this territorial requirement. On the imperialist expansion of the Jiankang empire into Southeast Asia, see Shufen Liu, “Jiankang,” 49–52; Lo and Elleman, China as a Sea Power, 38–44. On the persistence of ethnic diversity across the Han territory, see Holcombe, Genesis of East Asia, 8–29. On ethnic diversity within the Tabgatch empire, see Eberhard, Toba-Reich Nordchinas, chaps. 1–4, 11–12, 23; Sanping Chen, ­Multicultural China; Shao-yun Yang, “Becoming Zhongguo,” 61–99; Shao-yun Yang, “Fan and Han,” 11–13, 18–21; Zhou Yiliang, Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, 127– 89. On the ethnic diversity of the Jiankang empire, see Zhou Yiliang, Wei Jin

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Nanbeichao shi, 33–101; Wiens, Han Chinese Expansion, chaps. 2–3; Zhu Dawei, “Nanchao shaoshu minzu,” 59; Chen Yinke, Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, chap. 11; Kleeman, Great Perfection, chap. 1; Chittick, Jiankang Empire, chaps. 2, 4, 6, 8; Lycas, “Représenter l’espace,” chaps. 3–4. 12 Cameron, Making Mesopotamia, 4. 13 Barfield, Perilous Frontier, 1–20; Mair, “North(west)ern People,” 46–49, 54–64; Turchin, “Theory for Formation,” 200–217; Clark, “Frontier Discourse”; Fong, “Flourishing on the Frontier”; Von Glahn, Economic History of China, 160–66, 218–35, 242–78, 296–307, 322–36. 14 Bosl, “Political Relations”; Green, Alexander to Actium, 187–200; Kennedy, Prophet and the Age, 200–211. Slightly different in its cultural dynamic but still useful for comparisons is the phenomenon of two competing world-empires that do not share a common cultural framework but must still negotiate competing claims to universal rulership—such as the Byzantine and Sassanid empires or the Han and Xiongnu empires. Grainger, Rome, Parthia, and India, 183–86; Dignas and Winter, Rome and Persia; Di Cosmo, Ancient China, chaps. 5–6. 15 Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, chaps. 3–5. 16 On court ritual of the Northern Wei, see Duthie, “Origins, Ancestors, and Imperial Authority,” chap. 3. Duthie explains how Northern Wei court rituals were a hybrid system that incorporated elements of traditional nomadic culture. On court rituals of Jiankang, see Janousch, “Reform of Imperial Ritual,” chaps. 1– 2; Holcombe, “Re-Imagining China,” 6–8; Yang Ying, “Liu Song jiaoli jiankao,” 397–403. 17 The continuation of the official histories in this way was by no means necessary or self-evident. Given the reality of a polycentric Sinitic ecumene, literati might have followed the modified format of the first official history after the breakup of the Han dynasty, the Sanguo zhi, as was discussed in chapter 2. 18 On the shifting meaning of zhongguo, see Yang Jianxin, “‘Zhongguo’ yici”; Hu Axiang, Wei zai si ming. On the ambivalent spatial relationship between Guanzhong and the Yellow River plain (Guandong) during the Han, see Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 206–12. 19 WS 53.1184–85. The geographical essay of the Wei shu reports that “only Wu and Shu were left beyond our boundaries” 遺之度外，吳蜀而已. The essay also boasts that the Northern Wei had twice the registered population of the Jin dynasty at its height. WS 106a.2455. 20 WS 106a.2455. On the shifting interpretation of Hua identity from the Han to Wei periods, see Shao-yun Yang, “Becoming Zhongguo,” 38–60, 71–78. The ideological claim to a common, supraethnic Hua identity does not mean that ethnic tensions were not a reality of the Tabgatch empire; they certainly were, as they were in all multiethnic empires. Gao, Wei Jin Nanbeichao bingzhi yanjiu, 176, 326; Xia Nai, “Dushi zhaji,” 6. 21 WS 2.20, 32–33; 24.6720–21. 22 Han literati in the Wei state seem to have accepted the inclusion of Särbi in this supraethnic Hua identity. In a surprisingly candid moment, the Song statesman He Chengtian 何承天 (370–447) observed that officials that left the Wei

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court for service in the Song court did not do so out of ethnic loyalty but out of self-serving interests of salary and rank. SoS 64.1706. 23 This is a general pattern among Wei rulers. An exception to this rule is Wei Emperor Taiwu’s 太武 (r. 424–51) prescriptions against Buddhism. 24 Wang Jianshun, Bei Wei Yungang, 88. On the use of Buddhism by the Northern Wei court, see Ch’en, Buddhism in China, 145–46, 151–83; Cai Rixin, Han Wei Liu­ chao, 235–52; Pearce, “King’s Two Bodies,” 99–103. 25 The Luoyang qielan ji compares Luoyang’s pagoda spires and preaching halls to the Lingtai 靈臺 Observatory and the Epang 阿房 Palace of the Qin and Han capitals. The Shuijing zhu states that, among the capitals of the Warring States and the Han empire, “there was no structure like [the Yongming Monastery]” 未有若斯之搆. LYQLJ, preface, 1; SJZ 13.314–15. 26 The phrase “the dharma wheel turned east” is only mentioned twice in the Shuijing zhu, describing the cities of Pingcheng and Luoyang. SJZ 13.314–15, 16.399. For the full description of the temples of Pingcheng, see SJZ 13.312–15. 27 Jenner, Memories of Loyang, 103–45. 28 LYQLJ 1.11, 1.13. 29 WS 114.3037; Daoxuan, Guang hongming ji, T. 2103:2.104a; Nianchang, Fozu lidai tong zai, T. 2036:8.540b; LYQLJ 1.13. Also, there was in the Yongming Monastery a stone tablet proclaiming, “Among the precious halls on Mount Sumeru or the pure palaces in the Tusita Heaven, none can compare with this” 須彌寶殿，兠 率淨宮，莫尚於斯也. LYQLJ 1.12. See also SJZ 16.398; Chen Qiaoyi, Lixue zhaji, 323–24. 30 This was the justification that the imperially appointed chief monk Faguo made for monks prostrating themselves before the Wei emperor. WS 114.3030–31. 31 Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 180–86, 234–43. 32 JS 19.584; Rogers, Chronicle of Fu Chien, 56–58. 33 JS 70.1871. This critique, by Bian Kun 卞壼 (281–328), was directed especially at the libertine spirit of the third century. 34 Charles Holcombe calls this the “ritual state.” Holcombe, “Re-Imagining China,” 6–8. 35 Chittick, Jiankang Empire, 256–60. 36 The use of zhongtu here is explicitly tied to the Yangzi basin environment. In contrast to the plains and horses of the north, zhongtu was a land of trees and boats. Specifically, three of the four identified trees were subtropical trees, native to the Yangzi basin or farther south. SoS 95.2359. Two of the trees are identified in Zuo Si’s “Wu du fu” as quintessentially Wu trees. On the identification of these trees, see Read, Chinese Medicinal Plants, 154–55, 157–58, 195–96; Smith and Stuart, Chinese Materia Medica, 87–88, 313–14, 448–49; Knechtges, Wen Xuan, 1:206 ll. 411, 412; 386 l. 189. On the use of shenhua, see SoS 95.2359. More traditional uses of the term shenhua to refer to the Yellow River plain can be seen in JS 98.2575; Li Baiyao, Bei Qi shu, 45.618. 37 SoS 35.1028. 38 SoS 35.1028. By the time of the Song dynasty, the Jiankang empire was made up of twenty-two prefectures (ten of which were lodged), giving it the administrative

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illusion of completeness. For more on “lodged” districts, see Crowell, “Northern Émigrés”; Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 204–6. 39 Huan Kuan, Yan tie lun, 8.479–518; Loewe, Crisis and Conflict, 96–97. 40 SoS 35.1027–28. 41 On the political use of Buddhism at the Jiankang court, see Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest, chap. 3; Tsukamoto, History of Early Chinese Buddhism, chap. 6; Ch’en, Buddhism in China, 121–28; Janousch, “Reform of Imperial Ritual”; Warner Chen, “Emperor Liang Wu-ti”; Chittick, Jiankang Empire, chaps. 10–11. 42 Chittick, Jiankang Empire, 295–323. On Emperor Wu’s implementation of Buddhist rituals in the court, see Janousch, “Reform of Imperial Ritual,” chaps. 3–4. On Chen dynasty bodhisattva ordination, see Zhipan, Fozu tongji, T. 2035:200a. On ordination of Sui Emperor Yang, see An Faqin, Ayu wang, T. 2053:554b. On ordination of imperial princes during the Zhenguan era (627–49) of the Tang, see Daoxuan, Xu gaoseng zhuan, T. 2060:616. On Chen dynasty renunciation rituals, see Yao Silian, Chen shu, 2.37, 6.108; Li Yanshou, Nan shi, 9.273, 9.280, 10.302; Xu Song, Jiankang shilu, 19.532, 20.562. 43 Daoxuan, Xu gaoseng zhuan, T. 2060:469b; “Dongdu fayuan wen,” P. 2189; ­Janousch, “Reform of Imperial Ritual,” 201–4. See also “Chujiaren shou Pusa jie fa,” P. 2196; Tsuchihashi, “Perio hon ‘Shukkenin,’” 93–148. 44 Daoxuan, Xu gaoseng zhuan, T. 2060:464c, 469b; Tsuchihashi, “Perio hon ‘Shukkenin,’” 109, 70–76; Janousch, “Reform of Imperial Ritual,” 174–83. 45 For example, see Huainanzi 1.37–41, 11.764, 11.781–84, 11.811, 19.1334, 20.1399; Major et al., Huainanzi, 56, 407, 420, 775, 813; Di Cosmo, Ancient China, 196–205. 46 On the use of the four barbarians model, see SoS 95.2321–98.2411; WS 95.2041– 103.2303. For the Wei state, this was often simplified to the four states of Rouran to the north, Goguryeo to the East, Song-Liang to the south, and Tuyuhun to the west. Li Yanshou, Bei shi, 16.612–13, 47.1715; WS 14.359, 21.546, 24.617, 34.803, 78.1725. 47 Official Wei documents refer to the Rouran with the same derisive language that the Han had used to describe the Xiongnu and the Jin had used to describe the Särbi. The phrase “faces of men and hearts of beasts” (renmian shouxin 人面 獸心), for example, was employed to describe all of these peoples. HS 94b.3834; JS 47.1322; WS 41.927, 44.1003; Li Yanshou, Bei shi, 16.611–13. 48 Although not structurally prioritized, these rivals did have comparatively more content written about each of them by the other. The Song shu account of the northern Tuoba and Tuyuhun barbarians make up 55 percent of its account of foreign peoples. The Wei shu account of the southern “coastal barbarians” (i.e., Eastern Jin to Liang) makes up 36 percent of its account of foreign peoples. 49 Cook and Major, Defining Chu, 1–5, 51–66, 121–69; Brindley, Ancient China and the Yue, 113–250; Chittick, Jiankang Empire, 51–56. 50 Shangshu zhengyi 6.164. On the origins of this term, see Qu Lindong, “Nan shi” he “Bei shi,” 1–6. 51 WS 96.2092–93. On ethnic discourse on the south, see Chittick, Jiankang Empire, 57–62. On the feminization of the south, see Xiaofei Tian, Beacon Fire, 310–14, 346–66.

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WS 97.2153. WS 96.2092. WS 96.2092–93. WS 97.2133–34. The Wei shu also makes special note that Liu Yu was an illiterate commoner and that his family did not originate from the elite Liu clans of the Yellow River plain. WS 97.2129. 56 SoS 95.2358–59. Liang dynasty frontier poetry similarly equates the Tabgatch and the Xiongnu. Xiaofei Tian, Beacon Fire, 323–35. On the origin of the term suolu, see Qu Lindong, “Nan shi” he “Bei shi,” 1–6. The same rhetoric on the barbarian other can be found in the Nan Qi shu memoir on the “Wei caitiffs” (Wei lu 魏虜). Xiao Zixian, Nan Qi shu 南齊書, 57.983–1006. I am focusing here on the account in the Song shu for the sake of brevity. 57 SoS 95.2322, 95.2337, 95.2357, 95.2359. See also Wang Xizhi’s 王羲之 (321–79) use of “loose-rein” ideology in JS 80.2094–95. The spatialization of these policies is evident in that the Wei shu also uses the term heqin to describe its own relationship with the Rouran to the north but never with the Jiankang empire to the south. WS 28.685, 54.1203, 95.2060, 101.2236, 103.2290–91; Chittick, Jiankang Empire, 129–33. 58 SoS 29.2358–59. Similar descriptions of the Yellow River plain as a barbarian wasteland can be found in LYQLJ 2.114. 59 Marks, China, 122–27. 60 For more on depictions of the Yellow River plain as a wasteland, see Kitamura, “Nanbei chao shiqi,” 251–52. On Han subjects of the Tabgatch empire, see Chittick, Jiankang Empire, 133–38. 61 On the stalemate between the two empires, see Chen Yinke, Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, chap. 14. 62 Mittag and Mutschler, “Empire and Humankind,” 527–55. 63 Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 414. By “modest internal barriers,” Diamond means the lack of mountains between the lower Yellow, Huai, and lower Yangzi Rivers, where elevations were so modest that the Grand Canal could be built connecting them. But, of the various successful southern conquests, this route was only used by the Qing. All other successful invasions came first in the upper and middle Yangzi regions, where there are considerable mountain ranges separating them. Clearly, the “internal barriers” are more complex than Diamond supposes. 64 On the natural divide between the Yellow and Yangzi River basins, see Chen ­Qiaoyi, Zuguo de heliu, 8–9. On the military stalemate it created, see Graff, Medieval Chinese Warfare, 125–26, 129–30; Chittick, Jiankang Empire, 112–24. On naval warfare during the Six Dynasties, see Zhang Tieniu and Gao Xiao­ xing, Zhongguo gudai haijun shi, 34–67. 65 SoS 95.2359. 66 WS 35.819. 67 Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian, 105.3309–13; Wang Zhongluo, Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, 280–85; Rogers, Chronicle of Fu Chien, 169–70.

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68 Marks, China, 143–46. Southern diseases were key to the outcome of the Battle of Red Cliff in 208. Chen Shou, Sanguo zhi, 54.1261–62; Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian, 65.2087–93. 69 Wang Zhongluo, Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, 332–38; Graff, Medieval Chinese War­ fare, 123, 126. 70 On examples of efforts to overcome these geographical obstacles, see Lü Simian, Liang Jin Nanbeichao shi, 1307; Graff, Medieval Chinese Warfare, 125; SoS 1.16. On successful southern campaigns, see Graff, Medieval Chinese Warfare, 131–35. 71 Graff, Medieval Chinese Warfare, 128. 72 This was the case with Zu Ti’s 祖逖 (266–321) northern expeditions of 313–21, Huan Wen’s expedition of 354–69, and Liu Yu’s expedition of 409–18. Graff, Medieval Chinese Warfare, 127–28. Liu Yu’s successes led to a shift in the control of the court from Yellow River plain Han émigrés to men of Chu. Chittick, Jian­ kang Empire, 157–72. 73 WS 96.2093; SoS 95.2359. On the inappropriateness of relying on geography for defense, see Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhengyi 42.1370–73. 74 WS 96.2093; SoS 95.2359. 75 Dien, “Disputation at Pengcheng,” 32–59; Lü Simian, Liang Jin Nanbeichao shi, 383–94; Wang Zhongluo, Wei Jin Nanbeichao shi, 389–90. For the full biography of the two men, see SoS 59.1599–1605; WS 53.1168–72. 76 Lists of gifts of southern products are given throughout SoS 59.1600–1601, 59.1603; WS 53.1168–69. On the use of candles in the south and lamps in the north, see Dien, Six Dynasties Civilization, 363–70. On the drinking vessel and rice balls, see SoS 59.1601. On the beauty of Jiangnan, see SoS 59.1605. 77 Lists of gifts of northern products are given throughout SoS 59.1600–1603; WS 53.1169–70. 78 SoS 59.1600–1601; WS 53.1169, 1171. 79 SoS 59.1601; WS 53.1169. 80 On the Wei emperor’s desire for southern products, see SoS 59.1601, 59.1603. A similar sentiment can be found in a local geography by Mr. Huan 環 (probably third century) called the Wu di ji 吳地記, which states that, “in the third year of the Huangchu reign period (222), Wei came to request cardamom [from Wu]” 黃初三年，魏來求荳蔻. HTFZJY, 53. On Liu Jun 劉濬 (429–53) denying a need for horses, see SoS 59.1603. 81 WS 53.1169–70. 82 On cuisine and identity, see Montanari, Food Is Culture, 59–140; Vester, Taste of Power, 1–65. On food in Sinitic culture, see Anderson, Food and Environment; Sterckx, Of Tripod and Palate; Huang, Fermentation and Food Science. 83 Dien, Six Dynasties Civilization, 359–63; Anderson, Food and Environment, 152– 58; Benn, Tea in China, 5–6, 10, 2–41. A fragment of the Jingzhou tudi ji 荊州土 地記 (Record of the lands of Jing Prefecture) records a regional claim to producing the best tea. HTFZJY, 114. 84 For example, the difference in the staple crops of wheat versus rice is never mentioned in these debates.

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85 Liu Yiqing, Shishuo xinyu, 1.88; JS 54.1472–73. 86 The fifty-seventh chapter of this work is entirely dedicated to instruction on raising sheep and making products from their wool, milk, and meat. For instructions on the preparation of various kinds of lao (yoghurt or curdled milk) from goats, sheep, and cows, see Jia Sixie, Qimin yaoshu, 6.431–39. Jenner suggests that lao is something like the modern Mongolian drink urum. Jenner, Memories of Loyang, 215 n. 20. On the ethnicizing of these northern and southern cuisines, see Chittick, Jiankang Empire, 67–81. 87 The catalogs of the Sui shu, Jiu Tang shu, and Song shi all classify the Luoyang qielan ji as a work of geography. The Xin Tang shu classifies it as Buddhist literature. 88 Xiao Zixian, Nan Qi shu, 57.994–98; WS 63.1407–12; Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian, 138.4327–28; LYQLJ 3.136. 89 These were two large and two small states during the Spring and Autumn period. 90 LYQLJ 3.136. Translation slightly modified from Jenner, Memories of Loyang, 215. 91 LYQLJ 3.136. 92 Emperor Xiaowen referred to Wang Su’s change as a matter of xi 習 (becoming accustomed to) and not in terms of ritual correction. 93 Qi was at one time a hegemonic state and housed the Jixia Academy. Confucius was from Lu. Chen Qingzhi similarly compared the north and the south to great and small mountains and rivers, setting them up as categorically similar but qualitatively different. LYQLJ 2.114; Jenner, Memories of Loyang, 203. 94 LYQLJ 2.113, 3.136, 3.145. 95 LYQLJ 2.112–13; Jenner, Memories of Loyang, 200–203. A few days before this ­incident, Yang Yuanshen had also responded to taunts from Chen Qingzhi over the legitimacy of the Wei dynasty with a long and articulate indictment of the regionalism of the Jiankang empire. 96 On Dongshi and Xishi, see Zhuangzi 14.126. The allusion is especially apropos since Xishi was originally a native of the Yangzi basin kingdom of Yue, and King Fuchai of Wu’s infatuation with her ultimately led to his downfall. 97 LYQLJ 3.136; Jenner, Memories of Loyang, 215–16. In this cultural campaign, Yuan Shao once contrasted southern cuisine with the “eight lordly delicacies” (wanghou bazhen 王侯八珍) from the Zhou li. LYQLJ 3.136; Zhou li zhushu 4.94–96. But this canonical standard is contrived since it was the nomadic-influenced foods that actually figured in the north-south cuisine debates. 98 LYQLJ 3.136; Jenner, Memories of Loyang, 215–16. 99 On initial oppression of the south, see SuS 2.43, 24.682, 31.876; Li Yanshou, Bei shi, 11.415, 11.417–18, 11.422, 63.2245. On Sui Emperor Yang’s fascination with the south, see Zhang Yupu, “Sui Yangdi”; Wright, Sui Dynasty, 158–59. On Tang patronage of southern scholarship, see McMullen, State and Scholars. On SuiTang unification efforts, see Holcombe, “Southern Integration,” 758–65. 100 On rewards for official turncoats, see LYQLJ 2.113; YSJX 4.317–18. On instability at the courts of the sixth century, see YSJX 3.148, 3.157; Teng, Family Instructions, 53–55; Pearce, Spiro, and Ebrey, Culture and Power, 20–22; Xiaofei Tian, Beacon Fire, 318.

