China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Ruth Mostern, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: James M. Hargett, SUNY, Albany
Discussant: Naomi Standen, University of Wisconsin, Superior
This panel brings together work bearing on the ways that writers, artists, and officials in the Song era thought about geography, depicted and named places, and divided territories from one another. Each paper addresses the communicative and political purposes served by such projects. These inquiries reveal the relationship between geography and political authority at a time when the territorial extent of the empire and the intellectual and moral bases for sovereignty were undergoing massive change. Viewing the creation and representation of place in its moral, aesthetic, administrative and diplomatic contexts, our panel also makes a case for the value of studying geography as a tool for understanding thought and society in the Song era.
The papers on this panel form a continuum describing geographic policies and depictions increasingly abstract from the land itself. On one end lies David Wright’s discussion of diplomatic arguments about the disposition and transgression of territories and the conventions for marking and crossing a precisely delineated international border. On the other lies Alfreda Murcks examination of the way that scholars used representations of landscapes to communicate about their moral and political role and their relationship to the places that they viewed, lived or imagined. In the middle, Ruth Mostern looks at the conventions for depicting counties and prefectures and the circumstances behind the fluidity of their territorial extent, while James M. Hargett investigates the frequent changes in the names of territories and the principles guiding the selection of new names.
All four papers emphasize that geography is more than a stage for human events. In the Song era, territorial jurisdictions and place names were not static, but rather changed in accordance with political, moral or cosmological circumstances. The diverse meanings embedded in place names and landscape paintings illustrate that physical places were experienced differently according to the strategies of those who depicted them.
David Wright, Brigham Young University
A fixed and closely-guarded border separated Sung and Liao. This border was, for the most part, established during the tenth century, although some squabbles over tiny parcels of land persisted into the eleventh. A considerable complement of Chinese population and culture existed on the northern side of the border inside Liao territory. From the perspective of the Sung government, the border was not a vaguely defined indication of the extent of Chinese cultural influence but rather a precise marking of the extent of the territory directly under its control and liable to its taxation. It was, then, a political not cultural or linguistic boundary, one that defined Sung territory rather than the extent of Chinese civilization.
A significant portion of the border was along the Pai-kou River. Sung envoys to the Liao crossed a designated bridge over this river to enter and leave Liao territory, and an exchange of toasts and riding quirts at the bridge between Sung and Liao diplomatic personnel seems to have been part of the regimen of diplomatic ritual.
Border issues figured prominently into the negotiation of the Treaty of Shan-yuan in 1005. The final agreement contained provisions for extraditing fugitives and prohibiting the construction of new walls or moats along the border. Soon after the conclusion of the treaty, the names of several Chinese cities on the Sung side of the border were changed to avoid giving offense to the Liao rulers: Ching-jung ("Quieting the Barbarians") was changed to An-su ("Peaceful and Solemn"), Ting-yuan ("Pacifying the Afar") to Yung-ching ("Eternal Tranquility"), and P’ing-lu ch’eng ("City Where the Caitiffs Were Quelled") to Su-ning ("Solemn Peace").
Ruth Mostern, University of California, Berkeley
Much research in cultural geography and history of cartography has seen the process of territorialization and the representation of space on maps as a way for states to centralize and expand authority by reifying and standardizing lived space. However, in Song practice, the symbolic and legitimizing role played by political geography was instead to make the current rulers heir to a tradition of constantly changing borders stretching back to antiquity. Territorial designations were malleable, flexible and were hitched to non-territorial aspects of state power. The manipulation of territorial jurisdictions was thus a tool of political practice, used to calibrate the balance of power between court and officials and between the state and its good and bad subjects. My paper explores this process from the standpoint of both politics and representation.
This paper advances two propositions regarding Song administrative geography. First, I establish briefly that Song domestic administration was in fact territorial; that is to say that the government organized human activities according to bounded places. This claim contrasts with a Sinological tradition which has emphasized the role of "centering" in Chinese geographic-ritual thought, the idea that authority emanates from a point and a person rather than within a domain. My research argues for the preponderance, in the Song, of geographic thought characterized by relatively precise domains and cellular, demographic and topographical approaches to delineating and claiming land.
