Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China

INSCRIBED LANDSCAPES

INSCRIBED LANDSCAPES

Travel Writing from Imperial China

Translated with Annotations and an Introduction by

RICHARD E. STRASSBERG

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

THIS BOOK IS PUBLISHED WITH THE SUPPORT OF

THE KELTON FOUNDATION

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 1994 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Inscribed landscapes: travel writing from imperial China / Richard E. Strassberg.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-520-08580-0

(pbk: alk. paper)

1. China—Description and travel—To 1900. I. Title.

DS707.I57 1994

951—dc2O. 92-22968

Printed in the United States of America

15 14 13 12 11 10 09

987654

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). ©

For Jane, Jim, Jimmy, Cornelia, and Celeste Hall

To translate the spirit is an intention of such enormity, so phantasmal, that it can well turn out to be inoffensive; to translate the letter, a precision so extravagant that there is no risk in attempting it. Of more consequence than these infinite purposes is the conservation or suppression of certain particulars; of more consequence than those preferences and omissions is the syntactic movement.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

Contents 1

Contents 1

Illustrations

Preface

Editorial Notes

Introduction

I Ma Ti-po (n.d.

From A Record of the Feng and Shan Sacrifices: The Supreme Mountain

2 Wang Hsi-chih (ca. 303—ca. 361)

Preface to Collected Poems from the Orchid Pavilion

3 Lay Scholars of Hermitage Mountain (fl. ca. 400)

Preface and Poem on a Journey to Stone Gate

4 Pao Chao (ca. 414-466)

A Letter to My Younger Sister from the Banks of Thunder Garrison

5 Li Tao-yüan (d. 527)

From The Guide to Waterways with Commentary MENG'S GATE MOUNTAIN

Lotus Mountain

THE THREE GORGES

6 Yang Hsüan-chih (fl. ca. §28-547)

From The Temples of Lo-yang: The Bazaar of Lo-yang

7 Hsüan-tsang (ca. 600-664)

From A Record of the Western Region: The Land of Baluka */033:***GuW (646)

8 Wang Po (ca. 650-ca. 6j6)

Preface to Poems from the Pavilion of the Prince of Tfeng

9 Wang Wei (701-761)

A Letter from the Mountains to the Cultivated Talent Pfei Ti *******

10 Yüan Chieh (719—772) 7 4,

The Right-hand Stream *i3 (ca. 764)

The Winter Pavilion R*32 (766)

My Own Terrace **4* F (767)

11 Han Yü (768-824)

The Pavilion of Joyous Feasts

The I-ch’eng Station

12 Li Ao (772-836)

Diary of My Coming to the South

13 Po Chü-i (772-846)

The Cottage

Preface to Poems from the Cave of the Three Travelers —*7F (819)

14 Liu Tsung-yüan (773-819)

Eight Pieces from Yung Prefecture *9/3 (809-812) 1.MY FIRST EXCURSION TO WEST MOUNTAIN *10**3 (809)

2. FLATIRON POND $849138 (809)

3. THE LITTLE HILL WEST OF FLATIRON POND $84422É3C (809)

TO THE LITTLE ROCK POND WEST OF THE LITTLE HILL

5. YUAN CREEK

6. STONY BROOK

7. ROCKY STREAM

8. LITTLE ROCK CITADEL

Preface to Poems from Dimwit’s Stream

15 Liu K'ai (947-1000)

Flat-Top Mountain

16 Fan Chung-yen (989-1052)

The Pavilion of Yüeh-yang

17 Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072)

The Pavilion of the Old Drunkard

The Pavilion of Joyful Abundance

18 Su Shun-ch'in (1008-1048)

The Temple of the Moon-in-the-Water at Grotto Mountain in Su-chou

19 Wang An-shih (1021—1086)

The Mountain Where Hui-pao Meditated

20 Shen K’uo (1031-1095)

Geese Pond Mountain

21 Su Shih (1037-1101)

Red Cliff I

Red Cliff II

Stone Bells Mountain

From Tung-p’o’s Forest of Jottings

SANDY LAKE

AN EVENING STROLL TO THE TEMPLE THAT RECEIVES THE HEAVENLY

AN ACCOUNT FOR KUO OF OUR VISIT TO MOUNT WHITE WATER

22 Su Ch’e (1039—1112)

The Delightful Pavilion of Huang Prefecture

23 Ch'in Kuan (1049-1100)

Dragon Well I

Dragon Well II

24 Lu Yu (1125-1210)

From A Journey into Shu: The Cave of the Three Travelers

25 Fan Ch'eng-ta (1126-1193)

From Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu: Eyebrows Mountain

26 Chu Hsi (1130-1200)

The Mountain a Hundred Chang High

27 Yeh-lü Ch'u-ts'ai (1189-1243)

From Record of a Journey to the West

28 Yüan Hao-wen (1190—1257)

A Trip to Chi-nan

29 Ma Ko (fl. ca. 1224-1239)

Dragon Mountain

30 Chou Mi (1232-1298)

From Recollections of Wu-lin: Observing the Tidal Bore

31 Teng Mu (1247—1306)

Snow Gorge Mountain

32 Sa-tu-la (Sa T'ien-hsi, ca. 1300-ca. 1380)

Dragon Gate

33 Sung Lien (1310-1381)

Bell Mountain

34 Liu Chi (1311-1375)

The Wind-in-the-Pines Pavilion I

The Wind-in-the-Pines Pavilion II

35 Kao CH'I(1336-1374)

Flat-Top Mountain

36 Chang Chü-cheng (1525-1582)

Transverse Mountain

37 Wang Shih-chen (1526-1590)

Chang’s Cave

38 Yüan Hung-tao (1568—1610)

Tiger Hill

Heaven’s Eyes Mountain

An Evening Stroll to the Six Bridges to Await the Moon

39 Ch'ien Chfien-i (1382—1664)

From Yellow Emperor Mountain

40 Hsü Hung-tsu (1586-1641)

From The Travel Diaries of Hsü Hsia-k’o TERRACE OF HEAVEN MOUNTAIN

SEVEN STARS CAVERN

41 Chang Tai (ca. 1597-ca. 1679)

From Dreamlike Memories from the Studio of Contentment THE JUNIPER IN THE TEMPLE OF CONFUCIUS

