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

32 a l andscape of traces for a journey back to the capital and through its long history.20 According to Stephen Owen, it was during the Tang that mist was established as an important “poetic signifier” for hiddenness.21 Against a Tang imperial geography that was carefully “mapped, inventoried, administratively partitioned, [and] crisscrossed by post stations . . . misty scenes poetically resist imperial space, where everything is illuminated and perspicuous.”22 In Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry, mist, clouds, and fog do block the poet from the center of Tang imperial geography, but they also bridge the spatial and temporal rifts that define his exile, making possible his dazzling visions of that center. The “Autumn Stirrings” series contains a number of aqueous and atmospheric images of linkage, though in poem two, the gulf between where Du Fu undeniably is and where he so desperately wishes to be remains wide. Gazing north, he sheds the southern tears that Li Daoyuan made famous in his description of the Three Gorges in the Commentary to the Classic of Rivers. When Li Bai writes of the “sound of gibbons crying without rest,” he evokes the place through its textual traces.23 When Du Fu makes the same allusion, he insists on the authenticity of his experience—he “truly” (shi 實) sheds the tears described in the song.24 For Du Fu, to look at and listen to the landscape carefully is to discern the traces of a literary discourse that subtends and validates the physical, and vice versa. Du Fu’s real (shi) tears are paired with the emptiness or futility (xu 虛) of his dreams of service (and of a Chang’an that has yet to materialize fully). Full and empty, actual and imagined, material and immaterial, shi and xu form a “bipolar concept” that structures contrastive poetic imagery while also serving as a traditional literary critical pairing used to distinguish language describing concrete (shi) scenes from language that “subordinate[s]” the scenic to an abstract (xu) mood or effect.25 Shi and xu are a complementary rather than oppositional pair, each term establishing not only the condition of possibility for the other but also the possibility for the transformation of one into the other (just as the immaterial sounds of gibbons crying produces Du Fu’s material tears). Shi and xu also happen to be among the most important terms in the so-called “Li-Du” debate in Chinese literary criticism, the venerable practice of comparing Li Bai and Du Fu, usually to determine who deserves top place in the canon. In her study of the poetry of Li Bai, Paula Varsano describes how xu, which she translates as “unfounded” or “unfoundedness,” came to be associated (not always positively) with the imaginative poetry of Li Bai, and shi, which she translates as “substantive,” with the classically grounded poetry of Du Fu.26 Du Fu’s tears seem, at first glance, to support this traditional dichotomy. In reality, they form the substantive counterpart to a series of immaterial and

tracing the g orges 33 fleeting images. Unlike “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” which centers on a journey so fast that it is over almost as soon as it begins, Du Fu’s “Autumn Stirrings” suspend the poet-wanderer between the hard facts of his exile and the fevered memories of a past to which he can only return in reverie. If Du Fu’s past journeys in search of employment and away from the chaotic north were taken in vain, the journeys he takes in his Kuizhou poetry are little more than fantasy. They offer a temporary escape that only reinforces his immobility, reminding him that the one journey he so wishes to take— back home—remains impossible.27 Throughout his Kuizhou poetry, Du Fu finds himself in the space between—waking and sleeping, south and north, the real and the imagined, shi and xu. When he moves from one to the other, as in his alternation between the “painted ministry” and the “mountain hall,” his poetry reflects a painful awareness of the gap that separates the northern spaces and traditions that will always feel most substantive to him from the amorphous and disorienting southern landscape he now occupies. In the final couplet of the second “Autumn Stirrings” poem, that gap takes the form of an elusive and immaterial trace—the light of the moon: 請看石上藤蘿月 Look! the vine and creeper moon that was atop the rocks 已映洲前蘆荻花 Shines already on the reed flowers before the islet Temporarily lost in reverie, Du Fu has lost the time it took for the light of the moon to move from the vines atop the stones to the reed flowers before the islet, and he calls out for confirmation of this, for a trace of the passage of time. The materialization of this temporal gap in the space between the rocks and the flowering reeds provides him with only a temporary and partial means of orienting himself. The riverbank comes into view, but this is not really the object of his gaze. The stones, vines, and reeds are merely what give solid form to the light of the moon, which both marks the passage of time and also serves as a conventional poetic figure linking distant places and separated loved ones (who always look on the same moon no matter how far apart they are). In the second couplet, real tears in line 3 lead into the vain journeys of line 4. By the third couplet, the alternation between xu and shi accelerates: in line 5, the imagined painted ministry is replaced by Du Fu’s sickbed; in line 6, the solid battlements conceal the immaterial sound of the flute. Xu leads into shi and back to xu, and so on and so forth. “Autumn Stirrings” is so deeply poignant in part because Du Fu cannot fully sustain his reverie and

34 a l andscape of traces must thus suffer the constant alternation between the real and the imagined, presence and absence, past and present. As Paula Varsano writes of the highly allusive (and elusive) poetics of Li He 李賀 (791–817), it is “only by entering a dream-state, wherein presence and absence are so fluid as to be one . . . [that] the speaker [can] escape their unceasing and tortuous alteration.”28 For Du Fu, there is something even darker beyond such torture: a formless abyss that threatens to swallow the poet, removing all reference points and effacing the solid surfaces onto which he casts his visions and memories. In the last couplet of the penultimate “Autumn Stirrings” poem, the series and the poet seem to reach a point of exhaustion. The link between Kuizhou and Chang’an dissolves, and the realm now appears as an expanse of mountain passes, endless skies, and spreading waters: 關塞極天唯鳥道 Unshakable passes to sky’s end—only a bird’s path 江湖滿地一漁翁 Rivers and lakes fill the land—a solitary fisherman The waters and skies that once linked Du Fu to other places and times cease to transport him in this moment. Endless mountains hold him fast, and the rivers and lakes of the south make him a permanent and solitary transient. The one path that he can see is no path at all, and the only movement that is open to him will leave no trace, not even a footprint. Facing oblivion, Du Fu has wandered through his past, conjuring images of glory that rise and fall like empires. By the final couplet of the eighth and last poem, he is a man defeated: 綵筆昔遊干氣象 My colored brush has wandered through the past, forging atmospheres and images 白頭吟望苦低垂 My gray head, chanting and gazing, now hangs low and bitter Nowhere in the “Autumn Stirrings” poems does Du Fu use the word ji 跡. In fact, the literary figure that structures the series is xing 興, which I have translated above as “stirring.” As a verb, xing has a range of possible meanings, including to stir, to stimulate, to give rise to, and to effloresce. As one of the Six Principles (liuyi 六義) in the “Great Preface” (daxu 大序) to the early anthology of Chinese poetry known as the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經), xing is also a technical poetic term that refers to an external image or “stimulus,” which gives rise to internal emotions that are then

tracing the g orges 35 externalized through poetry. Poetry can in turn stimulate the reader affectively or creatively, or both.29 Owen translates the term as “affective image,” and describes it as “an image whose primary function is not signification but, rather, the stirring of a particular affection or mood: [xing] does not ‘refer to’ that mood; it generates it.”30 As a nonreferential image, the archetypal xing is empty of content but capable of filling a viewer or reader with profound emotion. While the xing in the title of “Autumn Stirrings” (qiuxing 秋興) is generally taken as referring to the feelings inspired by autumn and not the technical term of the “Great Preface,” its appearance there cannot help but evoke the affective images of the Book of Odes. 31 What ultimately distinguishes those xing from Du Fu’s natural images, however, is that the latter function referentially, as traces of a mostly obscured exilic landscape. In “Autumn Stirrings,” Du Fu’s emotions are stimulated by the physical traces that autumn has left on the landscape of the Three Gorges—jadelike dew and withered maples, wind and fog—and by a series of powerfully evocative immaterial traces—the cries of gibbons, the wail of a mournful flute, and the shifting light of the moon. This second set of traces makes Du Fu aware of things that he cannot see or that he failed to observe because his mind was elsewhere. Though their sources (gibbons, flute, moon) are absent or invisible, they map the poet’s surroundings while also stimulating his emotions. As traces on and of the Three Gorges, they are the substantive counterparts of an imagined Chang’an, yet they never cohere to form an integral landscape. Instead, they reveal the physical world through its fragments, flickering across a space that is mostly concealed by atmospheric effects or swallowed by spreading waters. The Three Gorges of “Autumn Stirrings” is a landscape of traces that will bear no permanent mark, a place where nothing seems to have changed but everything is revealed to be impermanent. Yu’s Traces I In “Autumn Stirrings,” the Three Gorges are simultaneously solid and changeable. They trap the poet in his exile, but they take form as a shifting mosaic of traces—traces heard but not seen, disappearing as they appear. They constitute a highly personal landscape in which space, time, light, and sound are filtered through the prism of Du Fu’s senses. Du Fu’s fragmentary landscape bears little resemblance to the national landscape that the Three Gorges has become. As I show in this section, politicians and planners in The People’s Republic of China have promoted a view of the Three Gorges as the monumental trace of a semidivine act, a form of landscaping that prefigures and justifies

36 a l andscape of traces contemporary interventions in the region. In the next section, I return to Du Fu, who makes use of the same mythology in more ambiguous ways. According to mytho-historical sources, one of which appears as an epigraph to this chapter, Yu the Great, mythical founder of the first dynasty in Chinese history, is said to have created the Three Gorges by boring through the granite, limestone, schist, and shale of this mountainous area so that the excess waters of an epic flood could drain into the sea. Yu’s contributions extend far beyond flood control, however. According to early accounts, his taming of the waters bolstered the centralization of state power, led to the creation of an empire-wide travel network, and established a system of tribute and taxation.32 Yu’s dredging and clearing were seen as civilizing acts that definitively inscribed the boundary between watery chaos and the (spatial and moral) order of a society grounded in agriculture and ruled by a bureaucracy. It was in the course of traveling through the realm to teach the people “how to procure the food of toil” and reminding them to pay their taxes in kind, that Yu left behind another set of traces, those formed by his feet. During the imperial period, “Yu’s traces” (Yuji 禹跡) served as a poetic term not only for his footprints and the marks that his ax and spade left on the surface of the earth, but also for the entirety of the geographical entity associated with Han cultural and political influence. Indeed, early maps of the realm were often simply called “charts of Yu’s Traces” (yuji tu 禹跡圖) (figure 1.1). Over the last two decades, Yu the Great, like other Chinese mythological figures, has enjoyed a revival, with statues, shrines, and other memorials appearing all over China.33 One of the most remarkable of these is the Yu the Great Mythology Park (Dayu shenhuayuan 大禹神話園), opened in 2006 in the city of Wuhan, just beneath the Wuhan First Yangzi Bridge, along the northern bank of the Yangzi. Approximately four hundred meters long and sixty meters wide, the park consists of three groups of statues and an exhibition hall dedicated to ancient Chinese flood mythology. The first group of stone statues is arranged along a short avenue and details the story of Yu’s father, Gun 鯀, who failed to quell the flood and was executed as a result.34 They lead to a central plaza dominated by a wall of carved marble close to three hundred feet long and eighteen feet tall, with a twenty-foot-tall bronze statue of Yu in the center. The relief carvings on the wall depict episodes in the mythology of Yu. To the east of the plaza is another avenue of stone relief carvings showing Yu’s quelling of the floods. Two large statues depicting episodes from Yu’s life mark the junction of both the first and third groups with the central plaza. Robin McNeal describes the park “as a visual narrative in three dimensions” leading visitors through Yu’s life story and on toward the Qingchuan

tracing the g orges 37 Pavilion 晴川閣, a shrine that has been dedicated to the worship of Yu the Great since the sixteenth century.35 The Yu the Great Mythology Park is an example of how mythical figures like Yu have been monumentalized and materialized in statues, parks, and other memorials as part of a postreform revival of interest in Chinese mythology. According to McNeal, contemporary interest in Yu the Great represents a continuation of early-twentieth-century attempts to forge a “coherent Chinese mythology” that could compete with the systematized accounts of Greek mythology that Chinese intellectuals first encountered in the late figure 1.1 Rubbing of an 1136 Yuji tu in the Forest of Stone Steles Museum, Xi’an, China. Source: U.S. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, call number G7821. C3 1136.Y81

