Qiuchi as Heterotopia: The Other Space for Su Shi.

• Author: Xia, Lili

Su Shi [phrase omitted] (1037-1101), the greatest poet of the Song dynasty (960-1279) has successfully built a series of self-referential images relating to "places" with imprints of his life experience, such as the East Slope (Dongpo '[phrase omitted]) in Huangzhou [phrase omitted], the West Lake (Xihu [phrase omitted]) in Hangzhou [phrase omitted], (1) and Mount Emei (Emei shan [phrase omitted]) near his hometown Meizhou [phrase omitted] in what is today Sichuan province. Qiuchi [phrase omitted] is one of these high-water marks projected onto his literary map. "Qiuchi," or the Qiu Pool, recurs as an enigmatic proper name in Su Shi's later poetry. It also became a posthumous sobriquet of the poet, in names such as "the master of Qiuchi" (Qiuchi zhu [phrase omitted]), "the old man of Qiuchi" (Qiuchi laoren [phrase omitted] or Qiuchi weng [phrase omitted]), "the senior transcendent of Qiuchi" (Qiuchi lao xian [phrase omitted] or Qiuchi xian bo [phrase omitted]), or simply "Qiuchi." (2) Admirers in later generations even gathered Su Shi's sayings into a collection titled Qiuchi biji [phrase omitted] (Miscellany of Qiuchi). The earliest extant version of this book is preserved in Zeng Zao's [phrase omitted] (d. 1155) Leishuo '[phrase omitted] (Categorized Tales), which widely circulated during the early Southern Song period (1127-1279) and considerably overlapped in content with another miscellany, Dongpo zhilin '[phrase omitted] [phrase omitted] (Forest of Accounts by the [Master of] East Slope). (3) Evidently the legendary Qiuchi is integral to the commemorative mechanism regarding Su Shi's self-identity and public image.

Su Shi demonstrated his talent as a virtuoso poet by transforming rigid stock language into ingenious self-referential allusions with poetic "alchemy," and Qiuchi is one of these compelling cases. The danger of interpreting such a rich and vivid image is to oversimplify and thus reduce an unsettled and perplexing literary puzzle to a flattened, one-to-one correspondence. Previous studies about the Qiuchi image in Su's work put emphasis on the so-called "Qiuchi rocks" as material artifacts or aesthetic objects. (4) In this paper I argue that Qiuchi in poetry is in the first place a metaphorical lopos or poetic space for Su Shi. (5) Instead of being merely the name of strange rocks, Qiuchi is a unique poetic trope enveloping manifold meanings during different stages of Su Shi's life, either in office or exile, and it invites diverse interpretations of dream psychology, cultural geography, Daoist paradisiacal allusion, and a talismanic projection with the "mnemonic potency" of home-returning. Here I adopt Michel Foucault's term heterotopia, meaning "counter-sites" of reality or the "other" space that represents the otherness of this world or the other possible modes of life/' Qiuchi, as I try to reveal, is an exceptional topos, the "other" space for the poet. This categorical otherness embodied in Qiuchi appellations is essential to Su Shi's self-identity and provides a poetic "landmark" for readers today to trace this great poet on his literary map.

DREAM AS INCEPTION

Rather than any concrete, physical object, Qiuchi was first envisaged as the poet's dream-scape. Later in his life, Su Shi told the whole story of Qiuchi's provenance and significance to himself in the preface of "Matching Tao [Qian's] 'Peach Blossom Spring'" (He Tao "Taohua yuan" [phrase omitted]), written in 1096, when he was exiled to Huizhou [phrase omitted] (in modern Guangdong province). Tao Qian's [phrase omitted] (3727?-427) "Peach Blossom Spring" can be described as the Chinese version of Arcadia, where a peaceful and unspoiled village of the remote past remains intact, isolated from, and invisible to this world. Here Su Shi analogizes Tao's topos to his personalized Qiuchi:

When I was in Yingzhou [in modern Anhui province], I once dreamed of arriving at an official's residence. People there did not differ from the mundane, while the mountains and rivers were pure and vast, which was delightful. I looked back upon the hall, and there was a plate with the inscription "Qiuchi." Then I woke up and wondered why I should have stayed there, since Qiuchi used to be the homeland of the Di people in Wudu under the protection of Yang Nandang [ll. fifth century]. I The next day I consulted with in\ guests, and one of them, Zhao Lingzhi [1051-1134], style name Delin, said: "Why should you ask, sir? This is a blessed land adjacent to the minor grotto-heaven. That is why Du Zimei [i.e., Du Fu [phrase omitted] (712-770)] said: 'Through ten thousand ages has the Qiuchi cave existed, / which covertly leads to a [Daoist] small heaven.'" (7) Another day, Wang Qingchen [fl. eleventh century], style name Zhongzhi, vice minister of the Ministry of Works, told me: "I once passed by Qiuchi during an envoy trip. It has ninety-nine springs and is encircled by ten thousand mountains, and thus it is a place like the Peach Blossom Spring where one can escape from the world." [phrase omitted] (8) The preface restores the epiphanic scene back in the period when Su Shi was prefect of Yingzhou in 1091 and 1092. (9) For Su, poetic inspiration was often caught in augural dreams, and Qiuchi is another oneiric epiphany born of his aspiration of seclusion, as the following piece proves too:

[phrase omitted] For ten thousand ages has the Qiuchi cave existed; [phrase omitted] Despite my hope to return, I fail to stay secluded in Snow Hall. [phrase omitted] Ardently [pursuing] the dream of the bamboo grove, [phrase omitted] 1 keep recounting Shan [Tao] and Wang [Rong]. (10) Yet what is fascinating in the preface is that with the help of oneiromancy, a legendary but real Qiuchi on earth emerged out of Su Shi's dream and was confirmed twice by his friends.

Qiuchi first appeared in historical documents during the Han dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE). The Wudu commandery was established by Emperor Wu of the Han [phrase omitted] (r. 141-87 BCE) in 111 BCE, and Qiuchi was within its domain. The Di EE tribe moved to this area during the Jian'an [phrase omitted] period (196-220), according to the History of the Later Han (Hou Han shu [phrase omitted] [phrase omitted]). (11) A more detailed account of Qiuchi's topography is recorded in the Annotated Classic of Waterways (Shuijing zhu [phrase omitted]):

The Han River also winds its way southeast through the west of Qu Mound and then meanders through its south, where bold cliffs are steep and sheer. Isolated and perilous with clouds aloft, [Qu Mound] looks like an upturned jug. Its high-level ground covers an area of more than twenty square li with serpentine sheep-gut paths of thirty-six turns. The Illustrations of Opening Up Mountains calls Qiuyi the place where "accumulated rocks are upborne and abrupt, and layers of mountains are most precipitous and lofty." Above there are a hundred qing [about 1,400 acres] of flat fields where soil can be boiled into salt, therefore it bears the moniker "The Hundred Qing." Springs are plentiful atop the mountain, that's why it is said that "clear springs gush while moist air vaporizes." [phrase omitted] (12) This Qiuchi is a high, enclosed, and self-sustained mountain, a quasi-Arcadia mentioned in early historical records. Du Fu was the first and only Tang poet to introduce Qiuchi in poetry (see appendix), and later Su Shi adopted it as an ideal site for a lofty retreat from this world.

What is extraordinary in Su Shi's use of Qiuchi, however, is that in linking it with Peach Blossom Spring, he rejected the stock imagery of an ultramundane place for transcendents, but instead relocated it in this world, a natural, desirable habitat for human beings. Accordingly, Su Shi stressed this-worldliness in his poem matching Tao Qian's "Peach Blossom Spring": "Commoners and sages do not live apart, / Pure and muddy beings share this world together" [phrase omitted]; "Peach blossoms abound in my courtyard; / As water flows outside my door" [i.e., Peach Blossom Spring is here at my home] [phrase omitted] (13) Interestingly enough, the "Peach Blossom Spring in this world" discourse seems to have taken shape in Su Shi's poems on landscape paintings (tilma shi [phrase omitted]) in response to his friend, the painter-cum-poet Wang Shen [phrase omitted] (fl. eleventh century). (14) Wang Shen excelled at blue-green landscape painting alluding to other-worldly, paradisiacal realms, while Su Shi ran counter to this conventional reading and affirmed the existence of Peach Blossom Spring on earth. Su composed two exchange poems in the same rhyme for Wang's painting Misty River and Layered Peaks (Yanjiang diezhang tu [phrase omitted]), playing with the corresponding couplets ending in xian '[phrase omitted] (immortal or transcendent) as follows:

[phrase omitted] Peach flowers bloom and streams flow in the human world. [phrase omitted] Why would all in Willing be transcendents? (15) [phrase omitted] In secluded, untraversed mountains, one cannot stay long; [phrase omitted] I would love to live on flatland as a household transcendent. (16) Rather than an elusive hideaway, for Su Shi Peach Blossom Spring turned out to be a restful haven like one's cozy home. Following this line of thought, the poet ingeniously implanted a chain of paradoxical assertions within his Qiuchi. First, he was able to locate a hallucinatory dreamscape as a historical spot in the real world. To go one step further, the poet equated the Qiuchi topos with the Peach Blossom Spring utopia in the same manner as Du Fu designated Qiuchi as the Daoist "grotto heaven" [phrase omitted] (17) and yet denied its transcendency by bringing it back down to earth. (18) In the same preface, Su Shi goes on to suppose "that places like this [i.e., utopias] between heaven and earth are copious, and Peach Blossom Spring is not alone" [phrase omitted]. (]9) Indeed, Qiuchi for Su Shi is his dreamscape while it leads to a real historical site, and...