AN INN IN T’AI-AN

WEST LAKE AT THE MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL

THE RIVERSIDE HOUSES ALONG THE CH’IN-HUAI #773

ROMANCE AT TWENTY-FOUR BRIDGES

THE YÜ GARDEN

THE RELIC AT KING AOKA TEMPLE

42 Ku Yen-wu (1613-1682)

Five Terraces Mountain

43 Chu I-tsun (1629-1709)

The Chin Temple

44 Shao Ch'ang-heng (1637-1707)

An Evening Stroll to Solitary Hill

45 K'ung Shang-jen (1648-1718)

Stone Gate Mountain

46 Tai Ming-shih (1653-1713)

Diary of a Journey North in the Year I-hai

47 Fang Pao (1668-1749)

Geese Pond Mountain

48 Yüan Mei (1716-1798)

Yellow Dragon Mountain

Yellow Emperor Mountain

The Cascade Pavilion at Gorge River Temple

49 Yün Ching (1757-1817)

Hermitage Mountain

50 Kung Tzu-chen (1792-1841)

Passing through Yang-chou Again in the Sixth Month of the Year Chi-hai

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Glossary-Index

Illustrations

Figures

Maps

Preface

The growth of planetary awareness at the end of our century has, among other things, stimulated a renewed interest in travel writing in many countries. Records of past journeys continue to hold our imaginations both as pioneering itineraries that reduced the distance between cultures and as eyewitness accounts of worlds now lost. Amid the abundance of recent works on travel writing in both China and the West, the lack of a comprehensive anthology in English of the voluminous literature from Imperial China has become increasingly apparent. Although examples of travel writing are rare for the first two-thirds of Chinese literary history, in the later dynasties it seems that just about every writer of note tried his hand at travel accounts or travel diaries. This anthology focuses on literary pieces, ones characterized by lyrical or autobiographical content, but also includes documentary pieces written as objective records of places or events. The line between these two poles of Chinese travel writing is often obscure, as are the distinctions that are sometimes drawn between the various subgenres of the travel account (yu-chi). The selections are arranged chronologically by author to suggest both the development and continuity of travel writing through the centuries. For in these works, tradition was a particularly powerful guide to artistic choice: early forms, themes, and literary techniques, in addition to the actual places visited, constantly reappear in pieces from later periods. Many of these works have been canonized by the literary tradition and were widely anthologized in general collections of prose. Some are still read in Chinese middle schools and universities today. In general, I have tried to include the monuments of classical Chinese travel writing, neglected examples by some of the notable personalities of Imperial China, works that record journeys to important places as well as works suggesting the generic extent of this kind of literature. I have excluded works that are not the result of personal experience and those of purely scholarly interest.

I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities Translation Program for a generous grant that enabled me to take a year off from teaching to begin work on this book. Several other grants from the UCLA Academic Senate were also helpful in enabling me to travel to China and engage in further research. The Center for Chinese Studies and the Office of International and Special Overseas Programs at UCLA and the Kelton Foundation provided support for the illustrations and maps. I hope I will be forgiven for collectively thanking the many colleagues, librarians, curators, and graduate assistants who were generous with their time and advice. At the University of California Press, executive editor Sheila Levine, senior editor Amy Klatzkin, and editor Laura Driussi have my gratitude for patiently guiding this book through the stages of publication, as does Anne Canright for her careful editing. I would also like to thank Columbia University Press for permission to reprint a revised version of K’ung Shang-jen’s travel account from an earlier book, The World of K'ung Shang-jen (1983).

Much can be understood about a civilization from its landscapes, and even more from the way its people described them. These pieces articulate traditional Chinese attitudes toward Nature, history, the individual, and society, and toward writing itself. Most of the places in this anthology still exist on the map and can be visited by travelers today. Despite the enormous destruction of Chinese culture through the centuries, an inconceivable amount of which has occurred within our very lifetimes, the modern pilgrim can still follow in the footsteps of many of these writers, encounter earlier inscriptions, and experience a sense of the ethos of the past. And for those preferring to indulge in what the Chinese call recumbent traveling (uso-yu), reading these pieces at leisure and contemplating the illustrations may stimulate the imagination to retrace these journeys from afar.

Editorial Notes

Classical Texts

Citations of classical texts follow the Harvard-Yenching and Sino- French Indexes unless otherwise noted. Official titles and geographical divisions follow Charles O. Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford, 1985), when possible. Romanizations of Central Asian places generally follow Feng Ch’eng-chün, ed., Hsi-yü ti-ming (Peking, 1982). Reign dates and eras follow Tz’u-hai (Shanghai, 1979), and conversions of dates are based on A Sino-Western Calendar for Two Thousand Years, 1—2000 a.d. (Taipei, 1960 rpt.). The following standard abbreviations of collectanea are used:

CPTCTS Chih-pu-tsu-chai ts'ung-shu

CTPS Chin-tai pi-shu

CTS Ch'üan Tfang shih

SPPY Szu-pu pei-yao

SPTK Szu-pu ts'ung-k'an

Taisho Taisho shinshü Daizökyö

TSCC Tsfung-shu chi-chfeng

The anthology Ni Ch’i-hsin et al., eds., Chung-kuo ku-tai yu-chi hsüan, vols, i and 2 (Peking, 1985), is abbreviated in the notes as Ni, Yu-chi.