38 a l andscape of traces nineteenth and early twentieth century.36 As an “instance of mythmaking writ large,” the park updates and gives monumental physical form to these intellectuals’ search for a solid ethnocultural foundation for China’s modernization efforts.37 While the park may address long-standing Chinese insecurities vis-à-vis the West, it also demonstrates how China’s new global power and prestige operate domestically, through the reinscription of the banks of the Yangzi as a national landscape grounded in ancient mythology. Yu’s role in this act of spatial production is not as a culture hero, but as an action hero, vanquishing monsters, quelling floods, and bringing order to the realm (figure 1.2). In addition to embodying the spirit of the people, as Jiang Zemin claims, this new Yu is also an allegory of raw national power (figure 1.3). An English-language text inscribed in stone at the park’s entrance, for example, compares Yu’s feats with those of the people of Wuhan, who “defeated” the floods of 1954 and 1998, and explains that the park was built to “glorify the unbending will and superb wisdom of Yu.” The prevention of floods, which have killed millions over just the last century and a half, has been one of the main justifications for building the Three Gorges Dam. figure 1.2 The Yu the Great Mythology Park with the First Yangzi River Bridge. See also color plate 3. Source: Image courtesy of Robin McNeal

tracing the g orges 39 To open this park in 2006, along the recently flooded banks of the Yangzi, as the dam neared its long-anticipated completion is to send a clear and confident message about the institution of a spatial order that is simultaneously new and as old as Chinese culture itself. For the average visitor, presumably unschooled in the mythography of early intellectuals, the massive sculptures representing Yu and his exploits will not conjure up old debates about the status of Chinese mythology. They will mark the contemporary revival of Yu’s spirit and the current leadership’s replication of his superhuman feat of quelling the floods. By making the banks of the river a site for monumental art, with its claim to permanence, the creators of the park scorned the natural variability that has defined the Yangzi for millennia. This is possible because as the Three Gorges Dam neared completion, it was on the verge of finally fixing the river—controlling its flow, clearing the many obstacles it posed to trade and travel, and ending its pattern of destruction. In this sense, the Yu the Great Mythology Park stands in stark contrast to other memorials and monuments that have been built along the Yangzi over the course of the twentieth century, not to mention the hydrographic markers figure 1.3 A heroic Yu the Great killing a nine-headed snake. Source: Image courtesy of Robin McNeal

40 a l andscape of traces and landmarks that have aided navigation for millennia. One example from the first category is the fifty-foot-tall obelisk of Changsha granite that was erected in the Three Gorges village of Xintan in 1924 to commemorate Cornell Plant, one of the first men to pilot a steamship through the rapids of the Gorges as far as Chongqing. Building on the work of the mid- to latenineteenth-century travelers and adventurers that I discuss in Part II, Plant systematically charted the rapids of the Yangzi Gorges and instructed steamship pilots on how to navigate them safely. As one admirer said after his death, “the best monument to Captain Plant is the work he has left behind, which will ever remain the foundation of what is hereafter done for the improvement of the navigation of the Upper River.”38 By inscribing the river textually and visually to improve navigation, Plant’s work laid the foundation for the Three Gorges Dam project, which clears the obstacles imposed by nature and fixes the flow of the river behind a massive wall of concrete and steel. Plant’s contribution to the remapping of the Yangzi helped make the dam possible, but the monument erected in his honor, by virtue of its original positioning, expresses an earlier understanding of the river as an obstacle that could be overcome through navigational technologies but not physically transformed. Whereas the Yu the Great Park in Wuhan stages a narrative of control performed within a space consolidated by the dam project, the Plant Memorial, which was first constructed above one of the most treacherous rapids in the gorges to serve as a beacon to steamships and native craft, stood in dialogue with the landscape as it existed in 1924. Built as a monument to a man, it was also a monument to the Yangzi. Ironically, the locals of Xintan were forced to move the obelisk in 2002–2003 to avoid its being inundated by the rising waters of the reservoir (figure 1.4). They took this opportunity to restore the Chinese and English inscriptions that had been defaced during the Cultural Revolution. By reinscribing the monument, they erased one set of historical traces in order to recover another; by moving it, they bowed to the new spatial order enshrined in the park in Wuhan. Although cultural artifacts of sufficient importance were generally shifted beyond the reach of the reservoir, others were simply too large to relocate. Among these were a number of boulders and outcroppings that local residents and navigators used to gauge changes in the water level.39 For millennia, all along the Yangzi, but especially in and around the treacherous gorges, residents and travelers often carved markers to indicate normal and abnormal water levels and aid in navigation. Perhaps the most elaborately carved of these hydrographic stations is the only one to remain accessible in situ. Located near the city of Fuling, west of the Gorges, White Crane Ridge (Baiheliang 白鶴梁)

tracing the g orges 41 is a sixteen-hundred-meter-long sandstone ridge on which fourteen carvings of fish and 165 inscriptions, some dating back to the mid-Tang Dynasty, are discernible. The eyes of the fish once indicated normal water levels, and the inscriptions recorded especially low levels and their dates, though they were sometimes far more detailed.40 White Crane Ridge, which now rests near the bottom of the Three Gorges Dam reservoir, has remained visible through the construction of China’s first underwater museum. This structure, promoted by UNESCO as preserving important “underwater cultural heritage,” encircles the ridge (which remains exposed to the water) and is punctuated with windows that allow visitors to look through the murky water of the Yangzi at the famous carvings. White Crane Ridge provides evidence of some of the navigational challenges that the dam was built to overcome, but it is also a record of a long local tradition of direct observation of, and engagement with, the variability of the river. As one of the few objects beneath the reservoir to remain visible, the ridge has become a relic for and of different ages. An ancient text that until recently could still fulfill its original function, it is now a trace of the past enshrined as figure 1.4 The relocated Plant monument. Source: Photo by Peter Simpson. Courtesy of the South China Morning Post

42 a l andscape of traces a monument for a future when the pre-dam shape of the gorges and the river will have become only a distant memory. * If the Plant Memorial marks an early moment in the reinscription of the Yangzi, and the White Crane Ridge Underwater Museum memorializes vanished ways of recording its variability, the Yu the Great Mythology Park attempts to inscribe indelibly its successful conquest. The park’s position within a landscape defined by monuments from the golden age of post-revolution China, the most important of which is the Wuhan First Yangzi Bridge, reminds us that its ultimate referent is not Chinese mythology, but the Yangzi as a site of socialist construction. In an excerpt from his 1956 poem “Swimming” (Youyong 游泳), which was written shortly after deadly floods in 1954 and inscribed on a 1969 memorial to that tragedy in Wuhan, Mao imagines the dam as counterpart to the bridge then under construction across the Yangzi: 起宏圖 I raise a grand plan— 一橋飛架南北 A single bridge, flying, will span south and north 天塹變通途 Transforming a natural moat into a thoroughfare 更立西江石壁 And across the western Jiang we shall erect a wall of stone 截斷巫山雲雨 That will rend Mt. Wu’s clouds and rain 高峽出平湖 Till lofty gorges rise from a placid lake41 In “Swimming,” to which I will return in later chapters, Mao imbues imagery from the Three Gorges poetic tradition with the spirit of socialist voluntarism to laud the ambitions of the young People’s Republic. The bridge and dam will knit together a nation broken by decades of strife and a century of imperial exploitation, transforming its troublesome geography into a landscape pacified by man. Mao, like Sun Yat-sen before him, envisioned modernization as an act of landscaping on a national scale. The Yu the Great Mythology Park embodies that vision in a number of ways. As a carefully designed landscape, it demonstrates control over civic space, making strong claims for both the integrity of the riverbank and the city, province, and nation that maintain it; it not only brings order to the scattered stories of Yu the Great, but it also provides a deep mytho-historical foundation for the spatial imaginary that supports the Three Gorges Dam and the Wuhan First Yangzi Bridge. The spatialization of this approach to “Chinese” history is mirrored in the discourse that justified and celebrated the Three Gorges Dam. When Jiang Zemin praises Yu the Great as the embodiment of “the primeval Chinese people’s spirit of tenacious

tracing the g orges 43 struggle in ‘transforming nature’ and ensuring the ‘certain triumph of man over nature’ ” in his speech marking the diversion of the Yangzi in 1998, he borrows slogans associated with “Mao’s war on nature” to fuse the mythology of the recent and distant past.42 By tracing the network of local, regional, and national sites that imbue the park with meaning, we see more clearly how Yu the Great has been enlisted in the recent reorganization of the Yangzi. To visit his park is to experience not only a new conception of Chinese mythology as national allegory, but also to place oneself at the nexus of multiple historical moments and in the shadow of multiple historical figures and structures. The shaping of Chinese history and identity in the present is still inextricably linked to the inscription of national space. That Yu is credited with creating that space and embodying the spirit of the Chinese people makes him a particularly powerful avatar of the state, though he has not always played that role. What is obscured in the creation of new sites in the cult of Yu are older and more ambiguous traces— Yuji. The Yu who appears amidst the fading traces of Du Fu’s poetry is, as we shall see, not the muscled hero of the present day. Yu’s Traces II It is through the interplay of absence and presence that Du Fu imagines Yu’s traces in a poem describing a temple dedicated to him in the city of Zhongzhou, upriver from Kuizhou: 禹廟 Yu’s Shrine43 禹廟空山裏 Yu’s Shrine stands within empty mountains 秋風落日斜 Where autumn wind and setting sun slant 荒庭垂橘柚 In overgrown courtyards hang tangerine and pomelo 古屋畫龍蛇 In ancient halls are painted dragons and serpents44 雲氣噓青壁 Clouds and mist respire over verdant cliffs45 江聲走白沙 River sounds race across white sands 早知乘四載 Long have I known that by riding the four vehicles,46 疏鑿控三巴 Dredging and carving, he mastered the three Ba47 “Yu’s Shrine” resembles other temple poems by Du Fu, many of which contrast the cultural fullness (shi) of the dead and the ritual promise of continued presence with the vacancy (xu/kong 空) of the temple.48 In the first and third couplets, Yu’s shrine is presented as a lonely building, hidden away within

44 a l andscape of traces “empty” mountains and surrounded by immaterial phenomena: autumn wind and slanting sunlight, clouds and mist exhaling over green cliffs, the sound of water rushing over sand. The courtyards and rooms of the temple that appear between these images of emptiness are empty too, overgrown by weeds and occupied only by painted images. Few worshippers come to trample the grass that fills the temple’s courtyards, but their citrus trees are traces of a ritual program dedicated to the worship of Yu’s feats. Tangerine and pomelo were the local specialties presented as tribute to Yu following his quelling of the flood and subsequent survey of the realm. Inside the temple’s aging halls, the images of dragons and snakes refer to the pestilential creatures that invaded the central states along with the waters of the flood. In some versions of his myth, Yu is heralded as much for driving away these creatures as he is for ending the floods. Within the religious context of the shrine, a space dedicated to maintaining a connection with the dead, the citrus trees and paintings are designed to materialize and illustrate Yu’s mythology. Whether they fulfill that function is another question. The temple’s desuetude suggests that this attempt to institutionalize Yu’s traces in the mountains of Zhongzhou may not have succeeded as planned. In his study of the Sichuan frontier in the Song Dynasty, Richard von Glahn cites this poem as early evidence of the secularization of the cults of the ancient kingdom of Ba, which included the Three Gorges.49 Though it conforms to a poetic pattern in Du Fu’s work for describing isolated temples, the lack of interest that Du Fu notes might also have something to do with Yu’s transformation from a local deity to a Confucian exemplar. Against the impermanent spatial and pictorial inscriptions that celebrate this particular Yu, the immaterial phenomena that fill the first and third couplets of the poem appear newly stable—they not only predate the temple buildings, but they will also outlive their passing. In the final couplet, Du Fu moves from natural images to a statement of personal knowledge: 早知乘四載 Long have I known that by riding the four vehicles, 疏鑿控三巴 Dredging and carving, he mastered the three Ba The archaic phrases “four vehicles” (sizai 四載) and “dredging and carving” (shuzao 疏鑿), which echo much older accounts of Yu’s feats, give these lines a triumphant ring. Du Fu’s characterization of them as things he’s known for a long time, however, adds an ambiguous undertone. Why does it matter that

tracing the g orges 45 this is something that he’s long known, and what does this knowledge have to do with the scene before him? In the second “Autumn Stirrings” poem, Du Fu tests his literary experience of the Three Gorges against his personal experience—he not only hears the crying gibbons, he “truly” sheds the tears of the old folk song. Is he is simply saying, as one commentator suggests, that he is now able to match his knowledge to the realities of a landscape dredged and carved?50 “Yu’s Shrine” is an atmospheric poem that turns enigmatic in its last couplet.51 The tenor of Du Fu’s claim to previous knowledge remains opaque, but the interaction of shi and xu images in the first three couplets and the personal tone of the final couplet suggest that he is not only comparing his knowledge of Yu against the physical realities of Yu’s shrine or the landscape he mastered, but also his own fate against that of the Yu enshrined in the temple. If even the traces of Yu the Great are subject to the vagaries of time, then what claim to permanence can the poet hope to stake? The doubts that “Yu’s Shrine” raises about the status of Yu’s traces and deeds continue to echo through “At Qutang Contemplating the Past 瞿唐懷古,” a poem Du Fu wrote in Kuizhou, not long after his visit to Zhongzhou:52 西南萬壑注 In the southwest myriad streams converge 勁敵兩崖開 Where fierce enemies are divided by paired palisades 地與山根裂 When the earth from its mountain roots was rent 江從月窟來 The Jiang from the Moon Cave came 削成當白帝 Pared to perfection it stands opposite Baidi 空曲隱陽臺 In an empty bend it hides the Yang Terrace 疏鑿功雖美 Though his feats of dredging and carving were glorious 陶鈞力大哉 The power of the Potter’s Wheel was greater yet If “At Qutang Contemplating the Past” looks back to “Yu’s Shrine,” it also offers an alternative answer to the question that Du Fu poses at the beginning of “The Two Palisades of Qutang 瞿唐兩崖” (see Passage I): “The Three Gorges—from where do they come down to us?”53 Instead of a reference to competing textual traditions, however, here Du Fu compares Yu the Great’s primordial dredging with the generative forces of nature, “the Potter’s Wheel” (taojun 陶鈞), which he deems “greater yet.”54 Du Fu calls Yu’s “feats” (gong 功) “glorious” (mei 美), but it is the focused and sustained power of flowing water that actually separates these “fierce enemies,” the mountains that form the great chasm of Qutang and its gate, Kuimen.55

