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

216 for the record and occasionally occluded, Ji creates this pattern primarily through the application of darker washes and denser strokes in the triangular midsection (with the base of the triangle along the painting’s left edge). The path is there, but does it allow for the flow of energy? The title of the painting—Below the 143 Meter Watermark—reminds us that its focus lies not among the lofty peaks or empty space at the top of the painting, which are typically associated with the ruler as manifestation and source of cosmic order, but below, among the densely packed detritus.30 Rather than creating a sense of perspectival depth or movement, the barely perceptible qimo serve to intensify vertical depth. The flat, compacted quality of the image makes the landscape nearly impenetrable, almost subterranean (or submerged). As Ji has said: “To ancient people, landscape paintings served as imagery where people imagined living and traveling. To me, the subject of the Three Gorges forms a sharp contrast to this ancient ideal.”31 Below the 143-Meter Watermark’s sense of flatness and submersion is comprehensible in relation to the disappointed expectations generated by what appears, at least at first, to be a classical model. But Ji has evoked the monumental landscape not simply to produce an allegory of misgovernment. He mimics but ultimately reverses the hierarchical signifying capacity of Northern Song monumental landscape painting in order to privilege the victims of trauma, not those who have caused it. The painting is an acknowledgment of those whose homes and villages lay beneath the 143 watermark, not a call for those behind the dam to repent. Ji’s Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (hereafter Migration Scroll) is typical of his later Three Gorges work in that it is more closely centered on the people who have been displaced by the dam (figure 6.9).32 In place of an identifiable landscape, Ji offers a human topography confronted by the rising waters of figure 6.9 Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (2009), Yun-fei Ji; hand-printed watercolor woodblock mounted on paper and silk. See also color plate 17. Source: Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

ink in the wound 217 the reservoir. This work reproduces in painstaking detail the material and formal characteristics of Chinese handscroll painting, but uses them as vehicles for what Ji calls an historical “record” (ji 記) of displacement and migration. Landscape paintings in the handscroll format are structured according to a panoramic temporality—often likened to cinematic time—in which the gradual movement from the right of the painting to the left indicates passage through space and time. Because the viewer has control over the speed of this journey and can linger wherever she chooses, however, the physical medium also encourages an ongoing dialogue between unfurling and furling. The Migration Scroll relies on both types of movement, but especially on the latter, which creates a palpable reverse momentum. By using the building blocks of landscape—earth, trees, water—to structure the image into five pictorial cells, Ji forces us to linger repeatedly, even as we gradually move toward the painting’s end. Each of these landscape cells is populated by human and semihuman figures whose bodies are positioned so as to slow forward momentum even further. In the first field (figure 6.10), there are eleven human figures and one hairy wild boar on its hind legs. All around them are miscellaneous objects—chairs, tables, a baby carriage, baskets, a bicycle, a laden tractor, a large wooden basin, and bundles fashioned from gaily colored cloth that echoes the similarly patterned clothing of the women throughout the image. In the second group, there are seven figures, six scattered in various states of repose around a mass of objects similar to those in the first field. The lone standing figure, an old man, looks left in the direction in which the handscroll is traditionally viewed. The posture and position of this man mirror those of a woman in the first group. Together, their gazes force the viewer incrementally leftward, even as the scattered arrangement and energies of the other figures hold them back temporarily. The third group (figure 6.11) contains eight figures—six women and two strange fish-headed figures wearing suits and ties. The women in this group

figure 6.11 Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (detail). figure 6.10 Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (detail).

ink in the wound 219 have perhaps the most carefully depicted facial expressions in the whole image. With eyes closed or gazes deflected in every direction except toward the viewer, they appear fatigued. Near the left edge of the group, a woman wearing a red, white, and brown flower-patterned shirt bows her head and cranes her neck in the direction of the next group and the water that lies beyond them. The rightmost woman, her face seemingly creased with worry, is separated from the rest of the group by the disturbing fish-men, whose formal clothing marks them as members of a wealthier class, possibly businessmen, possibly cadres (or both). With gaping mouths and tiny, beady eyes, they stand facing each other, their long, feeler-like tongues extended in an image of rapaciousness. In the final land-based group, there are eight figures in two groups of four. The first four are elderly and crowded against the landscape elements that separate this and the previous field. The final four are heavily laden with large bags and move purposefully toward the left (figure 6.12). These figures are immediately recognizable—they are the young men who for the last few decades have left their rural homes to flood the industrial and urban centers of China. They are no longer residents, neighbors, or friends, but rather migrants and laborers. The dam propels them forward, into an economy where their only assets are their bodies. Their own destination, however, is a mystery: at the far left of the painting, the land ends, giving way to an open expanse of water on which a final group of five public security officers float in a pontoon boat, each of them staring directly out toward the viewer. At the end, there is no land, only a watery surface that serves as the medium of state power. Ji’s medium of observation is reconceived here as a technics of power. If the scattered, immobile figures in the first three groups worked against the kinetic, leftward pull of the handscroll format, this last group of migrants finally propels us forward, toward both the floating officials and the inscription that follows the painting. figure 6.12 Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (detail). See also color plate 18.

220 for the record Mao Zedong famously proclaimed that “the people are like water and the army is like fish.”33 This fantasy of harmonious integration resurfaces here through its polar opposite, profound alienation: the water from the fish, the power from the people, the worker from his body, and the people from their land. Water appears not as the medium for the harmonious union between the people and the People’s Liberation Army, but as an existential threat.34 Displacement and alienation are at the heart of Ji’s conception of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam as a traumatic event. In this work, Ji distills this trauma into an imagined migration that leads the residents of the region from the fixity of land to the uncertainty of water, even as he places them within the landscape one last time. The Migration Scroll is a record of things, people, and events observed as well as a fictional narrative in which the spectral and horrific push and pull the migrants on their uncertain journey. For Ji, what really happened—the truth of displacement as an event or process—matters less than producing an image that acknowledges the physical and psychic experiences of displacement. If the pictorial component of the scroll functions as a fictional record based on on-the-ground observation and organized as a narrative of displacement, however, the textual component, which is almost identical to the one at the left side of Four People Leaving Badong, is both a record and a document that details the historical forces that have led to this displacement: Yu the Great’s mastery of the waters is already something from deepest antiquity. Yet year after year the flooding waters of the Yangzi have continued to cause trouble, and the common folk along the river’s banks have suffered great harm as a result. As early as the last century, Sun Yatsen suggested the solution of cutting off the river and constructing a dam in the Three Gorges. Some decades later, Mao Zedong also advocated this proposal. Construction on the reservoir finally began in 1994 and will be completed next year. The reservoir will be 190 meters deep and 500 miles in circumference. Stretching across the provinces of Hubei and Sichuan, it will even allow ocean-going vessels of upwards of 10,000 tons to reach Chongqing, spur the economic prosperity of the interior, solve electricity problems for a broad region, and serve as a major milestone among my country’s engineering projects, as well as a symbol of progress and modernization. With their very own hands, the migrants of the reservoir zone demolished—brick by brick, tile by tile—thirteen cities, 140 towns and 1,300 villages. Forced to leave their ancestral homes, neighbors, relatives and friends scattered to different places. I went to Zigui, Xiangxi and Fengjie, among other places, to personally witness the circumstances

ink in the wound 221 surrounding the displacement of the common people of Badong. Although this was already six years ago, it remains vividly before my eyes. That is why I have specially produced this Migration Scroll to serve as a record. [Written in the] fourth month of the wuzi year [2008], Ji Yunfei. The first section of this long inscription places the nearly completed dam project within the context of an ancient and modern history of water management. For Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong in the twentieth century, the dam was a final, technological “solution” (shuofa 說法) to a problem that the mythical Yu the Great failed to solve in antiquity. As Ji notes, there are significant benefits to the modern solution, not least of which is the symbolic capital that it generates for “my country” (woguo 我國). The second section shifts from the dam “as a symbol of progress” to the personally experienced scene of material demolition and displacement, of which this painting serves as a “record” (jilu 紀錄). Against the symbolic, mythical, historical, and economic conceptions of the dam, all of which share a humanitarian justification, Ji presents a visual and textual record of the bodies and personal goods of the people in whose name the dam was actually constructed. He does not attack the dam, but his image suggests that it has failed to fulfill its primary humanitarian function. By producing yet another flood, one far greater than anything that preceded it, the dam has not only not spared “the common folk along the river’s banks” “suffering” (huan 患) and “harm” (hai 害), it has definitively displaced them while also enlisting them in their own displacement. Ji’s visual and textual records draw on the ethico-documentary function of traditional painting and historiography. Writing before the completion of the Migration Scroll, Wu Hung already inserted Ji’s Three Gorges work into a long tradition of paintings of refugees, or liumin tu 流民圖. Said to have emerged out of an act of loyal remonstrance during the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127), liumin tu directly document the suffering of the common folk, whether from war, famine, or unfair government policies.35 Presented to those in control, such paintings were seen as having the potential to transform government policy. While the Migration Scroll does echoes the liumin tu tradition, the context of its production, its intended audience, and its effects are completely different from earlier examples. Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art’s Library Council as an “artist’s book,” Ji’s original painting was transformed into a technically masterful color print by one of China’s most famous woodblock studios and sold as a limitededition luxury art object in the United States. His audience was not the Chinese government or its technocratic officials, but a New York–focused, international

222 for the record art world in which Chinese contemporary art (especially if it has the aura of dissent) has become an increasingly hot commodity. This is not to imply a cynical profit motive, but to suggest how thoroughly Ji has adapted a traditional medium to a contemporary context in which artistic works documenting the effects of economic and social change in China have become, as Rey Chow puts it, “ubiquitous.”36 What Ji’s painterly approach contributes to documentary practice and discourse is a sense of the often invisible ways seemingly distinct historical events overlap and interact, not only psychically, but also materially. His work forces us to ask what it means to produce a record of something that you’ve never seen or that never happened at all, at least not as a discrete event. How does our understanding of the event and documentary’s relationship to it change when the event is composite, imagined, spectral, fictional? How does one make visible the invisible histories connecting the present to a past that, as Benjamin puts it, “can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again”?37 By collecting traces of the past, present, and future, Ji produces a new kind of record, not simply of what happened in the Three Gorges as the dam neared completion, but of the hidden ties that bind us to other spaces, other people, other times. Collapsing Time, Crushing the Body The need to spatialize trauma has two overlapping sources: first, the unsettled status of historical traumas that exceed not only their temporal but also their spatial bounds; and second, the rapid disappearance of the material reminders of the past, or, in the case of the gorges, the disappearance of the very earth needed to anchor one’s material existence. In Ji’s work, trauma is not only a “disorder of memory” or a “pathology of history,” but also a disorder of space and a pathology of geography.38 Ji responds to a culture of traumatic return and contemporary disappearance not by fabricating historical simulacra as traumatic monuments or attempting to preserve the present, but by resurrecting the past as an assemblage of heterogeneous fragments that he combines and layers with images of everyday life to create a strange new landscape. Aspects of this layering appear outrageous, but this is simply part of life in the ultra-unreal space-time of contemporary China, as Ji discovered when he first traveled to the Gorges region: At that time, I went to a village of displaced people. I showed them a map and asked them which villages they had come from. They told me the

ink in the wound 223 names of their hometowns, but I couldn’t find them on the map. I don’t know if it was because I was using a new map. Anyway, some place names had already disappeared. It was very strange.39 This meeting between Ji, with his map, and the displaced villagers is a “strange” confrontation between conflicting spatial and temporal realities. The migrants are not merely displaced; they are also unplaced, erased from the scientifically inscribed record (the map). Contemporary Chinese culture is full of similar instances of clashing spatial, temporal, and representational realities. Perhaps the most ubiquitous example from recent decades is the temporal collapse brought about by the character used to indicate a future demolition—the character chai, 拆, which means “to be demolished” (figure 6.13). Another example is specific to the now-flooded areas of the Gorges and comes in various forms—handwritten signs, carved markers, posters, carefully detailed timelines—all of which served to show either the eventual water level of the Three Gorges reservoir or to convey information about the relocation program (figure 5.18). Over the last few decades, the character 拆 has become one of the most omnipresent and iconic images in China.40 For some, it has in fact become a symbol of China itself: when combined with the sentence-ending particle na 哪 to form chai-na 拆哪, it becomes a pun on China. Hastily painted on exterior walls in districts slated for redevelopment, the chai character is the dark side of the Chinese dream, a silently performative utterance that says figure 6.13 “Chai 拆” (to be demolished), as seen in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life.

