Fixing Landscape_ A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three

FIXING LANDSCAPE COREY BYRNES A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges

FIXING LANDSCAPE Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.

FIXING LANDSCAPE COREY BYRNES A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges columbia university press New York

columbia university press publishers since 1893 new york chichester, west sussex cup.columbia.edu Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Wm. Theodore de Bary Fund in the publication of this book. Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Byrnes, Corey J., 1980– author. Title: Fixing landscape : a techno-poetic history of China’s Three Gorges / Corey Byrnes. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2018] | Series: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018017833| ISBN 9780231188067 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231547123 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Yangtze River Gorges (China)—History. Classification: LCC DS793.Y3 B96 2018 | DDC 951.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017833 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover image: Yang Jiechang, Crying Landscape (Yangzi River Dam), 2003. Image courtesy of the artist

CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Orientation xiii passage i. departure 1 part i. a landscape of traces 1. Tracing the Gorges 25 2. From Trace to Site 54 passage ii. one thousand li 88 part ii. reinscribing the three gorges 3. Chinese Landscape 93 4. Chinese Labor 130 pa ssage iii. one thousand years 160 part iii. for the record 5. A Record of the Trace 165 6. Ink in the Wound 198 pa ssage iv. part of the movement 235 Notes 241 Bibliography 287 Index 309

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS i still remember the first time i tried to articulate the half-formed ideas that inspired this project. At the end of my PhD qualifying exams, I explained to my committee—Andrew Jones, Paula Varsano, Pat Berger, and Robert Ashmore—that I wanted to write a dissertation that spanned two millennia, in which I could think comparatively about Tang poetry and contemporary film. It would have been easy for them to dismiss this plan as ill conceived. Instead, they listened carefully, took my ideas seriously, and encouraged me to pursue them. What I did not realize then was that they were also signing on without hesitation to the mammoth task of guiding me through this project. As my co-advisers, Paula Varsano and Andrew Jones have given me more of their precious time and energy than I am comfortable admitting. They remain my models for what it means to be a good colleague, an exemplary scholar, and a kind human being under even the most trying of circumstances. I am lucky that they remain my mentors, but far luckier that I can call them my friends. I have Dore Levy to thank for encouraging me

viii acknowledgments to apply to Berkeley, but also for introducing me to the wonders of Chinese poetry and feeding me so many delicious meals. Fixing Landscape would not exist without her. Many of the ideas that found their way into this book were developed in exchanges at Berkeley and beyond. Katrina Dodson, Emily Drumsta, Toby Warner, and Tristram Wolff joined me in my first (and only) dissertationwriting group. In reading the earliest version of the final chapter, Alan Tansman made a number of transformative interventions. I am indebted to Jason McGrath, whose very careful (and generous) reading of an early version of chapter 5 helped advance the dissertation at a key stage in its development. Thanks also to Michael Cherney and Yun-fei Ji—their art has sustained me through the long process of finishing this project. In one of the first (and hardest) seminars I took at Berkeley, Robert Ashmore gave me a sense of what it really means to read Du Fu. I am still in awe and still trying my best. In that seminar and others, I was privileged to learn from my fellow students—Roy Chan, Laurence Coddere, Menghsin Horng, Liu Xiao, Patrick Luhan, Lawrence Yang, Yueni Zhong, and many others. The winter after my exams, I was lucky to find a temporary home of unusual warmth with friends and family in Berlin—Lydia Brotherton, Marion Detjen and family, Gunnar Klack, Robyn Schulkowsky, and Eike Wittrock. Fixing Landscape really began to take shape during my time in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am eternally grateful to my colleague Michael Berry for his unstinting support through tough times. He is a great scholar and a remarkably kind man. Thanks also to Gillian Osborne, Brian Petit, and everyone else who helped make the Central Coast feel like home, if only for a short time. Northwestern University’s generous institutional support and unfailingly collegial intellectual community made finishing this book not only possible but also pleasurable. I am especially lucky to have had the mentorship of Laura Brueck as well as the support and guidance of Peter Fenves, Susannah Gottlieb, Laura Hein, Rajiv Kinra, Jules Law, Amy Stanley, and Paola Zamperini. Special thanks to all my colleagues in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and to Jean Deven for performing superhuman feats on an almost daily basis. To Patrick Noonan, my Berkeley friend and Northwestern colleague, I am lucky to share an office wall with you. In co-organizing a workshop on the Environmental Humanities through the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, I have had the pleasure of working with Tom Burke, Jill Mannor,

acknowledgments ix and Wendy Wall, who have created an intellectual world of rare warmth and rigor in Kresge Hall. To my workshop co-organizer Keith Woodhouse and to all the workshop stalwarts, you have done a great deal to make this a better book. Thanks also to Mario Aranda, Nadim Audi, Lydia Barnett, César BragaPinto, Sarah Dimick, Paul Fagan, Jun Hu, Michelle Huang, Rebecca Johnson, Andrew Leong, Nick Valvo, and many other friends and colleagues for making Chicago winters more than just bearable. A special thanks to Harris Feinsod, Emily Licht, and David Simon, old friends who went above and beyond to make a new city feel like home. A well-timed year at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center under the inimitable leadership of Homi K. Bhabha made the completion of this book possible. My sincere thanks to him for his radical hospitality and to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding my fellowship. To my fellows in the “Slow Violence” seminar—Anna Abramson, Betsy Beasley, Mark Geraghty, Callie Maidhof, Isaiah Lorado Wilner—your exceptional work is an inspiration. To the staff of the Mahindra Humanities Center—Steve Biel, Mary Halpenny-Killip, and Sarah Razor—I could not have asked for a kinder, more welcoming group of colleagues. A special thank-you to Andrea Volpe, the Mellon Seminar coordinator at the Center, for listening, understanding, and knowing when it was time for a drink. This project also benefited from the generous support of numerous other people at Harvard, especially Karen Thornber, who not only invited me to join important conversations about the Environmental Humanities, but also took the time to read my work with care; Eugene Wang, whose feedback on the final chapter helped me suss out the hidden ecology of my book; and David Der-wei Wang, who is as gracious as he is brilliant. During my time in Cambridge, I had the privilege of discussing my work with many exceptional scholars, including Arunabh Ghosh, Brian Lander, Stephanie LeMenager, Elizabeth Lord, Covell Meyskens, Anne Reinhardt, Shu-mei Shih, Amy Zhang, and Ling Zhang, all of whom pushed me to strengthen the interdisciplinary bones of my project, none more convincingly than Ling, an old friend from the other Cambridge and a true ally. Special thanks to my lunch partner Gillian Osborne, who kept me company in the attic of Warren House, and to Brian and Quinn for bringing much needed domestic joy into my life; to Kim Icreverzi, who read (and reread) chapter 5 at a crucial moment; to Daniel Callahan, for introducing me to Provincetown; to Jacob Moses, for taking me to swim in Walden Pond; and to David Francis, Joseph Lee, and Kris Trujillo for their excellent company.

x acknowledgments Laura Brueck, Christopher Bush, Peter Carroll, Peter Fenves, and Paola Iovene generously workshopped my manuscript at a late stage in its development; their perceptive feedback encouraged me to refine key aspects of my argument, and I have no doubt that Fixing Landscape is better thanks to their timely contribution. I am especially grateful to Paola Iovene, who kindly agreed to read my manuscript without ever having met me. Her continued guidance and kindness have been invaluable throughout the revision process. Thanks also to Ari Heinrich for his warm encouragement and to Ruth Mostern for her amazing generosity in reading (and greatly improving) the first two chapters of this book. My sincere thanks to Christine Dunbar of Columbia University Press for accepting this book and ushering it smoothly through the review and production processes, and to Christian Winting for his guidance on design and image-related issues. Thanks also to Kathryn Jorge, my production editor at Columbia University Press, and to Peggy Tropp, who expertly edited the manuscript, and to Ben Kolstad, who oversaw the day-to-day aspects of production. A special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers, who pleasantly surprised me by returning the manuscript only five weeks after I submitted it. Ross Yelsey, publications coordinator for Columbia University’s Weatherhead Institute, contacted me during my first year at Northwestern, when the book seemed impossibly far off. In the years since, he has been my guide through the mysterious world of academic publishing. I am grateful for his help and for the willingness of the Institute and its editorial committee to include my book in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute book series. Last but not least, I would like to thank my closest friends and family. Kathryn Crim, Katrina Dodson, Emily Drumsta, Andrea Gadbury, Rhiannon Graybill, Erin Klenow, Miriam Markowitz, Valeria Mogilevich, Ryan Murphy, Jerry Passannante, Lealah Pollock, David Simon, and Travis Wilds have made my life and this book better than it would otherwise be, and I am beyond grateful to them. To the Wolff-Ireland-Wilkie family, thanks for many restorative meals and walks in Vermont, Princeton, Providence, and London over the years. I look forward to more of the same in the decades to come. In the fall of 2000, my Uncle Mike and Aunt Marie welcomed me into their home in Beijing. Over the course of a long year, they fed, entertained, and supported me in innumerable ways. Their generosity has made this book possible. Thanks also to my departed grandparents and to my brother Kyle for giving me a sense of place that has shaped my approach to landscape in ways great and small. To my parents, who have supported me from the beginning, who let me leave

acknowledgments xi college and move to China, who have often wondered at my ability to convince institutions to pay me to travel, think, and write, I owe you more than I can really express. * Finally, this book is for Tristram. We met in May of 2003, as I was walking across the main green, my freshly bound undergraduate thesis in hand, and we have been inseparable ever since. He is the best person I know and this book lives becomes of him.