Second, I demonstrate that the key feature of the Song territorial concept lay in its fluidity of jurisdictions. Although administration was territorially based, the names, hierarchical positions and configurations of jurisdictions changed incessantly. The geography sections of the Song shi and other sources, and territorial sections of gazetteers and atlases, are almost all organized around the idea of yange: the successive changes in boundaries through the years. In this section of the paper I concentrate on some examples of memorials in which county and prefectural officials request changes in the extent or status of the territories under their jurisdiction, along with court initiatives altering the boundaries of counties and prefectures.
James M. Hargett, SUNY, Albany
Place names exist in every culture and China is no exception. The most basic reason for this is simple: they help people identify a particular environment—usually geographical or administrative—with recognized borders. My concern here is place names in China (diming). In general, they share five common characteristics: (1) most places in China have several names; (2) diming in China often changed from dynasty to dynasty, or within dynasties (this explains why one place might have several designations); (3) Chinese place names reflect both geographic and cultural influences; (4) older diming in China often derive from oral traditions, many of which reflect local dialect influences; (5) certain words used in Chinese place names have regional application and use (for instance, whereas he is a more northern term for river, jiang is more common in the south).
My interest in this essay concerns the second of these characteristics. More specifically, I am interested in changes in place names that occurred during the Song dynasty (960–1279). For instance, why was Chongyi (lit., esteem righteousness) changed to Chongxin (lit., esteem sincerity) in 976? Why was Suzhou’s name changed to Pingjiang (lit., Level River) in 1113? Or why was the word yi in many place names changed during the Song?
It is well known that the political consolidation and economic expansion of the Song empire resulted in much administrative reorganization, especially at the fu, zhou, and xian levels, and this in turn led to many place name changes. Still, however, a fascinating question remains: what principles guided the selection of official "new" names? Why, for instance, was Bianzhou now Kaifeng? Or why was Hangzhou now Lin’an? This is the key question I intend to explore in this paper. Ultimately, I will attempt to determine the relationship between place (di) and name (ming) in a representative sample of new place names adopted during the Song.
Alfreda Murck, Independent Scholar
In the great tradition of landscape painting in China, the use of literary imagery allowed painters to infuse their paintings with meanings beyond surface representation. Using images established in literature, the educated elite exchanged messages through visual media. This practice is abundantly evident in literati painting of the fourteenth century and later. I would like to examine the phenomena in the eleventh century to explore the question of how literary and philosophical views of the world shaped landscape painting.
The monumental landscape by Fan Kuan, Traveling Among Streams and Mountains (circa 1000), has been read as a representation of the solidity of the state and the hierarchy of the imperial court. This reading is supported by literary convention, for example, Meng Jiao’s (8th c.) "Panagyric for General Li." In 1072, the landscape master Guo Xi produced a painting for the Shenzong emperor in which human figures present a hierarchical structuring of society. In landscape terms, being a member of the imperial bureaucracy meant a loftier position on the mountain.
A less familiar example of a literary prototype structuring landscape painting is found in level-distance compositions. Depictions of Hunan in south China are an example. The Southern Sacred mountain, Heng shan, is one of many spectacular peaks in the Heng Mountain range. And yet paintings of the region are described as level distance (pingyuan), a pattern that begins with comments of Shen Gua (1031–1095). This insistence on levelness is not just a focus on the vast Dongting Lake at the expense of the Heng Mountain range, but, I will argue, also a result of the literary view of the primary function of the region, that is, a place of banishment. Through exile poetry the landscape of Hunan was associated with removal from the imperial hierarchy and the consequent lowering of status (to somewhere near water level).
Beyond vertical and horizontal orientations, landscape paintings will also be considered in light of the paired concepts of Distant/Close (yuan/jin), Inner/Outer (nei/wai), Central/Marginal (zhong/yeh), and Misty/Clear (yan/qing).