Weights and Measures

I have tried to convert Chinese measurements to their closest Western equivalents when possible. However, some that are rhetorical, such as "a myriad hsün’ or "a hundred change and those that are parts of proper names, such as Five-Li Station, have been preserved. Chinese measurements vary somewhat according to time and place. Generally speaking, quantities grew slightly in size over the centuries. A precise list of equivalents that would cover all of China during the last three millennia has yet to appear, and a number of historical measurements remain the subject of scholarly investigation. The following list is based on the chart of Chinese weights and measures in Frederic Wakeman, Jr., The Great Enterprise, vol. i (Berkeley, 1985), p. xiii, which provides a set of equivalents derived from various sources from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Other measures appearing in texts in this anthology have been added to these. They should be considered as approximate values for present purposes and the numbers adjusted downward a bit for earlier periods:

Chinese Dynasties

Bell Mountain i

The Cascade Pavilion 24

The Cave of the Three Travelers 26

Chang’s Cave 25

The Chin Temple 27

Ch’in-huai River 1

The Delightful Pavilion 16

Dragon Gate 2

Dragon Mountain 3

Dragon Well 4

Eyebrows Mountain 5

Five Terraces Mountain 6

Flat-Top Mountain (Ho-nan) 30

Flat-Top Mountain (Chiang-su) 31

Geese Pond Mountain 7

Heaven’s Eyes Mountain 8

Hermitage Mountain 9

The I-ch’eng Station 28

Lotus Mountain 10

Meng’s Gate Mountain 11

Mount White Water 13

The Mountain A Hundred Chang High 29

The Mountain Where Hui-pao Meditated 32

My Own Terrace 14

Orchid Pavilion 15

The Pavilion of Joyful Abundance 33

The Pavilion of Joyous Feasts 34

The Pavilion of the Old Drunkard 33

The Pavilion of the Prince of T’eng 35

The Pavilion of Yüeh-yang 36

Red Cliff 16

The Right-hand Stream 37

Sandy Lake 16

Seven Stars Cavern 17

Six Bridges 4

Snow Gorge Mountain 18

Solitary Hill 4

Stone Bells Mountain 19

Stone Gate 9

Stone Gate Mountain 20

The Supreme Mountain 21

T’ai-an Prefecture 21

The Temple of Confucius 20

The Temple of the Moon-in-the-Water 23

Terrace of Heaven Mountain 22

The Three Gorges 38

Thunder Garrison 41

Tiger Hill 31

Transverse Mountain 12

Twenty-four Bridges 42

West Lake 4

Wheel River 43

The Wind-in-the-Pines Pavilion 15

The Winter Pavilion 39

Yellow Dragon Mountain 44

Yellow Emperor Mountain 45

The Yü Garden 40

Yung prefecture 14

The Temple That Receives the Heavenly 16

Introduction

THE RISE OF CHINESE TRAVEL WRITING

Every traveler has a tale to tell. This ubiquitous European expression not only testifies to the pervasiveness of travel writing in many cultures but also indicates the centrality of the journey in Western narrative. The major genres from the epic to the novel have been constructed around odysseys, pilgrimages, crusades, exiles, explorations, picaresque adventures, Grand Tours, quests, and conquests. A primary guide has been the teleology of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which provided ample myths for the Western traveler to view his journey as ordained by a higher power and potentially redemptive. The exodus of the Israelites to the Promised Land or the progress of saints from the suffering of a profane world to the bliss of Heaven allegorically endowed journeys with the possibility of material reward or salvation of the soul. Tragic wanderings and a profound sense of rootlessness could be interpreted as the consequences of Adam and Eve’s egress from paradise or a divine curse. At the same time, Eurocentrism in its many national and historical guises often conditioned Western writers to emphasize the strange otherness of the places they visited. Much Western travel writing can be read as an unconscious projection of native values onto other cultures, an exporting of repressed anxieties, or as a fantasy of the exotic. In attempting to come to terms with the difference of foreign places, these texts often reveal themselves to be mirrors of the writer’s own desires and illusions.¹

During the medieval and early Renaissance periods, travel accounts often represented exotic, marginal worlds as fearful zones of demons, infidels, heretics, and natural dangers. Such texts as Wonders of the East presented the savagery of distant places with hyperbole and often considerable imagination to satisfy the reader’s desire for curiositas.²

Given the limited extent of medieval traveling, the representations in these works were mostly accepted as valid even though largely unverified. Despite a general intention to convey what was actually witnessed, such writers usually avoided contradicting the authority of the canonical auctores back home who dominated writing by interpreting individual experience through classical and theological allegories.

It was the travel writing of the Age of Exploration that finally challenged and helped to undermine the medieval worldview. Following the earlier efforts of such traders as Marco Polo in his Description of the World (1298-1299), a host of accounts recorded vastly different cultures and landscapes unexplainable within the established categories of knowledge. Such anthologies as Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589) contained many plausible and enthusiastic reports of ocean voyages that resulted in commercial profit.³ Owing to the increase in trade and colonization, these accounts could now be verified as readers demanded more factual, as opposed to allegorical, truth. Such texts not only encouraged four centuries of adventurous imperialism; they also liberated writers to become individual authors reporting on the unique meaning of their own experience in a variety of narrative forms resistant to traditional classification. As one contemporary critic points out, Authors exploited the discontinuity between the things in the New World and the words in the ancient books to claim for their works an unprecedented cultural power to represent the new.⁴ The savageness of these territories revealed to perceptive writers hitherto unrecognized qualities within themselves, while the fashionable consumption of foreign things introduced a new degree of cultural relativism. Romantic Nature, antiquity, and the primitivism of other peoples were often used to frame unflattering assessments of the home culture. Many of the comparisons drawn between these different societies fueled the critique of sociopolitical institutions in Europe, generating support for the revolutionary changes of the past three centuries.⁵

The overlapping of this kind of journalistic reporting with the evolving novel further moved travel writing into the progressive mainstream of Western narrative. The flexible forms of letters, diaries, histories, and romances served both factual and fictional writers as well as those in between. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, popular works based on actual journeys, such as The Travels of Mendes Pinto (1614)⁶ and Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), frequently crossed over into fiction so that the writer might put forth liberal opinions about the broader cultural issues of the time. Novels that parodied travel accounts, such as Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Bougeant’s The Marvellous Voyage of Prince Fan-Férédin (1735), and Vol- taire’s Candide (1759), employed common themes, character types, and plots.⁷

The Enlightenment’s optimistic advocacy of individual consciousness was also advanced in a kind of travel writing that used autobiography and biography to explore the self. The affluent increasingly ventured forth on Grand Tours to educate their tastes, enhance their status, and pursue forbidden pleasures. They constituted the core of an everwidening audience that consumed works about people much like themselves encountering distant places. Goethe’s Italian Journey (1786), for example, conveyed through letters to friends back home in Weimar not only the writer’s perceptive observations along the classical itinerary but also the subjective responses of a sensitive mind discovering itself undergoing change. In Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), the writer filtered many of his experiences of places, history, and society through his observations of the character of his English traveling companion, Dr. Johnson, for whom Scotland was a somewhat exotic location.