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101 Li Baiyao, Bei Qi shu, 45.617–18; Dien, Pei Ch’i Shu, 5–19, 37–41; Teng, Family Instructions, xvii–xxv; Li Yanshou, Bei shi, 83.2794–96; Qin Yongzhou, Yan Zhitui, 20–33. 102 Li Baiyao, Bei Qi shu, 45.625; Dien, Pei Ch’i Shu, 70. 103 YSJX 3.157. 104 Dien, “Yen Chih-Tui,” 43–64. Ignorance of each other was such that Yan Zhitui would compare faith in the other-worldly realms of Buddhism to southerners’ difficulty believing in “felt tents that could shelter a thousand people” 千人氈 帳 or northerners’ difficulty believing in “ships that could carry twenty thousand bushels” 二萬斛船. YSJX 5.379. 105 LYQLJ 2.114; Jenner, Memories of Loyang, 203. 106 YSJX 2.59, 3.157. For examples of Yan Zhitui advocating behavior contrary to that prescribed in textual sources, see YSJX 2.74, 2.82. For more on his use of canonical ritual as it related to local customs, see Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 256–58. 107 YSJX 2.59. For an alternative translation, see Teng, Family Instructions, 22. Yan Zhitui’s advice is replete with keen social observations from firsthand experience in the middle and lower Yangzi basin, Yellow River plain, and Guanzhong. He was also insistent that all literati should uphold geographical accuracy in their writing. YSJX 4.292. 108 Choo, “Between Imitation and Mockery,” 64. 109 Even on the rare occasions that Yan Zhitui referenced traditional spatial concepts for the world or the world center—such as zhongguo, jiuzhou 九州, Xia 夏, or barbarism—he did so in ways that decentered or fragmented them into his operative spatial units of north and south. YSJX 1.48, 6.413, 7.529. 110 For examples of implied negative evaluations of customs, see YSJX 2.96, 2.115, 2.120. For examples of applauding both northern and southern customs, see YSJX 2.74, 2.117. For examples of preferring a contemporary practice over textually sanctioned conduct, see YSJX 2.74, 2.78. Albert Dien has described the Confucian classics as “[losing] their sacred status for Yen.” Dien, “Yen ChihTui,” 49–56. For an alternative interpretation that sees Yan Zhitui’s assessment of customs more negatively, see Mark Edward Lewis, “Writing the World,” 71–78. 111 In evaluations opposing northern and southern practices that Yan adjudicated according to canonical texts, literary sources, or “ancient ways,” his assessments are almost perfectly even. YSJX 1.47–49, 2.67, 2.74, 2.77–79, 2.82–83, 2.86– 87, 2.92, 2.95, 2.117, 2.124–25, 4.324, 6.479–80, 7.529–30. In evaluations adjudicated without any of these conservative standards, Yan favors the south about three to one. See also Qin Yongzhou, Yan Zhitui, 78–79. 112 On mourning practices, see YSJX 2.79, 2.82, 2.92, 2.95–96, 2.103, 2.104–5, 2.217. On child raising, see YSJX 2.115. On treatment of guests, see YSJX 2.77, 2.83, 2.124– 25. On language, see YSJX 7.529–30. 113 On writing, see YSJX 4.279. On clan solidarity, see YSJX 1.34, 2.77, 2.86–87, 2.120. On family naming practices, see YSJX 2.67, 2.74, 2.78, 2.85–86, 6.479–80. 114 YSJX 2.59.

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115 YSJX 7.529–30. Translation modified from Teng, Family Instructions, 189. 116 YSJX 7.529. Translation modified from Teng, Family Instructions, 189. 117 YSJX 1.47–49. See also YSJX 1.34. On Yan Zhitui’s interest in maintaining separation between men and women, see Mark Edward Lewis, “Writing the World,” 34–43. 118 YSJX 3.148, 4.315, 4.322–24. 119 YSJX 4.317–18. 120 On different evaluations of Yan Zhitui’s north-south comparison, see Qin Yongzhou, Yan Zhitui, 76–79; Teng, Family Instructions, xxiii. The ecumenicalism of this ideal literatus extended to the realm of religion as well. On Yan Zhitui’s efforts to syncretize Buddhism and Confucianism, see YSJX 5.364–408; Dien, “Yen Chih-Tui,” 49–56, 62–64. 121 On the assumed continuation of a multipolar political landscape, see YSJX 2.59, 3.157. On Sui unification, see YSJX 2.72. Although he did not finish the work until after 589, he probably began work on it in the 570s. In another anecdote, Yan Zhitui mentioned a “recent” posting, which he had been appointed to in 572. YSJX 5.347. On the claimed audience of his own male descendants, see YSJX 1.1. 122 On the “opposition poetics,” see Owen, Poetry of the Early T‘ang, chaps. 2–3. For an example of this sort of explanation of the fall of Chen, see Wei Zheng’s 魏徵 (580–643) memorial in Liu Xu, Jiu Tang shu, 71.2550. 123 Emperor Yang’s reconciliatory position is evident in his marriage alliance with one of the most influential aristocratic families of the south, his lenient treatment of former Chen royal family and officials, the construction of the Grand Canal, the building of palace complexes in Luoyang and Jiangdu (Jiangsu), his imperial tours in the south, and the patronization of southern Buddhist and Daoist traditions. Wright, Sui Dynasty, 153–71; Xiong, Emperor Yang, 15–20, 35–37, 64–71, 75–93, 101–5, 148–51, 155–57. Tang endorsement of southern literature can be seen in Lu Deming’s 陸德明 (ca. 560–630) southern-style metaphysical exegesis of the Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文 (Explanation of canonical texts), which enjoyed official endorsement well into the eighth century. Liu Xu, Jiu Tang shu, 189A.4944–45; McMullen, State and Scholars, 71–72. Furthermore, despite Tang literati’s initial distaste for southern poetry, it would become celebrated in the second half of the eighth century. Owen, Great Age, 254–56. Tang endorsement of southern religious traditions is seen in the royal Li family’s preference for the southern Shangqing 上清 (Highest Clarity) tradition of Daoism. 124 On statements by Tang Emperor Taizong (r. 626–49) asserting the inclusion of all peoples and all barbarians under his rule, see Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian, 194.6103–4, 194.6247. The north-south metageography of early Tang historiography contrasts, for example, with the writing of the Zizhi tongjian, which traces the legitimate line of dynastic succession through the Jiankang courts. 125 Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 213–15. 126 On Sui administrative geography, see SuS 29.806–8; TD 171.4450–51; Liu Zhiji, Shitong, 10.274–75. On tujing, see Li Jifu, Yuanhe junxian tuzhi, preface. On a

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similar imperial metageography expressed in other monographs of the Sui shu, see SuS 6.105–7, 25.695, 26.719–20. 127 McMullen, State and Scholars, 72–76. On the relationship between northern and southern traditions of canonical scholarship, see Mou Runsun, “Lun ru shi liang jia,” 393; Mou Runsun, “Tang chu nanbei xueren.” Furthermore, southern officials in the early Tang bureaucracy were used to balance the factional powers of the Guanzhong and Shandong regional blocs. Wechsler, “Factionalism in Early T’ang,” 97–108. 128 On the composition of these pre-Sui histories, see McMullen, State and Scholars, 165–68; Chaussende, “Liang Shu,” 167–68; Chaussende, “Chen Shu,” 44–45; Pearce, “Zhou Shu,” 510–11; Klein, “Bei Qi Shu,” 13–14. 129 Li Yanshou, Bei shi, 100.3344–45. See also Qu Lindong, “Nan shi” he “Bei shi,” chap. 3. 130 SuS 33.962–64. 131 Qu Lindong, “Nan shi” he “Bei shi,” 55–69. On the decreased number of battles, Qu explains that Li Yanshou seems to have eliminated battles that could not be corroborated in both the northern and the southern records. But, since dynastic histories often exaggerate their own victories and fail to mention their own defeats, only recording battles that are confirmed in both accounts will considerably underestimate the actual number of battles. This underestimation, Qu points out, supports Li Yanshou’s ultimate goal of asserting imperial unity. 132 Li Yanshou, Bei shi, 100.3343. 133 Li Yanshou, Bei shi, 100.3344–45. 134 Li Yanshou, Bei shi, 100.3345. 135 TD 17.423. 136 TD 17.423. 137 Sima Guang, “Yi Liu Daoyuan,” 63.776; Chao Gongwu, Junzhai dushu zhi, 6.242.

Chapter Four 1 For a summation of natural-cultural interaction models among modern envi­ ronmental historians, see Stewart, “Environmental History,” 356–59; Hughes, What Is Environmental History?, 321–22. For a useful comparison with medieval Europe, see Hoffmann, Environmental History, 7–11. 2 On the variety and breadth of sources for the Shuijing zhu, see Chen Qiaoyi, “Shuijing zhu” yanjiu, 7–18; Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan pingzhuan, 110–23; Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, chaps. 6–7. 3 For example, this view is expressed by Jörg Hüsemann in Altertum vergegenwär­ tigen, 232–33, 239. Although we disagree on this point, Hüsemann’s related argument that the Shuijing zhu should not be read as an argument for imperial reunification (as Chen Qiaoyi had argued earlier) is certainly right. 4 Roetz, “On Nature and Culture,” 201; Harbsmeier, “Towards a Conceptual History,” 220–54; Marks, China. See also Tucker and Berthrong, Confucianism and Ecology; Girardot, Miller, and Liu, Daoism and Ecology.

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5 As discussed in chapter 1, the Huainanzi, with its Daoist and antiimperial inclinations, is a prominent exception to the general dominance of imperial ideology in Han geographical thought. 6 Ivanhoe, “Human Beings and Nature,” 157–58; Roetz, “On Nature and Culture,” 213; Ivanhoe, “Early Confucianism and Environmental Ethics,” 65–67, 69–73; Marks, China, 105–6. 7 Mark Edward Lewis, Early Chinese Empires, 72–74; Marks, China, 106–7. For ­examples of Han depictions of the Qin conquest of nature, see SJ 6.242, 6.245, 6.248, 6.250, 6.252, 6.256, 6.263, 6.280–81; Jia Yi, Xinshu, 1.1–2. On Han Emperor Wu’s similar attempts to conquer nature, see SJ 29.1413, 117.3056–60. 8 Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, chap. 4; Loewe, “Structure and Practice,” 470–79; Mostern, Dividing the Realm, 35–46; Zheng Yuyu, “Shenti xingdong,” 68–80; Marks, China, 87–102. 9 Henderson, “Cosmology and Concepts of Nature,” 184. 10 HS 26.1273. 11 On hydrological geography in the Shuijing zhu, see Chen Qiaoyi, “Shuijing zhu” yanjiu, 29–42. 12 SJZ, preface, 1. In the five-phases model, water is associated with the north. 13 SJZ 1.2. The Yuanming bao is a chenwei 讖緯 (prophetic apocrypha) text on the classical Chunqiu 春秋 (Spring and autumn annals). 14 Guodian Chu mu zhujian, 123–26; Scott Cook, Bamboo Texts, 323–54; Wang, Order in Early Chinese Excavated Texts, 30–37. 15 Wei Qipeng, Chujian “Laozi” jianshi, 96–100. 16 SJZ, preface, 1. The Xuanzhong ji is a lost anomaly account. This quotation in the Shuijing zhu is the earliest reference to it. The text was later attributed to a “Mr. Guo” (Guoshi 郭氏), which subsequent scholars speculated refers to Guo Pu. Campany, Strange Writing, 93–94. 17 SJZ 1.2; Liu Xi, Shiming, 1.62. 18 SJZ 1.2; Guanzi 14.813. According to Chinese medicine, qi circulates through the tendons and veins. 19 SJZ, preface, 1. The life-granting qualities of rivers will be discussed in the final section of this chapter. 20 The omission of Central Eurasia and islands off the coast of East Asia will also be discussed in greater detail in chapter 5. 21 SJZ 22.529. A similar statement is made in SJZ, preface, 1–2. On Li Daoyuan’s own perceived distance from the ancient history he sought to describe, see Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, 129–46. 22 Li Daoyuan acknowledged in his preface and described throughout his text the reality that rivers did sometimes change their course. This was especially true of the Yellow River. These environmental changes, however, were much less frequent than those of human geography. For more on Li Daoyuan’s use of natural geography as a backdrop to human history, see Nylan, “Wandering in the Ruins,” 66–68. 23 Jones, Reading Rivers, 3. For more on the river structure of the Shuijing zhu, see Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, 219–24; Lycas, “Représenter l’espace,” 311–16.

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24 My interpretation of the Shuijing zhu in this section differs considerably from that of Chen Qiaoyi, who interprets the Shuijing zhu as an argument for imperial reunification. He describes Li Daoyuan as a “patriot” (aiguo zhuyi zhe 爱国 主义者) and the Shuijing zhu as advocating an ideology of imperial “grand unification” (da yitong 大一統) and of “the human conquest of nature” (ren dingsheng tian 人定勝天). Chen Qiaoyi, “Shuijing zhu” yanjiu erji, 129–47; Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan pingzhuan, 33–42, 75–87. 25 Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 245–306. 26 The Mu Tianzi zhuan is a Warring States text, but it was lost and then rediscovered in a tomb excavated in about 279 CE. Shaughnessy, Rewriting Early Chinese Texts, 133–53, 172–77. The earliest syncretistic text linking these Sinitic and Buddhist central peaks was probably Daoan’s 道安 (314–85) lost Sihai baichuan shuiyuan ji 四海百川水源記. Cao Shibang, Zhongguo Fojiao, 182–83. 27 Q. Edward Wang, “History, Space, and Ethnicity”; Holcombe, “Re-Imagining China”; Holcombe, Genesis of East Asia, 8–29; Abramson, Ethnic Identity; Sanping Chen, Multicultural China. On depictions of foreign lands in the Shuijing zhu, see Chen Qiaoyi, “Shuijing zhu” yanjiu, 191–94. 28 SJZ 2.34–3.87. 29 Skinner, “Regional Urbanization,” 211–20; Skinner and Baker, City in Late Imperial China. Cordell Yee notes that, in his preface, Li Daoyuan “appears to take for granted the economic importance of these waterways for agriculture, trans­ portation, and communication,” and instead he “stresses cosmological principles to justify his attention to water.” Yee, “Traditional Chinese Cartography,” 93–94. Yee no doubt has Skinner’s macroregions in mind in this critique. 30 Mostern, Dividing the Realm, 35–46; Loewe, “Structure and Practice,” 470–79; Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 213–15. 31 A similar pattern is found in modern environmental history, which tends to highlight regional and global patterns over national patterns. Stewart, “Environmental History,” 360–61. 32 For the city of Luoyang, see SJZ 16.397–403. On the canals running through the city, see SJZ 16.697–99. 33 Statements of this sort are said of the raccoon-dog along the Wen River and the gibbons along the Yangzi. SJZ 24.582, 33.778. Li Daoyuan also noted that the Binlang tree cannot be transplanted from its native southern environment. SJZ 36.839. 34 SJZ 24.582. 35 SJZ 29.687. 36 SJZ 36.839. 37 Allan, Way of Water, 54–57. 38 Shangshu zhengyi 6.158a–205b. 39 SuS 33.982–88. 40 Xu Shen, Shuowen jiezi, 9B.1a. Mountains were understood as the source of both rivers and clouds (and therefore rain). 41 Raz, “Daoist Sacred Geography,” 1404. 42 Teiser, “Introduction,” 32–36; Jeeloo Liu, “Qi-naturalism,” 38–49.

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43 Robson, Power of Place, 17–25; Raz, “Daoist Sacred Geography,” 1402–10; Munakata, Sacred Mountains, 3–34. On the Shanhai jing, see Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, “Conception of Terrestrial Organization”; Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 284–303; Strassberg, Chinese Bestiary, 30–43. As late as the fourth century, Ge Hong warned his readers about the dangers of entering into mountain spaces. Ge Hong, Baopuzi neipian, 17.273–95. 44 Mount Kunlun marked the center of his worldview and the continental divide between the eastern Sinitic and the western Indic realms. See chapter 5. Within the Sinitic realm, mountains marked the headwater of rivers and the bound­ aries between regional drainage basins. Mountains were also employed to “separate the inner and the outer” (yi ge neiwai 以隔內外). SJZ 36.834. 45 Demiéville, “La montagne,” 364–89; Munakata, Sacred Mountains, 34. 46 SJZ 40.950. Qiongquan literally means the final springs. It is another term for the Yellow Springs or the Nine Springs, the underground dwelling place of the dead. 47 SJZ 39.924–25. Li Daoyuan’s explication here is based on a misinterpretation or manipulation of the Erya. See SJZS 39.3264–65; Yang Xiaoyan, “Shuijing zhu ‘Da shan yue gong.’” More connections between physical geography and divine efficacy on mountains can be seen in SJZ 24.570 and 27.650–51. 48 Sunzi 3.217–75; Chunqiu Zuo zhuan zhengyi 42.1370–73. 49 SJZ 20.485. Other examples include SJZ 3.75–76, 4.109, 4.117, 17.431–32, 17.433, 27.643– 44, 33.777, and 34.794. For examples of militaries relying on strategic points along rivers, bridges, and fords, see SJZ 3.75–76. 4.109, 4.117, 17.431–32, 17.433, 27.643–44, 33.777. See also Chen Qiaoyi, “Shuijing zhu” yanjiu, 177–80; Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan yu “Shuijing zhu,” 86–87. 50 Braudel, Mediterranean, 38–40. Braudel’s description of the inability of state and law to lay claim to mountain people is quite positive, calling hills “the refuge of liberty, democracy, and peasant republics.” 51 Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, 127–28. 52 SJZ 40.935–36. See also SJZ 9.235, 21.499; HHS 20.739. 53 For lowland defeats of the Red Eyebrows and the Yellow Turbans, see SJZ 4.119, 5.140, 9.239, 9.241, 16.388, 24.584, 31.728. On mountain strongholds of the Red Eyebrows and the Yellow Turbans, see SJZ 8.211, 15.367, 24.581. 54 SJZ 35.810. No mention of Mount Qinglin, cutting down trees, or the beautiful lad are made in the Song shu account of suppressing this rebellion. SoS 8.155, 80.2059–60. For another example of rebels, trees, and strange phenomena, see SJZ 24.580–81. 55 SJZ 30.706. 56 SJZ 37.863. 57 Tao Qian, Tao Yuanming ji, 6.479–90. 58 SJZ 37.870. 59 HTFZJY, 64. 60 SJZ 36.834. 61 Neither of these uses resemble any ethnic or linguistic definition of identity. On the early definition, see Liji zhengyi 12.466–67. On the history of the Man

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peoples, see Lü Mingzhong and Kuang Yuche, Nanfang minzu; He Guangyue, Nan Man yuanliu; Lycas, “Représenter l’espace,” chaps. 3–4. 62 As Sinitic civilization expanded southward into the Yangzi basin, Man tribes­ people either acculturated in the lowlands, retreated up into the hills, or fled farther south. On the expansion of Sinitic civilization southward and incorporation of Man peoples into the empire, see Wiens, Han Chinese Expansion; Fitzgerald, Southern Expansion; Lycas, “Représenter l’espace,” chap. 4; Cook and Major, Defining Chu; Kleeman, Great Perfection, 11–107. 63 SJZ 32.746. See also SJZ 31.735. 64 SJZ 33.776. See also SJZ 37.858–59, 37.862–63, 37.868–70, 38.888. 65 For the origin tale of the Jiulong tribe, see SJZ 37.858–59; HHS 86.2848–51. For the story of the tribal founder Linjun, see SJZ 37.862–63; HHS 86.2840; Felt, “Man Bar­ barians,” 38–52. For the story of the tribal founder Panhu, see SJZ 37.868–69; HHS 86.2829–30; Felt, “Man Barbarians,” 17–37; Lycas, “Représenter l’espace,” 171–79. 66 For punitive expeditions against the Man of Manzhong, the Wuling Mountains, the Sichuan basin, and Lingnan, see SJZ 28.658, 32.735, 32.746, 33.777, 36.829, 36.835, 37.858–59, 37.869–70, 38.888. 67 SJZ 37.868–69. 68 SJZ 37.858–59. 69 SJZ 36.823. 70 SJZ 36.827. 71 The inability of the state to control these two categories of mountain dwellers was interpreted in imperial metageography in terms of mountains being part of the outermost of the five realms of submission (wufu 五服), the realm of wastelands (huangfu 荒服). Distance from the center should be understood here in terms of relative, not absolute, space. 72 Campany, Making Transcendents, xiii. 73 Campany, Making Transcendents, 51–54. 74 Liu Xi, Shiming, 3.150. 75 SJZ 39.924, 24.750, 39.923. See also SJZ 9.225 15.366, 27.647, 27.650–51, 33.768, 39.915, 39.921, 39.923–24, 40.946–47. For a translations of Wang Fangping’s hagiography, see Campany, To Live, 259–70. 76 For example, see SJZ 9.225, 13.321, 21.504, 26.621–22, 27.651, 33.772, 39.914–15. 77 Campany, Making Transcendents. 78 SJZ 21.504, 21.507, 26.621–22, 27.647, 32.750–51, 39.915, 39.923–24, 40.946. 79 SJZ 13.321, 32.750–51. 80 Vervoorn, Men of the Cliffs, 5–6. For more on reclusion in the court, see Ver­ voorn, Men of the Cliffs, 1–17; Berkowitz, Patterns of Disengagement, 1–16. ­Berkowitz makes the distinction in his study between “nominal reclusion” and “substantive reclusion.” 81 SJZ 39.924. 82 SJZ 40.942. 83 SJZ 12.302; JS 94.2435–36. For the biography of Wang Jun, see JS 39.1146–50. For other examples of the moral judgment of recluses over the state, see SJZ 11.279, 26.633.