ORIENTATION a full technical and historical account of the three Gorges Dam project is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, my goal is to offer an alternative to conventional narratives about the dam—whether triumphalist or critical—and to seek its horizons of possibility in the millennia-long history of the Three Gorges region as a famous cultural and material landscape. Against the teleological thrust of standard chronologies, I present a series of overlapping and juxtaposed perspectives that reconsider the connections between a landscape constituted through poetry and painting and one reorganized by steel and concrete. For readers unfamiliar with either modern China or the standard history of the dam project, however, I have prepared a basic introduction to the key figures, texts, and events that I am recontextualizing and to which I refer frequently in what follows.1 1894 Sun Yat-sen 孫中山 (1866–1925), “father of the nation,” addresses a petition to the high-ranking Qing official Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 (1823–1901), offering his scientific expertise in support of

xiv orientation the waning dynasty. Sun writes of the almost magical power of electricity and introduces Li to the technology of the hydroelectric dam, then in its infancy, as a source of energy “that can be extracted without limit and used without depletion.” Sun does not succeed in presenting his petition to Li, though it is published later that year in the reformist missionary publication Globe Magazine (Wanguo gongbao 萬國公報).2 1911–1925 Sun Yat-sen consolidates the ideas that form his “Three Principles of the People” (Sanmin zhuyi 三民主義), an ambitious program of cultural, political, and infrastructural modernization. A detailed plan for the improvement of the Yangzi, including the damming of the Three Gorges, appears in this and a number of other published sources, including the English-language volume The International Development of China, first published in 1920. 1930s The Republican government of Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (1887– 1975) sponsors exploratory surveys of the Three Gorges, though the dam remains financially and technologically unfeasible. The Japanese also carry out surveys of the area during their occupation of eastern China. 1944–1947 John Savage (1879–1967), chief engineer of the United States Bureau of Reclamation, is invited to China to produce a series of proposals for the damming of the Yangzi. Savage, who led the design of the Hoover, Shasta, and Grand Coulee dams, deems the Yangzi project a “CLASSIC.” In 1945, the Chinese and United States governments sign a provisional contract for a loan of $3 billion for construction of the dam, though this contract is terminated in 1947, during the civil war that led to the Communist takeover of China. 1950s Following significant flooding in 1954, Chinese officials and scientists collaborate with Soviet experts to produce yet another plan for damming the Yangzi at the Three Gorges. In 1956, Mao Zedong 毛澤東 (1893–1976) swims across the Yangzi at Wuhan and pens one of his most famous poems, “Swimming,” which offers a vision of the spatial reorganization of the region. He continues to support the dam through the 1950s, though the catastrophic failures of the Great Leap Forward make construction impossible. 1966–1976 Mao launches the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which lasts until his death in 1976. Leaders continue to discuss the Three Gorges Dam during this chaotic period, but lack the resources to

orientation xv launch the project. In 1970, construction begins on the first low dam on the Yangzi River, the Gezhouba Dam 葛洲壩, located near the city of Yichang, just east of the Three Gorges. 1992–2012 In 1992, after decades of debate and planning by multiple governments, teams of scientists, and foreign advisers, the National People’s Congress, under the leadership of Jiang Zemin 江澤民 and Premier Li Peng 李鵬, approves construction of the Three Gorges Dam project. Ground is broken in 1994 and continues until the mid-2000s. The dam becomes fully operational in 2012.

FIXING LANDSCAPE

PASSAGE I DEPARTURE Setting Out at Dawn From the prow of a ship, Chinese tourists gaze out at the riotous greenery and jadeite water of a river gorge as traditional music plays and a tour guide recites a poem over a loudspeaker: 朝辭白帝彩雲間 At dawn depart Baidi midst many-colored clouds 千里江陵一日還 Across 1,000 li to Jiangling in a single day return 兩岸猿聲啼不住 From both banks the sound of gibbons crying without rest 輕舟已過萬重山 The light skiff has already crossed myriad-fold mountains

2 pa ssage i When the tour guide finishes her recitation, she praises the Three Gorges Dam project for “once again drawing the attention of the world” to this rugged stretch of river and mountains, as if to make up for a long lapse in interest. Meanwhile, a television on board the ship shows images of the Chinese leaders who first imagined and then finally built the dam—Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping—as well as footage of its early construction, which began in 1994. As the guide mentions the projected water level of the completed reservoir, a ship full of foreign tourists passes in the opposite direction. These nested journeys through the landscape of the Three Gorges take place in Jia Zhangke’s 賈樟柯 Still Life (Sanxia haoren 三峽好人), a 2005 film set in the city of Fengjie as its low-lying neighborhoods were being demolished to make way for the Three Gorges Dam reservoir. If the images that Jia brings together in this sequence speak to the modern history of the Three Gorges as a site of national construction, then the four-line poem that echoes through it testifies to a much longer history of imagining and representing the region. Anthologized for over a millennium and still memorized by countless schoolchildren, “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng 早發白帝城,” by the Tang Dynasty (618–907) poet Li Bai 李白 (701–762), is among the most famous depictions of the Three Gorges region.1 It charts a course from the fortified settlement that lies just west of the Gorges, through the towering mountains that separate the Sichuan Basin from the lakes and plains of eastern China, and on to the city of Jiangling in modern-day Hubei Province. Until recently, the Gorges, which extend for roughly 120 miles between Baidicheng in the west and the city of Yichang in the east, squeezed the Yangzi into a narrow, angry torrent, a string of treacherous rapids, boulders, reefs, shifting sandbars, and swirling currents. Before construction of the dam, the level of the river in the Gorges could rise seventy or eighty feet during major floods before spilling out over the countryside to the east, where it has killed countless millions over the centuries.2 In “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” the mountains that form the Gorges and the surrounding terrain appear only at the very end of the last line, not as part of the scenery, but as territory “already crossed.” We sense their presence in the third line, but only from the cries of gibbons echoing across the river. That the Gorges remain a palpable presence despite their absence reminds us that we are dealing with a cultural landscape so iconic—so fixed in the imagination—that it can easily signify from the edges of the poem. Li Bai does not need to describe this landscape because his Tang readers know to follow the gibbons’ cries back in time to Li Daoyuan’s 酈道元 (d. 527) Commentary to the Classic of Rivers (Shuijing zhu 水經注), the source of many of the

departure 3 images and much of the language that was used to describe the Three Gorges region in subsequent centuries: The two banks are chains of mountains with nary an opening. Layered cliffs and massed peaks hide the sky and cover the sun. If it is not midday or midnight the sun and moon are invisible. In summer, when the waters rise up the mountains, routes upstream and downstream become impassible. If there is a royal proclamation that must be spread quickly it sometimes happens that it departs Baidi at dawn and arrives at Jiangling at dusk, a distance of 1,200 li. Even if one were to ride a swift horse or mount the wind they could go no faster. When winter turns to spring, there are frothing torrents, green pools, and crystalline eddies that toss and turn reflections. On the highest peaks strange cedars grow in profusion, hanging springs and waterfalls gushing from their midst. Pure, luminous, towering, lush—there is so very much to delight. Whenever the weather clears or the day dawns with frost, within forests chill and by streams swift, one hears the long cries of gibbons high above. Unbroken and eerie, the sound echoes through the empty valleys, its mournfulness fading only after a long time. For this reason the fishermen [of the area] sing: “Of Badong’s Three Gorges, Wu Gorge is longest; when the gibbon thrice cries, tears drench your gown.”3 Li Bai’s allusions work because his readers already know the landscape as literary myth, but also because, his poem suggests, the physical landscape has not changed in the centuries since Li Daoyuan immortalized it.4 The same summer currents thunder through the gorges; the same gibbons cry mournfully into the chill of clear mornings. For most of its history, the Three Gorges region has existed in the cultural imagination as a remarkably stable collection of images, ideas, and myths. Only recently, with the rise of tourism on the Yangzi, have large numbers of people from around China and the world been able to travel to the region. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, tourists flocked to the gorges and their cities to see them before the completion of the dam and its reservoir, which required the demolition of thirteen major cities and the relocation of upwards of 1.5 million people. Before the rise of mass tourism and the infrastructure and media that support it however, the Three Gorges were first and foremost a literary landscape—more imagined than visited.

