Images of Southwestern Cultures in Medieval Chinese Poetry

• In Event: Imaging Peripheral Others: Medium, Ethnographic Representation, and Empire

Abstract

My paper seeks a better understanding of poetry as a medium of ethnographic representation in medieval China through an examination of images of southwestern cultures in classical shi of the Tang Dynasty (618-906). Descriptions of these cultures first appeared in the histories of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), a byproduct of the early empire’s expansionist campaigns, and historiography—both state-sponsored and independent—remained the primary ethnographic genre throughout the medieval period. However, as poetry composition became a core elite skill during the Tang, it also became a vital means of representing encounters with cultural and ethnic others. A number of works survive from poets such as Du Fu (712-770), Yuan Jie (719-772), and Yuan Zhen (779-831) that describe and interpret the peoples of the empire’s southwestern periphery. My paper will analyze these poems, mapping the contours of their ethnographic imagination, and comparing them to depictions of the same subjects in historical and geographical sources. While previous studies of Tang representations of foreign cultures have tended to take an inclusive approach to genres, minimizing the differences among them, I will seek to highlight and interrogate these differences. How do images of the southwestern other differ depending on the literary mode in which they are written? Can we observe a “traffic in images” between genres? What kinds of appropriation and repurposing do we find? Seeking answers to such questions can lead to a clearer appreciation of how regulations of genre and medium affected the production of ethnographic imaginaries in historical China.

Author

• Gregory Patterson, University of South Carolina