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84 Robson, “Buddhist Sacred Geography,” 1367–70. Zürcher notes that “the strong association between monasteries and mountains—especially ‘sacred’ mountains— was a typically Chinese phenomenon.” Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest of China, 207. Robson also notes that the idea of the Buddhist famous mountains of the Four Great Elements (Sida mingshan 四大名山) cannot be traced back before the Ming. Robson, Power of Place, 52–55. 85 SJZ 26.624. 86 Huijiao, Gaoseng zhuan, T. 2059:50.348b13–14, 356b.17–21, 357b.24, 367.5; Robson, “Buddhist Sacred Geography,” 1372–73; Berkowitz, Patterns of Disengagement, 13. 87 Robson, “Buddhist Sacred Geography,” 1367–79; Birnbaum, “Thoughts on T’ang Buddhist Mountain Traditions,” 6–7. 88 SJZ 39.924. For another example of a mountain monastery in a scenic location, see SJZ 32.750. 89 Robson, “Neither Too Far, nor Too Near,” 3–12. 90 SJZ 9.225. 91 On examples of transcending the mountain-lowland divide, see SJZ 9.225, 39.921. On the economic relationship between mountain monastery and lowland city, see Twitchett, “Monasteries and China’s Economy,” 533–41; Ch’en, Chinese Transformation of Buddhism, 125–32, 138, 151–58; Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society, 116–52; Walsh, Sacred Economies. 92 SJZ 1.11–13. Although James Robson is right that, in general, there is little correlation between mountain height and sacredness, Mount Kunlun is a clear exception in which the height and the sacredness of the mountain are both integral and reinforcing. Robson, Power of Place, 20–25. 93 On Mount Hua, see SJZ 4.108–9, 40.950. On Mount Tai, see SJZ 24.579–81, 40.950. On Mount Heng 恒, see SJZ 11.285, 40.951. On Mount Mao, see SJZ 40.941–43. On Mount Lu, see SJZ 39.923–25. 94 Ge Hong, Baopuzi neipian, 17.273–295; Kleeman, “Mountain Deities,” 230–32. 95 In order to depict Li Daoyuan as a modern geographer, Chen Qiaoyi argues that Li Daoyuan did not believe in spirits. Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan pingzhuan, 87. Besides the problem of extrapolating personal beliefs of the author from a text that has so few personal comments, this claim is inconsistent with the myriad tales of spiritual beings described in the Shuijing zhu. 96 SJZ 34.790. The internal quotation is from a rhapsody by Song Yu 宋玉 (fl. third c. BCE). See Song Yu, “Gaotang fu,” 19.264b–65a; Knechtges, Wen Xuan, 3:327. There are textual differences in this quote between the Shuijing zhu and the Wenxuan. 97 SJZ 40.941–42. On variations of this tale, see SJZ 5.128–29, 40.955; HTFZJY, 183; Wu Yue chunqiu 6.102; Li Fang, Taiping yulan, 47.228b. 98 SJZ 1.3. King Mu’s visitation with the Queen Mother of the West at Kunlun is only obliquely referenced, with no specific mention of any transfer of knowledge. SJZ 1.11–12, 4.111. Legends of Han Emperor Wu’s visitation with the Queen Mother of the West atop Kunlun fit into this tradition but are not referenced in the Shuijing zhu. Thomas E. Smith, “Record and the Shaping of Narrative,” 70–88, 247–61.

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99 SJZ 27.642–43. Li Daoyuan does not mention Yang Xi’s 楊羲 (330–ca. 386) Highest Clarity revelations atop Mount Mao. 100 Li Daoyuan used the terms ci 祠 and miao 廟 interchangeably. SJZ 22.515, 27.647, 30.713, 40.941–43. I will be referring to both collectively as “shrines.” 101 Shrines to transcendents were an exclusively mountain phenomenon; shrines to historical figures were more prominent in the lowlands but still sometimes present in the mountains—usually marking their burial place or some other significant site in their lives. For examples of mountain shrines to sage-kings, see SJZ 26.624, 31.722, 40.941–42. On mountain shrines to deities, see SJZ 13.319, 34.790. On mountain shrines to historical figures, see SJZ 7.196, 15.368, 26.625, 32.750–51. On mountain shrines to transcendents, see SJZ 21.504, 23.558–59, 27.647, 39.915, 40.938. On lowland shrines to sage-kings, see SJZ 24.574–75, 33.773–74, 38.893–94. On lowland shrines to deities, see SJZ 18.441, 30.713, 35.807. On lowland shrines to historic statesmen, see SJZ 7.196, 22.515, 22.518–19, 22.528, 28.663, 36.831–32, 38.895. On lowland shrines to philosophers and poets, see SJZ 9.225, 23.552–53, 25.592–95, 26.619, 34.791, 38.897. On mountain shrines attached to tombs, see SJZ 15.368, 26.625, 32.750–51, 40.941–42. 102 SJZ 39.924–25. Atop Mount Nülang 女郎 was the Nülang Shrine. “People from all over came to make offerings here” 左右民祀焉. SJZ 8.211. 103 Although monasteries and meditation huts appear often on mountainsides, bodhisattvas seem not yet to have established a sufficient presence on mountains to make them noteworthy in this early geographic literature. Robson, Power of Place, 52–56. 104 SJZ 28.661. 105 Braudel, Mediterranean, 34–38. 106 SJZ 27.647. For other accounts of commoners erecting mountain shrines, see SJZ 39.915, 39.921. For more on Tang Gongfang and the various retellings of his story, see Campany, Making Transcendents, 232–43; Campany, To Live, 107, 218, 433. 107 SJZ 39.915. 108 SJZ 1.11. On trees as iconography of immortality, see Finsterbusch, “Zur Ikonographie.” 109 SJZ 26.621–22. For further examples of the numinous quality of natural materials atop mountains, see SJZ 9.225, 13.321, 21.504, 27.651, 33.772, 39.914–15. 110 SJZ 27.644. 111 For further examples, see SJZ 11.284, 13.319, 14.342, 18.440, 19.461, 31.722–23, 36.824–25, 37.864. For more on hot springs in the Shuijing zhu, see Chen Qiaoyi, “Shuijing zhu” yanjiu, 78–87; Chen Qiaoyi, Lixue zhaji, 274–78. 112 SJZ 24.570. The qi here is evidence of Emperor Gaozu’s worthiness to rule. 113 James Robson is right to argue that sectarian labels “cannot properly account for Nanyue’s multidimensional history.” I would extend his argument further to include nonreligious dimensions as well. Robson, Power of Place, 2–4; Robson, “Buddhist Sacred Geography,” 1381–96. 114 Raz, “Daoist Sacred Geography,” 1410–23. A similar assessment can be made of the mountain metageographies of the “Yu gong” and the Shanhai jing with their nonhuman mountains that actually reaffirm the centrality of the imperial core.

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115 I will discuss this more in chapter 5. 116 On Mount Song, see SJZ 15.371, 40.950. On Mount Heng 恒, see SJZ 11.285, 40.951. Kleeman notes how the parity between these marchmounts was already being undermined in the Han as the eastern peak of Mount Tai rose in prominence over the central peak of Mount Song. Kleeman, “Mountain Deities,” 230. On Mount Huo, see SJZ 35.808. On the changing label of the southern marchmount, see Robson, Power of Place, 57–89. For more on the five marchmounts, see Nin, Five Sacred Mountains; Xie Ninggao, Zhongguo de mingshan; Tokiwa, Shina Bukkyō shiseki tōsaki; Zheng Shiping, Daojiao mingshan daguan; Cui Xiuguo et al., Wuyue shi hua. 117 SJZ 39.923. 118 This shift from the five marchmounts toward mountains of the Yangzi basin is also noted in Munakata, Sacred Mountains, 42. 119 On the riverine transportation described in the Shuijing zhu, see Chen Qiaoyi, “Shui­jing zhu” yanjiu, 210–17; Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan yu “Shuijing zhu,” 81–82. 120 Peter Coates’s cultural history of rivers highlights four themes: rivers of life, riches, power, and death. Coates, Story of Six Rivers, 9, 15–27. Issues of riches and power figure more prominently in the modern age. My analysis here aligns with his observations about rivers of life and death. 121 On flooding patterns of the Yellow River, see Yunzhen Chen et al., “SocioEconomic Impacts on Flooding,” 682–98; Cen Zhongmian, Huanghe bianqian shi; Shi Nianhai, Huanghe liuyu. On water control, see Zhongguo shuili shi gao. 122 SJZ 1.2. 123 SJZ 33.773. A very similar comment is made in SJZ 39.922. The lower Yangzi was said to “constantly have flooding” 常有水患 before its diking projects. SJZ 40.947. 124 Several of these disasters were preceded by ominous signs or prophetic nursery rhymes that went unheeded. SJZ 27.646, 28.667–68, 29.686. For a sunken Yellow River plain city, see SJZ 10.268–69. 125 SJZ 6.174–75, 10.258, 38.892; quote is from 6.166. 126 Along the Gengshi 更始 River, “the opening in the mountains is dark and deep, the cavernous ravine is dim and enclosed” 空岫陰深，邃澗闇密, and there “was sure to be miasma” 避瘴. SJZ 36.828. Along the Wen 溫 River, Li commented, the residents atop a mountain plateau were free of miasmic poison. SJZ 36.830. 127 SJZ 36.826; Gan Bao, Soushen ji, 12.156. A similar description of the dangers of miasmic air is given for a location along the nearby Lu 瀘 River. SJZ 36.826. 128 SJZ 28.661. 129 SJZ 38.897. The Shiji records that Qu Yuan threw himself into the Miluo 汨羅 River but does not specify more than that. SJ 84.2490. On Qu Yuan’s home, just up the Yangzi River from the suicide site, see SJZ 34.791. 130 SJZ 33.772–73. For similar stories of virtuous women, see SJZ 33.767, 33.771, 40.947. On filial sons committing suicide, see SJZ 22.485, 33.772. See also Farmer, “Three Chaste Ones,” 191–202. 131 SJZ 39.922.

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132 SJZ 30.712. Chen Qiaoyi argues that the Shuijing zhu depicts the “human con­ quest of nature” (ren dingsheng tian). Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan pingzhuan, 75–87. This section will present several anecdotes that might support this interpretation. It is essential, though, that they be read in the context of the preceding sections that present many other anecdotes about humankind’s inability to control rivers and mountains. 133 In an anecdote from the Luoyang qielan ji, a soldier visits the home of the Luo River God and is served a delicious liquor that he later finds out was made from the blood of children who had died (or were sacrificed) in the Luo River. LYQLJ 3.131–32. 134 SJZ 36.828. For other tales of Li Bing defeating river spirits, see SJZ 33.767, 768, 770. 135 Elders were one of the three types of appointees from among the resident populations in the quasi-official subdistrict administration of a township (xiang 鄉). Headquarter clerks (tingyuan 廷掾) were unranked subofficials beneath the district magistrate. Hucker, Dictionary of Official Titles, 399, 513. 136 SJZ 10.260. This anecdote is also found in SJ 126.3211–13. 137 Li Daoyuan described the enduring effect of Cifei’s slaying of two lamias in SJZ 35.802. His virtue is praised for safeguarding the river in Huainanzi, 18.1299; Lü Buwei, Lüshi chunqiu 20.553–54. Cifei’s name is also written 佽飛 and 次非. For other tales of officials defeating river spirits, see SJZ 10.259–60, 28.663, 33.768, 35.802. 138 For some examples, see SJZ 10.264, 24.573, 39.922, 40.937, 40.947. 139 SJZ 9.229–30. A similar description of constructing and operating a sluice can be seen in SJZ 39.922. 140 Lander, “Environmental Change,” 260–72; Needham, Wang, and Lu, Civil Engineering and Nautics, 285–96; Zheng Zhaojing, Zhongguo shuili shi, 258–61, 269–71. 141 SJZ 33.766. This definition of “a sea of land” comes from HS 28b.1642, 28b.1643 n. 7. On descriptions of agricultural water control in the Shuijing zhu, see Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan yu “Shuijing zhu,” 77–80; Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan pingzhuan, 75–87. 142 SJZ 7.190. Other examples of high officials taking part in waterworks projects can be found in SJZ 5.131–32 and 9.229–30. 143 Memorials for waterworks projects can be found in SJZ 9.229–30 and 14.339–40. 144 SJZ 10.264, 24.571, 10.258. See also SJZ 7.190–91. 145 SJZ 5.146. 146 SJZ 9.229–30, 14.339–40. 147 SJZ 26.625; HTFZJY, 204. A similar relationship is described for a hot spring. “When the generation is pure, then diseases are healed; but, when the generation is turbid, then there is no effect” 世清則疾愈，世濁則無驗. SJZ 18.440. 148 Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, x, 99.

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Chapter Five 1 Throughout this chapter, the terms “the West” and “the Western Regions” (xiyu 西域) refer to the lands of the Tarim basin, Transoxiana, Persia, and the Indian subcontinent. Although lands farther west, such as the Eastern Roman Empire, are included in accounts of the Western Regions in some dynastic histories, these lands are not mentioned in the Shuijing zhu. 2 My interpretation of the Shuijing zhu here differs from that of Jörg Hüsemann, who acknowledges Li Daoyuan’s incorporation of Buddhist geographies in order to accomplish his goal of being comprehensive but concludes that this was not more than an extensive appendage to the hydrographic model of the thirdcentury Shuijing. Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, 225–27. I argue that the first fascicle of the Shuijing zhu is not just an appendage of new information but an extension of the hydrographic structure itself, expanding the third-century known world of the Shuijing to the much larger sixth-century known world of the Shuijing zhu and relocating Kunlun from the western beginning of the account to the center of the structure. 3 Cheng Aiqin, Gudai Zhong-Yin jiaowang, 99–193; Mather, “Chinese and Indian Perceptions”; Kieschnick and Shahar, India in the Chinese Imagination, 1–12; Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, 1–14, 55–101; Forte, “Hui-Chih.” 4 On the decentering effect of Buddhist geography and its impact on concepts of ­regionalism within the Sinitic ecumene, see Lycas, “Représenter l’espace,” 302–11. 5 SJZ, preface, 2; 1.2, 1.12–13. 6 SJZ 1.12. 7 SJZ 1.13. 8 SJZ, preface, 2. Li Daoyuan’s perception of this problem is further explored in ­Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, 129–46. 9 SJZ 1.1. 10 SJZ 1.12. 11 SJZ, preface, 2. 12 I include in this category classical texts such as the Mu Tianzi zhuan, the Shan­ hai jing, and the Huainanzi, as well as early medieval texts such as the Shizhou ji and the Shenyi jing. On these texts as anomaly accounts, see Campany, Strange Writing, 30–31, 34–36, 43–45, 53–54. 13 On the metageographies of these classical texts, see Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 249–60, 284–303. For a comparative study of demonizing foreigners, see Poo, Enemies of Civilization, 80–84. 14 Imperial geographies include dynastic histories as well as reports of diplomatic missions like those of Zhang Qian and Kang Tai. 15 The salt and iron debates of the Western Han employ this-worldly and otherworldly conceptualizations of foreign lands in order to support the opposing positions. Huan Kuan, Yan tie lun, 8.479–518; Loewe, Crisis and Conflict, 96–97. For an example of anomaly accounts and imperial sources contradicting each other, Li Daoyuan cited Zhang Qian’s report that he reached the Pamir Mountains without ever finding Mount Kunlun. SJZ 2.36.

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16 Faxian’s early-fifth-century Foguo ji was the most important of these texts for Li Daoyuan, but he also drew from six other Buddhist geographical accounts of India and the West. Petech, Northern India, 4–9. Li Daoyuan cited geographical texts written by Indians and Central Eurasians in Sinitic script, but he never cited sutras that had been translated into Sinitic from their original Sanskrit. 17 Chen Qiaoyi describes Li Daoyuan as using a “scientific approach” (kexue taidu 科学态度) of “discarding what is false and retaining what is true” (qu wei cun zhen 去伪存真). But even Chen Qiaoyi acknowledges that Li Daoyuan prioritized these efforts toward his organizing hydrological structure and that in the details one finds more acceptance of unresolvable disagreements in his sources. Chen Qiaoyi, “Shuijing zhu” yanjiu erji, 139–45; Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan pingzhuan, 124–30. Topics of metacomments about problems with the organizing hydrology include the distance of Kunlun from the Yellow River plain (1.1), the divine inhabitants of Kunlun (1.12–13), and the number of rivers flowing out of Mount Kunlun/Anavatapta (1.3, 1.10, 1.11). 18 SJZ 1.1. 19 When contradictions were not resolved, Li Daoyuan frequently admitted that the truth was “unknown” (weixiang 未詳 or weizhi 未知). But he did make determinations about textual contradictions as well. Examples from the Western Regions include the disputed location of the Buddha’s alms bowl (2.35), the origin of the name of Vulture Mountain (1.9), and the presence of Pratyeka Buddha’s footprints in Khotan (2.36). 20 SJZ, preface, 1–2. 21 SJZ 1.11. 22 The actual location of Kunlun, as a mythic place, remained unknown. Map 5.1 merely maps the Tibetan Plateau with its surrounding Himalayan and Kunlun Mountain ranges as a rough approximation of where medieval Sinitic writers imagined Kunlun to be. 23 SJZ 1.1. Jörg Hüsemann sees in the organizing structure of the Shuijing zhu an absence of spatial hierarchies and a lack of clear centers and peripheries. He qualifies this opening line on the centrality of Kunlun by noting that Li Dao­ yuan did not himself affirm the validity of this statement in his commentary and that he merely acknowledged the contradictory nature of his sources. Hüsemann, Altertum vergegenwärtigen, 219–20. The contradictions in Li Daoyuan’s sources here, however, are about Kunlun’s differing descriptions and distances from the Yellow River plain, not about its centrality. The centrality of Kunlun in Li Daoyuan’s spatial structure, instead, is affirmed through his repeated description of Kunlun as the fountainhead of the great rivers of the world and his use of it to link Sinitic and Buddhist geographies together. 24 Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 169–86, 260–73, 284–303. 25 Munakata, Sacred Mountains, 9–12, 26–28, 33; Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 290–93. The “Yu gong” mentions Kunlun as a mountain range of the far west, whose tribes offered to Yu the Great gifts of felt and skins. Shangshu zhengyi 6.187. See also Gu Jiegang, “‘Yu gong’ zhong de Kunlun.” The Shanhai

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27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

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Notes to Pages 221–224 jing confusingly identifies multiple Mount Kunluns in different chapters (but always in the West). Shanhai jing 2.47–48, 11.294, 16.407. Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space, 249–58; Major, “Five Phases,” 133–37; Major, Heaven and Earth, 144–64. The popularity of Zou Yan’s theory in the Han can be seen in SJ 26.1259, 28.1368–69, 34.1558, 44.1847, and 76.2370. Descriptions of the theory are preserved in several texts. SJ 74.2344; Huan Kuan, Yan tie lun, 9.551–52; Huainanzi 4.322–26, 4.328–30; Weishu jicheng, 1089, 1091–92, 1095–96. SJZ 1.2; Liu Xi, Shiming, 1.62. A similar statement is quoted from Huan Tan’s 桓譚 Xinshu 新書. SJZ 1.2. These heights are cited from the Shanhai jing, the Shuijing, and the ­Huainanzi, respectively. Li Daoyuan also included Guo Pu’s commentary to the Shanhai jing stating that he “thought that it was over 2,500 li to the top” 以為自 上二千五百餘里. This description was presented in the Kunlun shuo 崑崙說, the Shanhai jing, and the Huainanzi, all of which are cited in SJZ 1.1, 1.11–12. SJZ 1.12–13; Shizhou ji, 78c; Thomas E. Smith, “Record and the Shaping of Narrative,” 555–56. SJZ 1.2. The four great rivers are the Yellow 河, Yangzi 江, Huai 淮, and Ji 濟 Rivers. SJZ 1.2, 1.11. See also Shanhai jing 11.297. Shangshu zhengyi 6.192. SJZ 1.2. The received Gao You commentary is worded slightly differently. Huai­ nanzi 4.326. SJZ 1.13, 2.40–41. Ban Gu recorded a similar path of the Yellow River but identified its source as from both the Congling Mountains and the Southern Mountain near Khotan. HS 96a.3871. On the general debate about the origin of the source of the Yellow River, see Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, “Where Is the Yellow River Source?,” 68–90. SJZ 1.11. See also Huainanzi 4.323–28. The received text of this passage of the Huai­ nanzi contains many textual problems that are apparent in Li Daoyuan’s quotation of it as well. Most puzzling is the line about the Weak-Water River, which seems to have been misplaced later in the chapter. For a discussion of this ­passage, see Major, Heaven and Earth, 157; Major et al., Huainanzi, 156–57. On differing interpretations of how to understand the passage as quoted in the Shuijing zhu, see SJZS 1.60. On the yellow water circling, my translation here differs from that of Major. For an explanation, see Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 395 n. 64. A similar account of the hydrology of Kunlun, not quoted in the Shuijing zhu, is given in Shanhai jing 11.294–98. The pool and gardens are also described in Zheng Jizhi’s 鄭緝之 (Song dynasty) Dongyang ji 東陽記, in HTFZJY, 198. SJZ 1.1, 1.11–13. This high deity was also identified in the Shuijing zhu as tiandi and tianhuang 天皇. See also Shanhai jing 2.47–48, 11.294; Huainanzi 4.328–30. SJZ 1.13. The god Luwu was an “enlightened beast” (kaiming shou 開明獸) with a tiger’s body, nine tails, and nine human heads. His duty was to guard the