4 pa ssage i For “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng” to be recited in 2005, in the middle of the Gorges, with the dam nearing completion and its reservoir expanding, as though nothing had changed in nearly thirteen hundred years, demonstrates the enduring appeal of that landscape and the texts that shaped it. In reality, the tour guide’s use of the poem suggests a relationship between poetry and landscape very different from the one that made Li Bai’s original work possible. Its recitation in the place it describes establishes a connection between poem and landscape based less in the recognition of literary allusions than in the ability of tourists to retrace the poet’s journey in real time, even though that journey is mostly absent from his poem. Its appearance in Still Life, a film that captures the demolition of the modern city that now contains Baidicheng, forces us to confront the discrepancy between the air of timelessness that poems like “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng” still lend the landscape and the radical changes the region has undergone in the last two decades. As much as the tourists might imagine themselves reenacting the poet’s journey, the historical footage that plays on the boat and the images of displacement that fill the film tell a different story. The moment the tour guide shifts from poem to dam and reservoir, she reminds us that the shoreline separating mountain from river in Li Bai’s poem will soon be submerged, just as the swift currents that he described will be slowed. Against touristic images of pristine nature, of the landscape of Li Bai protected and promoted as a world-class tourist destination, Still Life presents a landscape of spatial and social ruination. * Fixing Landscape maps the many points of connection between the seemingly timeless landscapes of the past and the spatial production of modern and contemporary China. We have become habituated to seeing the former as the sacrificial victim of the latter, but this book moves beyond simple narratives of loss to show how the recent reshaping of China as a modern nation-state is grounded not only in the political and economic transformations of the last few centuries, but also in the traditions that preceded them and against which they have so often signified. The story I tell here is not of a hitherto obscured cultural continuity, however, but of the shifting representational and spatial forms that have actively produced the Three Gorges as a famous landscape over the course of more than two millennia. Though the Three Gorges Dam has already been built, its reservoir filled, and many residents of the region displaced, this remains an urgent story. As the scene of touristic wonder from Still Life shows, from certain angles the landscape of the Gorges looks unchanged. The level of the Yangzi has risen by close to six hundred feet, but the mountains that form the Gorges are more

departure 5 than three thousand feet high and the river still narrows dramatically when it enters the Qutang Gorge (Qutang xia 瞿塘峽) east of Fengjie. Even Baidicheng is still standing. No longer a promontory, it is now an island, its banks reinforced with concrete to protect them from the enormous water pressure of the reservoir. The Gorges have been flooded but not erased; they remain aweinspiring. With the passage of time, this sense of awe will make it harder to remember what has been lost—not only the sights, sounds, and ecosystems of an undammed river and the fields, farms, homes, and relics of the people who occupied its banks, but also knowledge of the river as something enduring and changeable, a figure for and a site of history’s flux. Fixing Landscape recovers the fluidity of the Three Gorges as a cultural concept and physical reality that has been shaped over time, inscribed and reinscribed to support shifting values. My approach is inspired in part by what Ann Laura Stoler calls “concept-work,” a critical method that rejects stability “as an a priori attribute of concepts.”5 By considering the Three Gorges as a concept that is “provisional, active, and subject to change,” we remain sensitive to its multiplicity and the frequency with which it has been reinscribed to bear new meanings that are, more often than not, grounded in myths of cultural stability.6 The stability of the Three Gorges as a cultural, geographical, and national landscape is an effect, a product of physical and representational processes that have homogenized and simplified the region. These processes have not only facilitated the region’s cooptation by the state, but also obscured how the poetic and pictorial landscapes of the past relate to both the Three Gorges Dam project and the contemporary works of art it has inspired. This book refuses to take the Three Gorges as a given—whether historical, cultural, or even geographical—so that we might better understand how landscape emerges from the interaction of the representational and the physical. To readers interested in technical histories of hydropower and state building in China, my approach may seem unorthodox, but I encourage them to read on and take a closer look at the cultural and aesthetic grounds of our material entanglements. Poems do not build dams, but this book shows that the Three Gorges Dam would not exist as we know it without them. To do this, Fixing Landscape takes seriously the power that supports the Three Gorges Dam’s massive reorganization of space and the power of the landscape traditions that the region has inspired. By tradition, I have in mind neither the academically debunked but still popular vision of an unbroken lineage of cultural production based on a shared set of techniques, forms, or themes nor an “invented traditions” critique of that idea.7 Instead, I treat tradition the way a poet such as Li Bai treats his own poetry—as an iterative

6 pa ssage i form that draws on the past but redefines it with each iteration. Holding on to tradition might seem to run counter to the concept of iterability (and hence to go against the Derridean grain), but it allows us to discuss the workings of borrowed language and shared images beyond the old oppositional discourse of tradition versus modernity.8 By focusing on tradition as a process of incremental reinvention that gains cultural potency by maintaining some resemblance to an imagined past, I hope to further bridge some of the many divides that separate the study of premodern, modern, and contemporary culture in the place that we now call China. The forms of representation I discuss here are part of a tradition not only because they draw on a shared cultural vocabulary, but also because they reinstantiate landscape in response to shifting historical conditions and forms of power. To better understand how the Three Gorges has served as an important site for the creation and contestation of Chinese traditions, I have produced a book that ranges over more than two millennia and weaves premodern accounts of famous sites and figures together with modern and contemporary representations of the same places and people. Part I, which moves between the Tang, Song (960–1279), and Qing (1640–1911) dynasties and the present day, shows not only how the Three Gorges landscape was once defined by the fading and often ambiguous traces of historical and mythological figures but also how anxieties about the loss of those traces inspired attempts to “fix” them in and as landscape. Part II centers on the introduction of radically new ways of seeing, representing, and moving along the Yangzi in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It was during this period that the Three Gorges were inscribed as a “Chinese landscape,” first through the cartographic imagination of Western travel writers, explorers, and amateur scientists and then through a nationalist discourse of modernization. Part III centers on contemporary filmmakers and visual artists who documented the transformation of the Three Gorges region in the lead-up to completion of the dam. These artists responded to the nationalist embrace of a development scheme that began as an imperialist project of mapping and penetrating the Chinese interior by reaching back to the premodern traditions that I describe in Part I. The three parts of this book explore the complex and often elusive relationship between the art and science of landscape and the acts of landscaping that have indelibly shaped the Three Gorges region. Though they unfold chronologically, they do not tell a linear story. Each chapter is a microcosm of the project as a whole, a constellation of premodern, modern, and contemporary sources, and a melding of material and symbolic ways of engaging with landscape. Read in dialogue with one another, these diverse sources help us

departure 7 navigate the problems we face in confronting a landscape as richly overdetermined as the Three Gorges region is; they show us, for instance, how an eighth-century poem can change our understanding of a twenty-first-century film about a socialist experiment in spatial production developed in part by the American Bureau of Reclamation. To further work against the pull of linear narratives, I have included a sequence of “passages” after parts I, II, and III that lead us back through Li Bai’s “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng.” Like a recurring stratum in the sedimentary record of the landscape’s representational composition, this poem’s repetition as a quintessential expression of Chinese culture continues to lend the Three Gorges landscape an air of timelessness and stability. Its repetition in Fixing Landscape, however, is meant not only to destabilize conventional understandings of the entity that we call the Three Gorges, but also to inspire new ways of thinking about tradition as both concept and iterative practice. This is in some ways a methodological experiment, but I believe it is the method the topic demands. There are few places where the past and the present, the aesthetic and the material, have come together so intimately and violently as in the Three Gorges; this requires new ways of thinking and writing. My hope is that this approach will offer readers in both Chinese studies and neighboring fields new methods for rethinking spatial configurations across the globe with similarly storied cultural meanings. By bringing together genres and media normally segregated from one another, shifting between micro- and macro-temporal frames and intercutting historical moments, I have situated the dam project as an environmentally destructive and socially disruptive structure of “real-world” action and thought inextricably linked to the images and metaphors that constitute the Three Gorges as landscape. That the aesthetic may be an unacknowledged accomplice to material and political worlds is easy to claim, but harder to show; this book is, among other things, an illustration of this claim and a sourcebook for scholars working through similar problems in other real and representational worlds. Whence the Three Gorges (Dam)? A source of power for a flailing empire, a boon to the economy of the nation, a way of fixing the faults of nature—for a century, the Three Gorges Dam has been both a mirror and a cure for the anxieties of the men who imagined it. At 1.4 miles long, more than six hundred feet high, and with a reservoir that stretches four hundred miles, it exists in the realm of the mathematical