224 for the record unequivocally: this building will be destroyed. In this context, the linguistic and phonic content of the character have been evacuated, leaving behind a symbol that does not signify so much as embody and bring about demolition. The building upon which chai is written (and often encircled by a line that makes it look like a stamp or official seal) is transformed from a shelter or functional space into a surface for the projection of the national drama of progress—or, depending on your perspective, the national trauma of unbridled development. The certainty of the sign’s pronouncement also collapses time, bringing the future—both the planned skyscraper or mall development and the traumatic experience of displacement—immediately into the present, while simultaneously transforming the present in all its materiality into a ghostly remainder, a bit of a future past.41 As seen in many of the films, photographs, and other works of art produced in the lead-up to the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, areas along the Yangzi slated to be flooded were marked with signs indicating the various future water levels. These signs functioned analogously to the chai characters by serving as physical markers of the future in the present. Unlike chai, however, which pronounces a future demolition without saying anything specific about what is to follow, these markers simultaneously indicate both a future absence and a future presence. Cities, homes, cliffs, and archaeological sites below the markers would disappear, and water would come to take their place. That these signs often stood high above the river offers a ready metaphor for how the future might have impinged on and loomed over the present, pressing down on the residents of the gorges with a psychic weight equal to the water of the reservoir. Though not intended to function this way, reservoir-related markers are the newest manifestations of ancient hydrographic practices of the type preserved by the underwater museum that surrounds White Crane Ridge, which I discussed in chapter 1. Just as residents of Fuling would have been able to read the history of the river and its low points using the old inscriptions on White Crane Ridge, residents of the contemporary Yangzi could see the future of the river in the projected water-level markers for the reservoir. Signs marking the stages of the reservoir materialized information with which residents would have been intimately familiar: instead of 120 or 140 meters, a citizen of Wushan or Fengjie might have thought, “just below the threshold of my house,” or “three stories above my apartment.” In Below the 143 Meter Watermark, Ji does not include an actual marker, instead suggesting the height of the eventual water level through the painting’s title, vertical format, and spatial compression. Many of Ji’s nonvertical images, including Autumn Colors (figure 6.14),

ink in the wound 225 display a similar kind of compression and flatness. In this image, Ji creates an overwhelming sense of inundation: water snakes through the landscape, and even unidentifiable blank spaces begin to resemble liquid incursion into the otherwise densely painted scene. As in Last Days Before the Flood, described below, Autumn Colors incorporates a distant vista (in the upper right-hand corner) that vaguely resembles an aerial view of the Gorges. The scene of scavenging that unfolds in the rest of the painting appears below this landscape (figure 6.15), a spatial effect enhanced by Ji’s use of transparent watercolor washes to fill in portions of the painting, particularly those depicting open water. We look through and at water, and the visibility of this medium reminds us of the omnipresence of the liquid element: it is there both at the moment of artistic creation and at the moment of physical destruction. Another of Ji’s distinctive techniques enhances this simultaneity. Applying what he has called “the method of erasure and montage . . . to collected historical materials” in some of his paintings, Ji uses water to wash away certain images so that he can layer new ones on top, “develop(ing) layers that work together as a whole.”42 This process of controlled, small-scale flooding visibly distresses the mulberry paper with which he works, suggesting both the ephemerality and the fragility of the medium, and also of memory and history. “Erasure and montage” fabricates a trace and promises the continued presence of that which has disappeared. figure 6.14 Autumn Colors (2003), Yun-fei Ji; ink and watercolor on xuan paper. Source: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

226 for the record Ji’s focus on spatiotemporal compression and erasure gives form to the psychological effects of occupying a space as it ceases to exist. It also allows him to imagine how the Three Gorges migrants embody the physical processes of dispossession and the constriction of the individual’s place in the world. Ji achieves this by filling his paintings with the most basic and protective extensions of the human body—consumer goods and domestic objects—as he does in his 2006 painting Last Days Before the Flood (figure 6.16). Like Below the 143 Meter Watermark, this large image presents a severely foreshortened, vertical landscape in which hills and trees frame the ruins of villages and homes. Nearly every surface is densely filled, except for a small band of sky at the upper edge of the painting, below which a line of simply painted mountains extends into the distance. Three river-like bodies of water snake down from the mountains—one from the left, one from the right, and one from just right of center—converging to become a single, central river in the second quarter of the painting. This river seems to end abruptly near the middle of the image, where it passes by the ruins of a settlement, but reappears just below and to the right, where it flows horizontally to the painting’s edge. Ji creates a perceptible sense of receding space and depth through the use of both foreshortening and clearly delineated qimo, especially in the top half of the painting. figure 6.15 Autumn Colors (detail).

ink in the wound 227 The pull of this depth is counteracted, however, by the fact that nearly the entire surface of the painting is filled with a dense landscape. Though one can identify a vista and a horizon, when viewing the painting as a whole, this upper edge appears as merely the very top of a landscape defined by vertical depth. The qimo do not lead us up and out, but down and in, toward the bottom edge of the image. The overwhelming sense of flatness and compression redirects the viewer to the painting’s lower left-hand corner (figure 6.17). There, directly beneath figure 6.16 Last Days Before the Flood (2006), Yun-fei Ji; ink and mineral pigment on xuan paper. Source: U.S. Embassy, Beijing, China. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

228 for the record a laden packhorse, we find four figures: a woman and a child riding a bicycle are followed by another woman carrying a basket, all of whom follow a man carrying an oversize load on his own back. This group is one of many similar groupings that appear in Ji’s Three Gorges paintings. Sometimes sitting atop their belongings like refugees without a destination,43 sometimes ambling out of the frame,44 these people are the only signs of life in landscapes that resemble disaster zones, and all of this well before the water’s arrival. For Ji, the people—their experiences, their hard work, their suffering, their migration—rather than the dam’s environmental toll or the region’s scenic vistas and famous sites, are the central focus of his Three Gorges paintings. Last Days Before the Flood acknowledges these people by capturing a general process of constriction and compression in which the residents of the Gorges are increasingly and irrevocably dispossessed of their land, their homes, and their objects. The formal techniques that I have explored in the context of traumatic and disordered temporality reappear here to give shape to this process of dispossession. Through the spatial composition of his paintings, Ji figures the relatively simple physical process begun by the dam—the expansion of one thing and the contraction of another—and its morally and politically figure 6.17 Last Days Before the Flood (detail). See also color plate 19.

ink in the wound 229 dubious companion process—the erection of a symbol of state power on a national and international scale at the expense of the vernacular landscape and its inhabitants. This process can be subdivided into two stages: first, the destruction and dismantling of the manmade landscape; and second, the shrinkage of the land once inhabited and built up by the former residents, now migrants. Demolition and shrinkage represent the often unspoken imbalance between the agents of the dam project and those who have been directly affected. Ji’s incorporation of water thus creates a synecdochical flood narrative in which the stranded survivors and the surging water stand both for the full narrative of the creation of the dam and reservoir and also as a political allegory of its impact. As the nation and the party were glorified, as the scope and size of their reach were theatrically expanded, the material lives of those who lived below the final reservoir level were deconstructed to the point of nonexistence. All that remains in Ji’s pictures, and only temporarily, are the narrow spaces and tiny clearings in which groups of figures huddle, looking more like refugees than participants in a national triumph. These groups are most prominent in the Migration Scroll and in a series of images from Ji’s 2010 exhibition, “Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts.” Even before this motif had developed into a clear compositional structure, however, Ji was already incorporating refugee-like figures into his paintings, most notably in the earlier “Old One Hundred Names” (2003) and “Empty City” (2004) series. In paintings such as the 2002 A Monk’s Retreat (figure 6.18), which was included in “Old One Hundred Names” exhibition, Ji uses natural features, especially trees, shrubs, and stones, to create distinct pictorial cells. Though they provide room for figures, these spaces are notable for how claustrophobic they are, how they constrict the figures that they enclose. A Monk’s Retreat envisions the creation of the dam and reservoir as a catastrophic flood, a maelstrom that engulfs everything in its way—animals (real and imagined), automobiles, homes, water towers. This violent deluge stretches from the left edge across two-thirds of the large image, lapping menacingly at a patch of dry ground on the far right, where a group of five men crowd within a thicket and atop a rock outcropping (figure 6.19). Though a single, pig-faced figure stands beyond the trees and rocks, craning his neck toward the waves, none of the others seem to attend to the flood. Surrounded by everyday goods—hot-water thermoses, electric fans, umbrellas— and isolated from the raging waters, they appear affectless, bored. On closer inspection, however, there is something strange about three of the men and the semi-human-looking outsider: their bodies have no flesh; their bones,

230 for the record organs, and blood vessels are exposed. If Isabella Bird described the “cuts, bruises, wounds, weals [and] bad sores” that marked the naked bodies of the Yangzi River trackers in order to encourage her readers to “sympathetically bear [them] in mind,” then Ji moves past the skin that stops her penetrating gaze, exposing the body’s organs in order to elicit a more visceral sympathy from his viewers.45 Compression, destruction, and disembodiment in A Monk’s Retreat are all methods of figuring the extended process of “unmaking” that precedes the Three Gorges Dam project as a process of landscape production or “making.” In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry explores not only torture and war as acts of unmaking, but also the cultural structures that underlie making. For Scarry, making, or as she divides it, “making-up” and “making-real,” is the process through which humans come to terms with and attempt to protect their fragile physical forms. “Making-up” is an initial imaginative projection of the self out into the world, and “making-real” is a physical projection of the self, what she calls “the action of creating verbal and figure 6.18 A Monk’s Retreat (2002), Yun-fei Ji; ink and mineral pigment on xuan paper. See also color plate 20. Source: Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

ink in the wound 231 material artifacts.”46 In her scheme, the threat of pain is anterior to all human creation. If, as she imagines it, making is a process of replication and extension of the human body out into the world, then unmaking, as exemplified in torture and war, entails first the constriction of the body and its extensions, and finally the deconstruction of language and the remaking of the resultant pain into an “insignia” of power. The building blocks of one structure are appropriated for use in another. In Ji’s paintings, the insignia of power are everywhere and nowhere—they are the dam that never appears and the dog-faced Red Guards that menace in The East Wind, the roiling waters that wreak havoc in A Monk’s Retreat, and the public security officers that float at the watery edge of The Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll. What Ji captures in his images is a tipping point, the extended moment when the homes and land of the Three Gorges migrants are first appropriated and disassembled in preparation for a dubious act of making through unmaking. This is the process whereby the world of the residents of the Gorges shrinks as the dam and reservoir grow. The various claustrophobic, liminal spaces in Ji’s work are merely temporary resting places where these straggling migrants find a respite before the final, definitive constriction