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nine gates of Kunlun. Shanhai jing 2.47–48, 11.294; Guo Pu, Shanhai jing tuzan, 2.93–94. 40 SJZ 1.3. 41 SJZ 1.3. 42 SJZ 1.12–13. See also Shizhou ji, 78c; Thomas E. Smith, “Record and the Shaping of Narrative,” 555–59. For more on the Queen Mother of the West and Kunlun, see Cahill, Transcendence and Divine Passion, 18–20, 36–38, 78–80. 43 SJZ 1.1, 11–12. See also Shizhou ji, 78b–79b; Thomas E. Smith, “Record and the Shaping of Narrative,” 555–59. 44 SJZ 1.12. Both xuanji 旋機 and yuheng 玉衡 can be taken as synecdoches for the entire Big Dipper constellation. See also Shizhou ji, 78b; Thomas E. Smith, “Record and the Shaping of Narrative,” 557. 45 Zhang Hua, Bowu zhi, 1.7–8. 46 Shanhai jing 11.294; Yuan Ke and Zhou Ming, Zhongguo shenhua, 205–14; Thomas E. Smith, “Record and the Shaping of Narrative,” 70–88, 247–61; Porter, From Deluge to Discourse, 135–38. 47 SJZ 1.11. See also Huainanzi 4.328–30; Major et al., Huainanzi, 157. Xuan 玄 (mystic) here should be read as xuan 懸 (hanging). SJZS 1.61, 1.74 n. 48. 48 Cao Shibang, Zhongguo Fojiao, 181–83. For the bibliographic listing of Daoan’s work, see SuS 33.985; Ouyang Xiu and Song Qi, Xin Tang shu, 58.1504. 49 Fonian, Chang ahan jing, T. 1:18.114b–115b. A yojana is an Indian measurement defined as a day’s march for the royal army, about nine miles or thirty li. The particular model of Buddhist geography introduced into Sinitic culture through the Chang ahan jing remained the most complete description up to the sixthcentury composition of the Shuijing zhu. At the end of the sixth century, further explanations were added by the translation of the Lishiapitan lun 立世阿毘 曇論. Zhendi, Lishiapitan lun, T. 1644:181a–c. 50 On the four continents, see Fonian, Chang ahan jing, T. 1:18.115b. 51 It was a contested issue in ancient Indian geographies whether Sumeru was located at the center of the four continents or at the center of the continent of Jambudvipa like Mount Anavatapta. Sarkar, Geography of Ancient India, 10–38; Dube, Geographical Concepts in Ancient India, 28–45. 52 On Anavatapta, see Fonian, Chang ahan jing, T. 1:18.116c–117a; Jiumoluoshen, Dazhidu lun, T. 1:116c–117a. For more on ancient Indian understanding of Indian hydrology, see Sarkar, Geography of Ancient India, 129–54. 53 SJZ 1.3. 54 SJZ 1.3. This fourth-century Xiyu ji is the second most cited source for Li Daoyuan’s account of India. It should not be confused with the seventh-century Da Tang Xiyu ji by Xuanzang. 55 SJZ 1.4. 56 Yang Shoujing claimed that Master Monk was Daoan. SJZS 1.13. Petech identifies him only as pre-Faxian. Petech, Northern India, 5. 57 The identity of Fotudiao is unclear. On Yang Shoujing’s argument for him being Foguodiao 佛國調, see SJZS 1.57. The text of the Fotudiao zhuan was lost and is

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not recorded in Sui and Tang bibliographies. See also Chen Lianqing, “Jiben ‘Fotudiao’ xu,” 6. 58 For Zhu Fatai’s biography, see Huijiao, Gaoseng zhuan, T. 2059:5.354b–55a. Zhu Fatai, Daoan, and Fotudiao were all students of Fotudeng 佛圖澄 (d. 348). 59 SJZ 1.10–11. 60 SJZ 1.11–12. 61 Fonian, Chang ahan jing, T. 1:18.114c–115b. 62 Wang Jia, Shiyi ji, 10.221–22. 63 The use of the term “India” before the modern era is problematic for many of the same reasons that “China” is. An Indian equivalent to the “Sinitic ecumene” might be the “Sanskrit ecumene” or the “Brahmanical ecumene.” Although the Indian subcontinent was divided politically and ethnically, a caste of Brahmin and a standardized Sanskrit script provided a unifying elite culture across these various peoples. Pollock, Language of the Gods, part 1; Thapar, Early India, chap. 2. However, I use the terms India and Indic because I am describing how Sinitic authors understood India. As I will show in the section “Parallel but Different” below, they presented a rather monochromatic description of India as an essentially Buddhist realm with little nuance to account for the social and ethnic complexities of South Asia. Furthermore, the English word India and the Sinitic word for India, Tianzhu 天竺 (derived from xianzhu 祆竺 [MC xen-­ trjuwk]), both originate from the Persian word hinduka (Skt. Sindhu, name of the Indus River), which referred to the people who live beyond the Indus River. 64 The Shiji and the Han shu describe India with no reference to Buddhism. The Hou Han shu makes brief mention of Buddhism in India. The Huainanzi makes no reference to India. SJ 123.3164–66; HS 96a.3884–87; HHS 88.2921–22. See also Yingshi Yu, Trade and Expansion; Hulsewé, China in Central Asia. Some have argued, following Guo Pu’s commentary, that the land of Tiandu 天毒 mentioned in the Shanhai jing is India, but, as Zürcher has argued, this is very unlikely. Shanhai jing 18.441; Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest, 271. 65 The Sui catalog identifies eight geographical texts written by Buddhist monks. As noted in chapter 1, the influence of these authors was most felt in the sub­ genres of foreign lands and world geographies. 66 For example, see Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest, chap. 6; Mollier, Buddhism and Taoism; Kohn, Laughing at the Tao. 67 On the account of India in the Shuijing zhu, see Chen Qiaoyi, “Shuijing zhu” yanjiu erji, 179–90. 68 I prefer “central realm” over the more conventional Middle Kingdom or Central State(s) because “realm” better captures the dual meaning of both a political entity and a geographic region that both the Sinitic guo and the Sanskrit deśa suggest. Zhongguo was often equated with other terms that were more clearly geographical and cultural than political, such as Zhongyuan 中原 (Central Plains), zhongzhou 中州 (central region), and huaxia 華夏 (Sinitic civilization). Wilkinson, Chinese History, 191–93; Chen Suizheng, “‘Zhongguo’ cicheng,” 1–38; Wang Ermin, “‘Zhongguo’ mingcheng,” 370–400. Similarly, Madhyadeśa was a cultural and geographic region of India defined by physical, cultural, and

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religious geography, and was made up of many small states (janapadas). Sarkar, Geography of Ancient India, 66–78, 190–224. The account of India in the Hou Han shu reveals a clear understanding of this multistate system in India. HHS 88.2921–22. 69 On this five regions model of India, see TD 193.5260; Sarkar, Geography of Ancient India, 62–109. 70 For more on the sacred sites associated with the life of the Buddha, see Deeg, Places Where Siddhartha Trod; Rana Singh, Where the Buddha Walked. 71 On Aśoka and his relationship to Buddhism, see M. P. Singh, Ashoka and Buddhism; Seneviratna, King Asoka and Buddhism; Mookerji, “Aśoka, The Great.” 72 Zhu Fawei was the author of a work titled Foguo ji 佛國記, which is cited also in the Shijia fangzhi 釋迦方志 and the Taiping huanyu ji 太平寰宇記, but he is otherwise unknown. Yang Shoujing suggested that Zhu Fawei might be a misprint of the name Zhu Faya 竺法雅, a fourth-century monk described in the the Gaoseng zhuan. SJZS 1.37. 73 SJZ 1.7. For alternate translations, see Petech, Northern India, 40–41; Pelliot, “Le Fou-Nan,” 277–78. King Fan Zhan of Funan also presented tribute to the Wu court in 243. Chen Shou, Sanguo zhi, 47.1145. 74 FXZ, T. 2085:859b; SJZ 2.34. Li Daoyuan is describing in this passage Jibin 罽賓 (Kashmir) in northern India. See Petech, Northern India, 63–80; Pulleyblank, “Consonantal System of Old Chinese,” 218; Hulsewé, China in Central Asia, 104 n. 203. 75 HTFZJY, 49–50. A similar description of India can be found in the Yiwu zhi 異物志 (Record of peculiar things) from the Han-Jin period. HTFZJY, 152. 76 “Mouzi lihuo lun,” T. 2102:3c22–23; Sengyou, Hongming ji, T. 2102:35–48, especially 47b26–27. 77 FXZ, T. 2085:859a, 860c. In these references, the Indian monks use the terms “­peripheral land” (biandi 邊地) and “peripheral state” (bianguo 邊國) to refer to the Sinitic realm. 78 FXZ, T. 2085:864b29–c4. Throughout Faxian’s account, the Sinitic pilgrims avoid calling their homeland zhongguo, using instead the state names of Qin, Han, or Jin. In the seventh century, Daoxuan made nomenclature part of his five-point thesis for Indian centrality, calling India zhongguo and the Sinitic realm “Da Xia” 大夏 and “Dong Hua” 東華. Daoxuan, Shijia fangzhi, T. 2088:949a12–23. 79 Huili, Sanzang fashi zhuan, T. 2053:246a12–18; Rongxi Li, Biography of the Tripitaka Master, 138–39. 80 Forte, “Hui-Chih,” 106–34; Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade, 6–12. See also Deeg, “Religion versus Kultur,” 277–89. 81 Daoxuan, Shijia fangzhi, T. 2088:948c27–950c7. 82 On the locations of Qiemo, Shulu, and Khotan, see Hulsewé, China in Central Asia, 92 n. 125, 141 n. 373, and 96 n. 147. Qiemo is identified with Calmad(ana), in the area of modern Cherchen or Charchan (ancient Shanshan). The Southern Mountain(s) is/are located in the western part of the mountain range called in modern times the Kunlun Mountains (not to be confused with the mythical Mount Kunlun).

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83 The three sources of the Yellow River are described in SJZ 1.2–3, 2.35–37. Each ­description contains similar language regarding eastern and western flowing rivers issuing from the source. On Khotan, see also HS 96a.3881. Du You would criticize Li Daoyuan for claiming these multiple sources; see Chen Qiaoyi, Li Daoyuan yu “Shuijing zhu,” 114–16. 84 Li Daoyuan specifically stated that “the [Yellow] River has multiple sources numbering three, not only two [as reported in the Han shu]” 河水重源有三，非惟 二也. SJZ 2.34. 85 Anxi (MC ‘an-sik) is the Sinitic name for Persia, a transliteration of Aršak, the name of the ruling dynasty of the Parthian Empire (247 BCE–224 CE). Hulsewé, China in Central Asia, 115 n. 267. On Da Xia, Da Yuezhi, and Da Yuan, see Haloun, Seit wann kannten, 136, 201–2; Hulsewé, China in Central Asia, 119 n. 276, 131 n. 325, 145 n. 387. Li Daoyuan’s description of Central Asia is sketchy. He included no mention, for example, of the Syr Darya River. 86 SJZ 2.34–35. See also SJ 123.3162. 87 XYJ, T. 2087:869b21–c6; Rongxi Li, Great Tang Dynasty Record, 18–19. 88 Although Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism were known within the Sinitic ecumene by the sixth century, their impact on Sinitic culture paled in comparison to that of Buddhism. Leslie, “Persian Temples,” 276–80, 288–96; Lieu, Mani­ chaeism, 184–219. 89 SuS 33.982–88. 90 SJZ 2.34–36. Li Daoyuan seems here to be piecing together accounts of the Khotan River, the Kabul River, and the Amu Darya River. The state of Gandhāra was centered on the Peshawar Valley, through which flows the Kabul River before it actually turns eastward into the Indus River. Petech, Northern India, 57–59. 91 For the story, see SJZ 2.35. On the stupa and relic in Gandhāra, see SJZ 1.7. See also Petech, Northern India, 59–60. Some sources locate the Buddha’s bowl in Yuezhi, but Li Daoyuan corrects this with multiple other sources, locating it in Fulousha (Puruṣapura), in Northern India. 92 FXZ, T. 2085:858b21–27. On Xuanzang’s different depiction of Transoxiana, see XYJ, T. 2087:869b13–29. 93 On the Han-Xiongnu dichotomy, see Di Cosmo, Ancient China, 196–205. 94 Xiao Zixian, Nan Qi shu, 54.931. 95 SJ 110.2879–920; HS 94a.3743–94b.3834. 96 The mere fact that these lands had been excluded from the scope of the original Shuijing is not sufficient explanation since the same could be said of the Western Regions, India, and peninsular Southeast Asia. Yet Li Daoyuan found ways to incorporate all of these lands into his commentary. 97 This would change in Xuanzang’s articulation of a four-point division of Jam­ budvipa in the seventh century. XYJ, T. 2087:869b29–c5; Rongxi Li, Great Tang Dynasty Record, 18–19. 98 SJZ 1.4; Petech, Northern India, 19–20. This passage is particularly complicated because it is a combination of lines from different places in the Foguo ji, with Li Daoyuan’s comments added into the mix. For comparison, see FXZ, T. 2085:859b.

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99 Chen Qiaoyi, “Shuijing zhu” yanjiu erji, 183–85. This dismissal is consistent with Chen Qiaoyi’s interpretation of Li Daoyuan as a nationalist patriot. Chen Qiaoyi dismisses the “error” with the idiom “One flaw cannot mar the jade.” 100 FXZ, T. 2085:859b. For more on the harmonious climate, see FXZ, T. 2085:863a29; SJZ 1.9. In the seventh century, Daoxuan made climate one of the five points of his thesis for Indian centrality. Daoxuan, Shijia fangzhi, T. 2088:949b. 101 Not needing coercive state institutions was evidence of the superior morality of Buddhist teachings. This was an implicit critique of the heavy-handed Sinitic bureaucratic state, which sought to control rather than patronize the Buddhist order. 102 These exaggerations and selective use of evidence in Faxian’s account of Central India have been pointed out in Wang Chengzu, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 93–94. 103 Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest, 266. 104 This line from the Foguo ji is part of a series of statements affirming cultural continuity between northern and central India: “The state of Wuchang is certainly part of Northern India. The people all use the language of Central India. ‘Central India’ is what is also called ‘the central realm.’ The dress and cuisine of the common people [of Wuchang] are the same as of the central realm. Buddhism is extremely flourishing here” 烏萇國是正北天竺也。盡作中天竺語，中 天竺所謂中國。俗人衣服、飲食，亦與中國同。佛法甚盛. FXZ, T. 2085:858a18– 20. See also Petech, Northern India, 19–21; Anne Cheng, “Is Zhongguo the Middle Kingdom?,” 38–48. Anne Cheng corrects an early piece of mine that interprets Faxian as referring to the Sinitic central realm in this passage, but I had already corrected my misinterpretation on this issue in Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 428–32. The exact location of Uḍḍyāna is contested. See Cunningham, Ancient Geography of India, 68–70. 105 Yang Shoujing pointed out Li Daoyuan’s mistake in SJZS 1.20. Unwilling to accept this line as either a mistake or an assertion of Indo-Sinitic parity, Chen Qiaoyi interprets it as referring only to Central India, not to the Sinitic zhongguo at all. But this results in a tautology that makes little sense. Chen Qiaoyi, Shuijing zhu quanyi, 5. 106 On his birthplace of Kapilavastu, see SJZ 1.6–7. On the site where the Buddha achieved parinirvana, see SJZ 1.5. For sites where he transmitted his teachings, either in verbal or written form, see SJZ 1.6, 1.9, 1.10. For sites possessing traces or relics of the Buddha, see SJZ 1.4–5, 2.34–35. 107 FXZ, T. 2085:860c1–6, 864b29–c4. 108 SJZ 1.8. At the birthplace of the Buddha, Aśoka had built a statue of the prince and had the Buddha’s first seven footprints covered in lapis lazuli in order to preserve them. SJZ 1.6. 109 For example, as his account first entered India’s central realm, Li Daoyuan reported that both banks of the Yamuna River were covered with twenty separate monasteries. SJZ 1.4. 110 Robson, “Buddhist Sacred Geography,” 1358–67. 111 SJZ 13.314–15. The dharma wheel (dharmacakra) is the Buddha-truth. The phrase, “the dharma wheel turns east” is used multiple times in the Shuijing zhu to

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112 113 114

115

116 117 118

119 120 121 122 123

Notes to Pages 248–255 indicate the spread of Buddhism from its homeland in the West into the Sinitic lands of the East. See also SJZ 16.399. Stupas are mentioned two other times within the Sinitic ecumene but only as parts of proper nouns. They are also mentioned twice in the account of Southeast Asia. Chen Qiaoyi, “Shuijing zhu” yanjiu, 252–61. SJZ 2.39. Li Daoyuan cited Faxian, who reported that the Queli 雀離 Pagoda of Kucha was the equal of the Yongning Monastery. SJZ 16.398. For identification of the Queli Pagoda, see SJZS 2.109, 16.1414; Chen Qiaoyi, Lixue zhaji, 323–24. SJZ 2.34–41, 39.833–41. For examples of Buddhist apologia that argue for the centrality of India, see “Mouzi lihuo lun,” T. 2102.1c24–26, 3c22–23; FXZ, T. 2085.859b, 860c1–8, 864b28–c4; Daoxuan, Shijia fangzhi, T. 2088.948c27–950c7. For imperial geographies that maintain India’s peripheral position, see Yao Silian, Liang shu, 54.787–800; WS 102.2277–78; Li Yanshou, Nan shi, 78.1961. The most famous example (now lost) of spatialized anti-Buddhist literature is the Hua Hu jing 化胡經 (Classic on the conversion of the barbarians). See Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest, 264–80. Zürcher identifies the ethnocentric argument as one of the four major impediments to the adoption of Buddhism in Sinitic culture. Xiao Zixian, Nan Qi shu, 54.931–34; Li Yanshou, Nan shi, 75.1875–79; Sengyou, Hongming ji, T. 2102:35–48. Although Gu Huan employed the general term for barbarians, yi 夷, it is clear in his essay that he is talking about either Indians specifically or the inhabitants of the Western Regions more generally. This lack of geographical specificity was pointed out in the critical responses to this essay compiled in Sengyou, Hongming ji, T. 2102:47b19–21. Xiao Zixian, Nan Qi shu, 54.932. Xiao Zixian, Nan Qi shu, 54.931. Xiao Zixian, Nan Qi shu, 54.934. There is good reason not to take this claim of Daoism “stepping westward” too seriously since there is no evidence of Daoism spreading in the Western Regions. The statement is more likely made for the sake of literary parallelism than for its analytical value—what Stephen Owen has labeled “the discourse machine.” Owen, “Liu Xie and the Discourse Machine,” 175–92. SJZ 1.2. Yee, “Concluding Remarks,” 230. Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest, xiii. Cordell Yee describes the “Middle Kingdom complex” and identifies Kunlun and Buddhist geographies as the major alternatives to it. Yee, “Traditional Chinese Cartography,” 173–74. The general adoption of Buddhist metageographies within mainstream literature is difficult to measure. Buddhist monks wrote six of the twenty-five works in the Sui shu on either the whole world or the Western Regions, and these six texts do seem to use Buddhist metageographies. It was quite common to draw specific geographical information from Buddhist writers, such as Faxian, while ignoring their framing metageography.

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Notes to Pages 256–265

331

Conclusion 1 Braudel, Mediterranean, 355–94. This English translation poorly renders ennemi numéro 1 as “the first enemy.” 2 Li Yuan, “Woguo lishi,” 3. 3 They were also known as tuji 圖記 or tuzhi 圖志. The two extant tujing from the Sui dynasty are Lang Mao’s 郎茂 Suizhou jun tujing 隋州郡圖經 (Maps and treatises of the prefectures and commanderies of the Sui dynasty) and the Jizhou tujing 冀州圖經 (Maps and treatises of Ji Prefecture). HTDLSC, 207–24, 299– 303. See also Hargett, “Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers,” 409–12; Wang Yong, Zhongguo dilixue shi, 170–91. For titles of Sui imperial compilations of tujing, see SuS 33.986–88. 4 Chittick, “Development of Local Writing,” 63–67. 5 Felt, “Patterns of the Earth,” 269–75. At the same time, in the Japanese archipelago, the Nara court was also centralizing its authority through the standardization and collection of local geographies, called Fudoki 風土記 (Record of wind and earth). Aoki, Record of Wind and Earth. 6 Hargett, “Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers,” 412–36; Bol, “Rise of Local History,” 54–64. On the parallel shift from administrative functionalism to literary and scholarly localism, see Hargett, “Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers,” 426–28; Zheng Yuyu, “Shenti xingdong,” 64–99. Important differences existed between early medieval local geographies and Southern Zhao Song gazetteers. Gazetteers were more historically focused; they were constantly revised and updated (more like the tujing); and they were far larger, more comprehensive, and numerous. 7 Bol, “Rise of Local History,” 40–54, 72–76, quotes from 40, 76. See also Hartwell, “Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations,” 365–442; Hargett, “Song Dynasty Local Gazetteers,” 428–36; De Weerdt, Information, Territory, and Networks, 1–32, 76–164. 8 Brook, Troubled Empire, 27–28. 9 Dennis, Writing, Publishing, and Reading, 17–114. 10 On the diversity within the modern “Han” ethnicity, see Mullaney et al., Critical Han Studies, chaps. 1, 2, 7, 11; on the use of Sinitic imperial ideology to support Han nationalism, see chaps. 5, 6, 10. 11 Jing-shen Tao, “Barbarians or Northerners,” 66–86; Gungwu Wang, “Rhetoric of a Lesser Empire,” 52–62; Franke, “Sung Embassies,” 116–19, 129–33, 139–41. 12 Kelley, Beyond the Bronze Pillars, 25–26. The norm, however, was to refer to their northern neighbor with traditional Sinocentric terminology. 13 Varley, Imperial Restoration, chaps. 5–6; Taylor, History of the Vietnamese, chap. 7. 14 Barfield, Perilous Frontier. 15 Mair, “North(West)ern People,” 46–49, 54–64; Clark, “What’s the Matter with ‘China’?,” 299–304. Mair, too, tries to avoid the clumsy term “China.” 16 For examples of New Qing History, see Crossley, Manchus; Elliott, Manchu Way; Perdue, China Marches West.

