Debating Urban Identity: The Place of Jiankang in Geographic Genres of the 13th Century

• In Event: Reinventing the City: Mapping Chinese Urbanscapes in Image and Text

Abstract

This paper seeks to uncover the ambivalent urban identity of Jiankang (Nanjing) as a “residual capital” (liudu 留都) during the 13th century. Following the collapse of the Northern Song and the loss of northern territories in 1127, Jiankang underwent a period of turbulent transformation: first through its devastation in the Jurchen invasion, followed by its brief elevation to capital in 1136 when activist literati persuaded Emperor Gaozong to relocate there, and its subsequent demotion to a quasi-auxiliary capital in 1138 despite Jiankang’s fame for its strategic location and “Kingly qi.”

This paper focuses on the way two new spatially organized genres were used by different social groups to debate the geographic status of Jiankang and to chart the city’s past and future. The commoner Zeng Ji (13th cent.) privately published an urban anthology of poetry on Jiankang entitled One Hundred Songs of Jiankang. Organized by keying quatrains to specific historic sites, including ancient palaces and emblematic objects of the Six Dynasties and Southern Tang, this anthology acerbically satirized the present neglect of Jiankang from the perspective of its centrality in past eras. By contrast, the Gazetteer of Jiankang published by a board of literati elite editors in 1261, absorbed this populist revanchist critique by including selections of Zeng’s poems, yet also created new spatial categories to uphold Jiankang’s regional status as a city of ritual and local academies rather than as a center for a restored empire.

Author

• Benjamin B. Ridgway, Grinnell College