8 pa ssage i sublime, a testament not only to China’s wealth and power, but also, as some would have it, to the spirit of its people (figures i.1–i.3). For those opposed to the project, it has appeared otherwise: as an environmental and social catastrophe, uprooting people, destroying cities and villages, and ravaging the ecosystems of the world’s third-longest river.9 The embodiment of the Chinese spirit stands against the erasure of local culture; the generation of hydropower against the sovereign power of the state; the aesthetics of the figure i.1 The Three Gorges Dam in operation. See also color plate 1. Source: iStock/Getty Images figure i.2 Area affected by the Three Gorges Dam and its reservoir Chengdu Chongqing Fengdu Wanxian Lesser Three Gorges The Three Gorges Three Gorges Dam Reservoir Fengjie Three Gorges Dam Wushan (Mt . Wu) Yichang Wuhan Jiangling Zigui Changsha Nanjing Shanghai Baidicheng

departure 9 engineered against the beauty of a natural landscape. For most, the dam is a Manichean figure, black or white; reality, as always, is a grayer affair. This book does not weigh the benefits of the Three Gorges Dam against its costs. It treats the project first and foremost as a social, environmental, and cultural problem of massive proportions. The dam and its reservoir have indelibly inscribed the power of the state onto the surface of the earth. Its environmental and social consequences are still coming into view and will follow the Chinese people for centuries, if not millennia, to come. They constitute what Rob Nixon calls an “attritional catastrophe . . . marked above all by displacements—temporal, geographical, rhetorical, and technological displacements that simplify violence and underestimate, in advance and in retrospect, the human and environmental costs.”10 If, as Nixon argues, “such displacements smooth the way for amnesia, as places are rendered irretrievable to those who once inhabited them,” this book is an aide-memoire, but one that reconfigures how we see the present and reimagines how we might see the future by tracing the displacements of the Three Gorges Dam into the distant past and back again, into a strange new world just now forming, where memories of the past become haunting visions of the future.11 While I am concerned with what the dam has done, and will address artistic responses to it in the final part of Fixing Landscape, one of my primary concerns is how it came to be, in both the short and (very) long term. How did this particular dam become the Three Gorges Dam? What does it mean to modify the word “dam” with the geographical designation “Three Gorges,” and how does the resulting name link an engineered structure to the rich cultural history of this region? I contend that rather than violently severing the links between aesthetic landscapes and physical lands, the dam reinforces them, even as it ends certain ways of seeing and moving through the Gorges. This is in no way an attempt to wash the dam in the healing waters of tradition—they are not necessarily salutary—but rather an effort to show not only how a geological formation along the Yangzi River became the Three Gorges, but also how the Three Gorges themselves became both a national “Chinese landscape” and a locus of “Chinese traditions.” These are neither unidirectional nor completed processes. Attending to the multiplicity of the Three Gorges as landscape and concept raises fundamental questions about how to define the traditional in contemporary China, a pressing task when both the political establishment and independent artists are appropriating Chinese traditions to promote radically different interests. If the Three Gorges are especially attractive as a site of political inscription and artistic expression, it is due in part to the mysterious qualities long

10 pa ssage i associated with the region. Depictions of the Gorges in literature, painting, and fi lm abound with supernatural fi gures, clouds and rains that coalesce into beautiful goddesses, howling gibbons, and wildly changeable currents. In early geographical texts, writers even argued about where the Gorges began and ended and which sections of the river should be counted among the three. 12 When the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu 杜甫 (702–772), who is central to the story I tell in chapters 1 and 2, confronts the towering mountains that form Kuimen 夔門, the western gate of the Gorges, he invokes these debates by posing and immediately answering a rhetorical question: 三峽傳何處 The Three Gorges—from where do they come down to us? 雙崖壯此門 Paired palisades secure this gate 13 According to a widely repeated gloss, Du Fu is toying with his readers by invoking old textual debates to ask, “Where, according to tradition, are the figure i.3 Side-by-side satellite images from 1993 ( left ) and 2016 ( right ) show the extent of the Three Gorges Dam reservoir aft er completion of the dam. Source : U.S. Geological Survey

departure 11 Three Gorges?” 14 The third character in the opening line, chuan 傳, generally refers to the transmission of scholarly learning, moral precepts, modes of governance, and esoteric practices rather than the continuity of a physically extended landmark. It is only by bracketing this interpretation and opting for an unconventional translation of the poem’s fi rst line, however, that we can account for the spatial logic generated by the couplet’s parallelism. While Du Fu is certainly alluding to competing textual traditions, the argument for translating chuan as “according to tradition” is undermined by the transitive verb zhuang 壯 (to strengthen or secure something), which appears in the same position in the second line. As the title of the poem—“The Two Palisades of Qutang 瞿塘兩崖”—reminds us, it is the cliff s of Kuimen that secure the gorges, just as it is the Three Gorges that “come down” or “issue” from this specifi c spot. The strangeness of Du Fu’s use of chuan is easily smoothed over by translation and our reliance on explanatory commentaries. To disregard it, however, is to miss an all-too-fl eeting opportunity for exploring how the textual frames the physical. In both the second line of the fi rst couplet and the next couplet,

12 pa ssage i the textual ambiguities to which Du Fu alludes are already gone, overridden by the disorienting monumentality of Kuimen: 入天猶石色 Entering the sky—still the color of stone 穿水忽雲根 Piercing the river—suddenly the roots of clouds That traditions of classifying this imposing landscape clashed must have seemed strange to Du. Formed by towering mountains on either side of the Yangzi just east of modern Fengjie, the gatelike Kuimen channels the river’s surging waters into the narrow confines of the gorges, beyond which they enter the network of lakes and channels that make up the middle and lower Yangzi before flowing into the East China Sea near modern-day Shanghai. As entry to the Three Gorges, Kuimen marks the treacherous boundary separating the riches of Sichuan—the “Land of Heaven’s Storehouse” (Tianfu zhi guo 天府之國)—from eastern China and the world beyond. Despite the grandeur of the landscape that Kuimen opens onto, tourists who travel along the Yangzi today may still find themselves living out the ambiguous grammar of Du Fu’s lines, confused about where the Three Gorges end and begin. The Three Gorges—Qutang, Wu (Wu xia 巫峽), and Xiling (Xiling xia 西陵峽)—are in fact made up of multiple subgorges, each with its own evocative name—Bellows Gorge (Fengxiang xia風箱峽), Military Texts and Precious Sword Gorge (Bingshu baojian xia 兵書寶劍峽), Ox Liver and Horse Lung Gorge (Niugan mafei xia 牛肝馬肺峽), to name a few. Along a tributary that feeds into the Yangzi at Wushan one even finds Three Little Gorges (Xiao sanxia 小三峽), once famous for their crystalline waters, now made murky by the reservoir. In Du Fu’s time, as now, the neatness of the Three Gorges designation and the seeming solidity of its mountains belie a murkiness on the ground that distracts us from changes—small and great—not only in how the meaning and power of the landscape have been inscribed, transmitted, and contested over millennia, but in how the physical landscape has been altered to suit human needs. The neatness of the Three Gorges designation is the product of a process that rejects the spatial, cultural, and even ethnic messiness of the past for the political and touristic expedients of the present. Fixing Landscape recovers some of that messiness by paraphrasing Du Fu’s question: whence the Three Gorges? It treats the Gorges not as a uniform figure moving ineluctably toward the status of national landscape, but as a surface open to the inscription of personal and political desires and a constantly shifting concept that simultaneously attracts and repels attempts to “fix” it. To fix the landscape is not only to unify its heterogeneous qualities or

departure 13 to preserve and stabilize historical sites, but also to try to improve the Yangzi as a source of power and a route for travel and trade by blocking it behind a wall of concrete and steel. In recounting how people have gone about trying to fix the landscape, this book also shows how the landscape has resisted being fixed, how it has maintained a wondrous multiplicity and changeability. In this I follow Du Fu, who characterized the area around Kuizhou 夔州, the city directly to the west of Kuimen, as having a “changeable nature,” a land of clouds, winds, rains, and mists, a landscape fragmented, obscured, but ultimately made new by its transformations: 江城含變態 This Yangzi city has a changeable nature 一上一回新 Once I climbed, now I return, finding all made new15 It is precisely this changeability that the myth of the Three Gorges as national landscape, indelibly fixed as an aerial vista on the back of the ten-yuan banknote (figure I.4), rejects. About Landscape In shaping this book on the Three Gorges as landscape, I have tried to synthesize methods and critical frames gleaned from geography, postcolonial studies, landscape studies, and art history with scholarship on premodern figure i.4 Ten-yuan note: looking east through Kuimen, with Baidicheng in the lower left and the Three Gorges extending into the distance. See also color plate 2.