Thus, the mainstream of travel writing in the West developed as a means of facilitating the desires of writers and readers for a more liberated, autonomous existence. By defining altered selves in nontraditional accounts of other worlds, it played a role in critical phases of social and political emancipation at home. The twentieth century has witnessed an even greater proliferation of travel writing. Mass tourism has whetted the appetite of readers for more profound observations of places too briefly encountered, while exotic adventures continue to entertain. The paradigm of the journey has been often invoked to signify modern experience. The questioning of classical forms of representation has led to the breakdown of traditional structures of time and space to signify inner peregrinations of the psyche. Figurative language has been conceived of as a migration of meaning, and the act of theorizing as a product of displacement.⁸ Texts ranging from the high literary to film and advertising frequently signify reality as a transit through unstable states of being.

By contrast, the travel writing of Imperial China may seem far removed from the historical and intellectual foundations of the West, as remote in its forms and concerns as the land itself. The writers, like their original audience, were mostly degree-holding literati, usually officials and poets as well, whose public lives revolved around climbing up, slipping down, seeking entree to, or rejecting entirely the ladder of bureaucratic success. In a country without a strong maritime or colonial tradition, their itineraries were primarily internal. Theoretically, they scorned the pursuit of commercial profit and also showed little interest in foreign countries and non-Chinese ethnic groups. Within a cosmology without a purposeful Creator or strong philosophical interest in the concepts of truth and progress, the dominant Confucian ideology advocated the recovery of a ritualized moral order based on archetypes that were primarily cyclical and spatial. The literary forms of Chinese travel writing evolved out of a matrix where narrative was dominated by the impersonal style of official, historical biography, and subjective, autobiographical impulses were largely subsumed within lyric poetry. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, journalism was nonexistent and the novel generally regarded as an entertaining diversion.

Chinese travel writing, like its Western counterpart, is voluminous and formally diverse, resisting simple classification. Western readers were first introduced in the late nineteenth century to translations of records by Buddhist monks of their pilgrimages to India and to an ancient chronicle of an imperial tour to the margins of the empire.⁹ In the years since then, there has been a tendency to focus on these and similar accounts of political missions to the periphery and beyond.¹⁰ Such texts tend to confirm ideas of Chinese travel writing as being much like our own. They chart difficult quests through alien lands by individuals who objectively report on awesome geographical features and ethnographic oddities.

The mainstream of travel writing, however, was concerned with travel in China itself, and was written by literati for a number of reasons in addition to an impersonal, documentary one. Although scattered antecedents exist in early Chinese literature, it was not until the mid-eighth century, about two-thirds of the way through Chinese literary history, that a set of conventions of representation in prose was codified in the lyric travel account (yu-chi), enabling writers to articulate fully the autobiographical, aesthetic, intellectual, and moral dimensions of their journeys in first-person narratives; and it was not until the eleventh and twelfth centuries that the travel account and the related travel diary (jih-chi) actually began to flourish.

In the traditional Chinese classification of literature, travel writing could be found in two principal categories in the Four Libraries (Szu- pu) system. Those works that primarily documented geographical features were classified under the geography (ti-li) subsection of the history (shih) category.¹¹ Shorter, more personal pieces such as travel accounts and travel diaries were usually included within the collected works of literati in the belles lettres (chi) category. These collections were generally published posthumously, and the outstanding ones were continually reprinted through the centuries. From the Sung dynasty on, as Chinese prose became anthologized and individual pieces canonized as monuments, a number of travel accounts gained widespread prominence. In addition, travel writing was also disseminated through encyclopedias, local gazetteers, and guidebooks.¹²

A further form of transmission, one perhaps unique to Chinese travel writing, was accomplished by engraving texts at the original sites of their inspiration (see fig. ï). By incorporating a text into the environment, the traveler sought to participate enduringly in the totality of the scene. He perpetuated his momentary experience and hoped to gain literary immortality based on a deeply held conviction that through such inscriptions, future readers would come to know and appreciate the writer’s authentic self. At the same time, the text altered the scene by shaping the perceptions of later travelers and guiding those who sought to follow in the footsteps of earlier talents. Often, local figures would request or commission such inscriptions by notable visi-

tors to signify the importance of a place. Certain sites thus became virtual shrines in the literary culture, eliciting further inscriptions through the centuries. The Cave of the Three Travelers (San-yu-tung), first written about by Po Chü-i (772-846) in 819,1 attracted another set of Three Travelers in the Sung, and was further inscribed by Lu Yu (1125-1210) in his A Journey into Shu (1170).*¹³

For many travel writers, excursions to places that had accumulated a literary tradition were encounters in which Nature was inextricably linked with language and history. Sung Lien’s (1310-1381) piece Bell Mountain (1361),* for example, is a veritable peregrination through the past, as along his path he notes places associated with events and writers who had preceded him. In such cases, the experience of the inscribed landscape predominated over the encounter with pristine Nature so important to many Western travelers. So pervasive was this mode that several later connoisseurs of the landscape protested against the overinscription of a scene. Yüan Hung-tao (1568-1610) criticized the excessive number of engravings on the Mountain That Gathers the Clouds (Ch’i-yün-shan) as a contamination of the mountain’s spirit.¹⁴ Fang Pao’s (1668-1749) account of Geese Pond Mountain (1743)* praised the purity of this inaccessible spot by noting that no other travelers had yet been able to engrave inscriptions there. But to most writers, the presence of Chinese characters in a scene was not considered a violation of Nature by the artifice of civilization. According to some myths, writing was believed to have originated from the observation of natural processes or animal tracks by ancient sages and was thus regarded as contiguous with the environment. The ordering and enhancing of reality through the artful application of language stood at the heart of the Chinese concept of culture (wen); it was, indeed, a core function of the ruling class of literati-officials.

