Organizer: Tobie Meyer-Fong, Stanford University
Chair: James Millward, Georgetown University
Discussant: Timothy Brook, University of Toronto
In recent years, scholars have referred to a 'travel boom' in Late Imperial China, citing travel as part of a cluster of social, economic, and cultural factors that distinguished the late Ming and early Qing from previous periods. While travel has been identified as a symptom of China's changing condition in the late Ming, relatively little analytical work has been done on the subject of travel itself-with the exception of pioneering studies of pilgrimage and travel literature.
It is apparent that Chinese writers conceived of travel in two ways. The first, which is roughly associated with the characters lü and xing, implies long-distance movement and the rigors of the road. The second, generally associated with the term you, is related to leisure touring in a culturally famous or scenic area, including also imaginary journeys and outings with friends. The papers in this panel draw upon both of these categories of meaning to enhance our understanding of travel in late imperial China.
Using travel paintings, Ganza argues that during the late Ming and early Qing, the term you acquired additional meanings that more closely approximate Western scientific usage. Meyer-Fong explores the construction of scenic sites, which she argues is implicitly linked to status definition. Millward uses maps and travel accounts to study efforts by officials and exiles to reconcile Xinjiang with their literary and historical definitions of the Chinese empire. Heimarck examines images of place in the printed catalogue Chengshi Moyuan, elucidating the tension between cultured reference and market accommodation.
"To Hear with the Ears is not as Good as to See with the Eyes":
Travel Painting as an Expression of Empiricism in the Late Ming and Early Qing
Kenneth Ganza, Colby College
In the fourteenth century a discernible interest in commemorating travels first began to be expressed in Chinese visual arts. Early Chinese travel paintings recall journeys largely as vehicles for vicarious re-creation of personal experiences after the fact. Their inscriptions employ personal poetic allusions, and their formal treatment often distorts empirical topography to reflect more subjectively the experiences and memories of the travelers. However, travel painting began to change by the late Ming (1368-1644) and early Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. From the early sixteenth century through the late seventeenth, travel paintings began to record more novel, ambitious journeys, to emphasize objective reporting of travel information, and to employ pictorial devices that communicate accurately what the traveler experienced. All of these open the artist's travels to a wider audience and de-emphasize the subtle, in-group communication of joyful nostalgia that had been characteristic of earlier travel paintings.
These changes in travel painting coincide with an unprecedented rise in the publication of many different expressions of empirical geographic interest and with the replacement of subjectivist Neo-Confucianism of Wang Yangming (1472-1529) by the objectivist philosophies of Huang Zongxi (1610-1695) and others. This paper will cite examples of late Ming and early Qing travel painting and analyze patterns of late Ming geographical scholarship to argue that in this period travel painting and cultural geography became agents of empirical knowledge, rather than just the vehicles for self-cultivation that they earlier had been.
Marvelous Places and Categories of Knowledge in the 1606 Printed Book Chengshi
Moyuan
Tamara Heimarck, University of Michigan
The illustrated portion of the Chengshi Moyuan catalogue of ink cake designs is divided into six sections: heavenly works; illustrations of places; officialdom; things of abundance; collected scholarship; Buddhism and Daoism. While each section could serve as a window into the fashions of the late Ming, the section titled "illustrations of places" offers a particularly tangled mix of geomancy, elite literary reference, and a market-oriented encyclopedic style. Famous mountains like Mt. Huang and Mt. Hua, powerful or legendary sites, such as Mt. Kunlun and the Han palace, are illustrated and accompanied by poetic and prose commentary.
What is Cheng Dayue's purpose in assembling such materials? I argue that in his discussion of marvelous places, as elsewhere in his work, he balances the roles of entertaining entrepreneur; disseminator of literati knowledge to the less-informed; and representative of retreat-based fascinations. Increased international trade and an expanding market for luxury goods co-evolved with the commodification of late Ming society. In this culture, engaging in picturesque travel retreats (real or imagined) was not unlike collecting ancient vessels and jades-both activities were thought to evidence discernment. Ironically, in the process of extolling this elite tradition of leisure and retreat, Cheng simultaneously exploited and adapted it to the marketplace. This paper argues that visually, in terms of categorization, and in terms of written discourse on marvelous places, the Chengshi Moyuan is a hybrid of various traditions, and as such reflects the multiple priorities of late Ming urban culture.
Mapping Land and History: Qing Depictions of Xinjiang/the Western Regions
James Millward, Georgetown University
For Chinese scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the territory of Xinjiang occupied an ambiguous position. On the one hand, Xinjiang lay beyond the environmental and cultural frontiers of "China" as traditionally understood; the lands of shifting sands to the far west had escaped the influence even of the Great Yu in classical texts, and Chinese control had not extended beyond Gansu for a millennium. On the other hand, a journey to Xinjiang during the high Qing period was nonetheless travel within the realm, and the Mongol and Turkic peoples who inhabited the region were Qing subjects, as were the peoples of China proper.
In this paper, I will look primarily at two types of materials which reveal this tension: travel accounts and maps. In both, description of Xinjiang during the traveler's or cartographer's time became the occasion for reflection on and reference to the past, via the literary images of barren wastes 'beyond the pass' (guanwai) and 'Western Regions' (Xiyu) place names dating from the Han and Tang dynasties (when Chinese regimes had directly colonized parts of what is now Xinjiang). The high Qing intellectual predilection to research and rectify forced scholars to attempt a reconciliation of their somewhat fantastic preconceptions, as well as of the onomastic legacy, with the concrete realities and new set of names they encountered in Qing Xinjiang. This process, I will argue, also entailed the Chinese coming to grips with the new imperial reality created by Manchu expansionism.
Re-creation and Recreation: Tourism and the Renovation of Scenic Sites in
Seventeenth Century Yangzhou
Tobie Meyer-Fong, Stanford University
Although we now understand tourism to be tied to processes of self-definition, we often think of it as an encounter with Other people and places. In the Qing, however, for elite visitors and residents alike, sightseeing in Yangzhou was an experience imbued with self-referential connotations. Participants in sightseeing excursions reenacted famous literary gatherings, locating themselves in the spatial and status positions of their predecessors. Such practices provided them with an allusive vocabulary for self representation. Similarly, the reconstruction of scenic sites, like Pingshantang, during the early Qing was sponsored by a heterogeneous elite population investing in the creation of a locally oriented identity. In contrast, during the Qianlong period, such projects were increasingly directed toward the emperor: twenty-four famous 'vistas' were developed in honor of the imperial tours, and guidebooks to Yangzhou celebrated the imperial presence in the city's pleasure grounds.
Despite the devastation that Yangzhou suffered during the Qing conquest, the city rapidly reemerged as a major cultural center. Indeed, the city's placement at the intersection of two major transport arteries made it a natural stopping point for travelers. Wealthy residents funded the construction of scenic sites which became popular destinations for excursions by locals and visitors. These projects were concentrated in the area northwest of the city wall, which was quite literally constructed as an area devoted to leisure. My paper will focus on the renovation of Pingshantang in 1674, placing this project within the broader context of scenic site construction and elite tourism in Qing Yangzhou.