14 pa ssage i Chinese aesthetic traditions. If the former disciplines have provided a critical language for reframing landscape culture as a force for spatial production, the latter has offered a clear sense of the history of Chinese landscape as an aesthetic and ideological form. While I use the English term “landscape” for convenience in the chapters that follow, what I am talking about is really a hybrid concept—landscape/shanshui 山水—that encompasses not only premodern traditions centered on the Three Gorges and the modern landscaping of the region, but also the interaction of the two in the official discourse surrounding the dam and in artistic responses to it. The literal meaning of the Chinese phrase shanshui 山水—is “mountains and water.” Before the seventh century, shanshui described the coexistence of these two elements rather than a generalized “landscape,” which is how the term is conventionally translated. In premodern poetry, shanshui operates as a spatial organizing principle for balanced depictions of the physical world and a symbolic method of conveying internal states, qualities, and religious beliefs. The phrase was adopted as a generic term for a category of painting only in the Tang Dynasty. In classical Chinese texts before and after the Tang, an aesthetically pleasing view is usually described in visual terms as a scene or prospect (jing 景), not a shanshui. In Chinese today, shanshui remains closely associated with pictorial or poetic landscapes done in a recognizably premodern style, while the modern word fengjing 風景 is used to refer to both physical and artistic landscapes produced in a Western style (e.g., fengjinghua 風景畫, or “landscape painting”).16 Though representations of the physical world appear in some of the earliest extant examples of Chinese painting, most scholars trace the rise of shanshui as an independent pictorial genre to the end of the Tang and beginning of the Song dynasties (early to mid-tenth century).17 Images of towering mountains, gnarled pines, and bucolic scenes of fishing villages and eremitic retreats evolved from earlier forms to support the new political and personal identities that defined the postaristocratic order of the Song.18 Rather than mere setting or backdrop, shanshui came not only to serve as a virtual site for religious and philosophical practices of self-cultivation, but also to promote the Neo-Confucian belief in the correspondence between the order of the physical and human realms.19 In images of mountains that embodied the ideal monarch and ancient pines that expressed the loyalty of literati, certain shanshui painters turned Confucius’s famous dictum—“The wise delight in waters, the benevolent delight in mountains 知者樂水, 仁者樂山”—into a model approaching pictorial allegory.20 Art historical and literary scholarship of the last two decades has radically reshaped our understanding of shanshui painting and poetry. Rather

departure 15 than simply an emblem of Chinese ideas about “nature”—a modern concept that was misleadingly translated using the ancient philosophical and cosmological term ziran 自然 beginning in the mid-nineteenth century—shanshui has come into view as a dynamic representational form.21 Martin Powers and Foong Ping have helped recover the ideological, political, and bureaucratic origins of shanshui painting in the Northern Song Dynasty, while Lothar Ledderose has offered a provocative theory of landscape’s origins in early religious iconography.22 In literary studies, Paul Kroll and Stephen Owen have undermined the “nature” of medieval Chinese landscape poetry by showing how subjective experiences of the physical world were filtered through texts, producing what Kroll calls “lexical landscapes and textual mountains,” and Owen, “bookish landscapes.”23 More recently, Paula Varsano has offered an important corrective to Kroll’s and Owen’s influential work by drawing attention to how vision and direct experience remained central to landscape poetry despite its textual character.24 These and other scholars of Chinese poetry and painting have illuminated the symbolic power of landscape/shanshui and its relation to subjective experience. Yet their work has not always accounted for the innumerable ways that repeated actions and habits combine to form everyday landscapes or for the mechanisms by which landscape ideas come to act materially in the production of space.25 In the first case, landscape is a lived phenomenon, the gradual and shifting product of paths taken and fields hoed over years, decades, centuries. Scholars working in a range of disciplines have traced the genesis of such “vernacular landscapes” while also describing their frequent cooptation or destruction by powerful political and economic forces.26 Throughout this book, I pay careful attention to the often violent relationship between vernacular and official landscapes. In the second case, which is of special concern here, landscape is more than a symbolic mode or a mirror of the natural world; it is also a cultural practice that actively changes the physical world—landscape is also a verb. When W. J. T. Mitchell first made this claim in his 1994 book Landscape and Power, he drew implicitly on ideas about space that had been percolating for decades in Marxist and Foucauldian approaches to geography.27 Scholars building on the work of Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja have focused mostly on urban space or questions of regional and global uneven development under capitalism and imperialism, but their insistence on linking the social, representational, and spatial together offers an important starting point for my approach to landscape over the course of this book.28 In Part II of Fixing Landscape, I combine methods of spatial analysis borrowed from landscape studies, critical geography, and postcolonial studies

16 pa ssage i in order to reframe the contemporary spatial reorganization of the Yangzi in terms of China’s colonial and imperial histories. I argue that the introduction of various spatial and representational technologies—from photography and mapmaking to travel writing and tourism—that supported the “opening” of the Chinese interior in the second half of the nineteenth century marked the proximate, if not ultimate, horizon of possibility for the Three Gorges Dam project. By textually and visually fixing the volatile Yangzi according to the standards of modern science and geopolitics, these technologies made it possible to reconceptualize the river as a stable geographical entity and, eventually, a natural resource that could be harnessed to produce energy. Anti-imperialist motivations notwithstanding, the development of the Yangzi by the Republican and Communist governments continues and in many ways perfects a partial and abortive attempt by foreign powers to master Chinese territory and resources. Aspects of this part of my story will sound familiar to students of imperial knowledge production in other parts of the world. Landscape representation, geography, and cartography have been understood for decades as ways of seeing the world as intimately bound up with the extractionist and expansionist ideologies of capitalism and imperialism.29 I treat these spatial technologies as offering not just visual prospects, but also material ones that are actively produced as objects of exploitation. Although China was never fully colonized, the workings of imperial technology and discourse remained fully operable in China. It is, as Rey Chow wrote more than twenty years ago, “in spite of and perhaps because of the fact that [China] remained ‘territorially independent,’ [that] it offers even better illustrations of how imperialism works—i.e., how imperialism as ideological domination succeeds best without physical coercion, without actually capturing the body and the land.”30 There is, of course, more than one way to “actually” capture the land, just as there is more than one type of imperialism. The construction of China in the imperial imagination has had significant material effects that do not necessarily fit within the normal sequence of colonial conquest, expansion, and decolonization. What happened in Taiwan, Korea, and India or across the South American and African continents is different from what happened in China, but China was still an important site for perfecting imperial technologies and aesthetic forms. Imperialism and colonialism in China are often understood in terms of “free trade,” the semicolonial occupation of treaty ports, or, in the case of Manchuria, settler colonialism. What makes the “opening” of the upper Yangzi so important to our understanding of how imperialism worked (and

departure 17 continues to work) in China is that it combined territorial and commercial interests with a nascent discourse of resource imperialism. European, Japanese, and American powers introduced ways of seeing the natural world as a source of extractable resources that could be captured as part of an imperial enterprise or kept under the control of a sovereign nation-state. In their struggle to establish China as a viable nation-state, both the Qing and Republican governments embraced forms of knowledge that made extractionist imperialism possible, even if they were never in a position to fully exploit the Yangzi.31 This form of imperialism lives on not only in the development of the Yangzi and other rivers in southwestern China (many of which flow into south and southeast Asia), projects that blur the line between national landscape and imperial prospect, but also in China’s global search for resources.32 For China to “see like a [modern] state” it first had to see like a modern imperial power.33 Keeping in view the “durability” of colonial and imperial dispositions, which reappear as so many “partial, distorted, and piecemeal” effects, allows us to look beyond the founding myths of the dam project as well as other narratives of origin and rupture that continue to segregate the “past” from the “present.”34 Trace Work Fixing Landscape has been shaped by each of these rich approaches to the study of the representation, transformation, and exploitation of the earth. Perhaps its greatest influence, however, comes from two seemingly simple insights: First, the word “landscape” is an inherently ambiguous term that refers not only to a demarcated stretch of land that can be encompassed visually but also to the artistic framing and depiction of such a landscape. Second, our tendency to see these two landscapes as separate and stable concepts establishes a misleading hierarchy between the physical and the representational while obscuring the ambiguities that define their relationship. “Land” does not precede landscape; it is something already transformed, framed in visual and artistic terms, viewed from certain angles and not others, shaped by our experiences of other places and images. The physical land that appears at first glance as the raw material for artistic landscapes is always already artistic, particularly in culturally important places like the Three Gorges. To paraphrase Denis Cosgrove, we have inherited a way of seeing the world as landscape.35 This now-familiar conception of landscape was developed in the context of European and American culture; to make it productive in the story I tell here, I have refracted it through the social and historical lenses of shanshui while also