232 for the record forces them elsewhere. Despite their nonchalance, the fi gures in A Monk’s Retreat are vulnerable, deprived of the human body’s fi rst line of defense, its most basic protective membrane—the skin ( fi gures 6.20 and 6.21 ). The menacing waters and the sheltering trees thus assume even greater power—one as a threat and the other as a substitute, but equally imperiled, armor. Scarry treats objects as metaphorical extensions of the body, buffers against physical suff ering and pain. 47 Those who are wealthy enjoy a much greater buff er between their bodies and the world; they are, in Scarry’s terms, “radically embodied.” The poor, on the other hand, are not merely poor but radically “disembodied,” and thus constantly imperiled: Not just suffering but all forms of consciousness are involved in the diff erence between belonging to the people who are disembodied and belonging to those who are radically embodied, for the very end point of one’s precariousness (aft er many tiers of objecthood are crossed) is the figure 6.19 A Monk’s Retreat ( detail ). See also color plate 21.

ink in the wound 233 figure 6.20 A Monk’s Retreat (detail). figure 6.21 A Monk’s Retreat (detail). starting and stable point of the other’s existence: The second endures in near objectlessness; all his psychic states are without, or nearly without, objectification; hence in all his life activities, he stands in the vicinity of physical pain.48 Scarry’s point here is basic and undeniable: the poor are exposed to all manner of pain and suffering, and objects gain in importance when they are scarce. In their emphasis on the relationship between poverty and pain, Scarry and Ji share an approach to objects as benign and essential components of humanity. The omnipresence of consumer goods in Ji’s paintings is not simply part of his attempt to document authentically what he saw during his trips to the Gorges, but rather another indicator of how

234 for the record precarious the lives of these people have become, how literally close they are to danger and pain. Depicted as homeless and refugee-like, the Three Gorges migrants have only the smallest of material buffers between themselves and the nearly apocalyptic world that they inhabit. Their relative lack of material objects increases the significance of what they do have, each object assuming a talismanic importance incommensurate with its commonness. A Monk’s Retreat makes literal the metaphorical connection between the body and its material trappings: if you remove the goods that these men can carry on their backs and the clothes that they wear, you will see that they are not simply naked, but painfully disembodied, stripped of their very skin.49 In Ji’s painting, this dramatic exposure seems to be the end result of the processes that squeeze these men into the tiny space of the grove. As the flood rages and consumes the landscape and its human infrastructure, they are increasingly dispossessed and compressed within an ever-shrinking realm. The residents of the Gorges, as depicted in Ji’s paintings, are not simply homeless; they are victims of a violent dismemberment, a gruesome flaying, and a severing of perhaps the most important human link aside from family relations—that between the fragile body and what protects it.

PASSAGE IV PART OF THE MOVEMENT To read traces it is necessary to be a tracker—to let the shadow of one’s intention fall across the track; it is to become part of the movement. —Paul Carter1 Farewell to Baidicheng The desire to inscribe the landscape of the Three Gorges has, unsurprisingly, taken multiple, often contradictory, forms over the last two millennia. What makes it possible to compare these form is their shared preoccupation with change. To reinscribe the fading traces of the past as legible sites, or to mend natural and social systems seen as faulty, is to fight against or rush toward change. Since at least the Song Dynasty, fear of change has inspired layered acts of landscaping designed to preserve sites of cultural importance or to revive lost values in the Three Gorges region. The reconstruction of Du Fu’s home at Dongtun, the reinscription and relocation of the Plant Memorial in Xintan, the creation of an underwater museum around White Crane Ridge—these efforts to give shifting landscapes cultural coherence are

236 pa ssage iv simultaneously necessitated and thwarted by change. They remind us that landscape is a thing produced and reproduced, inscribed and reinscribed, imagined and material, constantly changing, even (or especially) as it is appropriated for ideological purposes or as a symbol of cultural continuity. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the proliferation of imperial and national discourses on China’s developmental failures made change an existential imperative.2 The scientific remapping of the Yangzi and its reconceptualization as a source of energy, the introduction of steamships and the fight over shipping rights, the reordering of the banks of the Yangzi as commemorated by the Yu the Great Mythology Park in Wuhan, and, of course, the construction of the Three Gorges Dam—in different ways and to different ends, these processes and constructions are designed to bring order to systems seen as dysfunctional, to fix the Chinese landscape as a scientific, imperial, national, and cultural prospect. Because they have long contributed to the consistency of the Three Gorges as cultural concept, premodern aesthetic forms and carefully preserved landmarks help diminish the perceived impact of the dam project as technological fix. From certain angles, the Three Gorges Dam has tamed the river and fueled the nation without diminishing the Chineseness of the landscape. Such seeming continuities are anything but simple, however. For contemporary artists who responded to the Three Gorges Dam project, premodern forms and familiar landmarks have functioned not as timeless expressions or sites of Chinese culture, but as the building blocks of an experimental aesthetics of change in which the ji/trace is repurposed to confront new types of spatiotemporal disorder. Where Du Fu asked us to look with him so that we might see the fractured memories of a past golden age as they formed and dissolved on the surfaces of the Gorges, Yun-fei Ji, Jia Zhangke, and other artists ask us to look at the dissolution of that very landscape as it is reduced to rubble and swallowed by the waters of the reservoir. If writers of the Tang and Song demonstrated how human structures, solid as they might seem, decay and shift and disappear altogether, only to reappear in other places and at other times, the contemporary artists who document the social and environmental consequences of development have shown us that rivers and lakes can dry up too, that even mountains may wear away. This is something that poets of the trace knew all too well; it is a lesson we would be wise to relearn. In the age of climate change and the massive spatial and social transformations that drive it, oceans, mountains, coasts, rivers, and grasslands are changing before our very eyes, not over millennia or centuries, but on shorter and shorter timelines. Retracing

part of the movement 237 the long history of how images and texts have inscribed and reinscribed the Three Gorges as a techno-poetic landscape acclimates us to changes in the past, of course; but as a methodologically deliberate way of seeing across time, it also suggests a critical path that might help us attend to, live in, and create for a world made strange by change. Perhaps nowhere are these changes stranger or more widely documented than in contemporary China. Since Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms in 1978, China has industrialized and urbanized at a rate unprecedented in human history, its newfound wealth finally allowing it to realize the grand infrastructural dreams of its founding fathers, among the most cherished of which has always been the damming of the Yangzi River. An engine of growth, mover of goods and people, source of water both near and far, and producer of hydroelectric power on a massive scale, the river has never been so important, or imperiled, as it is today. Pollution, erosion, habitat loss, canalization, and the diversion of its waters to parched regions in northern China have transformed the Yangzi and other Chinese rivers (including those that cross international borders), destroying their ecosystems and effacing the historical traces that happened to survive the ravages of time. The traces that remain in the Three Gorges, such as the temple complex at Baidicheng, are now part of a totally altered geography: once a narrow promontory reaching out into the river, Baidicheng has been transformed by the Three Gorges Dam and reservoir into an island, an accidental parable of rising seas and changing coasts. Travelers headed downstream might like to think they are bidding farewell to the same old Baidicheng—the landscape from which Li Bai’s light boat departed early in the morning—but that ship has long since sailed. In the course of traveling from a place fixed in the poetic imagination to one fixed by concrete, this book has also followed a trajectory from ancient trace (guji 古跡) to famous site (shengji 勝跡), from place to people, from lyrical self-expression to aesthetic forms driven by sympathy for others, from magic transport to arduous labor, from exile to the region to displacement from the region. In another kind of narrative, these movements might bespeak greater concern with material displacement than with its representation, with the reality of the physical world than with how its boundaries and terms are culturally reimagined. But the mission of Fixing Landscape has been to pick out the invisible threads linking the representational and the material, not only the “real world consequences” of techno-poetic tropes that turn changing landscapes into stable cultural concepts, but also the ways literature, film, painting, and photography speak back to the landscape and direct attention toward those who seek to fix it for their own ends.3

238 pa ssage iv figure iv.1 “Kuifu 夔府,” Michael Cherney (Qiumai 秋麥), from his Ten Thousand Li of the Yangtze River (2015). Image courtesy of the artist. Though the Three Gorges Dam is completed and its reservoir filled, the landscape is of course neither totally fixed nor fully altered. The river still flows; it is still possible to approximate Fan Chengda’s journey home or to retrace the imaginary itinerary that the Qianlong Emperor took when he viewed The Shu River (figures 2.1–2.4). This is what the Beijing-based photographer Michael Cherney (who also goes by the Chinese name Qiumai 秋麥 or Autumn Wheat) has done in his monumental Ten Thousand li of the Yangzi River (Changjiang wanli tu 長江萬裡圖), a forty-two-scroll photographic work printed and mounted on mica-flecked mulberry paper.4 Inspired by the thematic genre of Yangzi River paintings and a Song Dynasty painting of the same title in the collection of the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., Cherney selected forty-two sites along the Yangzi and Min rivers. Most of these correspond to those marked on the Freer painting, though Cherney has plotted them using modern technology, including online maps and Google Earth, in order to “determine the GPS coordinates of locations that would allow for photography of desired sites from the most ideal angle (rather than from the limited perspective of the river’s surface).”5 These techniques allow for a degree of spatial precision unthinkable in the Song, though the goal for Cherney is neither to fix exactly the locations inscribed on the Freer painting, many of which are only very loosely connected to the landscape, nor to establish his images as having some “basis in fact,” which was Fan Chengda’s goal

part of the movement 239 in commissioning a new painting of the Gorges. Instead, he seeks an “ideal angle” that allows for the most compelling picture of the river, as in his image of Kuimen (figure IV.1), entryway to the Qutang Gorge and the repeated point of departure and passage for this book. The mountains that make up Kuimen are among the most recognizable topographical features of the entire Yangzi River. Captured in innumerable travel photographs—and, as we have seen, depicted on the back of the ten-yuan banknote—Kuimen is an endlessly reproduced scene, a virtual landscape that can be tinted with a different ideological color for every new occasion. Cherney, however, drains Kuimen of its customary lurid tones, presenting the river and its mountains in granular black and white, beneath a veil of haze. One small part of a panorama that encompasses the mountains on the river’s southern bank as well as Baidicheng in the foreground at left, the sharply angled peak that forms the northern portion of Kuimen is a distant and barely visible shadow in the upper left-hand corner of the scroll. Though barely perceptible, this image of “Kuifu” is not what remains of a landscape drained of ideology: its contrastive dullness draws attention to the norms of representational manipulation. The gauziness of the landscape also conflates the omnipresent clouds and mists for which the Gorges have long been famous with the thick mantle of caustic smog for which China is increasingly infamous. Present in much of Cherney’s work, this atmospheric pall evokes the fragility of both the environment and the material traces of the past in contemporary China. Cloaked and

240 pa ssage iv threatened by the shadows of development, the subjects of Cherney’s photographs are rendered spectral: faint traces captured by the camera as part of an ongoing project to explore those places where China’s past and the present converge, or, more often, diverge. Against the impulse to fix the landscape, contemporary artists such as Cherney have embraced techniques that give form to change, that make visible not only the historical traces and representational modes that make the Chinese landscape, but also the more ominous traces of the environmental and social crises that threaten to unmake our world. Confronted with the displacements caused by the Three Gorge Dam and reservoir, artists have been forced to reimagine preconceptions about the relationship between place, materiality, and representation. Where the passage of time and the rising of water make it impossible to locate the physical traces of the past, they have found alternative ways of reinscribing those traces, thereby sustaining and renewing the landscape traditions that developed around the Three Gorges. Through a poetics of disappearance and displacement, they have recaptured the indeterminacy of the trace even as they mourn the erasure of the landscape that once held it. By joining Du Fu in asking us to “please look,” they teach us how to read traces, to become “part of the movement,” and to thereby acknowledge the folly and the danger of trying to fix what can never be fixed.6

NOTES Orientation 1. For more detailed information about the history of the dam and the politicians involved in planning it, see Covell Meyskens, “Building a Dam for China in the Three Gorges Region, 1919–1971,” in Water, Technology and the Nation-State, ed. Filippo Menga and Eric Swyngedouw (New York: Routledge, 2018), 207–222; and Dierdre Chetham, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002). 2. Marie-Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 36–41. Passage i. Departure 1. Li Bai 李白, Li Taibai quanji 李太白全集, ed. Wang Qi 王琦 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), 1022. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2. Lyman P. Van Slyke, Yangtze: Nature, History, and the River (Reading, Mass.: AddisonWesley, 1988), 19.