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332

Notes to Pages 265–270

17 Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 92–117, 494–630. On the application of Lieberman’s protected and exposed zones to early medieval Chinese history, see Chittick, Jiankang Empire, 10–12. 18 Turchin, “Theory for Formation,” 200–217. Even when Sinitic empires were not formed by north(west)ern people, Thomas Barfield has shown how codependent they were with contemporary Central Eurasian empires. Perilous Frontier, chap. 1. 19 Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Past, pt. 2; Shufen Liu, “Jiankang and the Commercial Empire”; Clark, “Frontier Discourse”; Fong, “Flourishing on the Frontier”; Von Glahn, Economic History of China, 160–66, 218–35, 242–78, 296–307, 322–36. 20 Clark, “What’s the Matter with ‘China’?,” 304–8; Twitchett, Financial Administration, chap. 6; Mote, “Chinese Society under Mongol Rule,” 629–33. 21 For a review of several recent books on the contemporary tension between Bei­ jing and Shanghai, see Cheng Li, “Rediscovering Urban Subcultures,” 139–53. On the cultural divide between north and south China, see Eberhard, “Chinese Regional Stereotypes,” 596–608; Young, “Regional Stereotypes,” 32–57; Friedman, “Symbols of Southern Identity,” 31–44. For the Mandarin-Cantonese ­divide within “Han” ethnicity, see Ramsey, “Languages of China,” 45–70; Carrico, “Recentering China,” 23–44. 22 Yee, “Reinterpreting Traditional Chinese Geographical Maps,” 37–64. 23 Braudel, Mediterranean, 20–21, 101–2. See also Worster, Rivers of Empire; Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism. 24 Ouyang Zhi, Shu jinglu, 62. 25 Skinner and Baker, City in Late Imperial China; Skinner, “Structure of Chinese History.” 26 Hartwell, “Demographic, Political, and Social Transformations,” 367. Italics in original. 27 Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Past, chap. 10; Von Glahn, Economic History of China, chap. 6. 28 Marks, China, 4, 7. 29 Quotations from Marks, China, 1, 5. On the gradual decrease in ecological diversity, see Marks, China, chaps. 1, 8; Zhou Kunshu, Huanjing kaogu; Zhou Kunshu and Gong Qiming, Huanjing kaogu yanjiu, vols. 1–4. On modern environmental degradation, see Marks, China, chaps. 6–7. 30 Gan Huaizhen, Dong Ya lishishang de tianxia, 238. 31 It is important to note the significant difference in content and purpose between the Da Tang Xiyu ji, which was an official report to the emperor on the political and cultural geography of the Western Regions, and the Da Tang Da cien si Sanzang fashi zhuan 大唐大慈恩寺三藏法師傳 (Biography of the Tripitaka Master of the Great Cien Monastery of the Great Tang dynasty), which was a faith-promoting biography of Xuanzang’s life, especially his pilgrimage. The latter was written for Sinitic Buddhist audiences and makes a clear point of Indian centrality in the world. The former, directed to the Tang emperor, makes concessions to an Indo-Sinitic bipolarity in the world. 32 XYJ, T. 2087:869b7–19.

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Notes to Pages 270–272

333

33 XYJ, T. 2087:869b21–c6. The other two were the Lord of Horses in the North (Bei mazhu 北馬主; i.e., nomadic societies of the steppe) and the Lord of Treasures in the West (Xi baozhu 西寶主; i.e., Persia and Transoxiana). 34 XYJ, T. 2087:869b29–c5. Translation from Rongxi Li, Great Tang Dynasty Record, 19. 35 Yee, “Traditional Chinese Cartography and the Myth of Westernization,” 173–77; Ledyard, “Cartography in Korea,” 254–67; Unno, “Cartography in Japan,” 371– 76. Cordell Yee has lamented the significant lacuna in scholarship on Buddhist geography. Yee, “Concluding Remarks,” 230. 36 Shaffer, “Southernization.” 37 Lewis and Wigen, Myth of Continents, chaps. 2–3.

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Index

Page numbers for figures are in italics. Abbasid caliphate, 122 Achaemenid empire, 122 administrative units: and foreign geographies, 39; and hydrocultural metageography, 172, 173, 174; in imperial geographies, 26, 53, 55–65, 59, 64, 70, 71, 157, 286n67; of Jiankang empire, 128, 306n38; in local geographies, 32, 96, 106; in locality stories, 88; and natural geographies, 36, 208; vs. natural units, 107–8, 168, 269; in tujing, 260; and world geographies, 43, 44 Age of Disunion, 16, 58, 60–61, 61, 65, 260, 290n119 Ailao people, 183–84 Allan, Sarah, 176 Amu Darya River, 227, 239, 240, 328n90 Anavatapta Pool, 222, 227, 240. See also Mount Anavatapta ancient traces (guji), 81–82, 242 anomaly accounts, 112, 215, 296n73, 314n16, 322n12; and geographical writing, 17, 22, 282n13; Kunlun in, 217, 218, 230; world, 297n90 Aśoka (Ayujia), Emperor, 129, 234, 245, 329n108 astrology (tianwen), 168 Ba, state of, 108, 109–10 Bactria (Da Xia), 238 Ban Gu, 168, 204–5, 324n35; and imperial metageography, 26, 57, 69, 70–71,

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172; on natural and cultural geography, 44, 76, 95. See also “Dili zhi” Bao Zidu, 79 barbarians: and Buddhism, 251–52; and Han imperial metageography, 132, 168; in hydrocultural metageography, 176; and Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 131–34, 135, 163; vs. lowlands, 183–84; in mountains, 182, 210; and north-south metageography, 263; and official histories, 132, 159, 160. See also Rouran barbarians; Xiongnu (Hu) barbarians Battle of Fei River (383), 138 Bei shi (History of the Northern Dynasties), 158–62, 285n54 Berkowitz, Alan J., 186, 317n80 Bian Kun, 306n33 Bianji, 269 Bieling, 112 biographies: vs. geographical writing, 22, 26, 71, 88; on local contributions, 74, 77, 78–81, 110; and local geographies, 32, 48, 109, 116, 202; in official histories, 99; of officials, 87, 292n26; of transcendents and recluses, 188 Birnbaum, Raoul, 188 Bodhidharma, 126 Bol, Peter, 261, 279n19, 280n28 borderland complex, 237, 245 Bowu zhi (Records of diverse matters), 225

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372 index Braudel, Fernand, 180, 192, 256, 266, 316n50 Buddhism: and capital geographies, 47; centrality in, 126, 237–41; vs. Confucianism, 41, 246; vs. Daoism, 41, 234, 246, 250–52; and ethnicity, 330n114; and foreign geographies, 40, 41; and geographical writing, 19–20, 49, 253– 54; in hydrocultural metageography, 173; vs. imperial metageography, 20– 21, 254; and India, 41, 64–65, 187, 233– 34, 237–41, 244, 245, 286n62, 326n64; in Indo-Sinitic metageography, 7, 251– 52, 255, 269; and Jiankang empire, 129, 130, 131, 163, 311n104; vs. ­local cults, 192; monuments of, 235, 245– 47; and mountains, 38, 178, 187–88, 226–28, 231, 232; and natural ­geographies, 38–39; in Sinitic civilization, 5, 7, 19, 41, 64, 187, 239, 244, 245–46, 251, 253, 254, 258; and Sinocentrism, 19–20, 42, 272; and state authority, 306n23, 329n101; and ­Tabgatch empire, 125–26, 131, 163, 311n104; in Transoxiana, 240–41; and universalism, 126, 129–30; and world geographies, 43 Buddhist geographies: centrality in, 173, 220; on India, 217, 219; and IndoSinitic metageography, 270; on ­Kunlun, 221, 222, 226–27, 228, 232; and Sinitic geographical writing, 53– 54, 230–31, 254, 325n49; as sources, 215–16, 322n2, 330n123 Buddhist literature, 236, 249–50; sutras, 44, 227–28, 323n16 Buddhist metageographies, 21, 42, 44, 53–54, 216, 255, 330n123 Campany, Robert, 17, 77, 186 Can Cong, 111, 112 Cao Shibang, 227, 287n72 capital cities: and gazetteers, 262; in ­hydrocultural metageography,

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172–73; and imperial metageography, 70, 123–24, 257, 258; mobility of, 127; vs. mountains, 195, 208. See also Chang’an; Jianye; Luoyang; Ye capital geographies, 28–29, 31, 37, 45– 49, 64, 95–96, 287n78; monasteries in, 47, 288n83 capital rhapsodies, 98–103, 100, 101–2, 127, 143, 287n77, 300n117 Central Asia. See Eurasia, Central centrality, geographic, 219–41; in Buddhism, 126, 173, 220, 237–41; vs. cultural continuity, 127–28; and hydrocultural metageography, 172–76, 234, 241; and imperial geographies, 215, 220, 272; in India, 234–37, 237–41, 244, 332n31; and Indo-Sinitic metageography, 212–13, 232–34, 241, 243, 250, 254, 271; and Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 126–28, 130–31, 133, 134; of Kunlun, 174, 196, 208, 219–26, 269, 316n44, 322n2, 323n23; and political authority, 122–31; of ­Yellow River ­basin, 239, 253 Central Plains. See Yellow River basin and plain Chang Qu, 13, 58, 80, 108–11, 302n150, 303n152 Chang ahan jing (Dīrghāgama), 227, 325n49 Chang’an, 46, 172, 287n78 Changhong of Zhou, 112 Chanyuan, Treaty of (1005), 263 Chao Gongwu, 161 Chen Qiaoyi, 243, 280n23, 315n24, 318n95, 321n132, 323n17, 329n99 Chen Qingzhi, 146, 149, 150–51, 310nn93–95 Chen Sanping, 120 Chen Shou, 98, 99, 100, 109, 298n97, 299n102 Chen dynasty, xii, 30, 31, 34, 53, 119, 158. See also Jiankang empire Cheng Hongzhi, 58

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index 373 Cheng Yü-yü, 106 Cheng-Han state, xii, 108 Chenliu fengsu zhuan (Account of the local customs of Chenliu), 89 chenwei (prophetic apocrypha) texts, 221, 314n13 China, concept of, 8–11, 119, 173, 326n63 Chinese exceptionalism, 4–5, 7, 119, 212. See also Sinocentrism Chittick, Andrew, 32, 67, 75, 119, 291n8 Choo, Jessey, 97, 152 Chu, state of, 90, 132, 145, 146; people from, 11, 120, 131, 139, 279n15, 304n4 Cifei of Jing, 205, 321n137 Clark, Hugh, 9 Coates, Peter, 320n120 comprehensive geographies, 50–55, 165, 170; foreign, 285n48; intertextual dialogue in, 52, 65; vs. local geographies, 53, 62–63; Tang literati on, 55, 61, 61– 63, 65; and tujing, 260 Confucianism, 80, 113, 167, 221, 290n3, 302n146; vs. Buddhism, 41, 246; on military use of topography, 179–80, 268 Crone, Patricia, 10 Cui Hao, 137 Cui Hong, 125 cultural geography, 12, 106; vs. natural geography, 7, 44, 76, 95, 171, 176, 238, 243, 254; and state power, 256–57. See also natural environment culture, elite: and capital geographies, 46, 47; and Confucianism, 290n3; ­ecumenical, 148, 149–52; and ecumenical regionalism, 73, 261, 262; and hydrocultural metageography, 166, 209, 242, 269; and imperial metageography, 5, 43, 70, 75, 77, 86, 121, 133, 143; Indian, 20, 326n63; in ­Indo-Sinitic metageography, 242, 254; and Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 135, 143; and local customs, 86– 87, 148; regional, 10, 67, 70, 80, 84;

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and Sinitic script, 9–10, 11, 135. See also elites, local culture, Sinitic: and Buddhism, 5, 7, 19, 41, 64, 187, 239, 244, 245–46, 251, 253, 254, 258; and Daoism, 251; and ecumenical regionalism, 97, 101, 108, 112; and founding myths, 82; and frontiers, 43, 264, 265; and hydrocultural metageography, 173, 242; in Indo-­ Sinitic metageography, 211, 231, 233, 236–37, 241–53, 242, 244–45; vs. mountains, 174, 182–83, 210; and northern and southern metageography, 117–18, 119, 122, 131, 141, 148, 149–52, 156, 157, 163; and regional cuisines, 143–48; and Yellow River basin, 73, 173, 254. See also feng (aura) of a place; local customs; qi; regionalism; Sinitic ecumene Dai ethnic identity, 120, 304n6 Daoan, 44, 227, 315n26 Daoism, 26, 312n123, 314n5, 330n118; vs. Buddhism, 41, 234, 246, 250–52; vs. local cults, 192; and mountains, 38, 191; and natural environment, 167 Daowu, Emperor (Tuoba Gui), 125 Daoxuan, 237, 327n78, 329n100 Daozheng, 42, 236, 245 Da Tang Da cien si Sanzang fashi zhuan (Biography of the Tripitaka Master of the Great Cien Monastery of the Great Tang dynasty), 332n31 Da Tang Xiyu ji (Great Tang record of the Western Regions; Xuanzang), 239, 269–70, 325n54, 332n31 Da Wei zhuzhou ji (Record of all pre­ fectures of the great Wei dynasty), 286n67, 289n95 Da Yuezhi, 238, 239, 241 Da Yu ji (Record of Yu the Great), 51, 288n89 deities: in anomaly accounts, 215; on Buddhist mountains, 227, 228, 231, 232; in geographical writing, 40, 75,

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374 index deities (continued) 88, 101; and hydrocultural metageography, 165, 173; and imperial legitimacy, 40, 69; of local cults, 192–93; in mountains, 38, 39, 167, 168, 177, 179, 181, 185, 189–95; and Mount Kunlun, 189, 224–26, 323n17; in rivers, 172, 202, 203–4, 205, 209 Dennis, Joseph, 262 Dien, Albert, 140, 150, 311n110 Diji (Records of the earth; Ren Fang), 45, 52–53 Di Ku (sage-king), 85, 183 Dili shu (Geographical writing; Lu Cheng), 45, 52–53, 54–55 “Dili zhi” (Monograph on geography; Ban Gu), 26–27, 43, 51, 55, 57, 85, 283n24, 284n34; and imperial metageography, 69, 70–71, 172; Sima Biao on, 44, 71, 95; on state authority, 204–5 Diocletian, Emperor (Rome), 95 “Dixing” (Terrestrial forms; Huai­ nanzi), 26 Dongshi, 146 Du You, 2, 59, 282n13 Du Yu, 112 Duke Deer Skin (Lupi gong; transcendent), 193 dynastic histories, official: on barbarians, 132, 159, 160; and biographies, 74, 87, 99; on Buddhism, 126; on emperors, 88; vs. geographical writing, 73–74; geographical writing in, 13, 43–44; imperial metageography in, 69, 71, 160, 162, 257–59, 305n17; on India, 286n62; on Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 140–43, 159; and legitimacy, 158, 159; vs. local geographies, 80, 160; vs. marginal mountain people, 210; of Northern and Southern dynasties, 157–62, 285n54; on Southeast Asia, 285n54; Yangzi basin in, 298n97. See also particular works

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Eastern Han dynasty, 34, 46, 186; capital of, 70, 220; geographical writing in, 18, 26–27, 30, 31. See also Han empire Eastern Jin dynasty, xii, 283n31, 286n55, 298n99, 303n154, 307n48; geographical writing in, 30, 31, 33, 36; and Jian­ kang empire, 115, 119, 127, 133; and official histories, 159; in Sichuan, 108; vs. Yellow River basin, 105. See also Jiankang empire Eastern Wei dynasty, xii, 30, 31, 120 Eastern Zhou dynasty, 159, 279n15 economic development, 19, 41, 174, 206, 265, 268, 268–69 ecumenical regionalism, 8, 66–116, 258, 259–62, 273; and elites, 6, 66–67, 68, 73, 97, 103, 260, 261, 262; and gazetteers, 259–60; and imperial metageography, 97–103, 108, 114, 165; and Jin reunification, 95; and local geographies, 66–67, 72–94, 94, 114–16, 259; and modern nationalism, 262; and north-south metageography, 156; polycentric, 73, 111, 118; and Sichuan, 108–11; and Sinitic culture, 97, 101, 108, 112; and Sinitic script, 66–67, 114; vs. universalism, 67, 76–77, 122; and Yangzi basin, 6, 68, 97, 106 elites: and Buddhism, 129, 245; cultural identity of, 68, 73, 279n15, 290n3; and ecumenical regionalism, 6, 66–67, 68, 73, 97, 103, 260, 261, 262; émigré, 104–5, 105, 119, 120, 121, 128, 139; and information technology, 256; in Jiankang empire, 119, 120, 128, 139; of Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 135, 140; Sino-Särbi, 120, 121; in Yangzi region, 20, 36, 38, 72, 97, 104–5 elites, local: and alternative meta­ geographies, 273; contributions of, 20, 72, 74, 77, 78–81, 87, 97, 102, 106, 109, 110–11, 113–16; and ecumenical region­a lism, 6, 66–67, 68, 97, 103, 260; and founding myths, 82; and gazetteers, 261, 262; in hydrocultural

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index 375 metageography, 176; and imperial metageography, 68, 70, 73, 257; and local cults, 192; and local officials, 206–7; and mountains, 195; power of, 72–73, 95; in Roman empire, 67; from Sichuan, 110–11; and transcendents, 186; women as, 78; in Yangzi basin, 108. See also officials, local environment. See natural environment environmental geographies, 20, 42, 49, 64, 107. See also natural geographies Erya (Approaching elegance), 222, 316n47 ethnicity: and Buddhism, 330n114; Dai, 120, 304n6; and ecumenical regionalism, 260; and foreign geographies, 41; in Han empire, 129, 300n127; of Han vs. Southerners, 279n17, 304n4; and Hua identity, 305nn20–22; in Jian­ kang empire, 128–29, 134, 139, 142; and modern nationalism, 11; in North­ ern Wei dynasty, 141; in Tabgatch empire, 134, 142, 304n8; vs. universalism, 121, 124 Eurasia, Central: and Buddhism, 41; in geographical writing, 12, 171, 243, 323n16; and Han vs. Southerners, 279n17; and Indo-Sinitic metageography, 243; and Jiankang empire, 129; and regional cuisines, 144; and Sinitic ecumene, 10, 35, 265, 300n127, 332n18. See also Western Regions Eurocentrism, 3 Faguo, 126, 306n30 Fan Ye, 292n18 Fan Zhan, 235 Fangmatan maps, 266 Farmer, Michael, 81, 90, 109, 291n8, 292n28, 294n48, 298n98; on Sichuan, 67, 108, 298n98 Faxian, 13, 42, 235–36, 241, 243–45, 323n16, 327n78, 330n112, 330n123 feng (aura) of a place, 76–80, 83, 110, 293nn32–34; and court officials, 78– 79, 80, 89, 90, 93; and Han imperial

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metageography, 168; of mountains, 179. See also local customs; qi Fengsu tongyi (Comprehensive meaning of local customs; Ying Shao), 76 Fengyi, Yellow River Earl, 189, 224, 229 Ferghana (Da Yuan), 238, 239 filial piety, 200 Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms ­period, 267 five-phases cosmology, 123 Foguo ji (Record of the Buddhist states; Faxian), 13, 40–42, 243–44, 323n16, 329n104 foreigners, 71, 176, 257, 273 foreign geographies, 27–30, 39–43, 48, 48–49, 51, 64, 285n48, 286n62, 322n15 foreign lands, 3, 24, 208, 239, 242, 244, 257. See also Eurasia, Central; frontiers; India Forte, Antonino, 236 Fotudiao (Buddhadeva), 229, 230, 325n57 Fotudiao zhuan (Account of Fotudiao), 229 frontiers: and alternative metageographies, 273; and ecumenical regionalism, 115; in foreign geographies, 41; and founding myths, 75, 82, 84–85; and Han metageography, 257, 258, 300n127; of Jiankang empire, 129, 131–34, 135, 140, 162; in local geographies, 39, 48; local products from, 141; and mountains, 178; and natural geographies, 36; and north-south metageography, 122, 263; and sagekings, 85, 295n60; and Sinitic culture, 43, 264, 265, 295n62; of Tabgatch empire, 131–34, 135, 140, 162–63; vs. universalism, 3, 21; Yangzi basin as, 19, 20, 24, 35, 36, 48, 49, 64, 72, 90–94 Fu Jian, 138 Fuchai, King (Wu), 102, 310n96 Funan (state), 40 Funan yiwu zhi (Record of the peculiar things of Funan; Zhu Ying), 285n53