18 pa ssage i triangulating these two concepts with a third figure—ji 跡 (also written 迹 and 蹟), or trace—which appears at the foundations of the Chinese tradition. At its most basic, ji is a “footprint,” an impression on the earth that combines negative space and physical outline to show that someone has stepped in a particular spot. It is a mark of presence that signifies through absence; it is materially empty but culturally full. The footprint is depicted as a generative force in a number of early myths, including the Book of Odes’ (Shijing 詩經) account of the birth of Hou Ji 后稷, ancestor of the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 bce) royal house, who was conceived when his mother “trod on the big toe of God’s [Di 帝] footprint.”36 Footprints also figure at the mythological origin of the Chinese writing system, which was supposedly modeled by the ancient sage Cang Jie 倉頡 on the tracks of birds (niaoji 鳥跡).37 These marks are not simply footprints, but also accidental textual inscriptions—the very first—a prelinguistic script that inspired the invention of the Chinese writing system. In both cases, the trace of the foot produces cultural narratives and forms that are themselves productive, whether of imperial legitimacy or textual tradition. Ranging from the monumental to the microscopic, the traces that follow these mythical footprints are fundamentally paradoxical, simultaneously full (shi 實) and empty (xu 虛), present (you 有) and absent (wu 無). They index the moment and place of their creation and the presence of their creators, but only through the absence of the creator and the passage of time. They materialize the passage of time through decay, gaining in historical power and symbolic presence as they fade; even after they are totally effaced, they linger in the form of surrogate traces (marks adjacent to or commemorating the original trace). As an historically and culturally important landscape, it is inevitable that the Three Gorges region should be considered a palimpsest of such traces. But it is also a single, monumental trace: According to Chinese mythology, the Yangzi, along with all the rivers of China, were dug out by the deity turned founding emperor of the Xia Dynasty (the first dynasty in Chinese history), Yu the Great 大禹, sometime in the late third millennium BCE. For millennia, the Gorges have been described in poetry and prose as traces of Yu’s dredging: “As for the Gorges of eastern Ba, they were dredged and bored by the Lord of Xia. Sheer cliffs that soar 10,000 zhang high, like a wall they stand, streaked and striated.”38 In this book, landscape/shanshui is a way of seeing the world as a site of inscription constituted by innumerable ji/traces and acts of tracing, whether historical (landmarks, ruins, monuments) or aesthetic (poems, travelogues, paintings), which stand always in the shadow of the “traces of Yu” (Yuji 禹跡).

departure 19 This approach resonates with Paul Carter’s notion of “dark writing,” the traces of human movements that are so often erased from contemporary renderings of the world, but that constitute “the way in which we figure forth the places we inhabit.”39 To follow traces in a place like the Three Gorges is to “figure forth” the landscape by participating in an endless retracing, covering the same territory that others have covered, and thus touching a range of pasts that extend far beyond those that immediately precede you. Reading the world through the dark writing of these traces allows one “to associate formerly distant things on the basis of some imagined likeness . . . [and] to draw together things formerly remote from one another.”40 It is the capacity of the trace to “draw together things” that makes it possible to write this book not as a strictly linear history of representations of the Three Gorges, but as a juxtapositional account of landscape as the product of overlapping and intersecting traces and acts of trace making.41 Tracing the Techno-Poetic Landscape Written in the long shadow cast by the completed Three Gorges Dam, Fixing Landscape might appear elegiac—a lament for what once was and could have been—but this is not a work of mourning. I believe that the people and environments of the Three Gorges deserve our anger over the destruction caused by the dam, but the landscape traditions centered there have not died. If anything, they have grown stronger, richer, and stranger in the face of change. What we are witnessing in the artistic responses to the dam project that I describe in chapters 5 and 6 is not an ending, but rather the beginning of new ways of seeing and being in the world, indebted to the past but looking forward to an uncertain future.42 What will become of these new ways of seeing and being is hard to predict. If the past is any guide, they will confront, but also conceivably feed, the powers that brought them into being. Landscape aesthetics are not necessarily benevolent. As a constellation of ideas “embedded in social practices,” the culture of landscape can become a powerful “material force” for historical change, both good and bad.43 One of the arguments of this book is that poetry, film, painting, cartography, travel writing, photography, and other forms of landscape are not simply representational modes but material forces for spatial change. This claim has a structure that will sound familiar to postmodern ears, but one that has also been easier to repeat than to substantiate. Here, through a series of deeply researched close readings of phase states in the transformed

20 pa ssage i yet enduring cultural landscape of the Three Gorges, I show that such aesthetic forms have long perpetuated ideas that either contribute directly to environmental ruin or make effective action against threats to the environment more difficult. The complex and often ambiguous interplay between literature and the environment has become the focus of serious scholarly interest, as, for example, in Patricia Yaeger’s focus on the “real world consequences” of literary tropes that “encourage humans to treat [the world] as an inexhaustible storehouse of goods”; Timothy Morton’s critique of nature writing as a form of phenomenological “eco-mimesis” ill-equipped to deal with the temporal and spatial scale of climate change; Amitav Ghosh’s suggestion that many of our most unsustainable desires have been “midwifed” by the modern novel; Karen Thornber’s theory of the “ecoambiguity” of East Asian literatures that have long been seen as emerging from cultures that are somehow closer to nature; and Ursula Heise’s study of the cultural frameworks and narratives that shape our understanding of animal endangerment and extinction.44 Indeed, these are only few examples of how aesthetic forms have been reconceived as more than responses to or reflections of their environments, but also as active cultural and material agents—with a variety of potential consequences, good and bad. To overstate the negative impact of aesthetic forms would be to risk an excessively paranoid form of reading, but to ignore the possibility that dams and poems have something in common, or more especially that the latter might help make the former possible, would be to disregard the material force of representation. In seeking to better understand the connections between landscape and the exploitation of the physical world, I have heeded Yaeger’s call for an ecocritical method that fuses the poetic with the technological, a “techno-poetics” that begins by looking beyond the metaphors that shape our experience of the natural world to the material realities of our current environmental crises and ends by asking not only how those metaphors might blind us to our predicament but also how they have contributed to it. For Yaeger, this method is founded on two observations: first, our relationship with the world “is always-already technological”;45 and second, the world “is [now] more techno than” natural.46 A vision of the Yangzi River as an inexhaustible natural resource or an “organic machine” would not appear until the early twentieth century, but over the course of two millennia, artists and writers have produced an aesthetic landscape grounded in an alternative set of technological images, metaphors, and tropes.47 The Three Gorges that they created is not an unambiguously natural landscape but rather a space produced through