242 pa ssage i. departure 3. Li Daoyuan 酈道元, Shuijing zhu jiaozheng 水經注校證, ed. Chen Qiaoyi 陳橋驛 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 790. 4. For a full translation of the Commentary’s Three Gorges passage, see Richard E. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 84–90. Later readers treated Li Daoyuan as the first writer to describe the Gorges based on personal observation, though he clearly relied heavily on earlier accounts. The textual history of the Commentary is complicated by Li’s tendency to borrow from earlier texts without citation. Wang Liqun 王立群 has argued that the passage that contains the “three cries” folk song was based on the earlier Jingzhou ji 荊州記, by the Liu Song Dynasty (420–479) scholar Zhao Shenghong 昭盛弘 (dates unknown), who was in turn deeply influenced by Yuan Shansong’s 袁山松 (d. 401) Yidu shanchuan ji 宜都山川記. Wang Liqun, Zhongguo gudai shanshui youji yanjiu 中國古 代山水游記研究 (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 2008), 41–56. For a summary of uncertainties surrounding the Commentary, see Michael Nylan, “Wandering in the Land of Ruins: The Shuijing zhu 水經注 (Water Classic Commentary) Revisited,” in Interpretation and Literature in Early Medieval China, ed. Alan K. C. Chan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 63–102. 5. Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 17. 6. Stoler, Duress, 19. 7. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 8. For more on Derrida’s concept of iterability, see Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 307–330. For a discursive interpretation of tradition, see Talal Asad, “Thinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 166–214. 9. The most vocal opponent of the dam in China was the activist Dai Qing 戴晴. Two of her edited volumes have been translated into English: The River Dragon Has Come: The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China’s Yangtze and Its People, trans. Yi Ming (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), and Yangtze! Yangtze!, trans. Nancy Liu (Toronto: Earthscan Canada, 1994). Many popular books were published in the lead-up to completion of the dam. The most sophisticated of these is Deirdre Chetham’s Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 10. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 7. 11. Nixon, Slow Violence, 4. 12. The sixteenth-century Sanxia tongzhi 三峽通志 (Comprehensive Gazetteer of the Three Gorges) opens with a short section that lists competing geographical descriptions of

pa ssage i. departure 243 which gorges comprise the Three Gorges. Wu Shouzhong 吳守忠, Sanxia tongzhi 三峽 通志 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2002). 13. Du Fu 杜甫, “The Two Palisades of Qutang 瞿塘兩崖,” Dushi xiangzhu杜詩詳注, ed. Qiu Zhao’ao 仇兆鰲 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2004), 1557, abbreviated hereafter as DSXZ. Though all translations of Du Fu are my own, I provide corresponding page numbers for Stephen Owen’s translation of The Poetry of Du Fu (Boston: De Gruyter, 2015) for reference (abbreviated as Owen, followed by book and poem number: Owen 18.9). 14. Qiu Zhao’ao (1638–1717) suggests an interpretation along these lines (DSXZ 1557), which David R. McCraw develops in Du Fu’s Lament from the South (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), 52. Owen’s interpretation (18.9) is similar to Qiu’s and McCraw’s. 15. “On Ascending Baidicheng, First Poem 上白帝城二首, 其一” (DSXZ 1273; Owen 15.8). The second line could also be translated, “With each step and each turn back, it appears anew.” 16. A number of common words for nonpictorial “landscapes” or “scenery” in modern Mandarin also incorporate the word jing 景 (scene/view/vista). 17. Michael Sullivan, Chinese Landscape Painting in the Sui and T’ang Dynasties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); James Cahill, Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Painting (Lawrence: University of Kansas, Spencer Museum of Art, 1988), chap. 2. Landscape poetry (shanshui shi 山水詩) is generally understood to have developed much earlier than landscape painting. For more on the popularization of the term shanshui and the relationship between geographical and aesthetic terminology in the landscape poetry of Xie Lingyun, see Yü-yü Cheng, “Bodily Movement and Geographic Categories: Xie Lingyun’s ‘Rhapsody on Mountain Dwelling’ and the Jin-Song Discourse on Mountains and Rivers,” American Journal of Semiotics 23 (2007): 193–219. 18. Ping Foong, The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Introduction. 19. Chang Tan, “Landscape Without Nature: Ecological Reflections in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 3, no. 3 (2016), 225; Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 17. 20. Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin Classics, 1979), 6.23; Lunyu zhengyi 論語正義, ed. Liu Baonan 劉寶楠 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 237. 21. For more on the history of the modern term ziran自然, see Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 326, and Tan, “Landscape Without Nature,” 224–226. For efforts to translate the natural sciences, see Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

244 pa ssage i. departure 22. Martin Powers, “When Is a Landscape Like a Body?,” in Landscape, Culture, and Power in Chinese Society, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1998); Foong, The Efficacious Landscape; Lothar Ledderose, “The Earthly Paradise: Religious Elements in Chinese Landscape Art,” in Theories of the Arts in China, ed. Susan Bush and Christian Murck (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 165–183. For the influence of religion on the development of poetic landscape representation, see Xiaofei Tian, “From the Eastern Jin Through the Early Tang (317–649),” in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, ed. Kang-i Sun Chang and Stephen Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 199–285, and Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011). 23. Paul Kroll, “Lexical Landscapes and Textual Mountains in the High T’ang,” T’oung Pao 84 (1998): 62–101; Stephen Owen, “The Librarian in Exile: Xie Lingyun’s Bookish Landscapes,” Early Medieval China 10–11, no. 1 (2004): 203–226. 24. Paula Varsano, “Do You See What I See?: Visuality and the Formation of the Chinese Landscape,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 35 (2013): 31–57. 25. Scholars writing on cultural sites, particularly sacred mountains, have focused more carefully on how religious and literary ideas shape space. See especially James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue) in Medieval China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); Wen-shing Chou, Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain in Qing China (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018); and Robert E. Harrist, Landscape of Words: Stone Inscriptions from Early and Medieval China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). Scholars of Chinese gardens have also been attentive to how landscape ideas are expressed materially; see, for example, Craig Clunas, Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (London: Reaktion Books, 1996). 26. For theories of experiential or vernacular landscapes, see John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984) (among other works), and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). For a work of environmental history that resonates with Jackson’s idea of the vernacular landscape, see Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). 27. W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1. James Elkins and Rachel DeLue, eds., Landscape Theory (London: Routledge, 2008) revisits many of the key theoretical debates in landscape studies. See also Elkins’s reflections on “unsolved problems” raised by this volume, “Report on the Book Landscape Theory,” https://www.academia.edu/163424/ On_the_Book_Landscape_Theory_English_?auto=download.

pa ssage i. departure 245 28. Jeremey W. Crampton and Stuart Elden, eds., Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). For an adaptation of the “trilectical” methods of Lefebvre and Soja to the context of Chinese spatial and environmental history, see Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 7, and throughout. Another important approach to landscape is phenomenological, as in Edward Casey’s studies of place and space. For a work that combines the political insights of Mitchell’s work with Casey’s phenomenological approach, see Jeff Malpas, The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014). For a popular example of landscape as object of historical memory work, see Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995). The scholarly literature on landscape is voluminous, varied, and scattered among different fields. For a survey of scholarly literature on European and American landscape traditions, see the “Bibliographic Essay” in Malcolm Andrew’s Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 236–242. 29. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008); Mitchell, Landscape and Power; Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). The list of scholars who have subjected landscape and geography to similar critiques is long. See especially Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York: Knopf, 1988), and Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994). I am also building on research on imperialism and technologies of representation in China, including James Hevia, The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Andrew Jones, “Portable Monuments: Architectural Photography and the ‘Forms’ of Empire in Modern China,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 18, no. 3 (2010): 599–631; Liu, Translingual Practice and Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also Tani Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). 30. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Interventions in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 7–8. See also Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10. 31. Shellen Xiao Wu makes a similar argument about coal and the development of a “discourse on energy” in late Qing and early Republican China in Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry in the Modern World Order (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015), 194.

246 pa ssage i. departure 32. It is the search for natural resources as part of economic and infrastructural development in particular that distinguishes contemporary China’s extractionist imperialism from the territorial imperialism of the Qing, which was, of course, one of the most successful empires in history. For more on Qing imperialism, see Magnus Fiskejö, “The Legacy of the Chinese Empires: Beyond ‘the West and the Rest,’ ” Education About Asia 22, no. 1 (2017): 6–10; Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton, eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004); Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and the International History Review 20, no. 2 (1998), a special issue on “Manchu Colonialism,” especially Peter C. Perdue, “Boundaries, Maps, and Movement: Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian Empires in Early Modern Central Eurasia,” International History Review 20, no. 2 (1998): 263–286, and Michael Adas, “Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective,” International History Review 20, no. 2 (1998): 371–388. 33. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). 34. Stoler, Duress, 26. 35. Cosgrove, Social Formation, 13. 36. Shijing 245 (Shengmin 生民), Maoshi zhengyi 毛詩正義 (juan 17, 260), in Ruan Yuan 阮元, ed., Shisan jing zhushu 十三經注疏 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), 1:528. This poem uses an archaic word for footprint, wu 武, rather than ji. This translation is by Arthur Waley; The Book of Songs, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 244. 37. For more on the myth of Cang Jie, see Imre Galambos, “The Chinese Writing System,” in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 3. 38. Guo Jingchun 郭景純 (276–324 CE), Jiang Fu 江賦, in Wenxuan 文選, compiled by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), 557–579. For a full translation of Guo’s poem, see David R. Knechtges, Wen Xuan or Selections of Refined Literature, vol. 2 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 321–352. 39. Paul Carter, Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 6. 40. Carter, Dark Writing, 6. 41. My use of the trace is based in Chinese aesthetic thought, though it is unavoidably shaped by Derrida’s theories of language and writing. In Derridean thought, the

pa ssage i. departure 247 trace/track is one of the primary figures of différance, the mechanism through which the linguistic sign signifies in relation to that from which it differs, which is necessarily both present and absent. A “mark of the absence of a presence,” the trace is a figure of the present that is equally related to the past (against whose absence and difference it signifies) and the future (which it makes possible as a point of departure). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xvii. In triangulating ji/trace with landscape and shanshui, I am also working against a tendency to romanticize the trace and its “haunting” qualities in order to draw attention to their durable material effects (Stoler, Duress, 5, 6). 42. In the years since the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, Chinese artists have turned to landscape as both an ecocritical form and a means of reflecting on the status of tradition in contemporary China. For more on this phenomenon, see Corey Byrnes, “Chinese Landscapes of Desolation” (forthcoming); Peter Fischer, ed., Shanshui: Poetry Without Sound? Landscape in Chinese Contemporary Art (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2011); Xavier Ortells-Nicolau, “Gray Pastoral: Critical Engagement with Idyllic Nature in Contemporary Photography from China,” Trans Asia Photography Review 5, no. 2 (2015); and Tan, “Landscape Without Nature.” 43. David Harvey, “The Nature of Environment: The Dialectics of Social and Environmental Change,” in The Ways of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 193. 44. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 535; Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 10; Karen Thornber, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 45. Yaeger, “Editor’s Column,” 526. 46. Yaeger, “Editor’s Column,” 527. 47. White, The Organic Machine. 48. My conception of the techno-poetic landscape overlaps somewhat with what Richard White describes as “hybrid landscapes,” in “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” Historian 66 (September 2004): 557–564. 49. Mao Zedong 毛澤東, “Shuidiao getou, youyong 水調歌頭, 游泳.” For the Chinese text as well as a translation of the entire poem, see Mao Zedong, The Poems of Mao Zedong, trans. Willis Barnstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 82–85.