46 a l andscape of traces In the first two couplets, Du Fu layers images in a dramatic sequence of geological processes framed by a mythical geography: streams converge from myriad sources, rending the earth and creating a channel that allows the Yangzi to arrive from the Moon Cave, mythical resting place of the moon and a poetic image for distant lands. “Pared to perfection” (xiaocheng 削成) in line 5, Kuimen and Qutang are then joined by two built structures: the first is Baidicheng, the fortified settlement constructed in the first century CE by Gongsun Shu 公孫述 (d. 36), a rebel leader who immodestly titled himself (and his base) Baidi 白帝, or White Emperor, after the mythological Lord of the West (a deity associated with autumn). Located just east of Kuizhou, directly opposite Kuimen and the Qutang Gorge, Baidicheng was the site of one Du Fu’s homes during his Kuizhou years and appears in many of his poems. The other structure is the Yang (sunny/sun) Terrace (Yangtai 陽臺). Discreetly hidden in a bend of the river downstream from Kuimen, this is the site of the romantic encounter between an ancient king of Chu and the goddess of Mt. Wu immortalized in Song Yu’s famous “Gaotang Rhapsody 高堂賦,” which I discuss in chapter 2. Just as the manmade fortifications of Baidi are placed opposite the natural gate of Kuimen, the Yang Terrace rests partially hidden in one of the great river’s bends. Against the ordering impulse embodied by these structures, Du Fu pits the physical products of gradual but irresistible natural forces. The title of the poem conveys something of this tension. The phrase that I have translated as “contemplating the past”—huaigu 懷古—refers not simply to a thought process and its object, but also to the emotions that traces of the past give rise to in one’s body (the literal meaning of huai 懷 is “bosom/ breast” or “to carry in the bosom”), as well as to the category of poems inspired by those traces.56 In “At Qutang Contemplating the Past,” the manmade structures in the third couplet are precisely the kinds of traces that inspire poets to meditate on the past, but they are not Du Fu’s primary focus. What occupies him is the topography that supports those traces—Qutang Gorge and Kuimen—both of which are traditionally described as among the most impressive of Yu the Great’s traces. As if in response to that tradition, Du Fu ends the poem with both a concession and an exclamation: Though Yu’s feats have been called glorious, it is the power of “nature,” expressed through the image of the endlessly generative “Potter’s Wheel,” that truly impresses. Du Fu is not simply reviewing these two options and coming out on the side of nature, he is using a textual allusion to oppose the forces of nature to the human desire to will order on a world that is always decaying and being made anew. In so doing, he implies

tracing the g orges 47 that the narrative of transmission—though “glorious”—pales in comparison to the might of nature and its dominion over humans. He makes this point by echoing (but changing the subject of ) a passage from the Zuozhuan 左傳, one of the earliest histories in the Chinese tradition: The king by Heaven’s grace sent duke Ding of Liu to the Ying to compliment Zhaomeng on the accomplishment of the toils of his journey; and [he accompanied him] to his lodging-house near a bend of the Luo. “How admirable,” said the viscount of Liu, “was the merit of Yu! His intelligent virtue reached far. But for Yu, we should have been fishes. That you and I manage the business of the princes in our caps and robes is all owing to Yu.”57 Du Fu borrows the language of the Duke of Zhao’s exclamation—“How admirable was the merit of Yu 美哉禹功”—but silences the tone of awe conveyed by the exclamatory particle zai 哉, replacing it with the conditional sui 雖 (although) and transposing it to the final line, where it elevates a new and even greater power: 疏鑿功雖美 Though his feats of dredging and carving were glorious 陶鈞力大哉 The power of the Potter’s Wheel was greater yet According to the Duke of Zhao, it is not simply the draining of the empire that should be attributed to Yu, but also the establishment and maintenance of its system of rule and order, which is carried out by those who wear “caps and robes.”58 For the exiled Du Fu, confronted with the present impressive riverscape, the correlation between Yu’s heroic hydraulic engineering and the smooth functioning of the “business of the princes” must have seemed a bitter irony. Not only had Du Fu repeatedly failed in his desire to don “cap and robe” and serve the Tang royal house, he had also been forced from his ancestral lands to this dreary hinterland by a catastrophic breakdown of political, spatial, and cultural order. No longer a trace of the mythical act on which the imperial order was based, the Gorges become an emblem both of Du Fu’s personal failures and of the fragmentation of that imperial order. As a deity who became the founder of a dynasty, Yu was both a god and a man. His feet marked out the entirety of the realm, but he was not unscathed by his tremendous labors. According some accounts, Yu’s efforts left his hands horribly calloused and his body partially paralyzed, forcing him to walk with a strange hopping movement. If the “traces of Yu” testify to his superhuman

48 a l andscape of traces strength, the shambling “gait of Yu” (Yubu 禹步) is a reminder of his infirmities.59 Celebratory but also sometimes ambivalent references to “Yu’s feats” appear in many of Du Fu’s Kuizhou poems, but this lame Yu does not. Had Du Fu embraced the more human Yu, he might have found a partner in his nearly constant physical suffering. Instead, he destabilized the mythology of Yu’s in more subtle ways, by comparing them to the generative and destructive forces of nature, forces against which the human will to inscribe order on the world would always fail. If, as Mark Edward Lewis has argued, early Chinese texts conceived of civilization as emerging from a state of primordial chaos, the cosmogonic narratives of the progressive ordering of the world that they offered coexisted with a cultural memory of that original chaos, which “survived as a permanent background condition to human existence.”60 In Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry, the threat of chaos is ever-present; it can be diminished for a time by imposing order on the world—real order for Yu and imaginary order for Du Fu—but it can never be entirely eliminated. Singing One’s Feelings on Traces of the Past Du Fu was a man rich in words but poor in the kinds of deeds recorded in China’s great histories. Lacking proof beyond his poems of his unfailing loyalty to the empire, he became an “autobiographer of ‘being’ rather than ‘deeds.’ ”61 This being encompassed not only the thwarted civil servant and invalid poet, but also alternative avatars, from the “lone fisherman” of his “Autumn Stirrings” and the “single gull of the sand” (yi sha ou 一沙鷗) in his famous “Writing My Feelings While Travelling at Night 旅夜書懷”62 to the many earlier poets and historical figures associated with the southern lands of Du Fu’s exile. These avatars were integral to his attempt to refigure space and time in response to his displacement to the frontier of a culture in crisis. The acts of mapping that they made possible helped Du Fu make sense of his immediate visual and aural experience of the Three Gorges by filtering it through the lenses of personal experience, memory, and textual learning. Du Fu’s mapping is defined at every stage by competing and contradictory forces: the aching pull of homesickness and the resignation that comes with the realization that he and his family may never leave the south. His thoughts often turn to the places and people of his past, but he can transcend neither his own corporeality nor his exile in the Gorges. Forced to live by the gaping maw of Kuimen, he speaks not of Yu the Great’s mastery, as he did in “Yu’s Shrine,” but of the greatness of nature’s power. In “At Qutang Yearning for

tracing the g orges 49 the Past,” the accounts that promote the “glory” of Yu’s feats give way to a landscape that is the product of natural, not supernatural, forces. As Du Fu becomes more comfortable with the lore and history of the Gorges, he continues to remap the landscape, envisioning it as a ground for the immaterial but enduring traces of language and cultural memory. The Three Gorges allow for such disparate figurations because they represent a spatial concept that encompasses a spectrum of culturally coded markmaking—at one end, they stand as an enduring monument to Yu’s mastery, which poets before and after Du Fu describe as still legible on the walls of the Gorges;63 at the other, they are the unstable ground of fading traces of human dwelling that endure through accidental survival or through the more reliable medium of words. It is through the textual trace in particular that Du Fu poetically repopulates the Three Gorges with its former residents—sympathetic locals and fellow exiles—figures at the periphery of empire who have come to occupy central positions in the culture Du Fu so loves. Embodied in Du Fu’s poetry, their words and stories are far more substantive than the physical traces that are attributed to them. Without the fixity of home, unable to repair the fractured empire, Du Fu orients himself through their traces. The centering power of the textual trace is at the heart of the five poems of “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past 詠懷古跡五首,” which immediately follow the “Autumn Stirrings” series in Qiu Zhao’ao’s 仇兆鰲 widely read edition of Du Fu’s works. In “Autumn Stirrings,” Du Fu attempts to anchor himself in the glorious imperial history of Chang’an, but he can do so only through the mediation of a volatile and inhospitable natural world. In “Singing My Feelings,” Du Fu orients himself not by moving between Kuizhou and Chang’an, but by establishing his affinity with exemplary figures of suffering and exile from the past. Its title notwithstanding, this series does not revolve around physical historical traces (guji 古跡). Instead, it explores a collection of figures with connections to the area in and around the gorges. Though important to the lore of the region as developed by Du Fu, the figures in the first, third, fourth, and fifth poems are not part of the larger story that Fixing Landscape tells.64 To close this chapter, I focus on the series’ second poem, in which Du Fu juxtaposes the affective and cultural power of the textual ji/trace with a countervailing conception of the ji as a concrete landmark. As we shall see in chapter 2, the idea of ji as something to be located in space, personally visited, and physically reinscribed in order to preserve it became common over the course of the Song Dynasty, dramatically reshaping the textual, pictorial, and physical contours of the Three Gorges as Du Fu knew it.