In addition to having a purely aesthetic function, this textualizing of the landscape often accompanied social, political, military, and economic development. It was one way a place became significant and was mapped onto an itinerary for other travelers. By applying the patterns of the classical language, writers symbolically claimed unknown or marginal places, transforming their otherness and bringing them within the Chinese world order.¹⁵

Such inscriptions could actually result in the physical alteration of the landscape as it was transformed into a shrine with commemorative pavilions, gardens, and other features often designed to recreate a writer’s original description. Red Cliff in modern Huang-kang, Hu-pei, became such a site of pilgrimage in the centuries following Su Shih’s (1037-1101) two influential pieces written in 1082.* Among the structures erected at the site were a sacrificial hall to honor the writer and a pavilion to house copies of his original calligraphy. Recently, a statue of Su Shih himself was erected, and in 1982 an academic conference was held at the site to discuss his travel writings. Similarly, although the original location of Wang Hsi-chih’s (ca. 303-ca. 361) Orchid Pavilion, which he recorded in 353,* was in the intervening centuries forgotten, it was subsequently recreated outside modern Shao-hsing, Che- chiang, with a winding stream similar to the one Wang mentioned.¹⁶ Of course, it was not necessary literally to engrave one’s text at the site: producing a widely read account was often sufficient to gain the writer inclusion in the genius loci.

Engraved inscriptions were not only read by later travelers to the site, but were also widely reproduced in rubbings sold as souvenirs. Later calligraphers, moreover, reinterpreted earlier versions or rewrote them in their own styles, further disseminating these texts.¹⁷ A number of texts gained enormous prestige through rubbings of engravings of the original calligraphed versions. Wang Hsi-chih’s Preface to Collected Poems from the Orchid Pavilion (353)* was engraved many times and became the most influential model of the running mode of calligraphy, even though the original had long since disappeared (fig. 2). Likewise, one of Su Shih’s handwritten versions of his first piece about Red Cliff* survived and has been revered through the centuries as a masterpiece;¹⁸ it, too, was widely reproduced in numerous engravings and reinterpretations (fig. 3). Both these texts also established enduring painting traditions as artists over the centuries created conventional formats based on the scenes described. Scholars in a boat beneath a cliff inevitably signified journeying to Red Cliff; poets seated along a winding stream with floating winecups was instantly recognized as the gathering at the Orchid Pavilion. These two sister arts were also combined, with the texts of travel accounts being appended to images depicting the scene. The Ming painter Shen Chou (1427-1509), for instance, added such a text to the end of his 1499 handscroll of Chang’s Cave (Chang- kung-tung; fig. 45); and the Ch’ing artist Chin Nung (1687-1773) produced an album of twelve leaves in 1736 in which he illustrated scenes from famous travel accounts and inscribed the texts as colophons (figs. 20, 23). Lastly, both images and texts appeared in the decorative arts, applied to a wide range of objects; some of these motifs continue to be employed by Chinese artisans today.¹⁹

Compared to Western travel narratives, however, travel writing was more marginal within the Chinese literary canon. The journey was less central mythically to Chinese cultural experience, which is noted for lacking a definitive epic account like the Odyssey, nor did it play a major role in the development of the Chinese novel. Monumental examples of the explorer’s narrative, such as The Travel Diaries of Hsü Hsia-k'o (1613-1639),* stand out in the literary landscape like solitary peaks. Some of the most heroic journeys, including Cheng Ho’s (1371—1435) seven voyages to South Asia and Africa in 1403-1431, yielded only secret official reports, which subsequently disappeared, and no literary accounts.²⁰ Despite the inclusion of a number of travel accounts in the early prose anthology Finest Flowering of the Preserve of Letters (Wen-yüan ying-hua, 987), in this and most other influential collections travel writing was generically subdivided and subordinated to other categories.²¹ When included in the collected works of individuals, travel writing formed but a minute portion; genres such as memorials to the throne, epitaphs, biographies, essays, letters, and prefaces were the ones usually looked to for serious stylistic and thematic statements. The earliest extant anthology exclusively devoted to travel accounts is a handwritten manuscript from the fourteenth century, which contains the table of contents from an earlier collection dated 1243; at least by then, apparently, travel writing had begun to be regarded, by some, as an independent genre.²² Although scattered critics during the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties took note of the travel account, as late as the first half of this century the term yu-chi still had not appeared in the classical dictionaries Tz’u-yüan (1915) and Tz'u-hai (1938). It remained for modern Chinese anthologizers to argue for travel literature as a major prose genre in its own right and to reintroduce it to contemporary readers.²³

The traditional division of Chinese travel writing into history and belles lettres reflects a distinction between public, impersonal forms and more private modes that included the representation of the subjective self. This duality was further reinforced by the presence of two principle discourses in classical Chinese, which were combined in varying

Fig. 2.

Wang Hsi-chih (ca. 303-ca. 361), Preface to Collected Poems from the Orchid Pavilion (detail, original 353). From a rubbing of the Ting-wu series of engravings reproduced in Shu-tao ch’iian-chi, vol. 4: Eastern Chin (Taipei, 1976).

proportions within most texts. At one pole was the objective, moralizing perspective of historiography; at the other, a mode of expressive and aesthetic responses to the landscape derived from poetic genres that could be termed lyrical.