departure 21 Yu the Great’s superhuman feat of dredging and clearing as well as a powerfully symbolic landscape bearing traces of some of the most famous figures in the Chinese tradition. The geology and hydrology of the upper Yangzi make the Three Gorges Dam possible, but the structure exists partly because these long-standing technological and cultural tropes have made the region so attractive as a site for the inscription of a technologically modern China. As we shall see, the early lore and literature of the region have been mined for imagery and used to establish a link between deepest antiquity and the technological glories of the present. With the completion of the dam, the Three Gorges region has become a techno-poetic landscape—the ultimate expression of a conception of landscape as an inscribable and trace-bearing surface combined with the modern view of the world as an inexhaustible natural resource.48 If the landscape has become definitively technological, however, then the Three Gorges Dam is more than a feat of engineering; it is also something poetic—a soaring “wall of stone erected across the western Jiang (xijiang shibi 西江石壁),” as Mao envisioned it in his verse.49 It is only by acknowledging the poetic force of the dam that we can fully account for both the cultural legacy of the space it so radically altered and the many new works of art it has inspired. The poetic in techno-poetic refers to more than just poetry; it encompasses the act of making or bringing into being, the productive capacity of representation to do things in the real world. Here we enter the more ambiguous side of the story. In place of oversimplified timelines that trace the dam project from Sun Yat-sen to Mao Zedong to Jiang Zemin, or grandiose speeches that link it to the mythological past, I offer a reappraisal not only of the forms of representation that remade the region in the modern period, but also of the poems, paintings, and works of prose that helped make the landscape famous in the first place and the works of art that have been produced in response to the dam project. It might seem that premodern travelers have, to adapt the old environmentalist guideline for nature-seekers, written only poems and left only footprints, but in reality they have helped fuel a dynamic that opposes poetic conceptions of the region as changeable with a powerful desire to fix it as a cultural site. As we shall soon see, the prestige accorded a poet such as Du Fu, for example, inspired later figures to search for the sites from which he described Kuizhou’s transformations. When they found his traces fading or irretrievable, they simply reinscribed them by repairing or building them anew, despite the fact that Du Fu’s finest poetry on the Three Gorges draws its power from processes of decay and displacement. This is a modest example of how techno-poetic culture works, but it is an important reminder that

22 pa ssage i although landscape poetry in premodern China is a complexly intertextual affair, it also deeply influences how people interact with the land. To see the world poetically is potentially to demand that it look more like the texts that have shaped our vision, whether those texts are poems from the mid-eighth century or engineering schematics from the 1940s.

PART I A Landscape of Traces

1 TRACING THE GORGES The [Thearch] Di said, “Come Yu, you also must have excellent words (to bring before me)” . . . Yu replied, “The inundating waters seemed to assail the heavens, and in their vast extent embraced the hills and overtopped the great mounds, so that the people were bewildered and overwhelmed. I mounted my four conveyances, and all along the hills hewed down the trees . . . I (also) opened passages for the streams (throughout the) nine (provinces), and conducted them to the four seas. I deepened (moreover) the channels and canals, and conducted them to the streams, sowing (grain), at the same time, along with Ji, and showing the multitudes how to procure the food of toil . . . (In this way) all the people got grain to eat, and the myriad regions began to come under good rule.” Gao-Yao said, “Yes, we ought to model ourselves after your excellent words.” —The Book of Documents1 From antiquity, the Chinese people have undertaken grand historical campaigns to pacify, develop and exploit nature. The myths of Jingwei filling the sea and the foolish old man moving a mountain, as well as the story of Yu the Great’s quelling of the flood, represent the primeval Chinese people’s spirit of tenacious struggle in “transforming nature” and ensuring that “man will certainly triumph over nature” . . . Today, the project that we are constructing in the Three Gorges of the Yangzi River—the world’s largest and most comprehensively beneficial conservancy and hydroelectric project—will greatly stimulate the economic development of the people of our nation. It is an enterprise that will enrich the people of today and spread its benefits over our descendants for millennia to come. —Jiang Zemin2 Imaginary Maps The poetic and technical representations that I describe in this book are forms of landscape that inscribe and reinscribe the physical world, producing poetic landscapes that become technical blueprints and technical landscapes saturated with poetic effects. As a techno-poetic landscape, the Three Gorges region has been shaped over millennia by the images and actions of those who have lived, worked, and traveled there. Many of the changes they made in the land were small and fleeting. Some endured, forming fields, paths, temples, hydrographic markings, and cities—sites that shaped and were shaped by poetry, prose, and painting. The Three Gorges Dam and reservoir have effaced many of these, replacing a landscape built up over time and defined by the pathos of change with a monument to the prowess of the Chinese state.

26 a l andscape of traces From a certain angle, the techno-poetic landscape has undergone a definitive change since the completion of the dam—it has become more technological than poetic. Fixing Landscape approaches the question of change from multiple angles so that we might better understand how the landscapes of the present relate to the landscapes of the past. Much separates the Tang Dynasty from the People’s Republic of China, and poetry from dams; what joins them is a vision of the Three Gorges landscape as an inscribed and inscribable surface. To fully appreciate the complexities of the Three Gorges as inscriptional landscape it is essential to start with one of the richest and most elusive figures in Chinese thought, ancient and modern, the trace (ji 跡). A footprint, a ruin, a famous site, a supernatural omen, an inscription on stone, wood, or silk— the trace is a fragmentary presence of something absent or lost. For those who value the past or wish to make use of it in the present, the trace is also something to be preserved and reinscribed to prevent its disappearance. In his study of ruins in Chinese culture, Wu Hung offers this partial taxonomy of traces: “divine traces” (shenji) [神跡] as ambiguous signs of supernatural power; “historical traces” (guji) [古跡] as subjects of antiquarian interest; “remnant traces” (yiji) [遺跡] as loci of political memory and expression; and “famous historical sites” (shengji) [勝跡] as meeting places of elite and popular culture.3 Drawing on a pattern of external stimulus and artistic and affective response that is at the core of premodern Chinese aesthetics, Wu further characterizes traces “as general signs of the past” that “can stimulate the huaigu [懷古] sentiment,” a profound yearning for the past.4 While keeping its traditional meanings and aesthetic functions in mind, I treat ji/trace as a hybrid concept that opens out onto a range of forms and practices, not only what are known in media studies as inscriptional technologies—writing, printing, filmmaking, photography, sound recording—but also the various ways in which space is shaped by politics and ideology.5 The ji that constitute the landscape of the Three Gorges are produced by and productive of many types of inscription—ke 刻 (to carve), shu 書 (to write), hua 畫 (to paint), and ji 記/紀 (to mark, record, document), as well as shu 疏 (to dredge), zao 鑿 (to chisel), and fu 斧 (to ax). My conception of ji/trace as both objective and active overlaps with but also extends beyond Wu’s taxonomy. By blurring the boundaries that separate things from actions, I hope to show

tracing the g orges 27 how ji/traces act to describe and circumscribe space. More than imprints or remainders on the surface of the earth, ji/traces can also be, or inspire, acts of spatial production that change the earth. The Three Gorges are rich in all manner of ji/traces. Rarely are their complexities and ambiguities—the way they hold presence and absence, the concrete and the imaginary, part and whole in a state of dynamic equilibrium—more fully exploited than in the poetry of Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770), who lived briefly in the city of Kuizhou, near the western entryway to the Gorges, in the middle of the eighth century. A contemporary of Li Bai, Du Fu is perhaps the most famous poet in the Chinese tradition, and the works that he produced in Kuizhou and its environs forever changed poetic and popular perceptions of this region. In Du Fu’s poetry, the Three Gorges are fully integrated into an imaginary map of empire, not as a symbol of the state or proving ground for the spirit of its people—as Jiang Zemin would later describe it—but as a frontier marking the farthest reach of Han culture and a site where past order gives way to present entropy. Du Fu orients himself in this exotic place by invoking the traces of historical and mythical figures he admires, many of whom were similarly displaced during their lifetimes, and by treating the landscape of the Gorges as a surface for the projection of fleeting visions and memories of his distant homeland. In Du Fu’s poetry, the Three Gorges appear not as a proto-national landscape, but rather as a site for the spatialization of a poetics of personal failure and imperial fragmentation. This is a profoundly different use of the region and its mythic dimensions than Jiang Zemin and other Chinese leaders have made, with far less tamable political effects. In the centuries following his death, Du Fu was transformed from a minor if respectable figure to the greatest poet in the tradition. With canonization came a newfound interest in the traces that he had left behind in the Three Gorges. These were far more than evocative “traces of the past.” During the Song Dynasty (960–1279), they became sites of pilgrimage that needed to be spatially fixed in order to maximize their sacred qualities. It is perhaps no coincidence that the elevation of Du Fu over the course of the Song coincides with one of the most important conceptual and physical transformations of the Three Gorges region: from a landscape of traces defined by flux into a landscape of landmarks fixed by a burgeoning geographical and touristic literature. As part of this transformation, the ji that appear in Du Fu’s poetry as figures of decay, threatening always to become illegible, are succeeded by “landmarks” or “famous sites” (shengji 勝跡), legible figures of cultural revival and flourishing.