248 1. fading traces 1. Fading Traces 1. James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics, vol. 3, The Shoo-King (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), part 2, 78; Shangshu Zhengyi 尚書正義 (juan 5, 29), in Ruan Yuan 阮元, ed., Shisan jing zhushu十三經注疏 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), vol. 1, 141. 2. Jiang Zemin 江澤民, “Ba sanxia gongcheng jiancheng shijie yiliu gongcheng 把三峽工 程建成世界一流工程,” in Jiang Zemin wenxuan 江澤民文選, vol. 2, http://cpc.people. com.cn/GB/64184/64185/180138/10818621.html. 3. Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 64. 4. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 64. 5. For a history of modern inscriptional technologies, see Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). 6. Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1987), 16. 7. von Glahn, The Country, 12–16. 8. “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past, Second Poem 詠懷古跡, 其二” (DSXZ 1499; Owen 17.34). Du Fu refers to the non-Han people of this region as “Man 蠻 [tribes],” “hundred Man” (baiman百蠻), “southern Man” (nanman南蠻), or “black Man” (wuman烏蠻), all catchall phrases for southern tribes. For a description of the ethnic makeup of the region during the early Song, see von Glahn, The Country, chap. 1, and throughout. 9. Su Shi 蘇軾, “Wang Dingguo shiji xu 王定國詩集序,” in Du Fu juan 杜甫卷, ed. the Huawen xuan 華文軒 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1964), 99; cited and translated by Eva Shan Chou in Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23. 10. Chou, Reconsidering Tu Fu, 27. For more on Du Fu’s importance during the Song, see Charles Hartman, “The Tang Poet Du Fu and the Song Dynasty Literati,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 30 (2008): 43–74. 11. For detailed information on Du Fu’s movements during his lifetime, see Chen Yixin 陳貽焮, Du Fu pingzhuan 杜甫評傳 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2003); William Hung, Tu Fu, China’s Greatest Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952); Li Chunping 李春坪, Du Fu nianpu xinbian 杜甫年譜新編 (Taibei: Xinan shuju, 1975); Liu Mengkang 劉孟伉, Du Fu nianpu 杜甫年譜 (Hong Kong: Huaxia chubanshe, 1967); David R. McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament from the South (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1992). For a collection of the best-known premodern writings on Du Fu, see the three-volume Du Fu juan. 12. Xuanzong left Chang’an with his “precious consort” (guifei 貴妃), Yang Yuhuan 楊玉環 (719–756), though the latter, blamed for distracting the emperor from his

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism 249 1. fading traces 249 duties, was executed at a post station between Chang’an and Chengdu. For a classic account of the rebellion, see Edwin G. Pulleyblank, The Background to the Rebellion of An Lu-shan (London: Oxford University Press, 1955). 13. Du Fu’s reasons for leaving Chengdu are not totally clear. For some theories, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament, 39–40. 14. “Reflected Light 返照” (DSXZ 1336; Owen 15.57). 15. Though the Yangzi was an important transportation route, most trade during this period was conducted over the land routes that connected the Chengdu Basin and Chang’an. Upper Yangzi ports remained relative economic and cultural backwaters well into the Southern Song (von Glahn, The Country, 198, 214). Shipping on the upper Yangzi was still carried out on a small scale through the Ming Dynasty. The size of ships and volume of cargo transported downriver and upriver increased dramatically during the Qing (due in part to population growth). Nanny Kim, “River Control, Merchant Philanthropy, and Environmental Change in Nineteenth-Century China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 52, no. 4 (2009): 667. 16. For a structuralist reading of the “Autumn Stirrings,” see Yu-Kung Kao and TsuLin Mei, “Tu Fu’s ‘Autumn Meditations’: An Exercise in Linguistic Criticism,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 28 (1968): 44–80. For a book-length exegesis, see Ye Jiaying 葉嘉瑩, Du Fu qiuxing bashou jishuo 杜甫秋興八首集說 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1988). See also McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament, chap. 11. 17. DSXZ 1485; Owen 17.27. 18. This line is built around a common Tang poetic reference that combines two separate tales. The first records an historical expedition taken by Zhang Qian 張騫 (d. 114 BCE), who was imprisoned by the Xiongnu while searching for the origins of the Yellow River. The second tells the story of a man who lived along a coast by which a mysterious raft passed every year during the eighth month. One year he decided to climb aboard, and after a lengthy trip he reached a strange city, where he found a weaving girl and a cowherd. When he asked them where he was, the boy sent him in search of a resident of the state of Chu, who explained that the man had hitched a ride on the “traveler star,” which passes through the Milky Way and the Cowherd constellation at the same time every year. Du Fu’s line refers to both Zhang Qian, who was a prisoner in a foreign land, and the man who traveled on an empty star-raft. 19. The “painted ministry” refers to a government building in Han Dynasty Chang’an in which portraits of meritorious officials were displayed. Du Fu superimposes Tang sites and institutions on their Han equivalents throughout the “Autumn Stirrings.” 20. For a similar image of connected waterways, see “Yearning for my Home on the Brocade River, Two Poems 懷錦水居止二首” (DSXZ 1237; Owen 14.74).

250 1. fading traces 21. Stephen Owen, “Synecdoche of the Imaginary,” in The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture, ed. Paula Varsano (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 261. 22. Owen, “Synecdoche,” 264. 23. For a study of the gibbon in Chinese literature, see Robert van Gulik, The Gibbon in China: An Essay in Chinese Animal Lore (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1967). 24. Du Fu makes a similar observation in his “Ballad of the Most Skilled 最能行” (DSXZ 1286; Owen 15.19): “ ‘At dawn depart from Baidi, by dusk arrive in Jiangling 朝 发白帝暮江陵’/Just recently I witnessed this feat—truly there is proof 顷来目击信有 征!” Stephen Owen describes a comparable gesture in Xie Lingyun’s 謝靈運 work in “The Librarian in Exile: Xie Lingyun’s Bookish Landscapes,” Early Medieval China 10–11, no. 1 (2004): 206. 25. Paula Varsano, Tracking the Banished Immortal (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2003), 9, and throughout. For more on xu/shi, see Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1992), 590. For a summary of approaches to xu/shi as used in the so-called Li-Du debate, see Varsano, Tracking, 4–12, and throughout. 26. Varsano, Tracking, 12, and throughout. 27. The possibility of returning home haunts Du Fu’s late poetry. For examples, see “On Hearing That the Armies Had Recovered Henan and Hebei 聞官軍收河南河北” (DSXZ 968; Owen 11.68), from 763, and “Dreams of Returning Home 夢歸” (DSXZ 1950; Owen 22.33), from 769. 28. Paula Varsano, “Lowered Curtain in the Half-Light: An Introduction,” in The Rhetoric of Hiddenness, 1. 29. The “Great Preface” to the Book of Odes is the most important statement of literary principles and poetic modes in the premodern Chinese literary tradition. For a line-by-line translation and exegesis alongside the Chinese text, see Owen, Readings, 37–56. 30. Owen, Readings, 46. 31. McCraw renders xing as “moods” (Du Fu’s Lament) while Kao and Mei opt for “meditations” (“Tu Fu’s ‘Autumn Meditations’ ”). I have followed Owen in translating the title as “Autumn Stirrings.” 32. Yu appears in a range of early sources, many of which are translated in Anne Birrell’s Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). The earliest sources are the Shangshu 尚書 and the Shijing 詩經. The latter contains at least six references to Yu, in poems 201, 244, 261, 300, 304, and 305. The former is the most important early source for Chinese flood myths related to Yu and his father Gun. The “Tribute of Yu” (Yu gong 禹貢) chapter contains the most thorough account of his feats. There are also lengthy accounts of Yu’s deeds

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism 251 1. fading traces 251 in the Guoyu 國語 and Mencius. For more, see Mark Edward Lewis, The Flood Myths of Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 163n28, 164n30, and throughout. 33. In 1995, a lavish, officially sponsored ceremony—the first since 1934—was held at what is known as Yu the Great’s tomb in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Michael Leibold reads this revival of a cult of Yu as part of a mid-1990s attempt to articulate a neo-Confucian philosophy that drew on “Chinese” traditions to reinforce centralized power; see his “Da Yu, a Modern Hero? Myth and Mythology in the People’s Republic of China,” in Perceptions of Antiquity in Chinese Civilization, ed. Dieter Kuhn and Helga Stahl (Heidelberg, Germany: Edition Forum, 2008), 361–375. Recent archaeological surveys carried out in China have been represented as verifying aspects of the mythology of Yu as flood queller; see Nicholas Wade, “Scientific Evidence of Flood May Give Credence to Legend of China’s First Dynasty,” New York Times, August 4, 2016. 34. Gun tried to stop the flood by building dams and dykes. After he was executed, Yu emerged fully formed from his corpse. Faced with the same floods, Yu reversed his father’s work, digging out the land and guiding the water into rivers that drained into the sea. 35. Robin McNeal, “Constructing Myth in Modern China,” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 3 (2012): 690. I have drawn on this article for its detailed description of the park and its statuary. Professor McNeal has also been kind enough to allow me to reproduce two of the excellent images that he took of the park. For more of his images, see https:// www.flickr.com/photos/robin_mcneal/albums/72157636433625894/with/10209018693/. 36. McNeal, “Constructing Myth,” 679. 37. McNeal, “Constructing Myth,” 699. 38. “Correspondence: A Memorial to Captain Plant,” North China Herald, April 2, 1921. 39. Formations such as the Yanyu Rock 灎澦堆, an enormous boulder located directly in front of Kuimen, were integral to both the popular culture of those who navigated the river and the poets who traveled through the gorges, including Du Fu. Yanyu was dynamited in 1958 on Mao’s suggestion. Deirdre Chetham, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 157. 40. Lyman P. Van Slyke, Yangtze: Nature, History, and the River (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1988), 38–39. 41. For the Chinese text of “Swimming” and an alternate translation, see Mao Zedong, The Poems of Mao Zedong, trans. Willis Barnstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 82–85. 42. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 43. DSXZ 1225; Owen 14.60.