Historiography provided the earliest forms of narrative in China and continued to dominate most prose writing until the modern period.²⁴ Its primary function was to document human behavior in society within a framework of Confucian moral judgment, as a guide to readers involved in statecraft. The historian created an omniscient, third-person voice and a terse, unembellished style of prose. He typically defined the self from an exterior perspective, against a background of exemplary types enacting well-defined roles. Time in these accounts was conventionally represented by means of the recurrent cycles of Chinese chronology; space was charted along an axis emanating from the power center of the court to the margins of the provinces. As a writer, the historian was primarily a processor of information that he collected, evaluated, edited, and retold. He regarded himself as engaging in a self-effacing act of documentation, which allowed him effectively to transmit the meaning of events with the proper combination of factuality and literary embellishment. There was from the outset a

close connection between historiographical discourse and state power, in that the office of the Grand Historian (T’ai-shih) was originally hereditary. The court’s desire to dominate the writing of history was so intense that at times the private compilation of history was decreed to be illegal, with such acts, when discovered, even resulting in imprisonment. Thus, when a travel writer adopted the narrative persona of the historian, he was appropriating a potent form of literary authority. At the same time, because the conventions of historiography governed content, they tended to direct the writer’s concerns toward the public values and issues of official, court-centered culture.

Historiographical conventions dominate almost exclusively in the few extant examples of early travel writing; they also constitute the primary discourse in works informational in nature, such as guidebooks, records of cities, and accounts of journeys to foreign lands. It was not until the period of disunity during the Six Dynasties that a complementary, lyrical discourse began to appear in prose, expressing what Yu-kung Kao has defined as the quintessential ideals of selfcontainment and self-contentment in Nature.²⁵ The rise of lyric shih poetry, the rejection of public life by many writers, and the search for alternate spheres of being such as transcendence in Nature supported new, personal forms of literature apart from the political focus of the court. In contrast to historiography’s paradigms of totality, Chinese lyricism sought to represent an alternate vision. The lyric poet, operating from a more interior ground of being than the historian, often captured his momentary experiences of self-realization in descriptions of landscapes. In an autobiographical act, he signified an identification of his inner feelings (ch’ing) with the sensual qualities of scenes (ching), using highly imagistic language that often obscured the distinction between observer and object. Similarly, he explored a more subjective sense of time by coordinating shifting perspectives to evoke a vision of the universal Tao as a process of endless transformation.

Lyric travel writing ultimately emerged as the most literary means of representing a journey. Its essential character was defined by the incorporation of individual poetic vision within a narrative framework derived from historiographical discourse. Thus lyric travel writers, whose works are the major focus of this anthology, wore the dual mask of historian and poet (in fact, they were often writers of biographies and poetry as well). They created sublime, self-centered worlds— marginal places universalized—as substitutes for the politicized dynastic scene with its unstable and unpredictable power center. Indeed, the lyric travel account grew out of the tension between the public and private aspects of the self experienced by exiled officials, such as Yüan Chieh (719-772) and Liu Tsung-yüan (773-819) of the T’ang. These men’s achievement of one of the few genuinely autobiographical forms in Chinese prose was the watershed between a long period of development, when travel writing was dominated almost exclusively by historiographical concerns, and the later, mature phase of travel writing, which sought to inscribe the landscape with the perceptions of the self.

Early Chinese Travel Writing

Prior to the travel accounts and travel diaries of the T’ang and Sung, relatively few prose texts survive that are concerned with the representation of a journey. The Book of Documents (Shu ching, early-late Chou dynasty) contains mythicized descriptions of the ritualized tours of the ancient sage-king Shun:

In the second month of the year, he [Shun] made a tour of inspection to the east as far as Tai-tsung [i.e., T’ai-shan, the Supreme Mountain], where he made a burnt offering to Heaven and sacrificed to the mountains and rivers according to their importance [fig. 8]. He received the eastern nobles in an audience and put their calendar in order, standardized the musical pitches and the measures of length and volume as well as the five kinds of rituals. He was presented with the five tokens of rank, three kinds of silk, two living animals and one dead one; he returned the five tokens of rank to the nobles. After finishing his tour, he returned to his capital. In the fifth month, he made a tour of inspection to the south as far as the Southern Sacred Mount, to which he sacrificed in the same manner as at Tai-tsung. Likewise, in the eighth month, he made a western tour of inspection as far as the Western Sacred Mount. In the eleventh month, he made a tour of inspection to the north as far as the Northern Sacred Mount, where he sacrificed as he had in the west. Upon his return to the capital, he went to the Temple of the Ancestor and offered up an ox.²⁶

This passage indicates the earliest reasons for writing about travel: to document heroic achievements in ordering the political, spiritual, and material dimensions of the world and to provide a guide for later rulers.

These public themes are paramount in the earliest extant travel narrative of any length, The Chronicle of Mu, Son-of-Heaven (Mu T’ien- tzu chuan), whose earliest strata have been dated around 400 B.C.²⁷ It tersely chronicles an imperial tour by Emperor Mu of the Chou (r. 1023-983 B.c.) through his realm—an example of what David Hawkes has called itineraria, that is, representations of ritual progresses, as well as of imaginary or supernatural quests.²⁸ The ritual progress in particular is a circuit by a powerful figure such as a king or wizard through the zones of a symmetrical cosmos. Each zone is presided over by a god or political figure who confirms the traveler’s authority or acknowledges submission in ritualized encounters (fig. 4). The traveler ultimately returns to the power center of the capital having thus demonstrated his control of totality.

The Chronicle of Mu reads like a record of the public activities of the emperor by a court historian:

On the day chia-ivu, the Son-of-Heaven journeyed west. He crossed the hills of the Yü Pass.

On chi-hai, he arrived at the plains of Yen-chü and Yu-chih.