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376 index Funan zhuan (Account of Funan; Kang Tai), 226, 229–30, 230, 235, 285n53 Gan Bao, 303n154 Gao You, 223, 228 [Gaoseng] Faxian zhuan (Memoir of [the eminent monk] Faxian), 13 Gaozong, Emperor (Tang), 159–60, 161, 162 Gaozu, Emperor (Han; Liu Bang), 1, 87, 88, 194, 319n112 gardens, 27, 29, 46–47, 48 gazetteers (difangzhi), 21, 22, 259–62, 261, 261–62, 262, 301n137, 331n5 Ge Hong, 97, 284n45, 316n43 genius loci, 75, 76–78, 79, 82, 106, 114. See also feng (aura) of a place; qi geographical writing (dili ji), 2, 11–16, 17–65, 186, 201; administrative, 13, 26, 32, 36, 39, 43, 44, 53, 55–63, 59, 63, 64, 65, 71; and anomaly accounts, 17, 22, 282n13; anthropocentric, 25, 27, 35; vs. biographies, 22, 26, 71, 88; on borderland complex, 237; and Buddhism, 19–20, 49, 253–54; by Buddhist monks, 13, 41, 53, 226, 229, 230, 238, 239, 249–50, 286n56, 326n65, 330n123; classical precedents for, 55, 56–57, 65; consolidation of, 49–55; criticism of, 12, 50–51, 54–55, 65, 216–17; Daoist, 251; defining, 21–24; development of, 18; early, 24–27, 49; ecumenical regionalism in, 67, 156; on Eurasia, 12, 171, 243, 323n16; and gazetteers, 261– 62; and governance, 39, 55, 57; and Jin reunification, 95–97; and metageographies, 5, 6, 72, 258; minor sub­ genres of, 29, 47–48; on mountains, 176, 177, 185, 191; natural environment in, 20, 22, 25–26, 27, 39, 167, 273; as new genre, 17–19, 65; official, 13, 43–44; vs. other genres, 73–74; reconceptualizations in, 20–21; and Sinitic literature, 55, 56–57, 65, 73–74; Sinitic vs. Buddhist, 230–31; spatial structure of, 22,

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24, 25, 26, 32, 45–49, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 54, 61, 64, 65, 191; subgenres of, 13, 27– 49; Tang literati on, 2, 15, 18, 21, 29, 33, 42, 55–63, 56, 64, 65, 109, 288n84, 289n111. See also particular types of geographies GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software, 16, 280n28 “Gouxu zhi” (Record of canals and ditches; Han shu), 201–2 governors, regional, 72, 73, 95 Gu Huan, 242, 246–47, 250–51, 330n115 Gu Kaizhi, 38 Gu Yewang, 53 Guan Gao, 79 Guanzhong region, xii, 120, 123, 127, 206, 278n12, 313n127 Guanzi (Writings of Master Guan), 25, 170 Guiji ji (Record of Guiji; Kong Lingfu), 107 Guo Pu, 38, 284n45, 326n64 “Guo Qin lun” (The faults of Qin; Jia Yi), 282n22 Han empire, xii; capitals of, 46, 127, 172, 287n78; correlative cosmology of, 168; ethnic diversity of, 129, 300n127; fragmentation of, 2–3, 5, 18, 19, 21, 35, 42, 43, 49, 64, 72, 115, 151, 178, 180, 212–13, 258, 259, 264, 264–66, 265, 266; frontiers of, 25, 283n23, 300n127; geographical writing in, 18, 26–27, 30, 31, 55, 56, 63, 64; imperial ideology of, 2–3, 26, 76–77, 121, 123, 130–31, 144, 257; and Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 121, 130–31, 143; and Kunlun, 221; memory of, 86–90, 106; and mountains, 177–78; vs. regionalism, 20, 35, 66, 67; and Sichuan, 109, 113; and Tabgatch empire, 120, 124, 133; tributary relations of, 40, 69, 70, 142– 43; and Xiongnu, 124, 129, 131–33, 242; Yangzi basin in, 91, 104. See also imperial metageography, Han

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index 377 Han-Jin chunqiu (Han-Jin spring and autumn annals; Xi Zuochi), 298n99 Han people (Hanren), 11, 279n17, 304n4 Han shu (History of the [former] Han dynasty), 51, 71, 168, 284n34, 286n63; bibliography of, 17, 281n1, 282n20; on India, 326n64. See also “Dili zhi” Hanshui ji (Record of the Han River; Yu Zhongyong), 284n33 Han-Tang dili shuchao (Wang Mo), 28, 30–33, 32, 33, 37, 281n1, 292n21; on foreign geographies, 285n48, 285n49, 285n52; on local geographies, 91, 93, 283n27, 283nn30–31; on natural geographies, 284n36; on Western Regions, 286nn55–56; on world geographies, 286n63 Han-Tang fangzhi jiyi (Liu Weiyi), 34; on local geographies, 91, 92, 281n1, 283n27, 283nn30–31, 289n104; on natural geographies, 284n36; on Western Jin, 298n93 Hanzhong ji (Record of Hanzhong), 88–89 Hartwell, Robert, 268 He Chengtian, 305n22 He Fasheng, 38 Helü, King (Wu), 102 Henderson, John B., 168 “Hequ shu” (Monograph on rivers and canals: Sima Qian, Shiji), 25, 201 Himalayan mountains, 238 Holcombe, Charles, 9, 150 Hou Yi, 225 Hou Han shu (Fan Ye), 280n25, 286nn62–63, 292n18; on India, 326n64, 327n68 Hu Baoguo, 289n111, 292n22, 297n86, 301n130 Hu Sanxing, 304n8 Hua Yanjun, 96 Huainanzi (Master of Huainan), 27, 43, 228, 284nn34–35, 285n50, 322n12, 324n36; alternative metageography in, 291n11, 314n5; on Kunlun, 173, 193,

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221, 222, 223, 226, 286n66; on local customs, 26, 286n66; and natural ­geographies, 36, 44 Huan Wen, 138, 309n72 Huangfu Mi, 299n105 “Huang jing” (Classic of the wildernesses; Shanhai jing), 40 Huang tu (Yellow chart), 46 Huashan jingshe ji (Record of the ­monasteries of Mount Hua; Zhang Guanglu), 284n42 huaxia (Sinitic civilization), 9, 90–91, 279n15, 326n68; and Tabgatch vs. ­Jiankang empires, 123–29. See also culture, Sinitic Huayang guozhi (Record of the kingdoms south of Mount Hua; Chang Qu), 13, 58, 80–81, 85, 108–11, 111–14, 282n13, 294n48, 301n137 Hua Yi tu (Map of Sinitic and barbarian lands), 266 Huo Yuan, 187 “Huozhi liezhuan” (Memoirs of moneymakers; Sima Qian, Shiji), 25 Hüsemann, Jörg, 279n21, 280n23, 293n28, 293n36, 313n3, 322n2, 323n23 hydraulic projects, 205–8, 209, 269 hydrocultural metageography, 6–7, 165– 210, 258, 266–69, 273; centrality in, 172–76, 234, 241; vs. imperial metageography, 165, 167–68, 169, 172–76; and Indo-Sinitic metageography, 211, 242, 252–53; mountains in, 177–97, 190, 197, 210; and natural geography, 172–76, 209; rivers in, 197–208; Sichuan in, 267–68; water in, 169–72 identity, cultural: and cuisine, 143– 48; of elites, 68, 73, 279n15, 290n3; Hua supraethnic, 124, 305nn20–22; Huaxia, 90–91, 124, 279n15; national, 121, 278n11; and political order, 86, 90; regional, 87, 97, 143–48; Sinitic, 82, 86 immortality, 185, 193, 223, 224, 226

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378 index imperial court: centrality of, 3, 4, 8, 20, 24, 49, 69, 123, 130, 147, 172–73, 215, 220, 272; escape from, 20, 38, 47, 209; and gazetteers, 261; and Han metageography, 20, 35, 43, 49, 70, 71, 82, 86, 94, 173, 220, 257, 258, 259, 272, 272–73; of Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 104– 5, 106, 119–22, 135, 136, 144–45, 146, 148–50, 155, 163, 263, 305n22; and ­local elites, 19, 67, 72, 77, 78, 81, 95, 115, 151, 157, 202, 206, 256–57, 259; vs. mountains, 179, 184–87, 195; women of, 71. See also officials, court imperial geographies, 286n63, 322n14; administrative, 26, 53, 55–65, 59, 63, 64, 65, 70, 71, 157, 286n67; and centrality, 215, 220, 272; and consolidation of genre, 50; on Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 136, 139; and Jin reunification, 95–96; on Kunlun, 230; vs. local cults, 192; and regionalism, 116, 295n60; on rivers, 201, 202; Tang literati on, 55–63, 65; on Western ­Regions, 215, 217, 218 imperial ideology: and Buddhism, 254; Han, 2–3, 26, 76–77, 121, 123, 130–31, 144, 257; and hydrocultural metageography, 198; and Indo-Sinitic metageography, 255; and local customs, 76– 77; vs. local geographies, 58, 62; and natural geographies, 36; vs. northsouth metageography, 136–40; Tang, 21, 61; of unification, 118, 148, 160, 162, 164. See also universalism imperial metageography, Han, 4–8, 26, 68–72; alternatives to, 18, 258–59, 272–73, 291n11, 314n5; and barbarians, 132, 168; and Buddhism, 20–21, 254; and capital cities, 45, 70, 123–24, 257, 258; corrections to, 111–14; in dynastic histories, 69, 71, 160, 162, 257–59, 305n17; and ecumenical regionalism, 82, 97–103, 108, 114, 165; and elite culture, 5, 43, 70, 75, 77, 86, 121, 133, 143; and fragmentation of imperial order,

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2–3, 18, 19, 21, 35, 42, 43, 49, 64, 72, 115, 151, 178, 180, 212–13, 258, 259, 264–66; and gazetteers, 261, 262; in geographical writing, 41, 43, 44, 48, 49, 54, 63, 64, 96, 99, 100, 103; and histori­ ography, 257–58; vs. hydrocultural metageography, 165, 167–68, 169, 172– 76, 198; and India, 20–21, 212; vs. ­Indo-Sinitic metageography, 251, 252, 255, 269; and Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 124–25, 127, 135–48, 163; and Jin empire, 68, 94–95, 96, 99, 100, 103; marginalization in, 210, 257, 272, 273; and modern nationalism, 5, 11; and mountains, 195–97, 220, 317n71; natural environment in, 166, 167–68, 198, 257; vs. natural geographies, 208, 209; and north-south metageography, 117, 119, 121, 124, 136–40, 156; in official histories, 13, 160, 162, 257–59; provincialization of, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147–48, 163, 234, 241, 253, 254; vs. regionalism, 20, 66, 68, 70, 73, 75, 87, 116, 141, 148, 165, 257, 259; vs. Sichuan, 111–14; spatial hierarchy in, 175–76; in Sui-Tang empire, 259–60; three divisions of, 70–72; and Warring States period, 67, 68–69, 71, 168 India: and Buddhism, 41, 64–65, 187, 233–34, 237–41, 244, 245, 286n62, 326n64; Buddhist geographies on, 217, 219; centrality of, 234–37, 236–41, 244, 332n31; Chinese knowledge of, 233–34, 238–40, 249; civilization of, 49, 174, 241–53; as ecumene, 7, 326n63; elite culture of, 20, 326n63; in hydrocultural metageography, 170, 232; maps in, 3; Sinitic geographical ­w riting on, 12, 20–21, 40–43, 49, 212; Sinocentrism toward, 19, 64–65; and Western Regions, 237–41, 322n1 Indo-Sinitic bipolar metageography, 7, 211–55, 258, 269–70, 269–72, 273; Buddhist-Indic ecumene in, 232– 53, 255; and Kunlun, 213, 219–32, 233,

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index 379 234, 241, 253, 254, 255, 270; sources for, 212, 213–19, 222–24, 228, 234, 237– 40, 248, 249 Inner Mongolia, 10 Inscription of Zhang Zai, 180 Jambudvipa, Buddhist continent of, 3, 54, 126, 325n51, 328n97; and IndoSinitic metageography, 41, 42, 44, 53, 222, 227–28, 231, 270 Japan, 10, 264, 331n5 Jia Yi, 282n22 Jiang fu (Rhapsody on the Yangzi River; Guo Pu), 38 Jiang ji (Record of the Yangzi; Yu Zhongyong), 284n33 Jiankang empire, xii, 19, 104–5, 118–63, 120, 139, 155; administrative units of, 128, 306n38; and barbarians, 131–34, 135, 163; and Buddhism, 129, 130, 131, 163, 311n104; and centrality, 126–28, 130–31, 133, 134; conquest of, 148, 149; elites in, 119, 120, 128, 135, 139, 140; as empire, 121; ethnicity in, 128–29, 134, 139, 142; and imperial metageography, 127, 135–48, 163; and Indo-Sinitic metageography, 213, 253, 255; legitimacy of, 106, 128, 130, 135, 143, 312n124; local geographies in, 72–73; official histories of, 140–43, 159; officials of, 108, 119–22, 135, 136, 144–45, 146, 148– 50, 155, 163, 263, 305n22; and Song dynasty, 260, 263; vs. Tabgatch empire, 122–31, 135–48, 162–63; threats to, 138– 39; universalist claim of, 126–27, 130– 31, 135; and Wei dynasty, 308n57, 310n95 Jianye (Jiankang; capital), 46, 104, 119, 154, 287n77, 287n78 Jiaozhou yiwu zhi (Record of the peculiar things of Jiao Prefecture), 285n47 Jifu jing (Classic of the imperial domain; Zhi Yu), 50, 62 Jin empire (Western Jin dynasty), xii; capitals of, 127, 220; vs. Eastern Jin,

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283n31, 298n93; and ecumenical ­regionalism, 94, 97–103, 109; geographical writing in, 29, 30, 31, 42, 46, 50, 55, 68, 287n78; in hydrocultural metageography, 267; local geographies in, 33, 34; and north-south metageography, 117, 121; population of, 305n19; and regional cuisines, 144; reunification by, 62, 64, 94–103; and Tabgatch empire, 124; and Yangzi ­basin, 72, 104, 138 Jingdian shiwen (Explanation of canonical texts), 312n123 Jing Yang yi’nan yiwu zhi (Record of the peculiar things of Jing and Yang and farther south; Xue Ying), 288n86 Jingzhou ji (Record of Jingzhou; Cheng Hongzhi), 58 Jin shu (History of the Jin dynasty), 159, 280n25, 286n63 Jiu Tang shu, 298n97 Jizhou lun (Essay on Jizhou; He Yan), 78–79 Jizhou lun (Essay on Jizhou; Lu Yu), 79 Jones, Prudence, 172 Juanzi (transcendent), 185, 194 “Junguo zhi” (Monograph on com­ manderies and principalities; Sima Biao), 71 Kan Yin, 53, 63, 287n70 Kang Tai, 40, 41, 226, 229, 230, 235, 285n53, 322n14 Kapilavastu (Jiaweiluowei), 234–35 Khitan Liao state, 263 Kong Lingfu, 107 Korea, 10 Kroll, Paul, 279n21 Kunlun, Mount. See Mount Kunlun Kuodi tu (Chart of the whole earth), 228 landscape. See natural environment languages: northern vs. southern, 153–54; Sinitic, 70, 278n14. See also Sinitic script

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380 index Laozi, 252 Lefebvre, Henri, 4, 17, 70 Legalism, 167 legitimacy: Confucianism on, 268; cultural, 107, 108; and deities, 40, 69; ­imperial vs. regional, 73–74, 133, 144, 162, 292n28, 310n95; of Jiankang empire, 106, 128, 312n124; of Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 130, 135, 143; of Jin empire, 97–103; and mountains, 189, 196; and north-south metageography, 264; and official histories, 158, 159; and qi, 319n112 Lewis, Mark Edward, 19, 66 Lewis, Martin, 3 Li Bing, 109, 203, 204, 206 Li Chong, 124 Li Daoyuan: and Buddhist geographies, 54; on comprehensiveness, 12, 44, 45, 50–51, 53, 54, 55, 57, 65, 85, 169, 172, 211, 213, 216, 232; and consolidation of geographical writing, 50–52; hydrocultural metageography of, 7, 165–66, 211, 268; on imperial geographies, 44, 51, 54, 57, 169; Indo-Sinitic metageography of, 269–70; methodology of, 213–19; on monuments to officials, 89– 90; on water, 169–76, 266. See also Shuijing zhu Li Dashi, 160 Li Te, 180 Li Xiaobo, 140–42 Li Yanshou, 158–62, 162, 313n131 Liang dynasty, xii, 129–30, 150, 158, 304n4, 308n56; geographical writing in, 30, 31, 34, 52, 53; and Jiankang ­empire, 119, 133. See also Jiankang empire Liao dynasty, 303n3 Lieberman, Victor, 265 Lingnan region, 48, 91, 288n86 Linhai shuitu (Landscape of Linhai; Shen Ying), 54 literature, classical Sinitic: and elite culture, 9–10; figures from, 83, 294n50;

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and geographical writing, 55, 56–57, 65; and imperial metageography, 69; and local customs, 151, 152–53; and ­locality stories, 75; vs. regionalism, 67; and Tabgatch vs. Jiankang empires, 124. See also Sinitic script Liu Bang (Han Gaozu). See Gaozu, Emperor Liu Chengzhi, 38 Liu Jun, 293n41 Liu Shanli, 300n118 Liu Weiyi, 33 Liu Yu (Song Emperor Wu), 133, 308n55, 309n72 Liu Zhiji, 54–55, 58, 59–60, 63, 79, 282n13, 289n101 Liu Song dynasty. See Song (Liu Song) dynasty local customs (fengsu), 293nn34–37; and Buddhism, 250–52; changing views of, 35, 151–56; civilizing influences on, 20, 35, 57, 76–77, 80, 81, 82, 86–87, 90, 109–10, 111, 116, 168; contributions to civilization from, 78–81, 111; and elite culture, 86–87, 148; in foreign geographies, 40–41; and founding myths, 81–82, 84; in geographical writing, 20, 22, 24, 26, 100–101, 153, 260; Huai­ nanzi on, 26, 286n66; and Indo-­ Sinitic metageography, 244–45; of Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 132, 135–36, 143, 147, 149, 163; and natural environment, 76–78, 80, 174, 186, 192–93, 204, 205; in natural geographies, 36, 208, 209. See also feng (aura) of a place; qi local geographies, 27–30, 64; administrative units in, 32, 96, 106; anecdotes in, 74–75; and biographies, 32, 48, 109, 116, 202; vs. comprehensive ­geographies, 53, 62–63; and con­ solidation of genre, 50; vs. dynastic histories, 80, 160; and ecumenical ­regionalism, 66–67, 72–94, 94, 114– 16, 259; and foreign geographies,

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index 381 39; and founding myths, 81–86, 106, 116; frontiers in, 39, 48, 283n23; and gazetteers, 261, 331n5; vs. Huayang guozhi, 109, 113, 114; vs. hydrocultural metageography, 172; vs. imperial ideology, 33, 58, 62, 67, 89; inconsistencies in, 85–86; and Jin geographical writing, 101; and Jin reunification, 95–96, 99; on local contributions, 78–81, 106, 116; and minor geographical writing, 48; vs. natural geographies, 208; natural units in, 107–8; peculiar things in, 292n22; on rivers, 201, 202; spatial structure of, 73–75, 87, 106; in Sui-Tang empire, 260; Tang literati on, 33, 56, 58–61, 62, 65, 79–80, 81, 85–86, 87, 116; and tujing, 260; and world geographies, 43, 44; on Yangzi basin, 32–35, 37, 49, 91, 93, 103, 105–8, 297n86, 301n130 locality stories, 24–26, 32–33, 186, 296n73; in capital geographies, 96; in comprehensive geographies, 54; and ­ecumenical regionalism, 88, 115; emperors in, 86, 87–88, 93; founding myths in, 82, 88; and Jin reunification, 95; types of, 75, 84; Western ­Regions in, 241; women in, 294n43 local products (tuchan): and cuisines, 143–48; desires for, 309n80; in geographical writing, 27, 32, 39, 40– 41, 48, 62; gift exchange of, 141–43; and Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 135–36, 141–43, 163; from mountains, 185; and regionalism, 67, 69, 82, 88, 102, 141; as tribute, 25, 40, 69, 70, 100, 142–43 Lu Cheng, 45, 48, 52, 53, 282n13 Lu Deming, 312n123 Lu Han, 58 Lu Ji, 97, 144 Lu Su, 84 Lu Yu, 79 Lü, Empress (Lü Zhi; Han), 88, 194 Lu, state of, 302n146, 310n93

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Luoyang: capital geographies on, 46, 47, 96, 287n78, 297n92; in capital rhapsodies, 300n117; in hydrocultural metageography, 172, 196, 220; and imperial metageography, 70; and Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 133; local customs of, 154; monasteries of, 13, 47, 126, 144, 248, 288n83, 310n87, 321n133, 330n112; and regional cuisines, 144– 46; southern officials in, 150–51; and Sui dynasty, 312n123 Luoyang ji (Record of Luoyang; Hua Yanjun), 96 Luoyang qielan ji (Record of the monasteries of Luoyang; Yang Xuanzhi), 13, 47, 144, 288n83, 310n87, 321n133 Madhyadeśa (zhongguo; central realm), 234–37, 326n68 Mair, Victor, 264–65 Manchuria, 10 Mandate of Heaven, 125, 159, 201, 263, 303n153 Man people, 85, 139, 182–83, 184, 317n62 maps, x, 3, 4, 50, 266, 267, 271; and GIS, 16; from Shuijing zhu, 14–15, 16; stele, 266. See also tujing marchmounts, five, 190, 195–96, 220 Marks, Robert, 167, 268–69 Master Monk (Shishi), 226, 230, 231 materia medica, 39, 48 Mawangdui maps, 266 McMullen, David, 158 metageographies, 3–8; alternative, 6, 18, 258–59, 272–73, 291n11, 314n5; Buddhist, 21, 42, 44, 53–54, 216, 255, 330n123; and historiography, 272–73; mountain, 195–97, 319n114; and state authority, 257–58; and transportation technology, 256. See also ecumenical regionalism; hydrocultural metageography; imperial metageography, Han; Indo-Sinitic bipolar metageography; northern and southern dynasties metageography