50 a l andscape of traces The second poem of “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past” centers on the Chu poet Song Yu, about whom little is known. According to tradition, he served as a court official during the reign of King Xiang of Chu 楚襄 王 (r. 298–263 bce), but was cashiered for speaking too forthrightly.65 Most consistently associated with modern Hunan, but sometimes extending as far west as Kuizhou, Chu was a peripheral but powerful state for well over six hundred years leading up to the unification of China by the state of Qin in 221 bce. Song Yu is credited with authoring a number of influential works in the southern or “Chu” style included in the Songs of Chu (Chuci 楚辭), an anthology famous for preserving secularized traces of shamanistic songs used in regional cults, including those centered on river deities, many of whom came to be anthropomorphized as gods and goddesses.66 Song Yu is often paired in the literary imagination with his more famous contemporary Qu Yuan, the archetypal exile, suicide, and author of one of the most important poetic laments in the tradition, “Encountering Sorrow 離騷.” Despite Qu Yuan’s fame, Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry draws more deeply on works associated with Song Yu, perhaps because the region was littered with traces associated with his poetry, including his former residence, the royal palaces of Chu, and the Yang Terrace atop Mt. Wu, which appears in a bend of the Yangzi in “At Qutang Contemplating the Past.” 詠懷古跡，其二 Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past, Second Poem67 搖落深知宋玉悲 Amidst autumn’s decay, deeply I understand Song Yu’s sorrow 風流儒雅亦吾師 A dashing romantic, learned, elegant—he too is my teacher 悵望千秋一灑淚 In despair, gazing across a thousand autumns— a single scattering of tears 蕭條異代不同時 Forlorn, isolated in different ages—no contemporaries we 江山故宅空文藻 Tales of his former home midst river and mountain are baseless literary stylings 雲雨荒台豈夢思 But clouds and rain by the ruined terrace—how could they be the yearnings of a dream? 最是楚宮俱泯滅 Most of all, the palaces of Chu have been totally effaced 舟人指點到今疑 Boatmen point them out, but these days they are full of doubt

tracing the g orges 51 The location of Song Yu’s house varied depending on one’s sources: some said that it could be found downriver, past the Gorges in Jiangling, while others claimed that it was further west in Zigui, in the heart of the Gorges.68 Du Fu is less confident, suggesting that references to his house are nothing more than “baseless literary stylings” (kong wenzao 空文藻). The precise connection between literary style and Song Yu’s house is obscure, though it is possible, as I have suggested in my translation, that Du Fu is referring to “baseless” texts produced by locals or traveling writers who wished to embellish their accounts of the landscape by exploiting Song’s aura.69 Du Fu contrasts these suspect accounts of Song Yu’s house with the ruins of the Yang Terrace, a structure most commentators locate in the mountains of the Wu Gorge, downriver from Kuizhou.70 For Du Fu, the ruination of the Yang Terrace gives it a materiality that both Song Yu’s “former residence” and the completely effaced “palaces of Chu” in line 7 lack. Famously described in Song Yu’s “Gaotang Rhapsody” as the location of a sensual dream assignation between a Chu king and the goddess of Mt. Wu, the terrace’s materiality is confirmed by its desolation (huang 荒). In other Kuizhou poems, including “At Qutang Yearning for the Past,” Du Fu describes the terrace as an integral, if secluded, part of the local landscape, though there is nothing in these works to suggest that he actually visited this site. Had he climbed to the ruins, what would he have found there?71 The terrace to which Du Fu and so many other poets refer was probably not the physical trace of the “original” immortalized in Song Yu’s rhapsody. More likely, it was the ruin of a structure intended for some other use but repurposed as a literary-historical trace, one of many Yang Terraces found throughout the ancient state of Chu (and as far east as modern Anhui Province) that were used to commemorate and give tangible form to the supernatural events described in Song Yu’s poem.72 These Yang Terraces, like the former residences of Song Yu, are examples of a common desire to seek, and if necessary fabricate, physical coordinates for poetic sites. This search for physical traces exemplifies how literary discourse (especially the belief that poetry documents actual experiences, places, and times) concretely shapes and transforms the landscape. The “lexical landscapes and textual mountains” that Paul Kroll has described in another context had a way of materializing long after the poems had been written and their poets buried. By calling into question the historical reliability of structures purported to be Song Yu’s former home, Du Fu reflects on one consequence of this search for physical landmarks. Competing claims to authenticity lead to the atomization of ji like Song Yu’s house. No longer limited to one site, they appear throughout the landscape.

52 a l andscape of traces In contrast to such dubious physical traces, Du Fu begins the poem with a series of textual traces that form a more solid connection between Song Yu and himself than any building possibly could. The first line opens with a quotation from one of the “Nine Disputations 九辯” of the Songs of Chu, which are traditionally attributed to Song Yu. The phrase I have translated as “autumn’s decay”—yaoluo 搖落—describes the withering and decay of vegetal life (“fluttering falling” is a more literal translation) and evokes a rich tradition of autumnal poetry and meditations on mortality.73 In the second line of the opening couplet, Du Fu describes Song Yu by borrowing a list of qualities— dashing romantic, learned, elegant—from a poem by the famous poet and exile Yu Xin 庾信 (513–581), the subject of the first poem in this series, and, according to tradition, a former resident of Song Yu’s house in Jiangling.74 Perhaps the strongest link between Song Yu and Yu Xin, however, comes from the latter’s magnum opus, “Mourning the Southland Rhapsody 哀江南賦,”75 which takes its title from a line in another Songs of Chu poem attributed to Song Yu, “Summoning the Soul 招魂”: 目極千里兮, 傷春心 The eye extends for one thousand li—ah—how it pains this spring heart 魂兮歸來, 哀江南! Soul—ah—return, come! How I mourn for the Southland!76 By the end of the second line, these embedded textual links between Song Yu and Yu Xin open out onto Du Fu. Song Yu—along with Yu Xin—is not simply a source of poetic language, he is “also” (yi 亦) Du Fu’s “teacher” (shi 師) in poetry and life. If the physical landmarks that Du Fu mentions in this poem are either out of view or no longer present, traces of Song Yu’s famed words and upright character have found new homes, first in Yu Xin’s poetry and then in both the person and the poetry of Du Fu. These words and traits, formulated poetically, transmitted textually, and embodied by Du Fu, have endured; Song Yu’s home and the palaces of Chu have not. Those who seek out these structures in order to establish a physical link to the past fail to understand, as Du Fu does, the nature of the ji/trace. It is both more elusive and more common than the historical site—reflected moonlight, an echo of an earlier text, a way of seeing the landscape, or a personal or literary quality studied and absorbed through poetry. The pointing fingers of the poem’s final line are the traces they seek, evidence of Song Yu’s enduring literary legacy. The homes of both the ancient poet and the king he immortalized may be gone, but they live on in those fingers.

tracing the g orges 53 In Du Fu’s poem there is no longer anything concrete at which to point, but that is not the end of the matter. “Totally effaced” traces can be reinscribed. Supported by sufficient fame or other cultural values, even immaterial literary traces have a way of metamorphosing into stone and wood. As early as the tenth century, Du Fu’s southern connections came to capture literati interest, helping to define a moral and literary image of the poet that spoke to contemporary concerns. An important corollary to this shift was the establishment of Du Fu as a figure of local fame in many of the cities, towns, and villages through which he passed during his time in the south. Though still viewed as a homesick northerner, Du Fu was posthumously embedded in multiple locales by officials and writers who rebuilt his “former residences” (guju 故 居), established shrines, and systematically reinscribed his lingering traces. Kuizhou and surrounding areas offered many such sites of memorialization and pilgrimage, and men of later generations worked hard to reinscribe Du Fu in the landscapes that he helped make famous.

2 FROM TRACE TO SITE Tracks are what is left behind; they bear witness to something that was never there, but always departing, disappearing . . . They are vestiges of the stride and the instant between strides. To notice them, to retrace them, to make sense of them, is to engage with the leftovers of history and to harness their potential to indicate different paths into the future. —Paul Carter1 Pointing Fingers For Du Fu, traces are not necessarily solid. Structures like the “palaces of Chu” might disappear altogether, but the clouds and rain that cloak Mt. Wu linger on. As traces of the divine made famous by Song Yu, these atmospheric phenomena continue to shape how travelers see and imagine the Three Gorges. In the second poem of Du Fu’s “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past 詠懷古跡,” the guji 古跡 is something the poet embodies—a fragment of the past inscribed in the self. What literal-minded travelers fail to recognize when they ask boatmen to point out the palaces of Chu or when they search for Song Yu’s house is that they are traces of the things they seek. Over the course of the Northern and Southern Song dynasties (960–1279), Du Fu became the object of many such seekers, men who searched the landscape for

from trace to site 55 places he had occupied and about which he had written. Some reconstructed buildings associated with the poet, establishing them as sites of literary pilgrimage and worship; others physically inscribed his poems in the landscape. Equally inspired by his fame as a poet and as a moral exemplar, they altered the landscape to make his traces legible or to produce legible traces where none could be found. In the process, they tried to fix the shifting traces of Du Fu’s world, reinscribing them as sites that could be easily identified and visited, a process that continues to this day. Writers, including Du Fu, had long been interested in locating and describing famous historical sites, but it was during the Song Dynasty that ji became the object of systematic textual and empirical research as part of a larger revolution in spatial thought. The new “modes of space making” that Song scholars developed “formed the basis for spatial ideas throughout the rest of the imperial era and beyond.”2 Their reinscription of the Three Gorges as a landscape of sites was supported by a group of related literary forms—local and empire-wide gazetteers (fangzhi 方志 and zongzhi 總志, respectively), the travel essay, and the travel diary (both youji 遊記)—the development of which coincided with the elevation of Du Fu to the pinnacle of the literary pantheon. According to Eva Shan Chou, Du Fu’s reputation as poet and cultural hero crystalized during the Northern Song (960–1127) as part “of a larger contemporary preoccupation with self-definition, in which Northern Sung [sic] literati sought precedents in the figures of the past.”3 Literati turned mostly to texts for these precedents, but they also sought more tangible links. By searching out what Paul Carter calls the “leftovers of history” in landscapes that were already well known through texts and images, they reinscribed familiar spaces in order to create “paths into the future” by way of the past. Thanks to his prestige as well as the large number of poems he wrote in and around Kuizhou, Du Fu figures prominently in Song geographical and travel writing on the Three Gorges region. When describing sites directly associated with Du Fu, authors are careful to locate them in relation to the contemporary landscape (as “X miles from the city wall,” for example). When introducing topographical features or other sites of interest, they often cite Du Fu’s poems, not only to add literary depth to their spatial description, but also to give readers a concrete sense of places they might only know through poetry. Du Fu’s role in these texts makes him an indispensable figure for understanding how the Three Gorges region has been reinscribed and reconceptualized over the last millennium. This chapter explores this process by looking at two sites that appear frequently in Du Fu’s poetry: his “Lofty Retreat” (gaozhai 高齋), which was located in the village of Dongtun 東屯 on the outskirts of Kuizhou;

56 a l andscape of traces and Mt. Wu (Wushan 巫山), the tallest peak in the Wu Gorges and mythical home of the goddess of Mt. Wu. “Lofty Retreat” (gaozhai 高齋) is the name Du Fu gave to three different homes he occupied in the Kuizhou area. By triangulating the status of his Dongtun “Lofty Retreat” in the eighteenth century, the present day, and the twelfth century, I show not only how the fixed site comes to supplement (and in some cases supplant) the immaterial trace in the cultural imagination, but also how the contemporary spatial reorganization of the Three Gorges has inspired a newly pressing interest in locating remnants of the past. My second site, which takes us away from Du Fu, is Mt. Wu, the supposed setting for Song Yu’s “Gaotang Rhapsody” (Gaotang fu 高唐賦), in which an ancient Chu king sleeps with a goddess in his dreams. The most famous erotic figure in early Chinese poetry, the goddess of Mt. Wu (Wushan shennü 巫山神女) remains a symbol of otherworldly sensuality. Beginning in the Tang Dynasty, and gaining momentum during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279), however, a small number of writers worked to sanitize her mythology. Attempts to reform the goddess were based not only in the reinterpretation of Song Yu’s rhapsody, but also in the study of texts that recounted her role in helping Yu the Great bore through the Three Gorges and in the reappraisal of conventionalized descriptions of the landscape of Mt. Wu. Writers who traveled to the region cast a skeptical eye on Mt. Wu and the Wu Gorge, comparing what they saw with what they had read in order to render the landscape spatially and morally unambiguous. Both Mt. Wu and Du Fu’s house at Dongtun provide vividly realized examples of how ephemeral and ambiguous traces of the kind that characterize Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry have been fixed as legible and enduring sites in the more than twelve hundred years since his death. From Ancient Trace to Famous Site The embrace of the clearly defined “site” over the more ambiguous “trace” (both ji 跡) required clear physical referents for textual knowledge—things to point at and visit, even if only in the mind’s eye. When the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) emperor Qianlong 乾隆 (r. 1735–1796) sat down to admire The Shu River (Shuchuan tu 蜀川圖), a prized Song Dynasty painting of the Yangzi River as it flows through Shu (modern Sichuan), for example, it was the clear labeling of sites of special interest that inspired him to inscribe Du Fu’s “Autumn Stirrings” in an open space near the upper edge of the handscroll:

from trace to site 57 Historical sites [guji 古跡] are so clear they can be picked out one by one [lili keshu 歷歷可數]. Imagining [xiang 想] old Du in his river pavilion wielding his brush, my inspiration was by no means shallow, so I inscribed his poems on the scroll to mark [志] them as paired treasures.4 For Qianlong, who was steeped in the literary traditions of Shu (modern Sichuan), the clarity of the textualized landscape, which allows him to “imagine” Du Fu in his riverside home, comes not from the painter’s success in capturing the likeness of famous landmarks, but from the addition of 189 written labels that offer the kind of information one finds in gazetteers and maps, including place names and historical landmarks, distances between major towns, brief descriptions of how place names have changed since the Tang, and citations (or, in some cases, paraphrases) of important geographical texts such as the Commentary to the Classic of Rivers and the ninth-century Treatise on the Prefectures and Counties of the Yuanhe Era (Yuanhe junxian zhi 元和郡縣志) (figure 2.1). While many of these labels are inscribed over carefully rendered topographical features, such as the mountains that form the Qutang Gorge, or well-known cities, such as Kuizhou, others are simply placed within the negative space that the artist uses to represent the river or cloud-covered mountains. The label for Du Fu’s thatched hall at Dongtun, for example, seems to hang in the air of an empty valley, just beyond the walls of Kuizhou (figure 2.2). Brought to life by texts that have long mediated the materiality of the region, The Shu River in turn reanimates those texts by providing a panoramic landscape in which to inscribe the sites they describe or at which they were written. That many of the painting’s labels mark sites that are not represented suggests that learned viewers would have been able to produce their own mental images, images that might inspire the further inscription of the painting, as was the case for Qianlong. The Shu River is both an object combining pictorial and textual approaches to geography and an object for aesthetic use—not simply something at which to look and point, but an object inscribed and inscribable. Qianlong, who is famous for writing on many objects in his vast collections, was more than a little inspired by The Shu River. Altogether, his additions on the painting and in colophons that follow it total more than seventeen hundred characters and include not only the complete text of the “Autumn Stirrings,” but also two quatrains, a number of prose passages, a small painting of a flowering plum branch, and two long poems. The second of these long poems, a 406-character heptasyllabic poem from June 19, 1746 (the same day he inscribed the “Autumn Stirrings”) restages a viewing of the painting by tying its landmarks to the historical, mythological, and literary figures associated with them. It treats the

figure 2.1 The Shu River (Shuchuan tu 蜀川圖) (detail), attributed to Li Gonglin 李 公麟 (ca. 1041–1106). This portion of the scroll contains the walled city of Kuizhou, labels for Du Fu’s “lofty retreat” and his home at Dongtun (see figure 2.2), Baidicheng, Qutang, and a host of other local landmarks. See also color plate 4. Source: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1916.539

60 a l andscape of traces landscape painting as a mnemonic device that evokes Shu not through mimetic representations of its landmarks but through the inscriptions that label those landmarks, including those associated with Yu the Great’s feats: 岷山導江幾千里 The Min Mountains channel the Jiang for thousands of li 神禹底績猶堪指 The God Yu’s feats of merit can still be pointed out5 figure 2.2 The Shu River (detail): The label for Du Fu’s “Dongtun thatched hall.” Source: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1916.539

from trace to site 61 Beginning with this opening couplet, Qianlong’s poem synthesizes the experience of simultaneously reading and viewing the painting, while also providing a hint of what that experience might have looked like—a group of learned men leaning over a prized painting and excitedly pointing out (zhi 指) sites of interest. They point to identify what Qianglong calls guji古跡—traces of the past or historical sites—but which might be more accurately termed shengji勝跡—“famous sites” rich with cultural meanings brought to life by the knowledgeable viewer. Guji and shengji are sometimes used interchangeably, though they describe slightly different kinds of ji. Scholars have suggested a range of translations for guji, including “heritage sites,”6 “traces of the past” (which sometimes refer to places that no longer exist),7 “ancient sites,”8 and “historical trace[s] in a narrow sense.”9 Shengji, which Wu Hung translates as a “renowned place,” generally refers to a site of scenic or historical interest (or both), “which has become a persistent subject of literary and artistic commemoration and representation.”10 Though guji and shengji overlap in meaning and usage, shengji refers more consistently to physical sites that make up a particular landscape. They may be associated with specific figures or literary moments, and may even take the form of ruins, but they are generally welldefined landmarks enriched by “countless layers of human experience.”11 If the aesthetics of guji depend on a spatialized historical consciousness—a sense of one’s relation to and distance from a particular past—the aesthetics of shengji are based in an appreciation of how the well-defined historical trace contributes to a sense of place in the present. As a form of imaginative spatial production centered on famous sites, Qianlong’s virtual journey creates a powerful sense of place through text and image. While “sense of place” normally connotes an affective, phenomenological, and cultural connection to one’s immediate surroundings, here it describes an appreciation for place mediated by the textual and visual expressions of other people.12 It is this sense of place that inspires the emperor to further mediate the landscape through a creative act of poetic chorography that links the painting’s sites into a journey that is simultaneously literary, spatial, and historical. This is possible because Qianlong has access not only to poetic works such as Du Fu’s “Autumn Stirrings,” but also to geographical writings designed to fix famous sites in time and space. If his appreciation of Du Fu’s poetry puts him in the long tradition of ji as aesthetic and affective stimuli, his use of the latter hints at how ji functioned as physical sites in spatial thinking in the millennium following the fall of the Tang. In his long poetic journey and introductory inscription, Qianlong alludes to many such sites, including Du Fu’s former home in Chengdu and his “river

62 a l andscape of traces pavilion” (jiangge 江閣). By the mid-eighteenth century, Du Fu’s homes and the Three Gorges sites he had written about had been important landmarks for over six hundred years. What distinguishes the posthumous status of Du Fu’s homes from that of the many historical traces Du Fu wrote about, is that the former were defined by literary and visual forms that drew on post-Tang empirical research methods to fix ji as geographically locatable sites. The men who produced such texts, guides, maps, and paintings might have been inspired by Du Fu’s depiction of the Three Gorges as a literary landscape made up of a patchwork of immaterial traces, but they sought to identify and reinscribe Du Fu’s own traces as part of a landscape of sites. In our own time, some scholars, inspired perhaps by the urgent timeline of the rising waters of the Three Gorges reservoir, which reached capacity in 2009, have revived these reinscriptional practices as part of their own attempt to fix, once and for all, the “present location” (xiandi 現地) of Du Fu’s Kuizhou homes or the palaces of Chu that appear in the second of his “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past” poems. In a 2000 article published in the Chinese-language Journal of Du Fu Studies, for example, Tan Wenxing 譚文興 launched an extended critique of a book titled A Study of the Current Locations of Sites in Du Fu’s Kuizhou Poetry, by the Taiwanese scholar Jian Jinsong 簡錦松. 13 Jian’s is the first monograph dedicated wholly to identifying the present locations of sites associated with Du Fu, including his Kuizhou homes at Dongtun and Rangxi 瀼西. 14 It draws on an extensive body of geographical writing, including travel essays, diaries, and gazetteers, as well as close to a millennium of commentaries on Du Fu’s poetry, scientific literature on the hydrology of the Yangzi, reports produced by the Three Gorges Dam Project, historical and contemporary maps, and onthe-ground research carried out before completion of the dam. Jian’s goal is to break free from what he sees as the circular logic common among Mainland Chinese scholars such as Tan Wenxing, most of whom, he argues, rely on unscientific, error-prone commentarial traditions to identify the present-day locations of sites associated with Du Fu.15 Tan’s critique, in turn, takes Jian to task for contradicting himself and failing to read Du Fu’s poetry with sufficient care. The substance of this cross-strait argument is less compelling than the shared ideas that underlie it. Despite their disagreements, Tan and Jian are both participating in a contemporary, GPS-calibrated version of the premodern search for precisely located and authenticated sites. The precision that they seek does not contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of the spatiotemporal logic of the ji/trace in Du Fu’s poetry. Instead, xiandi research

from trace to site 63 operates according to the primarily spatial logic of the famous site or shengji, though it seems oblivious to the possibility that its acts of location are also acts of spatial inscription. Like the sources on which it draws, xiandi research contributes to the ongoing production of local, regional, national, and cultural landscapes as constituted by sites of special interest. My point in drawing attention to this approach is not, of course, to rebuke it with the counterclaim that Du Fu’s poetry is pure invention.16 What the literal-mindedness of xiandi scholarship excludes is the way that Du Fu layers citation or “bookish landscapes” together with the fevered visions of memory and the physical geography of Kuizhou.17 The sites that xiandi scholars seek to fix were not fully fixed in Du Fu’s poetry—they were “always departing, disappearing.”18 That is the source of their power. They were experienced by the ailing poet as part of an almost hallucinatory itinerary that led, across a sea of stars or an expanse of water, to other times and other places. * Though they are heirs to the same Song Dynasty revolution in spatial thinking, today’s xiandi scholars and the Qianlong emperor do very different things with their knowledge of physical sites associated with Du Fu. In 1746, Qianlong and his companions approached The Shu River with a “spatial historical consciousness” that held the scholarly search for concrete sites and the evocative poetics of the ji/trace in balance as part of a creative enterprise combining calligraphic inscription, poetic composition, and painting.19 When Qianlong envisions Du Fu’s river pavilion from the luxurious confines of his Beijing palace, he begins a lyrical-inscriptional detour (by way of the “Autumn Stirrings”) that opens onto Kuizhou and the Three Gorges. Although he dedicates a few lines to the region in his long 1746 poem, the emperor does not describe his vision of Du Fu and his home in any detail. It is only at the end of the collection of colophons that follows The Shu River—where we find an image by the court painter Ding Guanpeng丁觀鵬 (active ca. 1740–1768)—that we get a full sense of how the lyrical immediacy of the Kuizhou landscape interacts with the narrative of the regional panorama of sites. Ding’s painting (figure 2.3), produced by command of the emperor, is meant to capture the “poetic intention” (shiyi 詩意) of the final couplet of Du Fu’s second “Autumn Stirrings” poem: 請看石上藤蘿月 Look! the vine and creeper moon that was atop the rocks 已映洲前蘆荻花 Shines already on the reed flowers before the islet

64 a l andscape of traces Ding’s interpretation of these lines takes the form of a moonlit scene in which Du Fu stands on a riverbank looking across the water toward a rocky outcropping, a vine-choked pine tree, and the refl ection of the moon in the water. To his right, a fi sherman in midstream rows toward the bank; to his left is a small group of partially visible buildings. Whereas The Shu River presents an imagined panorama of the Yangzi as it fl ows through Sichuan—a massive geographical, historical, and administrative region synthesized as a unifi ed cultural scene—Ding’s painting draws on a more intimate landscape style to present the unfolding of a single lyrical moment. 20 In chapter 1, I characterized the shift ing light in Du Fu’s second “Autumn Stirrings” poem as an immaterial trace with multiple valences—a refl ection of the moon, a manifestation of time’s passage, and a reminder of the temporal and spatial chasms that keep him from where he so badly wants to be. For Du Fu, fragments of his past appear and disappear on the surfaces of the Three Gorges like light and shadow cast by the moon. In his visualization of this particular moment, Ding does not try (and indeed cannot hope) to capture the alternation of appearance and disappearance, fullness and emptiness that defi ne the “Autumn Stirrings.” Instead, he focuses on giving shape to Du Fu’s immediate surroundings, including a cluster of buildings, one of which might be the “river pavilion” that fi rst inspires Qianlong’s lyrical detour through the Gorges. Partially obscured at the edge of the image, these structures link Ding’s painting, Qianlong’s inscriptions (both of which refer to Du Fu’s homes), and figure 2.3 Ding Guanpeng’s illustration of the fi nal couplet of Du Fu’s second “Autumn Stirrings” poem.