252 1. fading traces 44. Yu is credited with having driven away snakes and serpents from the land (Lewis, Flood Myths, 53). For a version of this aspect of his myth, see Mengzi zhushu jiejing 孟子注疏解經, “Teng wengong xia 滕文公下” (juan 6, 50) in Shisan jing, 2714. 45. DSXZ (1225) gives a variant of sheng 生 (rise from) for xu 噓 (exhale, puff ). 46. In the course of Yu’s work, he used four vehicles (sizai 四載): a boat (zhou 舟), a chariot (che 車) for traveling overland, a sledge (chun 輴) for traversing muddy areas, and a sedan chair (lei 樏) for crossing mountains. Shangshu Zhengyi (juan 5, 29), in Shisan jing, 141. 47. “The three Ba” is a Han administrative reorganization of the ancient state of Ba, which included the Gorges. For an early source on the history and geography of Ba, see Chang Ju 常璩 (ca. 291–361), Huayang guozhi 華陽國志, ed. Ren Naiqiang 任乃強 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987). 48. For other temple poems, see “Zhuge’s Shrine 諸葛廟” (DSXZ 1674; Owen 19.27) and poem four of “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past 詠懷古跡” series (DSXZ 1505; Owen 17.37). 49. von Glahn, The Country, 13. 50. See the collected comments that follow the poem in DSXZ (1225). 51. For alternative readings, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament, 182–183, and Yu-Kung Kao and Tsu-Lin Mei, “Meaning, Metaphor, and Allusion in T’ang Poetry,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 38 (1978): 331–332. 52. DSXZ 1558; Owen 18.10. 53. In both the DSXZ and Du Fu 杜甫, Dushi jingquan 杜詩鏡銓, ed. Yang Lun 楊 倫 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980), “At Qutang Contemplating the Past” follows immediately after “The Two Palisades of Qutang.” Qiu argues that they were written in that order (DSXZ 1558). 54. The image of the “Potter’s Wheel” (taojun 陶鈞) as generative force comes from the second chapter of the Zhuangzi 莊子. See William Callahan, “Cook Ding’s Life on the Whetstone: Contingency, Action, and Inertia in the Zhuangzi,” in Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, ed. Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 184–186. 55. Du Fu may have a poem by Shen Quanqi 沈佺期 (ca. 650–714) in mind here. In the opening couplet of his “Passing by the Dragon Gate of Shu 過蜀龍門,” Shen proclaims: “The Dragon Gate was not carved out by Yu 龍門非禹鑿/its weirdness is the work of Heaven 詭怪乃天功.” Shen Quanqi 沈佺期 and Song Zhiwen 宋之問, Shen Quanqi Song Zhiwen ji jiaozhu 沈佺期宋之問集校注 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2001), 200. 56. For more on huaigu poetry, see David R. Knechtges, “Ruin and Remembrance in Classical Chinese Literature: The ‘Fu on the Ruined City’ by Bao Zhao,” in Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture, ed. Paul Kroll (Boston: Brill, 2015),

the unruly detail of l ate col onialism 253 1. fading traces 253 55–89; Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), chap. 1; Hans Frankel, “The Contemplation of the Past in T’ang Poetry,” in Perspectives on the T’ang, ed. Arthur Wright and Dennis Twitchett (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 345–365; and Wu, A Story of Ruins, 64. 57. This translation is by James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 5, The Ch’un Ts’ew with the Tso Chuen (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), part 2, 578. For the original, see Chunqiu zuozhuan zhengyi 春秋左傳正義 (juan 41, 319), in Shisan jing, 2021. 58. Water control, centralized political administration, and moral philosophy were closely linked in early accounts of Yu’s dredging. Lewis, Flood Myths, 32–33. 59. The “gait of Yu” is also the name of a performance form that was used “in many rituals to protect travelers, cure diseases, and perform other functions” (Lewis, Flood Myths, 103). According to Wolfram Eberhard, shamans in the state of Ba performed a one-legged dance that was known as the “Yu step” (Yu bu 禹步). Wolfram Eberhard, The Local Cultures of South and East China (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 74. For more on attributes of Yu’s body, see: Lewis, Flood Myths, 190n87, and throughout. 60. Mark Edward Lewis, The Construction of Space in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 2–3. 61. Stephen Owen, “The Self ’s Perfect Mirror: Poetry as Autobiography,” in The Vitality of the Lyric Voice, ed. Shuen-fu Lin and Stephen Owen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 92. 62. DSXZ 1228; Owen 1463. 63. By the Tang, it was common to refer to the visibility of Yu’s traces on the mountains and cliffs of the Gorges. For examples, see Chen Zi’ang’s 陳子昂 (d. 702) “At Baidicheng Contemplating the Past 白帝城懷古,” Chen Zi’ang ji 陳子昂集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 17, and Meng Haoran’s 孟浩然 (ca. 689–740) “Entering the Gorges, Sent to My Younger Brother 入峽寄弟,” Meng Haoran shiji jianzhu 孟浩然詩集 箋注 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000), 136. 64. The first of the “Singing My Feelings” poems centers on the poet Yu Xin 庾信 (513–581); the third on Wang Zhaojun 王昭君, a royal consort who was married off to a Xiongnu leader during the Han; the fourth on Liu Bei 劉備 (161–223), scion of the royal house of the Han; and the fifth on Liu Bei’s military strategist, Zhuge Liang 諸葛 亮 (181–234). For readings of the entire series, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament, 186–195, and Hans Frankel, The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), 118–124. 65. For an extensive bibliography of studies on Song Yu, see David R. Knechtges and Taiping Chang, eds., Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature: A Reference Guide (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 1007–1022.

254 1. fading traces 66. von Glahn, The Country, 13–14. For more on the secularization of goddesses during the Tang Dynasty, see Edward H. Schafer, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T’ang Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). For a translation of the Songs of Chu, see David Hawkes, trans., The Songs of the South (New York: Penguin Classics, 2011). 67. DSXZ 1501; Owen 17.35. 68. Song Kaiyu 宋開玉, Dushi shidi 杜詩釋地 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2004), 394. In a poem titled “Song Yu’s House 宋玉宅,” Fan Chengda 范成大 (1126–1193) explains that, “according to tradition, the county offices of Zigui are [built] on the old remains of [Song Yu’s house]. In a wine shop to the left of the office some frivolous type [haoshizhe 好事者] has put up a sign saying ‘Song Yu’s Eastern House.’ ” Fan Shihu ji 范石湖集 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), 272. 69. Owen treats Song Yu as the one who produces wenzao: “His former house by the river and mountains, nothing but his literary flourishes” (17.35). Song Yu was a master of the fu (rhapsody), a form that was sometimes criticized for its fanciful scenarios and emphasis on virtuosic displays of arcane linguistic knowledge. What the “baselessness” of Song Yu’s own writing has to do with his house in this interpretation is not totally clear. 70. Jian Jinsong 簡錦松 believes that both the Yang Terrace and the Palaces of Chu were located within the immediate environs of Kuizhou. Du Fu Kuizhou shi xiandi yanjiu 杜甫夔州詩現地研究 (Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1999), chap. 2. 71. In a long poem titled “Mt Wu 巫山,” the famous Song Dynasty poet Su Shi recounts a conversation with an old man who in his youth repeatedly climbed to the top of Mt. Wu, where he found inscribed steles and other traces of the goddess and her cult. Su Shi 蘇軾, Su Shi shiji 蘇軾詩集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), 33. 72. See Song, Dushi shidi, 395–396, for more detailed information. Yang terraces may originally have been associated with shamanistic rituals, though the record appears to be silent on such matters. 73. Du Fu uses the phrase yaoluo 搖落 in a number of his poems, including, “Western Tower, First Poem 西閣二首, 其一” (DSXZ 1473; Owen 17.15). This is how it appears in the “Nine Disputations” (jiubian 九辯): “Doleful, ah, this autumn air! 悲哉秋之為 氣/Sere, severe, ah! The grasses and trees wither and decay 蕭瑟兮草木摇落而變衰.” Chuci buzhu 楚辭補注, comp. Hong Xingzu 洪興祖 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983), 182; Hawkes, The Songs of the South, 209. 74. These adjectives come from Yu Xin’s “Rhapsody on a Barren Tree Kushu fu 枯樹 賦,” Yu Zishan jizhu 庾子山集注, ed. Ni Fan 倪璠 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000), 46. Yu Xin is a figure of special significance for Du Fu. Descended from a northern family that fled south at the fall of the Western Jin Dynasty (265–316), he was technically a northerner born in exile, though he considered himself a native of the Yangzi city of

2. from trace to record 255 Jiangling. He reached lofty political and literary heights toward the end of the Liang Dynasty (502–557). When that dynasty began to implode, he was sent north to sue for peace. From 554 to the end of his life he was held as a captive of northern dynasties. For more, see William T. Graham, Jr., “The Lament for the South”: Yu Hsin’s “Ai Chiang-Nan Fu” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 4–20. 75. Yu Xin, Yu Zishan jizhu, 94. 76. Chuci buzhu, 215; Hawkes, The Songs of the South, 230. 2. From Trace to Record 1. Paul Carter, Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 91. 2. Ruth Mostern, “Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern”—The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960–1276 CE) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 99. 3. Eva Shan Chou, Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 26; Deborah Marie Rudolph, “Literary Innovation and Aesthetic Tradition in Travel Writing of the Southern Sung: A Study of Fan Ch’engta’s ‘Wu ch’uan lu’ ” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996), 56–57. 4. Stephen Allee has done extensive research on The Shu River, attributed to Li Gonglin 李公麟 (ca. 1041–1106), and the Ten Thousand Li Along the Yangzi River (Changjiang wanli tu 長江萬里圖), attributed to Juran 巨然 (active ca. 960–985). For documents that transcribe, date, and translate (nonpoetic) inscriptions, identify collectors’ seals, and list labels, see https://archive.asia.si.edu/SongYuan/F1916.539/F1916-539.Documentation. pdf (The Shu River) and https://archive.asia.si.edu/songyuan/F1911.168/F1911-168.Documentation.pdf (Ten Thousand Li). See also Julia Orell, “Picturing the Yangzi River in Southern Song China (1127–1279)” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2011). 5. Qianlong’s poem is collected in Zhang Zhao 張照 et al., comp., Shiqu baoji 石渠 寶笈 (Haikou: Hainan chubanshe, 2001), vol. 2, 1201–1202, and Qianlong, Yuzhishi chuji 御製詩初集, 32:11b–13a, in Qing Gaozong (Qianlong) yuzhi shiwen quanji 清高宗(乾隆)御 製詩文全集 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2010), vol. 1, 823–824. 6. Mostern, Dividing the Realm, 84. 7. Peter K. Bol, “The Rise of Local History: History, Geography, and Culture in Southern Song and Yuan Wuzhou,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 61, no. 1 (2001): 56. 8. James M. Hargett, “Local Gazetteers and Their Place in the History of Difangzhi Writing,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56, no. 2 (1996): 408. 9. Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 70. 10. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 86. 11. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 86.

