In the highly literate circles of the late Tang and Song empires, the composition of poetry, memorials, funerary inscriptions, social correspondence, and other genres did not merely express views and sentiments, but the act of writing itself placed author and subject within wider social and cultural networks. Broad claims to power, authority, and social status were not expressed only through texts, however. Painting, calligraphy, dress, tombs, and other aspects of material culture also proved effective vehicles for such claims.

This panel explores the practice of representation in poems, maps, paintings, and tombs in order to address methodological challenges confronted by historians of premodern China. The papers argue that the general remove between representation and past realities can be negotiated by placing cultural artifacts within the context of their production. Texts, paintings, and other artifacts provide indications of their production and intended use, and thereby provide a connection to historical cultures of practice. This reading of cultural artifacts as representation and as discourse does not deny the possibility of reconstructing past realities, but it proposes to explore the past through the practice of representation rather than by a transparent reading of these representations.

Robert Ashmore, University of California, Berkeley

Traditional criticism has interpreted Han Yu’s (768–824) poem "South Mountain" (Nan shan shi) as an experiment in crossing generic boundaries: a shi (poem) assuming many of the attributes of a fu (rhapsody). The exhaustive accretion of descriptive detail and the poem’s monumental scale indeed warrant comparison with fu composition. But Han Yu’s employment of aporia suggests specific intentions behind this "genre-crossing." At the close of the poem’s introductory section, Han Yu pleads the seeming impossibility of adequately treating his subject, the Zhongnan mountain range, in language. Although Sun Chuo (314–371) used the same device in the preface to his famous You Tiantai shan fu, his announcement of aporia relates to an actual lack of textual accounts of the region he intends to depict. Han Yu’s complaint about the lack of adequate accounts of the Zhongnan range, by contrast, is pointedly ironic, since few regions in the empire had inspired more compositions. The bulk of these compositions, moreover, employed precisely the genre of the occasional shi poem. The poem’s "transgressions" of ordinary shi rhetoric therefore cannot be dismissed as mere stylistic experimentation but rather bear distinct ideological content. Han Yu evokes the tropes and structures of the occasional shi, but situates them within this monumental hybrid in a manner that discredits that conventional mode of descriptive writing as inadequate to the truth of the landscape. By textually enacting the supersession of the conventional landscape shi, "South Mountain" conveys its central argument about the relation between writing and a new standard of truth.

Martin Powers, University of Michigan

The increased importance of the examination system in Song-dynasty official recruitment caused a fundamental change in the language and conceptualization of political authority. Although literati officials depended on the imprimatur of the imperial court for the legitimation of their authority, they achieved their official status as individuals, recruited from the ranks of the people. Being "of the people," they defined themselves against the hereditary power of the dynastic house and its Mandate of Heaven, claiming instead to represent the broader humanity of the min (the people).

Song literati officials represented the min in memorials and in poetry, traditional genres re-cast in the new language of the Ancient-Style Prose movement whose genealogy reinforced the claims to individuality and humanity. But Song literati also represented the min in paintings of commoners and everyday life. Although at first sight transparent in their liveliness and detail, paintings depicting the joys and hardships of commoners were political statements. When considered in the context of their production and viewing, these paintings reveal their true nature as statements about the min as an abstract concept and thereby as claims to power and authority. Painting, in other words, belonged to a repertoire of political practice. The consideration of these paintings in their political context reveals the varied cultural contexts of painting and viewing as well as the complexity of Song-dynasty political expression.

Ruth Mostern, University of California, Berkeley

The study of cartography in the Song dynasty poses a particular challenge. It is no exaggeration to claim that there were millions of maps created between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Song texts preserve records about maps of landed property, past eras, military maneuvers, counties, cities, palaces, temples, mountains, roads, and the cosmos, some produced in great number. Yet today, only a handful of these are extant, representing few examples and few types of maps.

While the historical geography tradition tends to valorize close readings of extant artifacts, this is not an effective method for understanding Song cartographic practice. By contrast, in this paper I read Song writings about maps. In particular, I focus on eleventh-century documents concerning the mapping of the northwest frontier, written during the lengthy conflict with the Tangut state of Xi Xia. I argue that cartography and territorial delimitation were essential to the practice of Song statecraft, and that Song civil and military officials considered the production of good maps integral to the process of apprehending and controlling a little-known and strategically important region.

This paper is part of a larger project. Instead of looking at the discursive record revealed by maps themselves, I endeavor to use the textual record as the basis for an archaeology of Song cartography: a guide to the range of problems which maps were enjoined to solve, the kinds of people who used maps, and the ways in which maps were objects of debate and conflict, power and pleasure.

Christian de Pee, Columbia University

In representing weddings, different genres in the premodern textual tradition construct incompatible ritual sequences that assume competing notions of time, space, bodies, gender, and text. But while the textual tradition strictly segregates these competing discourses into discrete genres such as ritual manuals, wedding correspondence, legal texts, and almanacs, archaeological traces of joint burial suggest that these competing discourses may have combined in ritual practice.

In joint burial, being the reunification of gendered, ritualized bodies of deceased spouses in the ritualized space and time of the tomb, the discourses of geomancy and divination, of literary display, and of legal claims converge in materialized form. These discourses, while segregated in texts, combine in joint burial under the unifying theme of reproduction. Wall paintings and stone-carvings, funerary inscriptions and tomb contracts, placement of bodies, and a variety of artifacts safeguard the reproduction of the family of the deceased as ritual, social, and biological unit. In these representations of reproduction, joint burial strongly resembles discourses on weddings.