Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China.

AuthorRudolph, Deborah

Oscar Wilde, who wrote that it is better to be beautiful than to be good, would have appreciated this book. It is a handsome volume, collecting some eighty-three pieces of travel writing by fifty authors, followed by over one thousand notes, preceded by a fifty-six page introduction, and accompanied by sixty-four illustrations and five maps. The writings span the Han through the Ch'ing dynasties. The illustrations range from hanging scrolls to woodblocks, from monumental landscapes to fine-line chieh-hua.

The introduction is the most informative essay of its kind yet to appear in English. It discusses many of the same issues - Chinese approaches to and appreciation of landscape and travel, the development of the literary tradition, and, in particular, the coincidence between landscape painting and travel writing during the Sung dynasty - and comes to many of the same conclusions Ch'en Su-chen does in her Master's thesis, published in Kuo-li T'ai-wan shih-fan ta-hsueh kuo-wen yen-chiu-so chi-k'an (no. 31 [1987]: 623-740) under the title "Sung-tai shan-shui yu-chi yen-chiu" (this, and all other secondary sources cited in this review, can be found in Strassberg's bibliography). Strassberg goes beyond Ch'en, however, in discussing the early ritual aspects of travel and in drawing succinct comparisons between Chinese and Western travel literature. He also raises two issues not touched on by Ch'en, both of them extremely interesting but, because of the general nature of introductions, no as well developed as either reader or writer would like. The first is his general characterization of the places described in the essays as "marginal" (pp. 6, 12). A number of places written of in the volume can certainly be so qualified, but most readers would agree that as a general characterization it is an unfair one: Han dynasty T'ai-shan, for instance, was neither culturally nor politically marginal, nor was Southern Sung Hangchou, nor the Temple of Confucius at Ch'u-fu during any era in which state and society were grounded in Confucian morality. A place like O-mei-shan might be called exurban, remote, difficult of access; but to call it "marginal" denies its identity as a spiritual center for Buddhism, and by extension denies the influence of Buddhism on mainstream Chinese culture and Chinese history. The other issue Strassberg raises is that of the literate traveler's "inscribing the landscape" - that is, figuratively altering the land by producing a written account that might influence another's perception of the place, and physically altering it by transferring the documentary account to a piece of dressed stone that would be mounted in some, if not rustic, at least public, spot. This is an attractive idea as far as it goes, but in physical terms, it fails to take into account the other types of inscriptions that certainly outnumber travel accounts in the Chinese landscape: autographs, poems, place-names, Buddhist scriptures, votive inscriptions - as well as funerary inscriptions, which may or may not be visible but are nonetheless very much a part of the land. In figurative terms, it discounts the influence other types of writing have had on travelers' perceptions of the land, an influence well attested to in, for instance, the Sung travel diaries. Curiously, Strassberg ends his discussion abruptly with the Sung dynasty, although well over one-third of the essays in the volume (thirty-five out of eighty-three) date to the post-Sung era.

The essays Strassberg has chosen for inclusion are certainly representative. Sixty-nine of the eighty-three pieces can be found in one or both of two anthologies cited in the introduction (p. 427 n. 23) as recently published examples of the current Chinese interest in travel literature: Ni Ch'i-hsin et al., eds., Chung-kuo ku-tai yu-chi hsuan (Peking: Chung-kuo lu-yu ch'u-pan-she, 1985; hereafter referred to as "Ni"), and Pei Yuan-ch'en and Yeh Yu-ming, eds., Li-tai yu-chi hsuan (Changsha: Hu-nan jen-min ch'u-pan-she, 1980; hereafter referred to as "Pei and Yeh"). Most of the remaining selections can be found scattered among a number of other recently published travel anthologies or in the pages of Ku-wen kuan-chih. The only real surprise - and it is a most pleasant surprise - is the inclusion of six (out of seven) short pieces by Chang Tai generally not anthologized in travel collections.

Anyone acquainted with the anthologies mentioned above knows that they are aimed at the general...

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