Reinventing the City: Mapping Chinese Urbanscapes in Image and Text

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel explores the ways cities can be known both through spatially encoded texts and renderings in pictorial form. “Mapping,” understood in its literal, cartographic sense and in a broader epistemological sense, encompasses not only the creation of a map (tu) but also a series of textual patternings to be projected and staged: the reconfigurations of urban vistas, the delineation of itineraries and architectures of power, the identification of zones where space and memory intersect, and the arrangements of poetic images keyed to specific sites. What kinds of representational, rhetorical, religious, cosmographical, or pictorial technologies were required to make such mappings? How did acts of “mapping” enable agents to formulate geographic interventions at key moments in a city’s history?

This panel presents four case studies over the longue durée, spanning middle-period to Qing dynasty China. Sun Yinggang maps the imagined spaces of stories of the underworld in Buddhist miracle tales, showing how they were entwined with the actual spaces of monasteries in Tang-dynasty Chang’an. Linda Feng examines the retrospective mapping of Tang-dynasty Chang’an in a Northern Song stele, to understand the textual bases and pictorial vocabulary necessary for this undertaking. Benjamin Ridgway traces the history of Jiankang (Nanjing) through the new genres of the gazetteer and urban poetry anthologies, investigating how each genre renders the city’s turbulent transformations in the 13th century. Chuck Wooldridge looks at the city of Luhe in the 19th century, demonstrating how scholars deployed traditional geographic genres to confront the modern crisis of the Taiping War.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Benjamin B. Ridgway, Grinnell College

Chair

• Olivia Milburn, Seoul National University

Individual Presentations

• Imagined Reality: Urban Space and Sui-Tang Beliefs in the Underworld - Yinggang Sun, Fudan University

• Retrospectively Mapping Chang’an: The Case of Lü Dafang’s Stele - Linda Rui Feng, University of Toronto

• Debating Urban Identity: The Place of Jiankang in Geographic Genres of the 13th Century - Benjamin B. Ridgway, Grinnell College

• Mapping a City at War: Xu Zi and the Militia of Luhe - Chuck Wooldridge, Lehman College, CUNY

Discussant

• Olivia Milburn, Seoul National University