256 2. from trace to record 12. For geographical and phenomenological approaches to place, see Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), and Edward Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 13. Jian Jinsong 簡錦松, Du Fu Kuizhou shi xiandi yanjiu 杜甫夔州詩現地研究 (Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1999); Tan Wenxing 譚文興, “Dongtun, Rangxi ji qita—du Du Fu Kuizhou shi xiandi yanjiu 東屯, 瀼西及其他—讀《杜甫夔州詩現地研究》,” Du Fu yanjiu xuekan 杜甫研究學刊 66, no. 4 (2000): 252. 14. For a sample of xiandi research on Du Fu, see the bibliography to Jian’s Du Fu Kuizhou shi. See also Song Kaiyu 宋開玉’s Dushi shidi 杜詩釋地 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2004), which has entries for every place name mentioned in Du Fu’s poetry as well as a final chapter of forty-five pages dedicated to sites of Du Fu worship throughout China. 15. Tan, “Dongtun,” 252. 16. Xiandi research is deeply invested in the “realism” of Du Fu’s poetry. Du Fu’s status as a supposedly “realist poet” (xianshi zhuyi shiren 現實主義詩人) has led some scholars to treat his poetry more as a meticulous geographical and social record than as a form of creative expression. See, for example, Ren Guiyuan 任桂園, “Gu Kuizhou diwang xingsheng yu Tangshi huzheng (shang) 古夔州地望形勝與唐詩互証,” Chongqing sanxia xueyuan xuebao 重慶三峽學院學報 25, no. 115 (2009): 6. For more on Du Fu’s realism, see Chou, Reconsidering Tu Fu, 75–106. 17. Stephen Owen, “The Librarian in Exile: Xie Lingyun’s Bookish Landscapes,” Early Medieval China 10–11, no. 1 (2004): 203–226. 18. Carter, Dark Writing, 91. 19. Carter, Dark Writing, 84. 20. Ding Guanpeng’s image is reminiscent of the landscapes of Ma Yuan 馬遠 (active ca. 1190–1225), who is closely associated with diagonally composed paintings anchored in “one corner” (yijiao 一角). See Richard Edwards, The Heart of Ma Yuan: The Search for a Southern Song Aesthetic (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011). 21. Zhu Mu 祝穆 and Zhu Zhu 祝洙, Songben fangyu shenglan 宋本方輿勝覽 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986); Wu Qian 吳潛, Zhengde Kuizhou fuzhi 正德夔州府 志, in Zhongguo xinan wenxian congshu, Xinan xijian fangzhi wenxian 中國西南文獻叢書, 西 南稀見方志文獻, vol. 9 (Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue chubanshe, 2003). 22. Most gazetteers provide only basic information about the location of Du Fu’s homes while citing earlier scholarly sources and listing poems written there. There are a number of sources on the origins and evolution of the Song gazetteer, including Hargett, “Local Gazetteers”; Bol, “The Rise of Local History”; Jeffrey Moser, “One Land of Many Places: The Integration of Local Culture in Southern Song Geographies,” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 42 (2012): 235–278; and Mostern, Dividing the Realm. These authors place the development of difangzhi in the context of waning state power,

2. from trace to record 257 decreased official interest in mapping projects at the end of the Northern Song, and the rise of local elite culture. For later developments in gazetteer production, see Benjamin Elman, “Geographical Research in the Ming-Ch’ing Period,” Monumenta Serica 35 (1981–1983): 1–18, and Yongtao Du, “Literati Spatial Order: A Preliminary Study of Comprehensive Gazetteers in the Late Ming,” Ming Studies 66 (2012): 16–43. 23. Fan Chengda 范成大, Wuchuan lu 吳船錄, in Fan Chengda biji liuzhong 范成大筆記 六種, ed. Kong Fanli 孔凡禮 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2002), 217 (hereafter FCDBJ). For a translation, see James M. Hargett, Riding the River Home: A Complete and Annotated Translation of Fan Chengda’s (1126–1193) Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (Wuchuan lu) (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2008). 24. For more on Chinese travel writing in the Song, see Cheng Minsheng 程民生, Songdai diyu wenhua 宋代地域文化 (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 1997); Ronald Egan, “When There Is a Parallel Text in Prose: Reading Lu You’s 1170 Yangzi River Journey in Poetry and Prose,” in Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture, ed. Paul Kroll (Boston: Brill, 2015), 221–250; James Hargett’s translations of Fan Chengda’s travel diaries (see bibliography); Wang Fuxin 王福鑫, Songdai lüyou yanjiu 宋代旅遊研 究 (Baoding: Heibei daxue chubanshe, 2007); and Cong Ellen Zhang, Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011). There are also two unpublished theses on Song travel writing: Beryl Chapman, “Travel Diaries of the Southern Sung Dynasty with Particular Reference to Fan Chengda’s Wuchuan lu” (master’s thesis, University of Sydney, 1985), and Rudolph, “Literary Innovation.” See also Richard E. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), Introduction. 25. The term youji 遊記 refers here not to long-length travel diaries such as Fan Chengda’s, but to short essays that detail the experience of traveling to and visiting specific sites of historical or cultural interest. This form of spatial writing emerged in the mid to late Tang and early Song, with Liu Zongyuan’s 柳宗元 (773–819) “Eight Accounts of Yongzhou” (Yongzhou baji 永州八記), frequently listed as one of the first mature travel essays. Liu Zongyuan ji 柳宗元集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), 762–773. For more on the development of youji, see James M. Hargett, On the Road in Twelfth Century China: The Travel Diaries of Fan Chengda (1126–1193) (Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1989), 17–25. For information on anthologies of travel writing, see Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, Introduction, and throughout. On the specific lyrical qualities of Liu’s famous works and the Tang essay in general, see Rudolph, “Literary Innovation,” 6–7. 26. Lu You 陸游, Weinan wenji 渭南文集, in Lu You quanji jiaozhu 陸游全集校注, ed. Qian Zhonglian 錢仲聯 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang jiaoyu chubanshe, 2011), juan 17, 100. Lu You’s Dongtun essay is also collected in DSXZ (2251). For a complete translation of Lu You’s Dontun essay, see Corey Byrnes, “Rising From a Placid Lake: The Three Gorges at the Intersection of History, Aesthetics and Politics” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2013), chap. 2.

258 2. from trace to record 27. The Rangxi lofty retreat seems to have been reconstructed sometime after the twelfth century. DSXZ (2253) includes an essay by the Ming official Chen Wenzhu 陳文 燭 (jinshi 1565) titled “A Record of the Reconstruction of the Rangxi Thatched Hut 重 修瀼西草堂記.” 28. Xie 䏶 can also be pronounced che. It seems to be a more common version of the characters 烲 and 䏹, the latter of which is used to write Yu’s name in Quan Shu yiwenzhi 全蜀藝文志, ed. Yang Shen 楊慎 (1488–1559) (Beijing: Xianzhuang shuju, 2003) (hereafter QSYWZ). 29. Yu Xie 于䏶, “Account of the Renovation of Du Fu’s Former Residence at Dongtun in Kuizhou 修夔州東屯少陵故居記,” QSYWZ 1206. 30. Song, Dushi shidi, 653. 31. “Two Chuan” (liangchuan 兩川) refers to eastern and western Sichuan. Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅, Yuzhang Huang wenji 豫章黃文集, in Sibu congkan 四部叢刊 (Taibei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1975), juan 17, 22b–23b (hereafter YZHWJ). In 2015, the government of Danleng, Sichuan, opened a new Hall of the Great Odes containing inscriptions of Du Fu’s Sichuan poetry in the style of Huang Tingjian’s calligraphy. 32. YZHWJ 22b–23b. For more on Huang’s essay, see David Palumbo-Liu, The Poetics of Appropriation: The Literary Theory and Practice of Huang Tingjian (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 34–36. 33. Thorny bushes and similar ground cover are common in poetry on ruins. For the relationship between ruins and wasteland, see David R. Knechtges, “Ruin and Remembrance in Classical Chinese Literature: The ‘Fu on the Ruined City’ by Bao Zhao,” in Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture, ed. Paul Kroll (Boston: Brill, 2015), 65. 34. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 26; See also Knechtges, “Ruin and Remembrance,” 56. 35. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 26. 36. Analects 11.15; Lunyu zhengyi 論語正義, ed. Liu Baonan 劉寶楠 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 453. For a translation of this passage, see the Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin Classics, 1979), 108. 37. QSYWZ 1206. 38. By contrast, local governments in other spots made famous by Du Fu’s postrebellion residence, including Tonggu 同谷 (in modern Gansu Province) and Chengdu, both of which had their own thatched huts, had sponsored the maintenance of his former homes. 39. QSYWZ 1207. 40. Su Shi 蘇軾, “Wang Dingguo shiji xu 王定國詩集序,” in Du Fu juan 杜甫卷, ed. the Huawen xuan 華文軒 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1964), 99. Cited and translated in Chou, Reconsidering Tu Fu, 23. 41. QSYWZ 1207.

2. from trace to record 259 42. QSYWZ 1204. 43. Ironically, it was often “celebrated ‘visitors/outsiders’ ” like Du Fu who contributed most to the fame of cultural sites. Zhang, Transformative Journeys, 179. 44. “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past, Second Poem 詠懷古跡, 其二” (DSXZ 1499; Owen 17.34). 45. Carter, Dark Writing, 84. 46. For more on “cultural pilgrimages” during the Song, see Zhang, Transformative Journeys, chap. 7, and throughout. 47. Strassberg frames Song travel writing as a manifestation of gewu (Inscribed Landscapes, 46). For more on gewu, see Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4–6, 441n3, and throughout; Andrew Plaks, trans., Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung (The Highest Order of Cultivation and On the Practice of the Mean) (New York: Penguin Books, 2003); and Hoyt Tillman, “The Idea and the Reality of the ‘Thing’ During the Song: Philosophical Attitudes Towards Wu,” Bulletin of Song and Yüan Studies 14 (1978): 68–82. 48. Jian, Du Fu, 237–244. 49. Bill Porter, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2016), 162. 50. Porter, Finding Them Gone, 163. 51. Porter, Finding Them Gone, 167. 52. Porter, Finding Them Gone, 166. 53. Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry draws primarily on works attributed to Song Yu in the Chuci anthology, including the “Nine Disputations” and “Summoning the Soul,” rather than on his rhapsodies. For examples of Du Fu’s use of language attributed to Song Yu, see chapter 1. 54. There is little to indicate that Song Yu’s Mt. Wu is the Mt. Wu of the Three Gorges. For foundational research on the goddess of Mt. Wu, with a special focus on the geography of Song Yu’s poems, see Wen Yiduo 聞一多, “Gaotang shennü chuanshuozhi fenxi 高堂神女傳說之分析,” in Qinghua daxue xuebao 清華大學學報 10, no. 4 (1935): 837–866. 55. Song Yu 宋玉, “Gaotang fu高唐賦,” in Wenxuan文選, compiled by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), 587. For a complete translation of the “Gaotang Rhapsody,” see David R. Knechtges, Wen Xuan or Selections of Refined Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), vol. 3, 325–339. For a bibliography of studies on the rhapsody as well as a list of translations, see David R. Knechtges and Taiping Chang, eds., Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature Part Two: A Reference Guide (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 1019–1021. 56. The goddess of Mt. Wu, or, as Edward H. Schafer renders her name, the “Divine Woman of Shamanka Mountain,” was “[probably] an ancient fertility goddess whose ritual mating with a shaman-king was necessary to the well-being of

260 2. from trace to record the land”; Schafer, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T’ang Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 46. For an account of the textual permutations of the goddess of Mt. Wu, see Wen, “Gaotang shennü,” 837–865. By the time she appeared in Song Yu’s rhapsody, the goddess had already begun to undergo a process of secularization that obscured her origins in local cults. In this she shared the fate of the many zoomorphic deities, including “dragon ladies and rain maidens,” who resided in numinous locales throughout the south. Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1987), 13–14; Schafer, The Divine Woman. 57. Paul F. Rouzer, Articulated Ladies: Gender and the Male Community in Early Chinese Texts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 58–59. 58. For more on goddess poetry in the Tang, see Schafer, The Divine Woman. For an account of how early erotic poetry, including rhapsodies, shaped later discourses on love and desire, see Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), chap. 1. For connections between Song Yu’s two “goddess” rhapsodies and early erotic literature, see Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 58–72. 59. Liu Gang 劉剛, “Songren guanyu Wushan shennüde bianwu yuqi dui Song Yu shennü miaoxiede piping 宋人關於巫山神女的辯誣與其對宋玉神女描寫的批評,” in Anshan shifan xueyuan xuebao 鞍山師範學院學報 12, no. 3 (2010), 23. 60. Du’s Record is collected in the sixty-volume edition of the Daozang 道臧 (Taipei, 1977) vol. 30, 24154–24207. For a partial translation (not including the entry on Yaoji), see Suzanne Cahill, Divine Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood: Records of the Assembled Transcendents of the Fortified Walled City, by Du Guangting (850–933) (Magdalena, N.M.: Three Pines Press, 2006). This passage is quoted verbatim in Li Fang 李昉, comp., Taiping guangji wubaijuan 太平廣記五百卷 (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1968), juan 56, 132. 61. Li, Taiping guangji, 132. In one essay on the shrine to the goddess, the Song writer Ma Yongqing 馬永卿 (dates uncertain; lived around the Northern Song/Southern Song transition) praises Du Guangting’s Record and another text for defending the goddess (QSYWZ 1059). 62. Li, Taiping guangji, 132. The relationship between Yu and the goddess of Mt. Wu described in the Yongcheng jixian lu might be distantly connected to shamanistic practice. For more, see Wolfram Eberhard, The Local Cultures of South and East China (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1968), 74. 63. Li Bai, “Moved by Poetic Images, Poem One 感興八首, 其一,” in Li Taibai quanji 李太白全集, ed. Wang Qi 王琦 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), 1102 (hereafter LTBQJ). Schafer notes that this poem “departs radically from tradition,” though it is a departure that would become increasingly common (The Divine Woman, 101–102).