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382 index military: of Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 137–38, 142; and topography, 179–80, 268 Ming, Emperor (Song; Liu Yu), 181 Ming dynasty, 261 monasteries: in capital geographies, 47, 288n83; of Luoyang, 13, 47, 126, 144, 248, 288n83, 310n87, 321n133, 330n112; in mountains, 188–89, 284n44, 318n84; networks of, 188–89 Mongolian Steppe, 10, 242–43, 265 Mongols, 261, 279n17. See also Yuan dynasty mountain bandits (shanzei), 180–81, 183, 184, 195, 210 mountains, 177–97, 190; and Buddhism, 38, 178, 187–88, 226–28, 231, 232; vs. capital cities, 195, 208; colonization of, 269; deities in, 38, 39, 167, 168, 177, 179, 181, 185, 189–95, 224–26, 227– 28, 231, 232, 323n17; escape to, 179– 89, 210, 316n50; geographical writing on, 176, 177, 185, 191; healing powers of, 193–94; hot springs in, 193–94, 195, 316n46, 321n147; in hydrocultural metageography, 177–97, 210, 266; vs. imperial court, 184–87, 195; and imperial metageography, Han, 195–97, 220, 317n71; and Indo-Sinitic metageography, 211, 316n44; as liminal spaces, 167, 177, 179, 181, 185, 189– 97, 209–10; vs. lowlands, 179, 182–83, 189, 194, 195, 209; metageographies of, 195–97, 319n114; migration to, 20, 38–39; monasteries in, 188–89, 284n44, 318n84; in natural geographies, 35–36, 38, 166–67; and northsouth metageography, 132, 308n63; physical monuments on, 191–92; qi of, 177, 178, 179, 185, 188, 194, 225; and rivers, 174, 176–77; vs. Sinitic culture, 174, 182–83, 210; state authority in, 179– 81, 189, 194, 195–97, 209, 210, 316n50, 316n53, 317n71

newFelt Structure of Earth.indd 382

Mount Anavatapta: Buddhist geographies on, 53, 222, 228, 325n51; centrality of, 269; and Indo-Sinitic meta­geography, 241, 254, 270; and Kunlun, 44, 170, 211–12, 226–32; rivers from, 227–28, 240 Mount Heng, 83, 196 Mount Hua, 13, 196 Mount Jishi, 222–23 Mount Kunlun, 323nn17–25; and Anava­ tapta, 44, 170, 211–12, 226–32; anomaly accounts of, 217, 218, 230; Buddhist geographies on, 221, 222, 226–27, 228, 232; centrality of, 174, 196, 208, 219– 26, 269, 316n44, 322n2, 323n23; deities on, 189–90, 224–26, 323n17; height of, 221–22, 318n92; Huainanzi on, 173, 193, 221, 222, 223, 226, 286n66; in Indo-­ Sinitic metageography, 213, 219–32, 233, 234, 241, 253, 254, 255, 270; and rivers, 219–20, 222–24, 228, 230–33, 237, 238, 242–43, 316n44, 323n17; sources for information on, 214–15, 216, 223–24 Mount Linli, 180–81 Mount Lu, 185, 186, 188, 192, 196 Mount Song, 195–96, 219–20, 231, 320n116 Mount Sumeru, 227, 231, 325n51 Mount Tai, 193, 196, 320n116 Mount Tianmen, 188–89 Mount Wu, 190–91 Mouzi lihuo lun (Master Mou’s essay on removing doubts), 236 Mu, King (Zhou), 191, 225, 318n98 Mu Tianzi zhuan (Account of Mu, Son of Heaven), 40, 284n34, 315n26, 322n12; on Kunlun, 173, 222, 225, 229, 230 myths: in local geographies, 81–86, 106, 116; of Mount Kunlun, 224, 225–26 Nan Qi shu, 280n25, 286n63, 308n56 Nan shi (History of the Southern Dynasties), 158–62, 285n54

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index 383 Nanzhong zhi (Record of Nanzhong; Wei Wan), 85 Nanzhou yiwu zhi (Record of the peculiar things of the southern regions), 235 nationalism, modern, 3, 5, 7, 9–11, 212, 262 natural disasters, 53, 89, 168; floods, 197–202, 205, 207. See also Yu the Great natural environment, 301nn130–31, 315n31; aesthetic appreciation of, 39, 47, 106–7, 187; and capital cities, 46– 47, 102; celestial vs. terrestrial, 168; vs. cultural geography, 7, 44, 76, 95, 168, 171, 176, 208, 213, 238, 243, 254; and economic development, 269; and ecumenical regionalism, 99–100; in geographical writing, 20, 22, 25–26, 27, 39, 44, 167, 273; and human character, 76–78, 134; vs. human environment, 171, 208, 209, 213, 268–69; human mastery of, 68, 165–66, 168, 202, 204, 209, 321n132; hydrocultural metageography of, 6–7, 165–210; in imperial metageography, 3, 166, 167–68, 198, 257; and local customs, 76–78, 80, 174, 175, 186, 192–93, 204, 205; in natural geographies, 36, 39, 106–7; natural units in, 107–8, 168, 269; and northsouth metageography, 136–37, 264; in PRC, 269; and qi, 56–57, 76–78, 110, 114, 115, 177–79, 185, 188, 194, 208; and state authority, 204–5 natural geographies, 27–30, 35–39, 284nn33–36, 289n109, 297n90; administrative units in, 36, 208; and hydrocultural metageography, 165–66, 172– 76, 209; vs. imperial metageography, 208, 209; language of, 106–7; local customs in, 36, 208, 209; on mountains, 178; mountains in, 35–36, 38, 166–67; natural environment in, 20, 36, 39, 106–7; and other geographical

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writing, 46, 47, 49, 64; religion in, 36; rivers in, 198, 201; sources for, 208 New Qing historians, 265 Northern and Southern dynasties, 97, 117–64; as complementary halves, 148– 56, 164; cuisines of, 143–48; natural barriers between, 308n63; officials of, 149–52. See also Jiankang empire; Tabgatch (Tuoba) empire northern and southern dynasties ­metageography, 6, 117–64, 148, 149, 151, 152, 156, 165, 258, 263–66, 273; com­peting centers in, 122–31, 140– 43; complementarity in, 148–56, 164; vs. imperial metageography, 117, 119, 121, 124, 136–40, 156; Jiankang and Tabgatch empires in, 119–34, 163; and language, 153; outer realms in, 131–34; provincialization in, 135–48; Sui-Tang literati on, 157–62 Northern Dynasties, 29, 33, 120, 121. See also Tabgatch (Tuoba) empire Northern Qi dynasty, xii, 120, 150, 158, 304n10; geographical writing in, 30, 31, 34; women in, 155. See also Tabgatch (Tuoba) empire Northern Wei dynasty, xii, 120, 132, 141, 305nn16–22; capitals of, 126, 127; geographical writing in, 30, 31, 34, 46, 53, 63; vs. Jiankang empire, 308n57, 310n95; population of, 305n19; and Tabgatch empire, 124, 125. See also Tabgatch (Tuoba) empire Northern Zhou dynasty, xii, 120, 152, 158, 304n10; geographical writing in, 30, 31, 34. See also Sino-Särbi empire Nü River, 208 Nylan, Michael, 90, 291n8 officials, court: biographies of, 292n26; and Han metageography, 257; of Jian­ kang vs. Tabgatch empires, 119–22, 135, 136, 144–45, 146, 148–50, 155, 163, 263, 305n22; local elites as, 78, 80, 87,

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384 index officials, court (continued) 111, 113; and local feng, 78–79, 80, 89, 90, 93; in locality stories, 86–87; mobility of, 148, 149–52, 163 officials, local, 321n135; criticism of, 87, 294n48; and gazetteers, 262; and Han metageography, 257; and local cults, 192; in locality stories, 86–87, 93; monuments to, 89–90, 206–7, 296n69; and rivers, 198, 202–4, 206, 208, 209 Old Woman Kong, 80 painting, landscape, 39, 188 Pamir Mountains, 237–38, 254 Panhu tribe, 183 Pearl River, 199, 265, 268 Pei Songzhi, 99 Pei Xiu, 50, 51 Pengcheng, encounter at (451), 140–43 Pengzu, 85, 113 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 266, 269 Persia, 170, 322n1, 328n85 Pingcheng (Datong), 126 place-name dictionaries, 29, 48 poetry: landscape, 22, 39, 107, 188; southern palace-style, 157 qi (pneuma, natural force), 314n18, 319n112; and imperial metageography, 168; of Kunlun, 225; and language, 153; of localities, 56–57, 76–78, 110, 114, 115, 208; of mountains, 177, 178, 179, 185, 188, 194; and regional cuisines, 143, 145; of Son of Heaven, 303n155; and virtues, 78–81; of water, 169, 170 Qi, Lady, 88 Qi, state of, 302n146, 310n93 Qiao Gong, 89 Qiao Zhou, 108, 109 Qi dynasty, 36, 52, 55, 304n4 Qimin yaoshu (Essential techniques of the common people), 144 Qin, First Emperor of, 87, 114, 115, 167

newFelt Structure of Earth.indd 384

Qin, Second Emperor of (Ying Huhai), 1 Qin dynasty, 1, 91, 206; and Sichuan, 109, 113, 302n140 Qing dynasty, 261, 265, 267–68 Qu Lindong, 313n131 Qu Yuan, 199–200, 320n129 Queen Mother of the West, 189, 224–25, 318n98 Raz, Gil, 177 recluses (yin), 81, 186–87, 187–88, 190, 195, 210 Red Cliff, Battle of (208), 309n68 Red Eyebrows, 181 regionalism, 290n1; and cuisines, 143– 48; in geographical writing, 20, 22, 24, 116, 209, 283n23, 295n60; in Han empire, 20, 35, 66, 67; in hydrocultural metageography, 266–67; vs. ­imperial metageography, 5, 20, 66, 68, 70, 71, 73, 75, 87, 116, 141, 148, 165, 257, 259; and Indo-Sinitic metageography, 252; and legitimacy, 73–74, 133, 144, 162, 292n28, 310n95; and local products, 67, 69, 82, 88, 102, 141; and natural environment, 20, 174; in northsouth metageography, 117, 140, 143– 48, 163; within Sinitic ecumene, 140– 43; vs. universalism, 3, 26, 74, 157. See also ecumenical regionalism regional locales: contributions of, 20, 72, 74, 77, 78–81, 87, 97, 102, 106, 109, 110–11, 113–16, 260, 261, 262; in hydrocultural metageography, 175; mountain cults in, 192–93; recip­ rocal relationship with ecumene of, 73, 74, 80, 81–82, 86–87, 93–94, 101–2, 108, 110, 111, 114–16. See also ecumenical regionalism; local customs Ren Fang, 45, 48, 52, 53, 282n13 Ren Naiqiang, 108, 302n150 Revolt of the Six Garrisons (523), 120 rhapsodies, 288n85, 291n15; capital, 98–103, 127, 143, 287n77, 300n117

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index 385 rituals: Buddhist, 129–30; and elite culture, 290n3; vs. geographic centrality, 128; and imperial metageography, 68, 69, 70, 135; and Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 125, 127, 131, 135; of universal rulership, 122–23 rivers, 7, 197–208, 265, 266; and Anava­ tapta, 227–28; benefits of, 197–98, 201–2; changing courses of, 314n22; dangers of, 197–202, 205, 207, 209; deities in, 172, 202, 203–4, 205, 209; economic importance of, 174, 206, 268–69; hot springs in, 208; in Indo-Sinitic metageography, 211, 237, 242, 254, 271; and Kunlun, 219–20, 222–24, 228, 230–33, 237, 238, 242–43, 316n44, 323n17; local geographies on, 201, 202; management of, 197, 198, 200–201, 201–8, 209; and miasmas, 320nn126–27; and mountains, 174, 176–77; in natural geographies, 166; and primacy of water, 170; sources for information on, 213–14, 216; suicides in, 199–200, 201; of Western Regions, 240. See also Yangzi River; Yellow River Robson, James, 187, 188, 245, 295n59, 318n84, 318n92, 319n113 Roetz, Heiner, 167 Roman empire, 67, 86, 95, 122, 172, 322n1 Rong barbarians, 183 Rouran barbarians, 131, 138, 307nn46– 47, 308n57 sage-kings, 93, 101, 168, 190, 294n50, 295n59; on frontiers, 85, 295n60; local appropriation of, 81–86; and ­Sichuan, 84, 86, 109, 112–13 “Sandu fu” (Rhapsodies on the three capitals; Zuo Si), 98, 99–101, 103, 143, 287n77 Sanguo zhi (Record of the Three Kingdoms; Chen Shou), 98, 99, 298n97, 305n17

newFelt Structure of Earth.indd 385

San Qin ji (Record of the Three Qin), 58, 79, 293n41 Sanskrit script, 326n63 San Wu junguo zhi (Record of the commanderies and princedoms of the Three Wu), 80 Särbi (Xianbei) people, 11, 84–85, 120, 133, 305n22, 307n47. See also SinoSärbi empire Scott, James, 180, 210 Sen, Tansen, 236 Sengyou, 53 Shaffer, Lynda, 272 Shakyamuni Buddha, 234–35, 252 Shang dynasty, 113, 295n60 Shangshu (Hallowed documents), 51, 282n16. See also “Yu gong” Shanhai jing (Classic of mountains and seas), 25–26, 43, 44, 284nn33–34, 319n114; alternative metageography in, 173, 291n11; genre of, 282n20, 322n12; on India, 326n64; influence of, 282n19, 286n66; on Kunlun, 220, 222, 229, 230, 324n37 Shen Ying, 54 Shen Yue, 128, 134, 161 Shenyi jing (Classic of divine marvels), 225, 282n13, 322n12 Shiben (Origins of descent lines), 85 Shiji (The grand scribe’s records; Sima Qian), 25, 27, 82, 88, 283n25, 320n129; on India, 326n64; as official history, 158, 159, 161 Shijia fangzhi (Gazetteer on the land of Shakya[muni]; Daoxuan), 237 Shijie ji (Record of the world; Sengyou), 53 Shiming (Explaining words), 170, 185 Shisan zhou zhi (Record of the thirteen regions; Kan Yin), 53, 63, 287n70 Shishuo xinyu (Liu Yiqing), 287n77, 293n41 Shitong (Comprehensive understanding of history; Liu Zhiji), 54–55, 289n101, 301n137

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386 index Shiyi ji (Uncollected records; Wang Jia), 231 Shizhou ji (Record of the ten continents), 225, 282n13, 297n90, 322n12 Shu, state of, 268, 298nn97–99, 299n102, 299n107; and ecumenical regionalism, 94, 108–11; and irrigation, 206; and legitimacy of Jin empire, 97–103; misconceptions about, 111–14; and ­Sinitic ecumene, 101–2. See also Sichuan “Shu du fu,” 110 Shu Han, xii “Shuidi” (Water and earth; Guanzi), 170 Shuijing, 279n21, 297n90; on centrality, 220, 231; and hydrocultural metageography, 54, 166, 171–72; and Indo-­ Sinitic metageography, 212; and Shui­jing zhu, 12, 55, 216, 322n2, 328n96 Shuijing zhu (Guide to waterways with commentary; Li Daoyuan), 126, 284n33, 293n36; hydrocultural metageography of, 6–7, 54, 165–210, 268– 69; Indo-Sinitic metageography of, 44–45, 211–55, 269–70; influence on geographical writing of, 24, 50–52, 54; locality story in, 88–89; maps from, 14–15, 16; maps of citations from, 22–23; missing portions of, 279n21; on mountains, 177–97, 189– 97; and reunification, 315n24; and Shuijing, 12, 55, 216, 322n2, 328n96; sources for, 12, 85, 86, 248, 249, 285n53, 286n66, 323n23, 323nn17–19; spatial structure of, 35, 190; studies of, 280n23; Tang literati on, 62, 63; on water, 169– 76, 266 Shuowen jiezi (Explanations of simple and compound characters), 177 Shuwang benji (Fundamental chronicles of the Shu kings), 113, 294n51 Sichuan, xii, 152, 296n72; contributions of, 109, 110; and ecumenical regionalism, 108–11; in hydrocultural meta­ geography, 267–68; vs. imperial

newFelt Structure of Earth.indd 386

metageography, 111–14; and irrigation, 206; and Jin empire, 94, 101; ­local works on, 67, 85; mountains of, 180, 184; and Qin dynasty, 109, 113, 302n140; rivers in, 198, 200; and sagekings, 84, 86, 109, 112–13 Sihai baichuan shuiyuan ji (Record of the source of the hundred rivers within the four seas; Daoan), 44, 227 Sihai huayi zongtu (General map of the Sinitic and foreign lands within the four seas), 271 Sima Biao, 44, 53, 71, 95 Sima Fu, 205, 207 Sima Guang, 161 Sima Qian, 1–2, 25, 40, 158, 282n20, 295n60 Sima Xiangru, 102 Sinitic ecumene, 5–11; boundaries of, 10–11; Buddhism in, 5, 7, 19, 41, 64, 187, 239, 244, 245–46, 251, 253, 254, 258; cultural vs. political, 66, 68, 73, 90, 93–94, 97, 111, 114, 116, 156; and ­ecumenical regionalism, 75, 98, 114– 15; in geographical writing, 25, 33, 35, 39, 42, 46, 96, 99–100, 209; in hydrocultural metageography, 166, 174, 268; and Indic ecumene, 211–55, 232; in Indo-Sinitic metageography, 232– 34, 252–53, 254; in north-south metageography, 130, 134–36, 140–43, 145, 148, 163, 263; and official histories, 158–62; political fragmentation of, 2–3, 18, 19, 21, 35, 42, 43, 49, 64, 72, 115, 151, 178, 180, 212–13, 258, 259, 264–66; and Western Regions, 10, 35, 216, 265, 300n127, 332n18; and Yangzi b ­ asin, 19, 38, 49, 64, 94, 103– 14, 106, 108, 115, 258. See also culture, Sinitic Sinitic script, 9–11, 70, 135, 150, 228, 279n15; and ecumenical regionalism, 66–67, 114; and India, 234 Sinocentrism: and Buddhism, 19–20, 42, 272; and centrality, 220;

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index 387 fragmentation of, 21; in geographical writing, 5, 16, 40, 41, 43, 215; and ­India, 19, 64–65; and Indo-Sinitic metageography, 241, 252, 255; and Westernization, 272. See also imperial metageography, Han; universalism Sino-Särbi empire, xii, 120–21. See also Särbi (Xianbei) people Sino-steppe borderland, 11 site-based geographies, 29, 48, 64 Six Dynasties period, 124, 267 Sixteen Kingdoms, xii, 33 Siyi zhi (Record of the barbarians of the four directions), 285n48 Skinner, G. William, 174, 268 Song (Liu Song) dynasty (420–79), xii, 119, 132, 303n3, 304n4, 305n22; geographical writing in, 30, 31, 36, 55; ­local geographies in, 33, 34, 105, 283n30. See also Jiankang empire Song (Zhao Song) dynasty (960–1279), 161, 198, 260–61, 263–64, 266–68, 283n30 Song shu, 139, 280n25, 286n63, 307n48, 316n54; on barbarians, 129, 133, 134, 137; on Pengcheng, 140–43 Song Yongchu shanchuan ji (Record of the mountains and rivers of the Yongchu reign period of the Song ­dynasty; Liu Chengzhi), 38 Soushen ji (Gan Bao), 303n154 Southeast Asia, 10, 12, 40, 248, 285n54 Southern Dynasties, 105, 119. See also ­Jiankang empire Southern Qi dynasty, xii, 30, 31, 34, 52, 119. See also Jiankang empire Spanish empire, 256 spatial practice: in geographical writing, 14–15, 17, 33, 35, 48, 49; and metageographies, 4–6, 72, 256; and Tang literati, 63 Spring and Autumn period, 78, 132, 145, 146, 310n89 state authority: and Buddhism, 306n23, 329n101; and cultural geography, 256–

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57; “Dili zhi” on, 204–5; and meta­ geographies, 257–58; in mountains, 179–81, 189, 194, 195–97, 209, 210, 316n50, 316n53, 317n71; and rivers, 197, 198, 200–201, 201–2, 203, 204–8, 209 Su Dan, 193 suicides, on rivers, 199–200, 201 Sui dynasty, xii; conquests by, 118, 148, 149; and ecumenical regionalism, 95, 259–60; geographical writing in, 42, 55; and imperial metageography, 87, 259–60; military of, 138; and northsouth metageography, 6, 7–8, 119, 120, 157–62, 263; official history of, 158; ­reunification by, 62, 64, 119. See also Sino-Särbi empire Sui shu: bibliography of, 48, 91, 281n1, 289n101, 292n21; on comprehensive geographies, 52, 53–54, 62; geographical writing in, 28, 31, 32, 37, 50, 56, 57, 157, 176, 280n22, 284n36, 285n52, 285nn48–49, 286n63, 290n116, 330n123; and local geographies, 59–60, 91, 92, 283n27, 283n30; and official histories, 161; regionalism in, 289n106; on West­ ern Regions, 239, 286n55 Sui-Tang empire. See Sui dynasty; Tang dynasty Sun Chu, 293n41 Sunzi (Master Sun’s [methods of warfare]), 179 Tabgatch (Tuoba) empire, xii, 118–34, 304n5; and barbarians, 131–34, 138, 263, 308n56; and Buddhism, 125–26; and centrality, 126–28, 130–31, 133, 134, 220; as empire, 121; ethnicity in, 134, 142, 304n8; and imperial metageography, 124–25, 127, 135– 48, 163; and Indo-Sinitic metage­ ography, 213, 253, 254–55; vs. Jian­kang empire, 122–31, 135–48, 162–63; official histories of, 159; officials of, 119–22, 135, 136, 144–45, 146, 148–50,