28 a l andscape of traces As the landscape was being reconceptualized, it was also undergoing demographic and spatial changes brought about by the ongoing expansion of Han settlements into areas south of the Yangzi that had long been dominated by non-Han tribes.6 As the spatial reach of Song administrators and Han settlers extended south, the strangeness of the region, much of it grounded in local myth and religion, was gradually secularized and folded into the cultural orthodoxy of Song China. The exotic allure of the Gorges remained powerful, as it does today, but it was rendered morally meaningful as part of a shift in spatial thinking that produced a landscape defined more by its edifying sites than its suggestive traces. Although the expansion of Han culture and control was already well under way by Du Fu’s time,7 the Three Gorges that he experienced in the mid-eighth century was still an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous place, integral to the lore of the greater empire but nonetheless foreign, as Du Fu reminds his readers: 三峽樓臺淹日月 In towers and terraces of the Three Gorges lingering for days and months 五溪衣服共雲山 With the tribes who wear the clothing of the Five Streams sharing cloud and mountain8 * Du Fu was the scion of an illustrious family with roots in a suburb of the Tang capital at Chang’an, near modern-day Xi’an. His grandfather, Du Shenyan 杜審言 (d. ca. 705), was one of the most eminent poets of the early Tang. As a boy, Du Fu received an exemplary education in the classics and literary composition. Though he had the pedigree and training for a glorious political career, he twice failed the imperial examinations (in 736 and 745) that were a prerequisite for service in the state bureaucracy. It was only in 751, at the age of thirty-nine, that Du Fu, after submitting a number of long poems to the throne as evidence of his qualifications, succeeded in passing a special examination set by Emperor Xuanzong 玄宗 (r. 712–756). Even with the emperor’s support, however, his career never took off. When a massive rebellion broke out in 755, he was well connected but politically insignificant. Having failed professionally, Du Fu dedicated himself to writing poetry. Steeped in the classics, formally inventive, and technically virtuosic, the more than fourteen hundred poems that make up his collected works are revered in China. Of these, the roughly four hundred that he composed in Kuizhou are generally considered among his finest. For well over a millennium, they have generated countless commentaries, exegeses, translations, and works of praise and imitation. Du Fu is famous for more than his poetry, however.

tracing the g orges 29 After his death he became known as a man of unimpeachable integrity who, “despite his unsatisfied desire to serve the state, through all his vicissitudes . . . never for the space of a meal forgot his sovereign.”9 By the end of the Song Dynasty, Du Fu the failed official and invalid had become Du Fu the “historian poet” (shishi 詩史) and “poet sage” (shisheng 詩聖), titles that “evoke the two roles, historian and sage, which were most esteemed by Confucius.”10 In 766, however, when Du Fu arrived in Kuizhou with his small family in tow, he was an impoverished refugee, sick with malaria, diabetes, and other ailments.11 He had already been displaced for nine years, having fled Chang’an in the spring of 757 after a brief period of incarceration by rebels. In 755, the forces of the traitorous general An Lushan 安祿山 (ca. 703–757) had torn through the northeastern capital at Luoyang. The next year, they captured the northwestern capital at Chang’an, forcing Emperor Xuanzong south to Sichuan.12 Du Fu remained in the ravaged north for a number of years after hostilities began. By 759, finding himself politically isolated and unable to support his family, he followed some of his political allies to Sichuan. By 760, he was established in Chengdu, capital of modern-day Sichuan, where he experienced a period of relative stability. By 765, however, he was on the move again, traveling slowly down the Yangzi and longing always for an end to the conflict and a clear route home.13 Du Fu would remain a wanderer for the last decade of his life, an accidental exile in the southern reaches of a foundering empire, a “soul not yet summoned” (wei zhao hun 未招魂) home.14 In the spring of 766, Du Fu and his family sailed east down the Yangzi (then known simply as the Jiang 江) to Kuizhou for a stay that would last until the autumn of 768. Located just upriver from Kuimen, the entryway to the Gorges, Kuizhou was a transportation and commercial hub linking the Chengdu basin to the northwest with the fertile plains and expansive lakes of modern Hubei and Hunan to the east.15 Famous for its deadly rapids, changeable weather, and scenic beauty, the Three Gorges region was, and still is, closely associated with a number of cultural and literary heroes—Yu the Great, Liu Bei 劉備 (161–223), Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181–234), Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 343–ca. 277), and Song Yu 宋玉 (third century BCE), among others. Though central to Han culture, Kuizhou and the Gorges were on the frontier of the Tang state, nodes in a zone of contact between Han and non-Han peoples. The latter occupied much of the countryside around Kuizhou, especially southwest of the Yangzi, and the region had long served as a setting for tales of otherworldly encounters, rain maidens, and dragon spirits. During his time as a refugee, Du Fu wrote prolifically about both his experience living on the frontier and the traces of the cultural heroes who had also

30 a l andscape of traces spent time there, integrating both into a poetic map of empire and exile. At one end of this map stand Kuizhou and the Gorges, points from which Du Fu looks outward to take the measure of personal and imperial history. Casting his gaze across space and back in time, he considers the forces that constitute his many worlds—social, aesthetic, political, physical. Through his observations and imaginative journeys, he establishes Kuizhou not as symbol of, or synecdoche for, empire, but as the antipode of Chang’an, the gridded capital that had defined the imperial spatial imagination for a millennium. Joined by sheets of clouds and the night stars, these two places loom large in Du Fu’s most famous poetry of exile, especially the eight poems of the “Autumn Stirrings 秋興八首” series, in which visions of abandoned imperial gardens and blinding glimpses of the deceased sovereign dissolve into images of the Gorges, which are established in the opening couplets of the first poem as a harsh and volatile landscape: 玉露凋傷楓樹林 Jade dew wilts and wounds the forests of maple trees 巫山巫峽氣蕭森 On Wu Mountain, in Wu Gorge—the air is bitter harsh 江間波浪兼天湧 In the middle of the Jiang, waves join the sky, surging 塞上風雲接地陰 Atop the pass, wind and clouds touch the earth, darkling The most common type of ji—physical traces of the past directly experienced by the poet—play a limited role in “Autumn Stirrings.” Yet the spatial bipolarity of the series and its alternation between images of plenitude and emptiness exemplify the aesthetic and affective qualities of the ji/trace as it operates in Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry. In the poems of this series, the Gorges function as a surface for the projection of immaterial traces that refuse to adhere, appearing from and disappearing into a formless void. Through their play, they constitute the landscape not as a fixed monument, but as a site of change, decay, and chaos. The “Autumn Stirrings” series is long and complex, and an analysis of each of its eight poems is beyond the scope of this chapter.16 To illustrate how Du Fu poetically produces the Three Gorges as a landscape of ji/traces that are not simply material or historical, but also atmospheric, elemental, textual, and affective, I offer a focused reading of the second poem, which includes an allusion to the same crying gibbons that appear in Li Bai’s

tracing the g orges 31 “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” and of select lines from poems six, seven, and eight. 秋興，其二 Autumn Stirrings, Poem Two17 夔府孤城落日斜 When on the solitary city of Kuizhou the setting sun slants 每依北斗望京華 I always follow the Big Dipper to look toward the capital 聽猿實下三聲淚 Hearing gibbons truly I shed tears at their “three cries” 奉使虛隨八月槎 Sent out to serve vainly have I pursued the “eighth month” raft18 畫省香爐違伏枕 The painted ministry’s fragrant censers so far from my sickbed19 山樓粉堞隱悲笳 The mountain hall’s whitewashed battlements hide a doleful flute 請看石上藤蘿月 Look! the vine and creeper moon that was atop the rocks 已映洲前蘆荻花 Shines already on the reed flowers before the islet Opening at dusk in Kuizhou, the second of the “Autumn Stirrings” poems is organized around a back-and-forth motion that draws Du Fu’s gaze and mind north to Chang’an, only to leave him where he started, ailing and homesick in Kuizhou. A study in oscillation, this poem helps establish the bipolar structure of the entire eight-poem series, in which the imagined connection between Chang’an and Kuizhou grows stronger and stronger, until by the sixth poem, the astral triangulations and waking dreams that transport Du Fu in the second poem are replaced by an almost material conduit leading him north to Chang’an: 瞿唐峽口曲江頭 From the mouth of Qutang Gorge to the head of the Serpentine 萬里風煙接素秋 Ten thousand li of wind and fog link hoary autumns Here, the “mouth” (kou 口) of Qutang becomes a portal that leads across ten thousand li of wind and fog to the banks of the Serpentine, a stream that flowed through a royal park in the southeast corner of Chang’an, allowing