Travel Writing and Cultural Memory in Late-Ming Beijing: The Case of A Sketch of Sites and Objects in the Imperial Capital (Dijing jingwulue, 1635).

• Author: Feng, Naixi

With the flourishing of travel culture in late sixteenth-century China came a proliferation of writings about places. (1) During this period, literati voices accumulated on scenic sites, created a historical and literary legacy, and in turn devised literary images of those places. (2) As the northern capital and de facto political center of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), Beijing was the preeminent destination of literati scholars traveling as candidates for imperial examinations or court officials sojourning on their way to governmental postings. They explored scenic sites in the metropolitan region, highlighted the aesthetic qualities of the mountains and waterways, and created a literary heritage ofthe landscape. (3)

Among all writings on Beijing, A Sketch of Sites and Objects in the Imperial Capital (Dijing jingwuliie [phrase omitted], hereafter referred to as A Sketch) is a work of distinction, because it showcases how late-Ming scholars employed travel writings associated with urban sightseeing to both construct and preserve the cultural memory of the capital. It is one of the largest and most comprehensive urban miscellanies on Beijing produced by literati writers during the Ming dynasty. From 1629 to 1634, Liu Tong [phrase omitted] (1593-1636, jinshi 1634), the primary author of A Sketch and a native of Macheng county [phrase omitted], Hubei, and his friend Yu Yizheng [phrase omitted] (1597-1636), the coauthor and editor of the book, a native of Beijing, traveled extensively around the city. (4) Liu Tong undertook the primary task of composing 127 essays, while Yu was responsible for editing and proofreading. With help from their friend Zhou Sun [phrase omitted], they also collected more than one thousand poems on Beijing, almost half of which were composed by Ming writers connected to the southern provinces. (5) The book was first published in 1635 at Nanjing when Liu Tong was on the way to claim his official posting in Wu county [phrase omitted] The first edition was voluminous, with all prose and poetry printed on over seven hundred pages, but later, especially after the mid-eighteenth century, an abridged version without the poems circulated widely and became the most accessible edition. (7)

The organization of the chapters in A Sketch informs readers about the geographical structure of the capital. The book consists of eight chapters, with each including fifteen to twenty essays and a varying number of poems. The chapters are organized in geographical units, beginning in the north and moving clockwise to the east and the south. The mountainous part of western Beijing, i.e., the most scenic area, is treated in the following four chapters and occupies a considerable textual space, and the last chapter focuses on famous sites in the surrounding districts. (8) Liu Tong's essays cover hundreds of scenic sites and introduce their history, patrons, famous visitors, anecdotes; among all themes, the scenery and landscape, both natural and cultural, constitute the most prominent part of the book, in terms of both the length ofdescription and the literary quality of writing. (9)

A Sketch is inspired both by the scholars' traveling experience and the historical material that constitutes the genealogy of writings about place, sharing formal similarities with travelogues, gazetteers, and urban manuals. (10) Most of the sites were written previously in varying degrees of detail, but A Sketch rarely uses direct quotations from earlier sources; instead, it reframes and re-presents previous writings in particular ways. Written in a literary style that is expressive, individualist, and poetic, the landscape essays in A Sketch have been esteemed by literary historians as the representative masterpiece of the Jingling school [phrase omitted] and are now regarded as quintessential examples of the "casual essays" (xiaopin [phrase omitted]) in the late imperial period. (11) On the other hand, historians have examined the documentary value of the book and praised it as the most substantial of "guides-cum-travel accounts" that have survived since the early seventeenth century. At the same time, however, they have criticized A Sketch because it gives little "practical guidance" and offers "a relatively shallow sense of Beijing's history." (12) As for how to evaluate the historical and literary values of the book, I would argue, its historical significance lies in displaying a sophisticated expression of contemporary literati's concerns of the past and their present, rather than presenting an authoritative account of what happened in the city. This significance cannot be fully achieved without the critical tool of taking Liu Tong's distinguished literary style into account, which enriched the lyrical capacity of his prose. Therefore, my approach to critically evaluating A Sketch is to contextualize the collection as a direct effort, on the part of Liu Tong, to preserve the cultural memory of the capital through the textual preservation of scenic sites.

