The City of Ye in the Chinese Literary Landscape.

• Author: Kou, Lu

The City of Ye in the Chinese Literary Landscape. By JOANNE TSAO. Sinica Leidensia, vol. 145. Leiden: BRILL, 2020. Pp. x + 210. $102.

Joanne Tsao's book is a study of the city of Ye in the Chinese cultural imagination. Although the early history of the city can be traced back to the Warring States period (ca. 475-221 BCE), Ye, located near modern-day Linzhang county in Hebei province of China, became culturally and politically significant in the early third century, when the charismatic warlord Cao Cao US (155-220) designated Ye as his base of operations, and his patronage of literary activities gave birth to what was later known as the "Jian'an literature." With its landmarks, lore, and the famous personages who have "occupied" and defined this space in later generations' imaginations, Ye has haunted countless readers and writers and served as both a source of inspiration and a point of contention in Chinese cultural tradition. While the creation and reception of Jian'an literature and the Three Kingdoms period (220-265) have been addressed in recent scholarship (for example, Xiaofei Tian, The Halbert at Red Cliff: Jian 'an and the Three Kingdoms, 2018), Tsao's book focuses on the city of Ye itself "as a site of literary production" and investigates how the city is represented over time in "Chinese polite literature, particularly poetry" (p. 3).

This is a well-researched, comprehensive study with attentive care to the translation and interpretation of primary literary texts, a valuable addition to the field of early medieval Chinese literature and cultural history. By the time readers finish the postscript, they will likely have been convinced by the author's main argument that "Ye remained alive beyond its physical existence" (p. 4) and has continued to exist as an imagined place that later readers have appropriated and refashioned as a means to ruminate on the past and understand their present. Tsao's methodology is deductive; she chooses specific texts from a larger literary corpus on Ye that show certain "major issues over time and [are] more relevant in defining the ritualized tropes" and lets them "speak as the voice of the city" (p. 4). The book is thus organized chronologically with a greater focus on the early medieval period, when certain ways of writing about Ye became established. While this methodology is helpful for tracing continuities in tropes and motifs, the reader may wonder whether there are texts that cannot be...