from trace to site 65 the larger landscape of The Shu River (on which Du Fu’s homes in Chengdu and Kuizhou are labeled). Though it retains the historical significance of a guji, Du Fu’s home also functions here as a shengji that is legible as part of a larger cultural landscape of sites comprising the region of Shu. This is precisely how Ding describes The Shu River in a short text that accompanies his painting: “in a single glance across one thousand li of river and mountains nothing is omitted. Each and every noted site and famous region [shengji mingqu 勝蹟名區] follows one after the other in an instant [zhigu jian 指顧間].” The literal meaning of the colloquial phrase, zhigu jian 指顧間, which I have translated as “in an instant,” is “within the time it takes to point and nod.” Just as Qianlong describes pointing out (zhi 指) the physical traces of Yu the Great in his long poem, Ding reminds us that ji are not simply evocative sources of artistic inspiration but also objects in and of the landscape—sites to be pointed out or nodded at while traveling along the river. Finding Du Fu at Home It is easy to see how thoughts of Du Fu’s home might inspire artistic acts or contribute to a general sense of the Three Gorges as a culturally important landscape. What is not immediately obvious, however, is the extended process by which Du Fu’s home came to be imbued with carefully determined cultural values. During the Song, travel writers and local officials began to produce essays and other texts centered on structures that were presented by locals as Du Fu’s former homes. These same structures appear in empire-wide gazetteers of the thirteenth century, such as Zhu Mu’s 祝穆 (d. after 1246) Fangyu shenglan 方輿勝覽 (first published 1246), and in local gazetteers for Kuizhou, the earliest extant of which was published in 1512.21 Gazetteers are encyclopedia-like texts in which the topography, mythology, history, economy, literature, and other aspects of a county or prefecture were collected and categorized to produce an epistemology of place designed not to question, but to bolster, local claims to fame. Though their approaches to Du Fu’s homes vary, the scholars and officials who compiled gazetteers and composed travel essays and diaries worked to locate them not just historically, but also spatially, in relation to the landscape of Kuizhou in their own time.22 For more skeptical authors, this sometimes meant questioning local claims, as the famed statesman, diarist, and poet Fan Chengda 范成大 (1126–1193) did when he moored his boat at Baidicheng on August 14, 1177:

66 a l andscape of traces My fellow travelers [and I] went to Qutang to sacrifice [si 祀] to the White Emperor and to climb to the Three Gorges Hall and visit the Lofty Retreat, all within the old fort [at Baidicheng]. Although the Lofty Retreat is not necessarily the one about which Du Fu wrote, it still overlooks Yanyu Islet and affords a spectacular vista.23 This entry comes from Fan’s Record of a Wu Boat (Wuchuan lu 吳船錄), one of the earliest and best-known examples of the long-length travel diary genre (youji 遊記).24 It not only exemplifies the skepticism of certain forms of travel writing that became popular during the Song, it also provides evidence of the common practice of making historical claims for preexisting structures or even building new structures and identifying them as the “former residences” of famous figures. While the status of the “lofty retreat” is of only passing concern to Fan Chengda, for other Song travelers and officials, Du Fu’s homes were objects of special interest. During the long period of comparative neglect between his death and literary resurrection, however, the physical landmarks associated with his life in Chengdu, Kuizhou, and a host of sites were allowed to decay. Not yet enshrined as “former residences” of a figure of great fame, they were treated like normal buildings and often fell into disrepair. Some of them, including Du Fu’s famous Chengdu thatched hall (caotang 草堂), which was restored by Lü Dafang 吕大防 (1027–1097) in the eleventh century, or his Dongtun “lofty retreat” in Kuizhou, were rebuilt as memorial structures, sites of pilgrimage for the devout reader. The story of Du Fu’s literary influence is well known. What has been less thoroughly studied are the complex processes by which the unfolding of that influence, over generations of writers and readers, contributed to the reinscription of Du Fu’s poetic traces as coordinates comprising an itinerary of physical sites and landmarks. And what has been almost entirely ignored are the representational and material effects of this mapping, which slowly reconfigured how certain visitors perceived and experienced the landscape of the Three Gorges. The most direct way in which these processes reconfigured the landscape was through simple architectural intervention. Men like Lü Dafang, who rebuilt Du Fu’s Chengdu thatched hut, sought to reestablish a lost material connection to Du Fu by reconstructing the structures in which he had lived. To produce a sense of place often entailed physically reshaping the landscape and its built structures. This is not to say that “new” structures were seen as fake. Their authenticity depended on their status as sites of ritual and cultural practice, activities that created a powerful connection with the deceased figure of fame.

from trace to site 67 Physical acts of spatial production were often bolstered by short essays (categorized as ji 記, or in some cases, youji 遊記) written by local officials.25 The literature of sites of interest was designed not only to promote the local, however. In many essays, the reinscription of the ji serves as a way to instantiate important values spatially, as in Lu You’s 陸游 (1125–1210) 1171 essay, “An Account of the Dongtun Lofty Retreat” (Dongtun gaozhai ji 東屯高齋記), which begins as an exercise in locating and attempting to adjudicate the current status of Du Fu’s three Kuizhou Lofty Retreats.26 Part of a larger class of what Lu You calls “lingering traces” (yiji 遺跡), each of these structures is associated with a specific section of Tang Kuizhou, a complex space comprised of walls, temples, and markets that no longer exists. Like all of these structures, Du Fu’s homes were not only located within Kuizhou and its environs, they also helped to constitute those now absent places. According to Lu You, at Baidicheng and Rangxi the physical substrate necessary for even the faintest of traces has been totally effaced.27 The only spot where it is still possible to envision both the location and surroundings of one of Du’s Lofty Retreats is at Dongtun, though Lu You says nothing of actual ruins and provides very little evidence for his conclusion. The link that he does establish is through one Li Xiang 李襄, whose family has lived in Dongtun for several generations and who claims to possess ancient scrolls from the Dali 大曆 reign period (766–779). These scrolls are perhaps the only things actually “still there” (youzai 猶在) from Du Fu’s time in Kuizhou. But what exactly do they have to do with the Tang poet? Are they manuscript copies of his work, perhaps in his own hand, or are they land deeds bearing his signature? Lu You does not answer these questions, but it is clear that the Dali era scrolls play an important role in confirming the spatial and temporal continuity of Du Fu’s presence in Dongtun. As objects from Du Fu’s lifetime, they differentiate Dongtun from Baidi and Rangxi as a place that still bears legible traces of the past, thus offering a site suitable for “visiting and mourning” (diao 弔). These objects are paired with a description of the surrounding area, which is “very reminiscent” (liangshi 良是) of that found in Du Fu’s poetry. As in the opening section of the essay, where Lu You judges Li Xiang’s property against the place described in Du Fu’s poetry, text and landscape are correlated as a way of locating people in space and time. Lu You’s focus on Dongtun is largely a function of what he claims is the original object of the essay—to “make note” (ji 記) of Li Xiang. Unlike Du Fu, who was an ambitious “man of the world” (tianxia shi 天下士), Li Xiang never even set off on the road to glory, thus avoiding suffering and humiliation. Instead, he chose to stay in place, living as a recluse without having had

68 a l andscape of traces to seek office and then retire from the world. In this, he continues his connection to Dongtun and maintains the agricultural base necessary for a life of contemplative leisure. By comparison, Du Fu was unable to stay in Dongtun for the span of a single year. Lu You thus implicitly judges Du Fu a failure (shi 失) and Li a success (de 得) in navigating the travails of life while maintaining righteousness and propagating a family line. There is a clear irony to this: not only does the majority of the essay, ostensibly about Li, center on Du Fu, but the text itself is proof of the immortality that literary fame offers. From a certain perspective, Lu You’s essay is about the relative merits of different methods of “turning death into life” (shi si fu sheng 使死復生), ways of maintaining some form of presence in the face of absence. Li Xiang has achieved this by staying in place and becoming an integral component of the landscape of Dongtun. In contrast, Lu You’s failure to find hard evidence of any of the other Lofty Retreats renders Du Fu’s immortality almost totally immaterial. Only at Dongtun, where the poet is evoked by the landscape and the “ancient scrolls” embedded there, does he finds something worthy not only of mourning, but of “expending the effort” (chuli 出力) to memorialize. If the Dali scrolls are a textual surrogate for the poet, allowing the Li family to legitimate their Dongtun property as an authentic ji, then Lu You’s essay functions as a textual surrogate for readers who are unable to access Du Fu’s “lingering traces” in person. It fulfills this function not by recounting Lu You’s travels around Kuizhou or providing a description of the Lofty Retreat—as the essay’s title seems to promise—but by memorializing the values embodied by Li Xiang and Du Fu and embedded in the landscape of Dongtun. By making Li Xiang a mirror image of Du Fu—possessing a similar loftiness but a different fate—Lu You goes as far as he possibly can with the tools at his disposal towards reinscribing Du Fu in Dongtun. Those tools—the essay, brush, paper, printing, communities of readers and writers—create a sense of Dongtun as a cultural and historical place that can circulate textually throughout the realm. Text not only diffuses the ji, however; it also helps to fix it as an empirically authenticated site while also offering clear spatial details that allow readers to visit it in person, if they so desire. Essays like Lu You’s reinforce the relationship between people and places, but they only reflect one aspect of the reinscriptional practices that shaped the Three Gorges during the Song. Another aspect is the rebuilding of ancient structures or “former residences” (guju 故居) to serve as sites of pilgrimage. What Lu You does not tell us is that Li Xiang’s residence was just such a reconstruction. For this information, we must turn to an 1197 essay by the Kuizhou official Yu Xie 于䏶28 (fl. later twelfth to early thirteenth century):

from trace to site 69 After Shaoling left the Gorges, his land changed owners three times. In recent times it came into the possession of a certain Li family, and scrolls in Du Fu’s hand were still there. Eventually, it [passed to a] son [of the Li family], Li Xiang, who was inclined to good deeds [po haoshi 頗 好事] and interested in ancient sites [jiangqiu guji 講求古蹟]. [Li Xiang] once again reconstructed a Lofty Retreat, and, in imitation of the old fellow of Fuzhou’s [efforts to] spread the reputation of Shaoling’s poetic intent, built a Hall of the Great Odes [daya tang 大雅堂]. Overlooking a stream he also built a thatched hall and painted his [Du Fu’s] posthumous portrait. Many years having passed, the roof had fallen into disrepair and was left unrepaired, the scrolls too had been spirited away by someone wielding great power and this former refuge of a past worthy had been all but reduced to a mound of brambles and shrubs [jingzhen zhi xu 荊榛之墟].29 From Yu Xie we learn that Li Xiang was worthy of praise not simply because he led an exemplary life of seclusion, but because he created a popular tourist attraction dedicated to Du Fu, complete with a reconstructed lofty retreat, a thatched hut containing Du Fu’s portrait, and a Hall of the Great Odes, modeled on another Sichuan structure that contained inscriptions of all of Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry in the hand of Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105), “the old fellow of Fuzhou.” Li was more than simply “interested in ancient sites”; he created one to serve as a shrine to Du Fu. His Shaoling Shrine (Shaoling ci 少陵祠) was by no means unique, however. According to a dictionary of place names in Du Fu’s poetry, there have been at least eight Shaoling Shrines throughout China, some of which are still active today.30 Perhaps the most famous of all monuments to Du Fu was the Hall of the Great Odes (daya tang 大雅堂) that Li Xiang imitates in Dongtun. The original hall was built in 1100 by Yang Su 楊素, an official in the Sichuanese city of Danleng, in order to fulfill Huang Tingjian’s desire to “write out all of Du Fu’s poems on the two Chuan and the Kui Gorge and have them inscribed on stone.”31 In the essay he wrote to commemorate the construction of the hall, Huang complained that readers who “delight in making far-fetched interpretations [chuanzao 穿鑿; literally, drilling and boring], discarding [a poem’s] greater purpose [dazhi 大旨] and grasping after its inspiration [faxing 發興], believing that each and every object with which they meet—forests and springs, men and things, grasses and trees, fish and insects—is imbued with allegorical significance [yousuo tuo 有所託] . . . are like those who guess at riddles and codes.”32 For Huang, the hall is meant to reverse the decay of a