Preserving the cultural memory of the capital city-a collective of numerous locations where memory takes root in concrete space, objects, and people-often became an imperative duty for Chinese literati when the disintegration of a dynasty compelled scholars to collect historical and cultural knowledge and push them into publication and circulation. (13) In the case of A Sketch, however, Liu Tong was situated in a special temporal structure. Unlike earlier scholars who had lamented dynastic loss, Liu as a sojourner residing in Beijing was himself experiencing the very process of social crises and urban decay that manifested itself in local poverty, political controversies, and, most significantly, military conflicts between the Ming state and the ruling Manchus. In such a state of crisis, famous figures, especially scholar officials, and their activities were at risk of being forgotten, and the physical landscape and the institutions in the capital were facing the very real prospect of being annihilated. These conditions compelled Liu Tong to both preserve the city's literary and historical heritage and to report on its current condition.

This article examines the literary strategies that Liu Tong employed in his efforts to preserve Beijing's literary legacy and the surviving landscape, with particular attention to the author's adaptation of earlier travel writings about Beijing, his development of a new lyrical style of prose, and the portrayal of the immediate reality of his lived experience in the city. As seen in A Sketch, Liu Tong carefully adopted and rewrote travelogues written by the famous essayists of the so-called Gong'an school [phrase omitted]-Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610), Yuan Zongdao [phrase omitted] (1560-1600), and Yuan Zhongdao [phrase omitted] (1570-1624)-and established a dense, poetic style of prose writing. (14) He also conducted comprehensive field research in Beijing to record the most up-to-date conditions of various sites, many of which were in varying states of desolation.

In what ways did the special spatial and temporal framework-a frontier capital in the waning years of a dynasty-affect the literary properties of A Sketch? And how did the perspective, style, and content of A Sketch collaborate with Liu Tong's agenda in the textual preservation of scenic sites? My analysis focuses on the literary relationship between A Sketch and the earlier texts on Beijing, as well as on the interactive process between landscape experience and literary writing. 1 examine how the use of literary "precursors" and "the inspiration of real landscape" contributed to the textual properties of A Sketch, (15) and I pay particular attention to the emergence of the northernness of Beijing's landscape in the text, which generates a unique cultural image of Beijing, distinguishing the capital from other cities in China, especially those in Jiangnan '[phrase omitted], so that it could be identified and thus located in memory. Rather than promoting an environmental-deterministic perspective, I track the engagement of scholars, most of whom originated from southern China, with the natural and social environments of Beijing--geographical, climatic, economic, and military--to discover how and why Liu Tong invented a new, poetic style in the prose writing of urban experiences.

In the following sections, 1 elaborate first on Liu Tong's geopolitical and historiographi-cal concerns about late-Ming Beijing and on the literary prototypes and working methods applied in A Sketch. I then explore travel writings from earlier periods that constituted the literary heritage of Beijing and served as sources for A Sketch, providing not only historical and cultural background but also literary devices and ways of seeing that were deployed to give voice to the author's reactions. Finally, I discuss how through his eclectic and creative use of past literature, his unique ways of representing scenery, and the onsite observations of the physical environment, Liu Tong crafted the landscape of Beijing in the early 1630s into A Sketch.

A SKETCH OF BEIJING IN THE FINAL YEARS OF THE MING DYNASTY

After Emperor Yongle (r. 1403-1424) relocated the Ming capital to Beijing in 1420, the windswept garrison town of old Beiping was transformed into the metropolitan city of Beijing. (16) The main scenic sites in the capital could be generally categorized into two types. The landscape to the west of the walled city, comprising picturesque mountains and lakes, was appealing; among the West Mountains (Xishan H lil), a large number of Buddhist temples attracted many visitors. (17) The southwestern and northern parts of the city, by contrast, preserved the harsher image of the northern frontier. A desert expanded in the south and encroached upon farmland; the turbulent Hun River [phrase omitted] (or Lugou River [phrase omitted]) roared into the open plain, bringing frequent floods to local peasants. In the...