On hsin-chfou, the Son-of-Heaven journeyed north to the P’eng people. They are the descendants of Ho-tsung, Ancestor of the Yellow River. Duke Shu of P’eng met the Son-of-Heaven at Chih-chih. He presented ten leopard skins and twenty-six fine horses. The Son-of-Heaven commanded Ching-li to accept them.²⁹

The text constitutes the traveler as a man who completely dominates his environment. He demonstrates his control by journeying to distant locations by horseback and chariot, engaging in political and religious rituals, hunting, banqueting, accumulating and distributing tribute, judging his subjects, and receiving benefits in encounters with spiritual beings. Emperor Mu is largely represented as an impersonal function of the rituals of statecraft; there is little explanation in the text of his inner motivations. We do get a brief personal view when the emperor voices doubts about the moral correctness of his traveling and questions whether he will be judged by history as a profligate for leaving the capital. Here, the text seems to be answering the criticism of Emperor Mu in the Confucian classic The Tso Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chfun-chfiu Tso chuan)—that Emperor Mu wished to indulge himself by traveling throughout his kingdom.³⁰ The Tso Commentary adopted a negative attitude toward this behavior and praised the officials who remonstrated with him, persuading him (supposedly) to remain at home and die a natural death in his palace. This is the Confucian view. Unfortunately, the beginning of The Chronicle of Mu is missing, and the work provides no further statement of the emperor’s motivations.

Nevertheless, Emperor Mu’s concern with the issue of travel bespeaks a primal principle of Chinese political culture, what could be called the politics of centrality, in which power is believed to emanate from a fixed center and threatens to become dissipated when the center is destabilized and loses its ritualized authority. For the ruler to abandon the capital and travel for pleasure rather than necessity was a serious moral issue, for it meant that he risked losing dominance over the very margins he was visiting. Differing from the negative judgment of The Tso Commentary, The Chronicle of Mu quickly resolves this problem when the emperor is assured by a flattering knight that history will not criticize his desire to travel as long as he maintains the world in a proper state of order, which the ritualized encounters on his journey demonstrate.³¹

The Chronicle of Mu records an early act of inscribing the landscape when it states that after visiting the Queen Mother of the West and banqueting at the Jade Pond (fig. 4), "The Son-of-Heaven rode up to the Hsi Mountains where he engraved a record of his journey into the rock and planted a huai-tree, naming the place ‘Mountain of the Queen Mother of the West.’"³² In the ritual tours of emperors documented in the dynastic histories, such inscriptions enunciated praise of sagely rule, projecting the ruler’s extension of his authority and signifying his possession of the world.³³ Their ideological function was to project domination, while the required response of the reader was awe and submission.

The other major example of travel writing that has survived from early antiquity, Guideways through Mountains and Seas (Shan-hai ching, ca. 320 B.C.-A.D. 200), is also an anonymous work and is composed of several strata. Some parts of it appear to have been a guidebook for travelers through known territory; other parts seem to be a description of mythical lands unlikely to be visited. Both types of landscape are filled with fantastic beings.³⁴ The itineraries through known mountains in each direction note natural features, local objects of value, and the resident gods and how to propitiate them:

Another hundred miles east is Green Hill Mountain. On its south side is much jade; on its north side is much azurite. There is an animal here with the shape of a fox with nine tails. It makes a sound like a baby and devours men. By eating it, one can avoid evil forces. There is a bird here with the form of a dove. It makes a sound like men shouting. Its name is the Kuan-kuan. Wearing it at the waist will prevent delusions. The Ying River issues forth from here and flows south into the Chi-i Marsh. There are many red ju-fish, which have the form of a fish with a human face. They make sounds like mandarin ducks. Eating them will prevent skin disease. … The gods are in the form of birds with dragon heads. The proper sacrifice uses animals with hair and a jade chang-bhde, which are buried. The rice offering uses glutinous rice, a jade pi-disc, and hulled rice. White chien-straw is used for mats.³⁵

Those routes through surrounding regions termed Great Wilds (Ta- huang) contain a wealth of early mythology about the bizarre peoples and strange gods who inhabit these distant zones (fig. 5):

In the Great Wilds of the West there is a mountain named Ao-ao-chü, where the sun and moon set. There is an animal here with heads on the right and left named the P’ing-p’eng. There is Shaman Mountain. There is Valley Mountain. There is Golden Gate Mountain and a person named Huang-chi’s Corpse. There are single-wing birds who fly in pairs. There is a white bird with green wings, yellow tail, and a black beak. There is a red dog called Celestial Dog. Wherever he descends, war occurs. South of the Western Sea at the edge of the Shifting Sands beyond the Red River and before the Black River is a great mountain called K'un-lun. There is a god with the face of a human and the body of a tiger, with a white spotted tail, who lives here. Below, the depths of the Weak River surrounds the mountain; beyond is Fiery Mountain. Anything that is tossed up there bursts into flames. There is a person there who wears a headdress, has tiger teeth, the tail of a leopard, and lives in a cave named Queen Mother of the West. This mountain contains every kind of object. …³⁶

The traveler of the Guideways is never personified and can only be read as a function of the itineraries. In the chapters on relatively familiar territory, the care given to describe sacrificial offerings reveals a world in which the naive traveler is at risk unless he performs the proper rituals. In the chapters on the Great Wilds, by contrast, the prospective traveler is given no advice concerning sacrifices, and the routes in these chapters seem poorly defined, even unfeasible. For later readers, such as the lyric poet T’ao Ch’ien (365-427), it was precisely the exoticism of such territories that appealed to them, stimulating their fascination with the strange.³⁷

Fundamental historiographical frames of time and space in both these texts reappear as regular features of later travel writing. The Chronicle of Mu employs the chronology of the horary stems system, which encloses linear sequences within recurring cycles.³⁸ The Guideways utilizes the simplest way of representing spatial progression as a string of spheres—mountains or territories linked by a single road. In addition, the Guideways describes each mountain in the chapters on familiar territory using exactly the same categories of key features, thus creating a rhythmic repetition, an illusion of control over Nature in which the danger of the unexpected is absent and unseen spirits can be managed. In later travel writing, the tendency for writers to select the same categories of objects for scrutiny and conventionalize the basic elements of a scene can be read as a similar effort to enclose and order the world. Compared to their Western counterparts, later Chinese travel writers described remarkably few irrational, terrifying landscapes, bizarre or grotesque experiences, or journeys of unremitting physical suffering.