2. from trace to record 261 64. Yuefu shiji 樂府詩集, compiled by Guo Maoqian 郭茂倩 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2003), 238–243 (hereafter YFSJ). Though an elite form, Music Bureau poetry has roots in folk music, which provided titles and tunes (now lost) for each theme. See Joseph Allen, In the Voice of Others: Chinese Music Bureau Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), and Anne Birrell, Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993). 65. Yu Fen’s 于濆 ninth-century “How High Mt. Wu” poem (YFSJ 240), for example, blames Song Yu for slandering the ancient kings of Chu and making the goddess of Mt. Wu a succubus. This critical tradition seems to have continued into at least the Ming Dynasty. In a poem titled “Mt. Wu” (Wushan 巫山), the travel writer and poet Wang Shixing 王士性 (1547–1598) echoes Yu Fen’s critique of Song Yu. Wang Shixing dilishu sanzhong 王士性地理書三種, ed. Zhou Zhenhe 周振鶴 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chuanshe, 1993), 519. 66. These lines appear near the end of Song Yu’s “Goddess” rhapsody (Shennü fu 神 女賦). Wenxuan, 889; Knechtges, Wen Xuan, 349. 67. Fan Chengda, Fan Shihu ji 范石湖集 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), 116 (hereafter FSHJ). 68. This line alludes to the story of Lady Li 李夫人, consort of Emperor Wudi of the Han 漢武帝 and a famous femme fatale. The best-known version of her story comes from Ban Gu’s 班固 (32–92) Han shu 漢書, which describes the stunning Lady Li’s dubious rise to favor and her deathbed manipulation of the emperor that led to the political ascent of her immoral brothers. Having refused the emperor a final glance before her death, Lady Li comes to obsess the ruler, inspiring him to seek her through occult practices. When a wizard from the state of Qi promises to conjure her spirit, the emperor is only too eager to follow along. Seeing a woman who resembles Lady Li, Wudi composes a poem in which he asks, “Was it her, or was it not her [shiye feiye 是邪 非邪]?” Wudi next composes a rhapsody on Lady Li that draws heavily on the mystical imagery of Song Yu’s goddess rhapsodies and the language of the Songs of Chu. Ban Gu, Han shu 漢書 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1970), vol. 51, 2346. For more on Lady Li, see Stephen Owen, “One Sight: The Han Shu Biography of Lady Li,” in Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture: China, Europe, and Japan, ed. David R. Knechtges and Eugene Vance (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 239–259. 69. YFSJ 242. 70. FSHJ 215. 71. FCDBJ 219. 72. FSHJ 215. 73. See Li Bai’s “Observing Yuan Danqiu Seated Before a Screen Painting of Mt. Wu 觀元丹丘坐巫山屏風” (LTBQJ 1135). 74. FCDBJ 219.

262 2. from trace to record 75. Fan describes commissioning paintings “to take back” (yigui以歸) with him in two poems from his journey down the Yangzi, “The Tower of Myriad Vistas 萬景樓” (FSHJ 254) and “Upon First Entering the Area of the Great Mt. E 初入大峨” (FSHJ 256). 76. Mao Zedong, “Shuidiao getou, youyong 水調歌頭, 游泳.” For the Chinese text and an alternate translation, see Mao Zedong, The Poems of Mao Zedong, trans. Willis Barnstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 82–85. 77. Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 106. 78. Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, 114. 79. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 535. Passage ii. One Thousand L i 1. From the first preface to Luo Jinshen’s 羅縉紳Xingchuan biyao行川必要 (Yichang: Shuishi xinfu zhongying, 1883). 2. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 3. Chinese Landscape 1. Sun Yat-sen 孫中山, “Shang Li Hongzhang shu 上李鸿章书,” in Sun Zhongshan quanji 孫中山全集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), vol. 1, 8. 2. John Savage, Preliminary Report on the Yangtze Gorge Project (Chungking: Government of China, Ministry of Economic Affairs, National Resources Commission, 1944), 6. 3. Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13. 4. Hans van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 8. For a summary of different approaches to China’s semicolonial status, see Anne Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018), 3–7. 5. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 29, and throughout. For the question of collaboration, see Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 8–14, and chap. 3. 6. The Treaty of Tianjin (art. X) established Chinkiang as a treaty port. Edward Hertslet, Hertslet’s China Treaties (London: Harrison and Sons, 1908), vol. 1, 22–23. 7. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

3. chinese l andscape 263 8. Shellen Xiao Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry in the Modern World Order (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015), 140–142. 9. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 15. 10. Early foreign visitors to Sichuan noted the friendly natives and the absence of the hated epithet yang guizi 洋鬼子, or “foreign devil”; see, for example, Archibald Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges: or, Trade and Travel in Western China (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1888), 140–141. For the idea of Sichuan as a Chinese “El Dorado,” see Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 69. For more on the complex subject of Europe’s diminishing esteem for China, see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 69–85; Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Verso, 2008), 58; Nicholas R. Clifford, “A Truthful Impression of the Country”: British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1949 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), chap. 2; and Thurin, Victorian Travelers, 5–6. 11. This image is based on a sketch by Blakiston’s travel companion, Alfred Barton; Thomas Wright Blakiston, Five Months on the Yang-tsze; with a Narrative of the Exploration of Its Upper Waters, and Notices of the Present Rebellions in China (London: John Murray, 1862). 12. Blakiston, Five Months, 84. 13. Blakiston, Five Months, 86. 14. Blakiston, Five Months, 177. Blakiston and his associates also collected a small number of ornithological, botanical, and geological specimens to be sent off to the relevant experts in London upon their return (Blakiston, Five Months, 359). Following his Yangzi expedition, Blakiston became a highly respected natural historian. For more, see the entry by H. E. D. Blakiston (revised by Christopher J. Schmitz) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/2598. 15. Blakiston, Five Months, 162–163. 16. For more on the history of willowware, see Patricia O’Hara, “The Willow Pattern That We Knew: The Victorian Literature of Blue Willow,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 4 (1993): 421–442. 17. Blakiston, Five Months, 163. 18. James Hevia, The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 14, and chap. 3. Aspects of Blakiston’s narrative resemble the “route books” produced by the military intelligence organs of the British imperial bureaucracy as part of this “information system” (Hevia, Imperial, 73–78). 19. Blakiston, Five Months, 204.

264 3. chinese l andscape 20. Blakiston, Five Months, 205. 21. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 26. See also Hevia, The Imperial Security State, 82–83. 22. Blakiston, Five Months, 178. 23. Hevia, The Imperial Security State, 73, 149. For more on optical consistency and the transportability of maps, see James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 125; James Hevia, “The Archive State and the Fear of Pollution: From the Opium Wars to Fu-Manchu,” Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 237–240; Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representations in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael E. Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 19–69; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds., Empires of Vision: A Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 33, 42n27. 24. “Western China: Trade and Travel in the Yang Tse Gorges,” New York Times, May 6, 1899. 25. “Western China.” 26. For more on the Treaty of Tianjin, see Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 48–51. 27. Hertslet, Hertslet’s China Treaties, vol. 1, 77. The treaty did allow for members of the British government to reside in Chongqing “to watch the conditions of British trade.” 28. Hertslet, Hertslet’s China Treaties, vol. 1, 94, 96. 29. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, chap. 1 and 5. 30. Little complained that the “Peking authorities will shelter themselves behind the ambiguous clauses of the Treaty, as long as they can”; Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 352–354. 31. Cornell Plant dates this to 1897, though Little’s own account dates it to 1898. See S. Cornell Plant, Handbook for the Guidance of Shipmasters on the Ichang-Chunking Section of the Yangtze River (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1920), 1, and Archibald Little, Gleanings from Fifty Years in China (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1910), 134. For more on Little in Sichuan, see Thurin, Victorian Travelers, chap. 2. 32. Two British military steamships, HMS Woodcock and Woodlark, also made the Yichang to Chongqing trip in 1900. The same year, the German-owned Suihsiang was wrecked just beyond Yichang, delaying the introduction of regular steam travel until 1909, when the Chinese Szechuan Steam Navigation Company introduced the Britishbuilt Shutung, also piloted by Plant. Plant, Handbook, 1; “Plant Memorial Inauguration—Monument to Pioneer of Navigation on Upper Yangtze Unveiled by British Consul,” North China Herald, December 6, 1924; “Memorial to Late Captain Plant—Pioneer of Yangtze Navigation Monument on the Hsin T’an and Bursary Fund,” North China Herald, October 4, 1924.

3. chinese l andscape 265 33. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 54. Ari Kelman describes a similar process in A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 77. 34. Nanny Kim, “River Control, Merchant Philanthropy, and Environmental Change in Nineteenth-Century China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 52, no. 4 (2009): 660–694. According to Kim, the “improvement works on the Upper Yangzi go back to the Tang and Song,” though they “increased noticeably in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and greatly so in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries” (670). 35. Kim, “River Control,” 678, 661n2. 36. Kim, “River Control,” 664. For Mao’s role in this process, see Deirdre Chetham, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 157. 37. Kim, “River Control,” 679–681. 38. For a survey of Western, Japanese, and Chinese mapping projects from the late Qing and early Republican era, see Li Peng 李鵬, “Wanqing minguo chuanjiang hangdaotu bianhuide lishi kaocha 晚清民國川江航道圖編繪的歷史考察,” in Xueshu yanjiu 學術研 究 2 (2015): 96–103. 39. The Maritime Customs was one of the most important sources of government revenue between its founding and the Communist Revolution in 1949. See van de Ven, Breaking with the Past. 40. Plant, Handbook, “Prefatory Note” from 1916 published in the 1920 edition. 41. Plant, Handbook, 2. 42. H. G. W. Woodhead, The Yangtsze and Its Problems (Shanghai: Mercury Press of Shanghai, 1931), 17. 43. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, chap. 5. 44. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 16. 45. Luo Jinshen 羅縉紳, Xingchuan biyao 行川必要 (Yichang: Shuishi xinfu zhongying, 1883). Little commends the Xingchuan biyao (Essential Guide) as “well-arranged” and gives a “pidgin English” version of the title as “Walkee Szechuen must want-jee” as well as a grander translation of “Vademecum [sic] of Admiral Ho”; Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 323. Edward Parker provides “an almost literal translation” of the route guide portion of the text and a glossary of “valuable local terms” with English translations; Edward Parker, Up the Yang-tse (Hongkong: China Mail Office, 1891), 21. 46. The textual history of Luo’s Essential Guide and Critical Chart is complex. Early editions seem to have circulated together with the Xiajiang jiushengchuan zhi 峽江救生船志 (Gazetteer of the Lifeboat System of the Yangzi Gorges), a two-volume text, also attributed to Luo, that details the workings of a lifeboat system as well as the names of Chinese and Western donors.