70 a l andscape of traces literary and moral culture (siwen 斯文) grounded in the ancient Book of Odes (which contains a section titled “Great Odes”) and the Songs of Chu, but “lost” (weidi 委地)—literally “cast into the dirt”—since Du Fu’s death. Just as Yu Xie and his peers would “resurrect” (xing 興) the Dongtun lofty retreat from a “mound of brambles and shrubs” at the end of the twelfth century, Huang Tingjian and Yang Su sought to reverse the loss of a shared literary culture by inscribing Du Fu’s poems in stone and embedding them in Sichuan at the beginning of the century.33 Cultural decay is figured in both cases as a process of ruination that marks a tipping point in a cyclical pattern leading to revival. In Yu Xie’s essay, the character I have translated as “mound”—xu 墟—is also one of the most common words for what we might call a “ruin.” According to Wu Hung, the xu that appeared in premodern poetic and pictorial contexts was most often “an empty site  .  .  . [that] generated visitors’ mental and emotional responses not through tangible remains,” but rather by stimulating their historical consciousness.34 As with ji, “it is the visitors’ recognition of a place as a xu that stimulates emotion and thought.”35 And like traces, ruins not only inspire subjective reactions, but can also drive visitors like Yu Xie to look past the emptiness of the site to the materiality of the ruin as a thing that can be restored to its original state and inscribed with important cultural values. For Yang Su and Huang Tingjian, it is the values of a literary tradition exemplified by Du Fu and his poetry rather than a physical structure that are in a state of ruination. To revive them, however, requires the construction of a physical site of worship that materializes the right kinds of reading and writing. Skill in determining the author’s “intention” (yi 意)—both by paying meticulous attention to the original text and by looking beyond it to its sources and context of composition—was an indispensable first step. In Huang’s essay on the Hall of the Great Odes, both comprehension and revival are figured as spatial practices of “ascending the hall” (shengtang 升堂) and “entering the room” (rushi 入室), phrases borrowed from the Analects of Confucius, where they describe the stages of a student’s assimilation of the master’s teachings.36 This upward journey, from the dirt to the master’s inner sanctum, is enabled by the construction of the Hall, but it is by no means assured. It is only by approaching Du Fu through the foundational texts of the literary tradition— a hermeneutic recommendation concretized by the inscription of his poetry within a structure named after the poetry of the Book of Odes—that one can capture their “greater purpose” and avoid tossing the entire tradition into the dirt. For Yu Xie, writing twenty-six years after Lu You penned his celebration of Li Xiang and nearly a century after Huang Tingjian’s essay on the Hall of the

from trace to site 71 Great Odes, the shrine to Du Fu at Dongtun was neither a “trace of the past” (guji) nor a “lingering trace” (yiji), but a ruin (xu) totally “incapable of bringing about the intended effect of inspiring one to yearn for worthies and venerate moral virtue” (wuyi zhi sixian shangdezhi yi 無以致思賢尚德之意).37 Conveniently, at this time, Li Xiang was looking to sell his property, so one of Yu Xie’s friends donated the necessary funds and placed the land under the control of the local government. The men then set about restoring its buildings and grounds until it became one of the finest sites in all of Kuizhou. In the same essay, Yu Xie complains that by allowing Du Fu’s Dongtun lofty retreat to decay, Kuizhou had failed to maintain a sense of historical propriety (quedian 缺典).38 For Yu Xie, reconstruction was about far more than promoting sites of local interest for the casual tourist: “As for this labor [shiyi 是役], how could it have been carried out simply for the sake of wandering and gazing [youguan 游觀; i.e., pleasure travel]!”39 Du Fu had long since come to surpass mere literary fame. He was a man who embodied the values and intentions of the classics, “never forgetting his sovereign, even for the space of a meal.”40 When Yu praises his friends’ role in reconstructing the lofty retreat, he uses the language of cultural revival, rather than architectural repair, proclaiming that “they alone were able to revive [xing 興] 400 year old ruins [yizhi 遺趾] and make them new [gengxin zhi 更新之].”41 If Du Fu was important for more than his poetry, it is little wonder that the structures that were built to memorialize him could become more than buildings and the images placed therein more than representations. As sites for the veneration of moral virtue and objects of worship, they were essential to the sacralization of Du Fu. In an essay commemorating the renovation of Du Fu’s famous thatched hall in Chengdu, the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) writer Yang Tinghe 楊廷和 (1459–1529) places Du Fu squarely within a lineage of figures who have been “universally worshipped [si 祀] in antiquity as in the present” in Sichuan. That Du Fu, “who was merely an impoverished refugee, is arrayed loftily alongside” men famous for “great deeds and virtue [gongde 功德] . . . is truly not just because of his poetry.”42 Du Fu is more than an object of worship; he is an object of worship in Shu, arrayed alongside famous Shu men of the ages.43 The perpetuation of this geographically specific tradition of worship, whether by Yang Tinghe in the Ming, Yu Xie in the Southern Song, Huang Tingjian in the Northern Song, or Qianlong in the Qing, ensured that Du Fu would always be at home in Shu, despite the fact that he had so often ached to leave the south. If Du Fu was forced to share the “clouds and mountains” of Kuizhou with the tribes of the Five Streams, those who worshipped his traces experienced a landscape that was no longer defined by its peripheral

72 a l andscape of traces heterogeneity.44 The collective acts of spatial inscription that they carried out served as a means of promulgating a new moral and literary orthodoxy from a point in time and space central to Han culture. It also created an entirely new set of traces and itineraries, those grooved and creatively “regroove[d]” by the men and women who traveled to find Du Fu in the landscape, often from the comfort of their studies.45 Instead of textually mapping unfamiliar places (and possibly making them famous in the process), Fan Chengda, Lu You, Yu Xie, Yang Tinghe, and their peers judged the appearance of the landscape against well-known literary works and narratives, and in the case of Du Fu’s former homes, laid out the coordinates of a route for cultural pilgrimage.46 By actively contributing to the production of spaces of tourism and worship, their writings also changed how certain people experienced the landscape. To produce a site of worship legitimated by its status as historical trace was to help foster a moral way of seeing and being in the world. Viewed from this perspective, the qualities of objective observation and description often attributed to Song travel writing in general, and to the essay in particular, seem inadequate. Rather than simply evidence of an objective embrace of gewu 格物 (the “thorough investigation of things”), observation and the modes of reading and writing it supported were tools in the active production of sites and landscapes of cultural devotion.47 For Lu You and Yu Xie, the essay form helped to produce Dongtun as a site of cultural devotion. Since what mattered most was the active creation of a sense of presence through worship, neither writer worked very hard to confirm that Du Fu had actually lived there. Lu You describes the scenery as “very reminiscent,” but he relies primarily on Li Xiang’s claims, which once reproduced in his essay, acquire the air of historical fact. With Yu Xie’s arrival, this historical fact becomes an official one that is repeated through the ages. This is a serious problem for xiandi scholar Jian Jinsong, who suggests that Li Xiang’s story about Dongtun and its Tang-era documents was fabricated to improve his reputation.48 Setting aside the impossibility of judging Li Xiang’s motives from a distance of more than eight hundred years, why does any of this matter? What might we gain from pinpointing the “real” location of Du Fu’s Dongtun home? We will never know if Li Xiang was as devious as Jian believes him to have been, though it is safe to assume that Lu You and Yu Xie believed his land had once belonged to Du Fu. At the very least, if they had doubts, they kept them to themselves. Their goal was not to prove or disprove Li Xiang’s claim, but to reinscribe Du Fu in the landscape made famous by his poetry. Through this reinscription, the men who wrote about and restored Du Fu’s Dongtun house helped produce a space imbued with meaning and authenticated through

from trace to site 73 pilgrimage and worship. As Yu Xie’s essay makes clear, textual inscription and the reinscription of physical traces on the surface of the earth often went hand in hand. The ji 記 (essay/record) does not simply spread word of the authentic ji 跡; it helps to produce it. * The history of Dongtun after Du Fu’s death shows how questions of authenticity and spatial continuity are shaped by ritual and worship. There are still pilgrims today to demonstrate this. In his 2015 book, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past, the American translator and poet Bill Porter—who also goes by the Buddhist penname Red Pine (Chisong 赤松)—chronicles a thirtyday pilgrimage to sites associated with poets across China, interspersing a prose travelogue with translations of famous poems written at the sites he visits. As part of his search for “source[s] of inspiration,” Porter seeks out the tracks of the ancients in order to see what and how they saw and to commune with them spiritually by offering libations of whiskey.49 When he travels to Fengjie, the city known in the Tang as Kuizhou, he makes two stops. First, he follows in Fan Chengda’s footsteps to Baidicheng, where he finds a “replacement . . . carved out of rock near the summit” for Du Fu’s original lofty retreat, which is now submerged.50 For his second stop, he uses none other than Jian Jinsong’s xiandi book to search out Du Fu’s Dongtun property, which he also estimates to be some “fifty meters below the water level.”51 Porter’s project would be impossible without a strong faith in the authenticity of the many “present sites” and “former homes” scattered throughout China. His search for Du Fu seems to prove this faith, but what he does at Dongtun transcends the assumptions of xiandi scholarship. Porter arrives not only to find Du Fu “gone,” but also to discover the erasure of the landscape he made so famous. While it proves impossible to retrace Lu You and Yu Xie’s footsteps to Li Xiang’s Dongtun shrine, Porter inscribes a new site of worship, climbing down a “dirt ridge for several hundred meters” and offering his whiskey to the roots of an orange tree as “intermediary.”52 The search for poets of the past is a search for such intermediaries—objects in the landscape made numinous by faith. The Dangers of Lazy Reading Few thinkers concerned with the links between specific places and poetic intentions could imitate Yu Xie and Huang Tingjian in constructing a physical site that spatialized the steps leading toward correct interpretation.

74 a l andscape of traces Yet anyone with the proper training could draw on a set of scholarly practices—described variously as bian 辯 (adjudicate, clarify), kao 考 (investigate, research) and xiang 詳 (explain thoroughly, explicate)—that were designed to support accurate interpretation. It is these practices, combined with observations made in the course of travel, that allow Fan Chengda and Lu You to combat questionable interpretations of Du Fu’s poetry, often by comparing poetic landscapes against the physical spaces on which they were supposedly based. Given the otherworldly appearance of its cloud-shrouded landscapes and its evocatively ambiguous poetics, the Three Gorges region was ripe for this type of adjudication, perhaps because it resisted it so enticingly. Efforts to correct faulty readings entailed not only the demystification of the landscape through the collection of accurate topographic information, but also the reinterpretation of older textual sources and the creation of new ones. Fan Chengda and others carried out just such a reform project on the goddess of Mt. Wu and the Chu poet Song Yu, the subject of Du Fu’s second poem in the “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past” series.53 They sought to clear the erotic clouds that had cloaked the goddess for over a millennium and to fundamentally change how people looked at and represented the landscape of the Three Gorges.54 As described in the preface to Song Yu’s “Gaotang Rhapsody,” the goddess is an endlessly changeable being who once shared her bed with a king of Chu: Once in the past, King Xiang of Chu and Song Yu were strolling the terrace at Yunmeng and gazed at the Gaotang tower, the top of which was covered by clouds and mists, rising peak-like to the apex, when suddenly the appearance [of the vapors] changed and in the briefest span began to mutate and transform ceaselessly. The King asked Yu: “What manner of qi is this?” Yu responded: “These are the so-called morning clouds.” The King said: “And what are morning clouds?” Yu said: “Once in the past, when the previous king was wandering around Gaotang, he grew fatigued and took a nap during the day. In a dream he saw a woman who said: “I am the lady of Mt. Wu; the sojourner of Gaotang. I heard that milord was wandering around Gaotang and wished to offer you my pillow and mat.” The King thereupon honored her with his company. Parting, she took her leave and said: “I reside on the sunny side of Mt. Wu and on the treacherous reaches of Gaoqiu. At daybreak I am the morning clouds, at dusk the driving rain. Morning after morning, evening after evening I am here beneath the Yang Terrace.” The next morning he looked for this and it was as she had said.55

from trace to site 75 For millennia, writers have embraced the goddess and her lore as a rich source of erotic imagery, an approach that continues to this day, as evidenced by the many pages of kitschy semi-pornographic images of the goddess generated by a simple internet search for Wushan shennü 巫山神女. 56 For as long as the goddess has been an erotic figure, however, scholars have taken pains to note that Song Yu’s “Gaotang Rhapsody” is not an erotic poem, or at the very least, that it does not promote sensuality.57 For some, the scenario described by Song Yu, with its mingling of worlds and its suggestion of kingly negligence, offered a negative example through which to establish the bounds of sexual propriety.58 Since at least the Tang, writers have worked this skeptical tradition into their poetic treatments of Mt. Wu and the goddess, arguing that Song Yu’s account is either woefully misleading or embarrassingly misunderstood. One scholar links this approach to the influence of Song Dynasty Neo-Confucianism, which sets up a strict distinction between humans, who experience desire and emotion, and spirits, which do not.59 This is close to the argument that Du Guangting 杜光庭 (850–933) offers in his collection of biographies of Daoist goddesses and saints, the Record of the Assembled Immortals of the Round Citadel (Yongcheng jixian lu 墉城集仙錄), which identifies the goddess as Yaoji 瑤姬, official title Lady Cloudflower (Yunhua furen 雲華夫人 ).60 According to Du’s account, which was repeated almost verbatim in Li Fang’s 李昉 (925–996) Taiping guangji 太平廣記, “Song Yu wrote his goddess rhapsodies [shenxian fu 神仙賦] to allegorize his passions [yuqing 寓情], [in the process] debauching and besmirching the most illustrious and perfected high immortal. How else could this slander have descended on her?”61 In Du’s Record, Yaoji becomes a skilled practitioner of the Daoist arts of transformation who decides to reside on Mt. Wu after passing the mountain and becoming enamored of its spectacular scenery. Sometime after settling there, she meets Yu the Great, who, in the midst of forming the Three Gorges, was beset by a mysterious wind and interfering demons near Mt. Wu. Unable to finish his work, Yu requests Yaoji’s help, and the goddess responded by “presenting Yu with a stratagem in the form of a text for summoning the hundred spirits and ordering her [attendant] spirits . . . to help Yu split stones and clear a way for the waves, to relieve blockages and carve a channel through obstructions in order to follow the water’s flow.”62 Du Guangting’s focus on the violation of the goddess is typical of a revisionary approach with precedents in Tang poetry. In an early example, Li Bai describes the goddess as approaching the king of Chu “without desire” (wuxin 無心) and asks his readers:

76 a l andscape of traces 茫昧竟誰測 Who will finally fathom this confusing muddle 虛傳宋玉文 This fantasy transmitted by Song Yu’s writing63 Devoid of the moralistic tone of Du Guangting’s Record, Li Bai’s eighth-century poem describes the entire encounter between the goddess and the Chu king as a humorously empty fantasy transmitted as fact by Song Yu’s writing. It does so by drawing on a strain of doubt that hinges on the mystifying relationship between reality and illusion, waking and dreaming and the world objectively observed and as seen through texts. Doubt and ambiguity are highly conventionalized characteristics of poems on Mt. Wu, especially those collected under the title “How High Mt. Wu” (Wushan gao 巫山高) in Guo Maoqian’s 郭茂倩 (b. 1094) famous anthology of Music Bureau (yuefu 樂府) poetry.64 Most of these highly intertextual poems, written between the sixth and tenth centuries, use the ambiguous qualities of the landscape to heighten its atmosphere of erotic possibility and suspense. Others, however, reject familiar clichés, demystifying the mountain’s clouds and rains and complaining that more than a thousand years of slander had been heaped on the goddess and the kings of Chu.65 In the Song Dynasty, doubts about the erotic nature of the Goddess came to inspire a more careful investigation of the language of the rhapsodies attributed to Song Yu. Before even traveling through the Three Gorges, Fan Chengda had written a preface to a poem in which he reappraised the final lines of Song Yu’s “Goddess” rhapsody: Previously, when I investigated Song Yu’s talk of “morning clouds,” [and the common claim] that it slandered the kings of ancient times, I discovered it to have absolutely no basis in fact [benwu juyi 本無據依]. As for King Xiang’s dreaming [of the goddess] and his ordering [Song] Yu to compose a fu, [the text] only says: “Her face turned red in anger and she held fast to herself, never could she be trifled with in such a manner [頩顏怒以自持, 曾不可乎犯干]!”66 Later generations did not look into this carefully, uniformly besmirching [Song Yu and the goddess] with their slander . . . Who will counter all of this baseless derision?67 The playful poem that follows this preface was written in response to a poem by Fan’s friend, which was itself inspired by a painting of Mt. Wu owned by another acquaintance. It presents a capsule history and a symbolic geography for both the spread of a licentious interpretation of Song Yu’s rhapsodies and also for the influence of that licentiousness on poetic representations of other goddesses. In the first half of the long poem, Fan echoes the erotic imagery

from trace to site 77 and language that have made Mt. Wu famous, while also casting doubt on the “standard theme”: 瑤姬家山高插天 Yaoji’s mountain home—so high it pierces the heavens 碧叢奇秀古未傳 Of the exquisite fineness of its emerald groves, since antiquity nothing has been transmitted 向來題目經楚客 Without break, a standard theme has come down to us from that wanderer of Chu [Song Yu] 名字徑度岷峨前 Whose name has spread straight past Mt. Min and Mt. E 是邪非邪莽誰識 But is it true or is it false? Who can comprehend this muddle?68 喬林古廟常秋色 Lofty forests and ancient shrine—forever the color of autumn 暮去行雨朝行雲 At dusk departs the driving rain, at dawn come scudding clouds 翠帷瑤席知何人 Verdant canopy and jasper mats—do you know to whom they belong? 峽船一息且千里 Gorge boats in a breath’s span cross one thousand li 五兩竿頭見旛尾 At the ends of paired poles appear pennants’ tips 仰窺仙館至今疑 Gazing up to sneak a look at the immortal’s lodge—to this day one remains unsure 行人問訊居人指 The traveler makes his enquiries, the locals point the way The always-autumnal landscape that Fan describes is the composite product of language and imagery borrowed from earlier poems and texts. Even the mountain’s “emerald groves” (bicong 碧叢) come from a “How High Mt. Wu” poem by the Tang poet Li He 李賀 (790–816).69 What those texts have not communicated, however, at least according to Fan, is how “marvelous and fine” the mountain’s trees are. Inspired by hackneyed accounts of Yaoji’s sensuality, travelers look past the lush greenery to sneak a prurient look at the goddess’s home. When they cannot locate it, they turn to locals, who are only too happy to point the way. In lines 11 and 12, Fan reenacts the dubious pointing that closes out Du Fu’s poem on Song Yu. Whereas Du Fu’s travelers failed to understand how one might embody immaterial traces of the past, Fan Chengda’s have failed even to understand the texts that draw them to the landscape.

78 a l andscape of traces In the second half of the poem, Fan explains that the popular understanding of the goddess is based on a sloppy reading of Song Yu’s poem that has been “carelessly spread” (langchuan 浪傳) by “hungry travelers, their eyes ever cold” (jike yan changhan 飢客眼長寒), through the “How High Mt. Wu” poems. Like the “palaces of Chu” and Song Yu’s home in Du Fu’s poem, Mt. Wu of the “How High Mt. Wu” tradition hovers between past and present and illusion and reality, inspiring travelers to seek and locals to point the way, even though their shared object always eludes them. This indeterminacy finds expression both in the lingering “wonder” (another possible meaning of yi 疑) that surrounds the location of the Yang Terrace or the Gaotang tower and the sense of doubt that surrounds the story itself. If Li Bai’s poem represents a charming exception to the erotic tradition of Mt. Wu poetry, Fan Chengda’s represents a direct attack on it. Fan tries to rehabilitate not just the kings of Chu and the goddess of Mt. Wu, but also Song Yu, whom he sees as a victim of poor reading comprehension. In both his preface and his poem, Fan singles out readers and writers who neglected to “investigate” (cha 察) both the intent and the wording of Song Yu’s rhapsodies, thereby spreading “slanderous language” (xieyu 媟語) and “silly talk of boys and girls” (ernü yu 兒女語) in their own poems. The implications of this failure to read and write correctly are by no means limited to Mt. Wu: Fan identifies it as the origin of a wantonness that spreads, through space and time, and from literary woman to literary woman, till it reaches even the Milky Way and its lonely weaving girl, who becomes a popular figure for romantic longing. What Fan neglects to mention in his poem on the Mt. Wu painting are any texts—aside from Song Yu’s rhapsodies—that might support his assertions. This changes when he is finally able to visit a temple across the river from Mt. Wu, where he finds stone inscriptions that tell the story of Yaoji’s role in helping Yu the Great carve out the Three Gorges. In the preface to the “How High Mt. Wu” poem that Fan writes to commemorate his visit, he stands by his earlier poem: “in investigating [kao 考] the intent of Song Yu’s rhapsodies, I judged [bian 辨] the matter of Gaotang with extreme thoroughness [shenxiang 甚詳].”70 The stone inscriptions not only confirm this, they also make it possible for him to put an end to both the doubt and the erotic wonder that define the “How High Mt. Wu” poems. Fan does not name the inscribed texts that support his conclusions in his poem and preface, but he does provide more detailed information in the travel diary entry that he wrote at the same time:

from trace to site 79 The Goddess’s Temple is located atop a small ridge on the bank opposite the peaks [of Mt. Wu]. . . . A stone carving within the present-day temple cites the Yongcheng ji: “Yaoji, daughter of the Queen Mother of the West, was called The Perfected One of Cloud and Flower. She assisted Yu in driving out the ghosts and demons [from the area of the Gorges] and in cutting through the stone to let flow the waters.” Having merit, she was memorialized in writing [yougong jianji 有功見紀] and is now enfeoffed as the Perfected One of Miraculous Efficacy.71 Du Guangting’s Record provides Fan with an alternative history that is based on deeds of action inscribed in the landscape of the Gorges rather than on clouds gyring atop the mountain. Referring to her assistance of Yu and her inclusion in Du Guangting’s text, Fan Chengda writes: “having merit, she was memorialized in writing.” This phrase is key to both Fan’s interest in Yaoji and to our understanding of how authors inscribe historical and mythical figures in the landscape through the correct types of reading and writing. In this case, Fan uses the word ji 紀 (to record, to be included in a historical record), which is cognate with and often used interchangeably with ji 記 (write, record; essay), to refer to the stone inscriptions of Du Guangting’s text that fill the goddess’s temple. The version of the goddess’s life contained in those inscriptions differs from the salacious account found in the many texts that misread Song Yu’s rhapsody. Du Guangting does describe her famous capacity for transformation—into clouds and mists, rocks, dragons, and countless other forms—but balances it with the monumental permanence of Yu the Great’s flood control project. In the previous chapter, I described how Yu’s feats and the landscape they produced are classified not only as his traces—his literal footprints and axe marks— but also as marks of his meritorious deeds. Though the surface of the earth is inscribed with the traces of Yu’s and Yaoji’s deeds, and though Du Guangting has described the true history of their connection, careless travelers and readers have preferred to cover their eyes with the clouds and rain of poetic lore. Fan Chengda responds by invoking a form of writing—the record of merit carved in stone and embedded in the landscape—that reflects the goals of his larger literary project. Like his travel diary and the poems that he wrote alongside it, these inscriptions on stone, if read correctly, force readers to reconsider a physical landscape they had previously known only through faulty practices of reading and writing. Both ji 紀 (to record) and ke 刻 (to inscribe) are inscriptional practices that function primarily to memorialize and

80 a l andscape of traces preserve a text that makes accurate interpretation possible. For Fan Chengda, Du Guangting’s record and its inscription in the goddess’s temple beneath Mt. Wu supply him with the textual evidence he needs to redeem the goddess and her mountain. It is no coincidence that he cites these inscriptions in the preface to his own “How High Mt. Wu” poem. As he makes clear in the poem itself, he does so to replace the ambiguous clouds and mists of a misguided erotic tradition with the stony permanence of the Gorges as traces of heroic acts carried out by “the perfected one of the west” (the goddess) and Yu: 西真功高佐禹跡 How lofty the feats of the perfected one of the west, who helped to produce the traces of Yu 斧鑿鱗皴倚天壁 So that the scaly marks of ax and chisel could rest on these heaven-soaring cliffs72 In his first poem on Mt. Wu, Fan Chengda attempts to capture the materiality of the mountain, to offer a vision of the landscape as more than just a figure for the goddess’s transformations. By emphasizing the hitherto neglected fineness of the mountain’s “emerald groves,” Fan not only suggests that there are topographic truths that lie beneath the shapeless mists of innuendo, he also reminds us that his initial topic is not the goddess or King Xiang of Chu, but a painting of a mountain dotted with trees. It is hard to say with any certainty what this painting of Mt. Wu would have looked like. At the very least, its presence in the narrow confines of the Wu Gorge would seem to pose significant challenges for artists. In The Shu River handscroll, the Wu Gorge is depicted from a distance with what appears to be a combined aerial and lowangle perspective (figure 2.4). In a sixteenth-century hanging-scroll painting of the Wu Gorge in the collection of the Cleveland Art Museum, the landscape is dramatically elongated and includes a boat struggling across dangerous rapids (figure 2.5). To date, I have not been able to identify a single extant painting solely dedicated to the depiction of Mt. Wu or the Wu Gorge from the Song, though it is clear from poetic evidence that the mountain was a pictorial theme as early as the eighth century,73 and Fan’s poem is proof that the tradition of “Mt. Wu paintings” (Wushan tu 巫山圖) paintings continued into the Song. While we may never know exactly what such paintings looked like, we can be sure that most of them failed to satisfy Fan Chengda. In his final extended discussion of Mt. Wu, in his travel diary, he complains that painters of this landscape consistently failed to capture its changeable weather:

figure 2.4 The Shu River (detail): The Wu Gorge. Source: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1916.539