During this early phase, classical philosophers of the later Chou dynasty defined some of the basic ideological meanings of travel, meanings that continued to guide the perceptions of later writers. The Confucian school and the writer(s) of the Inner Chapters of the Chuang-tzu in particular asserted complementary visions of how travel affected moral and spiritual perceptions of the Tao, the nature of Nature and the ways of being in it, as well as the role of language.

Classical Confucianism articulated several views about travel from the standpoint of its program of self-cultivation and ruling the world.

As an ideology, Confucianism arose to reverse the disintegration of the centralized Chou feudal system due to the rapid mobility of new local elites. Order was to be restored by educating a ruling class of morally aware Noble Men (chün-tzu) who would reinstitute the patterns of ritual behavior (li) of the idealized sage-kings of the early Chou and remote antiquity. Li was largely antithetical to any concept of spontaneous, unconstrained movement based on personal desire. Travel by a ruler could be justified only as a pragmatic extension of the moral Tao from the political center—hence The Tso Commentary’s critique of Emperor Mu. Confucius (551-479 B.C.) himself is quoted implying that Mu’s desire to travel was a failure of the ruler to practice humaneness (jen) by "restraining the self and returning to li" (k’o-chi fu4i), which could have had dire consequences for the state.³⁹ Confucius’s own peregrinations in search of an enlightened ruler who would employ him have a negative connotation too: he traveled only because the world was in chaos, seeking to find his proper place in a stable power center. To the extent that perfect Confucian government was associated with temporal repetition of moral activity and the spatial stability of its rulers, purely personal travel in the context of statecraft was synonymous with destabilization and a loosening of the bonds of li.

The Confucius of The Analects (Lun-yü), however, found positive value in limited excursions into Nature to discover scenes of moral symbols that would illuminate the ideal qualities of the Noble Man. In what is perhaps the line most quoted in later Chinese travel writing, he said: The wise man delights in streams; the humane man delights in mountains.⁴⁰ This view of the self reading its perfected image in the landscape is a basic assumption that underlies not only Confucian but also later lyrical modes of travel writing. Indeed, this statement was often appropriated by later writers to defend their private, pleasurable journeys as proper acts of self-cultivation. Nevertheless, Confucius did not view Nature as an alternate sphere of subjective feeling within which the traveler could transcend the political world; his concept of beauty (shan) identified the aesthetic with the morally good. The landscape for him was thus a didactic scene where the Noble Man prepared himself for his proper role as a ruler at the center of the sociopolitical world.⁴¹

Related to the discovery in Nature of a mirror of the moral self is the idea that certain scenic views can provide a total perspective on the world. The Mencius (Meng-tzu) states that when Confucius climbed East Mountain (Tung-shan), he realized the relative insignificance of his home state of Lu; and when he climbed the Supreme Mountain (T’ai- shan), the empire appeared small.⁴² For Chinese travel writers, the ascension of mountains or other high points became a pervasive motif and often the climactic focus of their accounts. The descriptions were not of arduous conquests of death-defying heights, for most of the important Chinese mountains were well under six thousand feet, and even a hill, terrace, or pavilion might serve to provide the experience. Rather, the ascents were generally safe though sometimes demanding hikes to points offering scenic panoramas that writers represented as symbolic of an all-encompassing view of reality. The process of more grounded travel was often represented as yielding a series of partial perspectives indicative of the finitude of the human condition. But the heights of mountains were widely believed to be points of contact with Heaven itself, where the traveler could gain the grand view (ta- kuan).⁴³ When Fan Chung-yen (989-1052), in The Pavilion of Yüeh-yang (1046),* described the panorama of Grotto Lake (Tung-t’ing-hu) as a grand view, for instance, or the Ming prime minister Chang Chü- cheng (1525-1582) wrote in Transverse Mountain* that he had climbed to the summit to gain a grand view of the world, each sought to present his journey as a quest for Confucian sagehood.

Confucius also articulated another issue that lay at the heart of the act of literary inscription: the correspondence of name (minf) and reality (shih). When asked what he would put first if given the administration of the state of Wei, he replied, the rectification of names (cheng-ming) ⁴⁴ which he saw as fundamental to speech and action as well as to the institutionalization of ritual and punishments. In Confucian ideology, such naming was seen as a core function of the ruling class, who would employ the classical language to recover the moral structure of the golden age of the sage-kings. The travel writer as a Noble Man rectifying names is a persona that appears in a number of texts, particularly the subgenre of the valedictory travel account. Beginning with Han Yü‘s (768-824) celebration of a fellow exile’s character in The Pavilion of Joyous Feasts (804),* many writers inscribed the landscape as a scene of individual virtue, thereby seeking to praise worthy men, redress injustice, or restore the historical record while simultaneously constituting themselves as loyal Confucians. A frequent pattern at least since Yüan Chieh’s (719-772) The Right-hand Stream (ca. 765)* is the encounter of a traveler with a hitherto undiscovered or unappreciated scene, followed by his lyrical response to it and, finally, his appropriate naming of it.

In contrast to travel as a purposeful activity whose ultimate goal was the restoration of moral and political order, the Chuang-tzu presents travel as liberation from the unnatural constraints of society, a spiritualized venturing forth into the unrestricted realm of authentic being (tzu-jan) much like the self-generated movement of the Tao. If the purpose of the Confucian itinerary can be summed up in the ideals of self-cultivation and ruling the world, the phrase free and easy wandering (hsiao-yao yu)—the title of the first chapter of this work— became the bywords of all who, following the Chuang-tzu, sought escape from the strife of the dynastic scene. In a number of fables, tropes of floating on the wind or down a river serve to convey man’s natural, effortless participation in the Tao. Many of the characters are described as constantly on the move. The gigantic p'eng-bird metamorphoses from the k'un-fish and flies from the northern darkness to the Celestial Lake in the south, a trope for the continuum of the Tao as ongoing