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388 index Tabgatch (Tuoba) empire (continued) 155, 163, 263, 305n22; origins of, 120; and southern foods, 146–47; universalist claims of, 126–27, 130–31, 135, 139–40; women of, 155; and Yellow River plain, 123–25, 127–30, 133 Taikang sannian diji (Geographical ­record of the third year of the Taikang reign period), 96 Taiwu, Emperor (Wei; Tuoba Tao), 140, 141, 142, 306n23 “Taiyi sheng shui” (Guodian text), 169 Tan Qixiang, 300n119 Tang Gong (transcendent), 193 Tang dynasty, xii; and ecumenical regionalism, 95, 259–60; factionalism in, 313n127; and imperial metageography, 21, 61, 87, 259–60; and north-south metageography, 6, 7–8, 119, 120, 263, 265–66; unification discourse of, 118, 162, 164. See also Sino-Särbi empire Tang literati: on comprehensive geographies, 55, 61–63, 65; on imperial ­geographies, 55–63, 65; on local geographies, 33, 56, 58–61, 62, 65, 79–80, 81, 85–86, 87, 116; on medieval geographical writing, 2, 15, 18, 21, 29, 42, 55–63, 64, 65, 109, 288n84, 289n111; on Northern and Southern dynasties, 117–18, 119, 123, 136, 157–62; and southern poetry, 312n123 Tao Qian, 182 “Taohua yuan” (Peach blossom spring; Tao Qian), 182 Tarim basin, 40, 41, 223, 248, 322n1; imperial geographies on, 217, 218; and Indo-Sinitic metageography, 243, 270 Three Kingdoms period: and foreign geographies, 40; geographical writing in, 30, 31, 55; history of, 98, 99, 298n97, 305n17; local geographies in, 33, 34, 72, 96–97; and north-south metageography, 119, 143; and official histories, 159; and Yangzi basin, 94, 104 Tian Xiaofei, 12

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tianxia (all under heaven), 42, 44, 59, 62, 69, 220, 227; and ecumenical ­regionalism, 69, 71, 81, 111, 115; and north-south metageography, 123, 125, 127, 136, 158, 160, 162 Tibetan Plateau, 44, 173, 323n22; in IndoSinitic metageography, 211, 217, 242– 43, 254 Tongdian (Comprehensive canons; Du You), 59, 60–61, 301n137 transcendents (xian), 178, 184–90, 187–88, 189, 190, 193–95, 210, 225, 319n101 Transoxiana (Persia), 40, 41, 170, 238–41, 322n1 travelogues, 29, 44, 47, 48, 53, 282n13, 288n85 tujing (map-treatise) style, 55, 62, 157, 259–60, 331n3, 331n5 Tuoba barbarians, 307n48. See also ­Tabgatch (Tuoba) empire Turchin, Peter, 121, 265 universalism: and Buddhism, 126, 129– 30; vs. ecumenical regionalism, 67, 76–77, 122; and ethnic diversity, 121, 124; and geographic centrality, 122– 31; Han ideology of, 2–3, 26, 76–77, 121, 123, 130–31, 144, 257; in imperial geographies, 19, 215; and Indo-Sinitic metageography, 49, 212, 251–52, 253; and Jiankang vs. Tabgatch empires, 122, 126–27, 130–31, 135, 305n14; vs. ­local geographies, 33, 67; and official histories, 160; vs. regionalism, 3, 26, 74, 157; Tang literati on, 21, 61 Vervoorn, Aat Emile, 186 Vietnam, 264 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 3 Wang Bao, 102 Wang Fangping (transcendent), 185 Wang Hong, 79 Wang Ji, 293n41 Wang Jia, 231

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index 389 Wang Jianshun, 125, 144 Wang Jun, 187 Wang Mo, 48 Wang Ping, 97 Wang Su, 144–46, 147, 149, 151, 310n92 Wang Xianzhi, 107 Wang Xizhi, 308n57 Warring States period: geographical writing in, 18, 24–26, 40, 55, 56, 64; vs. imperial metageography, 67, 68– 69, 71, 168; Tang literati on, 56 water, 169–76, 207, 266. See also rivers Wei Qipeng, 169 Wei Shou, 132, 144, 161, 298n97 Wei Wan, 85 Wei dynasty. See Eastern Wei dynasty; Northern Wei dynasty; Western Wei dynasty Wei shu (History of the Wei dynasty), 124–25, 129, 139, 144, 298n98, 308n55; on barbarians, 132–33, 307n48, 308n57; geographical writing in, 280n25, 286n63, 305n19; on Pengcheng, 140–43 Wei (Cao Wei) state, xii, 94, 134, 298n98, 307n46; and legitimacy of Jin empire, 97–103 Wen, Emperor (Song; Liu Yilong), 140 Wen Weng, 111, 112 Wenxin diaolong, 289n101 Wenxuan (Selections of refined literature), 284n34 Western Han dynasty, 30, 31, 71, 239. See also Han empire Western Jin dynasty. See Jin empire Western Regions, 330n118; geographies on, 40, 41, 226, 229–30, 239, 269– 70, 286nn55–56, 325n54, 332n31; in ­hydrocultural metageography, 232; imperial geographies on, 215, 217, 218; and India, 237–41, 322n1; and ­Indo-Sinitic metageography, 212, 255; and Sinitic ecumene, 10, 35, 216, 265, 300n127, 332n18; sources for, 213–19; tributary relations with, 215. See also Eurasia, Central

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Western Wei dynasty, xii, 30, 31, 120 Wigen, Kären, 3 Williams, Nicholas, 97 women: of imperial court, 71; local, 78, 80–81; locality stories of, 294n43; suicides of, 200; in Tabgatch empire, 155 Wood, Denis, 4, 277n5 Woolf, Greg, 68 world geographies, 28–29, 31, 42–45, 49, 64, 286n63, 297n90; and comprehensive geographies, 53; and consolidation of genre, 50; and hydrocultural metageography, 170, 171; and IndoSinitic metageography, 211, 271; and Jin reunification, 95; and Kunlun, 227, 232; Tang literati on, 62 world-systems theory, 3 Wu, Emperor (Han), 87, 226, 296n72 Wu, Emperor (Liang; Xiao Yan), 129–30 Wu, state of, xii, 40, 90, 94, 298n97; as barbarian, 132, 154, 299n107; and Jian­ kang empire, 108, 119, 129, 139; and ­legitimacy of Jin empire, 97–103; local geographies on, 283n23, 303n154; people of, 11, 119–20, 139, 279n15, 304n4; and Qin emperor, 114, 115; and Sinitic ecumene, 101, 102 Wu di ji, 309n80 “Wu di zhuan” (Tales of the land of Wu; Yue jue shu), 26 Wu jing zhengyi (Correct interpretation of the Five Classics), 158 Wu Yue chunqiu (Spring and autumn annals of Wu and Yue), 160 Xi Zuochi, 298n99 Xia dynasty, 84 Xian Luo, 80 Xiang Yu, 1 Xiangzhong ji (Record of Xiangzhong; Lu Han), 58 Xiao He, 1, 57 Xiaowen, Emperor (Wei; Yuan Hong), 144–45, 310n92 Xie Lingyun, 107, 284n45, 291n15

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390 index Ximen Bao, 203–4 Xiongnu (Hu) barbarians, 40, 41, 239, 301n127, 307n47; and Han empire, 124, 129, 131–33, 242; and Tabgatch empire, 131–32, 134, 308n56 Xishi, 147, 310n96 Xi Xia state (Tangut), 263 Xiyu ji (Record of the Western Regions; Master Monk), 226, 229–30, 325n54 Xuanzang, 236, 239, 269, 270, 271, 325n54, 328n97, 332n31 Xuanzhong ji (Records of within the obscure realm), 169–70, 314n16 Xue Ying, 288n86 Xunzi, 167 Yan Shigu, 289n112 Yan Zhitui, 149–57, 152–56, 161, 311nn104–9 Yandi (sage-king), 190–91 Yang, Emperor (Sui; Yang Guang), 157, 312n123 Yang Shoujing, 86 Yang Xiong, 102 Yang Xuanzhi, 13, 47, 126, 144, 147 Yang Yuanshen, 146, 310n95 “Yangdu fu” (Yu Chan), 287n77 Yangxian fengtu (Local environment of Yangxian; Zhou Chu), 54 Yangzi River, 152, 197–98, 199–200, 209, 252–53 Yangzi River basin, xii; in dynastic ­histories, 298n97; and ecumenical ­regionalism, 6, 68, 97, 106; elites in, 20, 36, 38, 72, 97, 104–5, 108; environment of, 20, 306n36, 309n68; as frontier, 5, 19, 20, 24, 35, 36, 48, 49, 64, 72, 90–94, 132; frontiers of, 122, 265; geographical writing on, 37, 45, 46, 47, 48, 65, 96–97, 101, 103, 260; in hydrocultural metageography, 166, 175, 182–83, 196, 202–3, 296n75; in IndoSinitic metageography, 255; and Jin empire, 72, 94, 95, 104, 138; local

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g­ eographies on, 32–35, 37, 49, 91, 93, 103, 105, 106–8, 297n86, 301n130; in locality stories, 75; migration to, 33, 35, 64, 91, 108, 155, 162, 178, 300nn118– 19; in natural geographies, 36, 39; and north-south metageography, 6, 117, 118, 124, 127–29, 133, 263; peculiar things in, 301n130; population growth in, 72, 140; sage-kings in, 84, 295n59; as secondary core, 5, 10, 19, 38, 49, 64, 94, 103–14, 115, 258; Wu people in, 11, 40; vs. Yellow River basin and plain, 6, 11, 19, 34, 37, 90–91, 136–38, 162, 164, 265–66, 296n75 Yanshi jiaxun (Mr. Yan’s family instruction; Yan Zhitui), 149, 156 Yaoji (deity), 190–91 Ye (capital), 46, 103, 287n78 Yee, Cordell, 253, 315n29, 330n122, 333n35 Yellow Emperor, 85, 189, 224, 229 Yellow River: benefits vs. dangers of, 197–98, 314n22; centrality of, 239; in hydrocultural metageography, 166, 170–71, 173; in Indo-Sinitic metageography, 212, 243, 252–53, 270; and irrigation, 206; and Kunlun, 222– 23, 224, 228, 230, 232, 233; management of, 207, 209; sources of, 237–38, 324n35, 328n83 Yellow River basin and plain, xii, 278n12; and barbarians, 132, 134; centrality of, 239, 253; and ecumenical regionalism, 73, 97; émigré elites from, 108, 120; environment of, 20; and founding myths, 82, 86; frontiers of, 122, 264–65; geographical writing on, 24, 34, 36, 37, 45, 65, 91, 96–97, 101, 260; and imperial metageography, 113, 143; and Indo-Sinitic metageography, 213, 241, 243, 254–55; invasions of, 104, 106; and Jin empire, 94, 105; and Kunlun, 219–20; in local geographies, 33, 34, 35; and locality stories,

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index 391 75; migration from, 19, 27, 33, 35, 36, 49, 64, 72, 91, 104–5, 162, 300nn118– 19; monuments in, 247; nomadic ­migration to, 155; and north-south metageography, 6, 117, 118, 123–25, 127–30, 133, 152, 263; and regional cuisines, 144; and Sichuan, 109–10; and Sinitic culture, 73, 173, 174, 254; and Sinitic script, 9–10; sources for information on, 216; vs. Yangzi basin, 6, 11, 19, 34, 37, 90–91, 136–38, 162, 164, 265–66, 296n75 Yellow Turbans, 181 Yijing (Classic of changes), vi, 169 Ying Shao, 76, 77 “Yi Xia lun” (Essay on the barbaric and Sinitic peoples; Gu Huan), 250–51 Yizhou ji (Record of Yizhou), 85, 206 Yongning Monastery (Luoyang), 126, 248, 330n112 Yu Chan, 287n77 Yu Fan, 175 Yu Xu, 133 Yu Zhongyong, 284n33 Yuan, Emperor (Jin; Sima Rui), 38 Yuan Shao, 145, 146, 147 Yuan dynasty, 261, 266, 267 Yuanhe junxian tuzhi (Map-records of the commanderies and counties of the Yuanhe reign period), 58 Yuanjia liunian diji (Geographical ­record of the sixth year of the Yuanjia reign period), 62 Yuanming bao (Bud of the original mandate), 169 Yudi zhi (Record of the earth; Gu ­Yewang), 53 Yue, state of, 90, 132, 154, 283n23; people of, 131, 132, 279n15 “Yue di zhuan” (Tales of the land of Yue; Yue jue shu), 26–27 Yue jue shu (Lost histories of Yue), 26–27 “Yu gong” (Tribute of Yu; Shangshu), 25, 27, 50, 51; and imperial metageography,

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43, 68–69, 82, 132, 319n114; on Kunlun, 221, 222–23, 323n25; on nature, 25, 176, 284n34 Yu gong diyu tu (Map of the regions of the tribute of Yu; Pei Xiu), 50 Yuji tu (Map of the traces of Yu the Great), 266, 267 Yulin (Forest of speech), 293n41 Yungang Grottoes, 125 Yu the Great, 82–84, 112, 184, 191, 295n54 Yuzhang jiuzhi (Old records of Yuzhang), 84 Zhang Bo, 80 Zhang Cheng, 140–42 Zhang Daoling, 191 Zhang Guanglu, 284n42 Zhang Kan, 89 Zhang Qian, 40, 322n14, 322n15 Zhi Yu, 50, 62 zhongguo (middle kingdom, central realm), 7, 9, 326n68, 327n78 Zhou Chu, 54 Zhou, King (Shang), 293n34 Zhou dynasty, 101, 131, 264, 295n60; and imperial metageography, 69, 87; and Sichuan, 112, 113 Zhou li (Rituals of Zhou), 57, 68, 133 Zhu Fatai, 230 Zhu Fawei, 235, 327n72 Zhu Gan, 63 Zhu Ying, 40, 41, 285n53 Zhuang Zun, 102 Zhuangzi, 302n150 Zhuzhu (transcendent), 185, 194 Zizhi tongjian, 304n8, 312n124 Zou Yan, 26, 173; Great Continents model of, 220–21 Zuo Si, 98, 99–101, 103, 143, 287n77 Zuo zhuan (Mr. Zuo’s commentary [to the spring and autumn annals]), 179 Zürcher, Eric, 244, 254, 318n84, 330n114

Zu Ti, 309n72

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Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series (titles now in print) 24. Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan, 645–900, by William Wayne Farris 25. Shikitei Sanba and the Comic Tradition in Edo Fiction, by Robert W. Leutner 26. Washing Silk: The Life and Selected Poetry of Wei Chuang (834?–910), by Robin D. S. Yates 28. Tang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China, by Victor H. Mair 30. Readings in Chinese Literary Thought, by Stephen Owen 31. Rememhering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia in Eighteenth- Century Japan, by Peter Nosco 33. Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo, by Susan Jolliffe Napier 34. Inside a Service Trade: Studies in Contemporary Chinese Prose, by Rudolf G. Wagner 35. The Willow in Autumn: Ryutei Tanehiko, 1783–1842, by Andrew Lawrence Markus 36. The Confucian Transformation of Korea: A Study of Society and Ideology, by Martina Deuchler 37. The Korean Singer of Tales, by Marshall R. Pihl 38. Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China, by Timothy Brook 39. Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi, by Ronald C. Egan 41. Studies in the Comic Spirit in Modern Japanese Fiction, by Joel R. Cohn 42. Wind Against the Mountain: The Crisis of Politics and Culture in Thirteenth- Century China, by Richard L. Davis 43. Powerful Relations: Kinship, Status, and the State in Sung China (960–1279), by Beverly Bossler 44. Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters, by Qian Zhongshu; selected and translated by Ronald Egan 45. Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the World Market, by Sucheta Mazumdar 49. Precious Volumes: An Introduction to Chinese Sectarian Scriptures from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Daniel L. Overmyer 50. Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent, by Alfreda Murck 51. Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought, by Brook Ziporyn 53. Articulated Ladies: Gender and the Male Community in Early Chinese Texts, by Paul Rouzer 55. Allegories of Desire: Esoteric Literary Commentaries of Medieval Japan, by Susan Blakeley Klein 56. Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th-17th Centuries), by Lucille Chia 57. To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, by Michael J. Puett

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Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan, edited by Judith T. Zeitlin and Lydia H. Liu Rulin waishi and Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial China, by Shang Wei Words Well Put: Visions of Poetic Competence in the Chinese Tradition, by Graham Sanders Householders: The Reizei Family in Japanese History, by Steven D. Carter The Divine Nature of Power: Chinese Ritual Architecture at the Sacred Site of Jinci, by Tracy Miller Beacon Fire and Shooting Star: The Literary Culture of the Liang (502–557), by Xiaofei Tian Lost Soul: “Confucianism” in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse, by John Makeham The Sage Learning of Liu Zhi: Islamic Thought in Confucian Terms, by Sachiko Murata, William C. Chittick, and Tu Weiming Through a Forest of Chancellors: Fugitive Histories in Liu Yuan’s Lingyan ge, an Illustrated Book from Seventeenth- Century Suzhou, by Anne Burkus- Chasson Empire of Texts in Motion: Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese Transculturations of Japanese Literature, by Karen Laura Thornber Empire’s Twilight: Northeast Asia Under the Mongols, by David M. Robinson Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China, by Eugenio Menegon Manifest in Words, Written on Paper: Producing and Circulating Poetry in Tang Dynasty China, by Christopher M. B. Nugent The Poetics of Sovereignty: On Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, by Jack W. Chen Ancestral Memory in Early China, by K. E. Brashier ‘Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern’: The Spatial Organization of the Song State, by Ruth Mostern The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi, by Wiebke Denecke Songs of Contentment and Transgression: Discharged Officials and Literati Communities in Sixteenth- Century North China, by Tian Yuan Tan Ten Thousand Scrolls: Reading and Writing in the Poetics of Huang Tingjian and the Late Northern Song, by Yugen Wang A Northern Alternative: Xue Xuan (1389-1464) and the Hedong School, by Khee Heong Koh Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth- Century China, by Xiaofei Tian Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan, by Hideaki Fujiki Strange Eventful Histories: Identity, Performance, and Xu Wei’s Four Cries of a Gibbon, by Shiamin Kwa Critics and Commentators: The Book of Poems as Classic and Literature, by Bruce Rusk Home and the World: Editing the Glorious Ming in Woodblock-Printed Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Yuming He Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity, by Beverly Bossler Chinese History: A New Manual, Third Edition, by Endymion Wilkinson A Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary, by Jerry Norman

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Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

Drifting among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History, by Michael Fuller Martial Spectacles of the Ming Court, by David M. Robinson Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900-1937, by Shengqing Wu Cherishing Antiquity: The Cultural Construction of an Ancient Chinese Kingdom, by Olivia Milburn The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China, by Ronald Egan Public Memory in Early China, by K. E. Brashier Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature, by Wai-yee Li The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy, by Nicolas Tackett Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination, by Tamara T. Chin Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China, by Sarah M. Allen One Who Knows Me: Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China, by Anna Shields Materializing Magic Power: Chinese Popular Religion in Villages and Cities, by Wei-Ping Lin Traces of Grand Peace: Classics and State Activism in Imperial China, by Jaeyoon Song Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late- Qing China, by Ellen Widmer Chinese History: A New Manual, Fourth Edition, by Endymion Wilkinson After the Prosperous Age: State and Elites in Early Nineteenth- Century Suzhou, by Seunghyun Han Celestial Masters: History and Ritual in Early Daoist Communities, by Terry F. Kleeman Transgressive Typologies: Constructions of Gender and Power in Early Tang China, by Rebecca Doran Li Mengyang, the North- South Divide, and Literati Learning in Ming China, by Chang Woei Ong Bannermen Tales (Zidishu): Manchu Storytelling and Cultural Hybridity in the Qing Dynasty, by Elena Suet-Ying Chiu Upriver Journeys: Diaspora and Empire in Southern China, 1570-1850, by Steven B. Miles Ancestors, Kings, and the Dao, by Constance A. Cook The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms, by Xiaofei Tian Speaking of Profit: Bao Shichen and Reform in Nineteenth- Century China, by William T. Rowe Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State, by Hou Li Reading Philosophy, Writing Poetry: Intertextual Modes of Making Meaning in Early Medieval China, by Wendy Swartz Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China, by Suyoung Son Shen Gua’s Empiricism, by Ya Zuo

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Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series 114. Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries, by Stephen Owen 115. Shrines to Living Men in the Ming Political Cosmos, by Sarah Schneewind 116. In the Wake of the Mongols: The Making of a New Social Order in North China, 1200– 1600, by Jinping Wang 117. Opera, Society, and Politics in Modern China, by Hsiao-t’i Li 118. Imperiled Destinies: The Daoist Quest for Deliverance in Medieval China, by Franciscus Verellen 119. Ethnic Chrysalis: China’s Orochen People and the Legacy of Qing Borderland Administration, by Loretta Kim

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