Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges 9780231547123

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Orientation
PASSAGE I. DEPARTURE
Introduction
PART I. A Landscape of Traces
1. Tracing the Gorges
2. From Trace to Site
PASSAGE II. ONE THOUSAND LI
Introduction
PART II. Reinscribing the Three Gorges
3. Chinese Landscape
4. Chinese Labor
PASSAGE III. ONE THOUSAND YEARS
Introduction
PART III. For the Record
5. A Record of the Trace
6. Ink in the Wound
PASSAGE IV. PART OF THE MOVEMENT
Introduction
NOTES
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

FIXING LANDSCAPE

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on modern and contemporary East Asia.

FIXING LANDSCAPE

A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges

COREY BYRNES

columbia university press

New York

columbia universit y press publishers since 1893 new york

chichester , west sussex cup.columbia.edu

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Wm. Theodore de Bary Fund in the publication of this book. Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Byrnes, Corey J., 1980– author. Title: Fixing landscape : a techno-poetic history of China’s Three Gorges / Corey Byrnes. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2018] | Series: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018017833| ISBN 9780231188067 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231547123 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Yangtze River Gorges (China)—History. Classification: LCC DS793.Y3 B96 2018 | DDC 951.2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017833

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover image: Yang Jiechang, Crying Landscape (Yangzi River Dam), 2003. Image courtesy of the artist

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

Orientation xiii

pa ssage i. departure

1

part i. a l and s cape of tr aces 1. Tracing the Gorges

25

2. From Trace to Site

54

pa ssage ii. one thousand li

88

part ii. reinscribing the three g orges 3. Chinese Landscape 4. Chinese Labor

93

130

pa ssage iii. one thousand years

160

part iii. for the record 5. A Record of the Trace 165 6. Ink in the Wound

198

pa ssage iv. part of the movement Notes

241

Bibliography 287 Index

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235

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

i still remember the first time i tried to articulate the half-formed ideas that inspired this project. At the end of my PhD qualifying exams, I explained to my committee—Andrew Jones, Paula Varsano, Pat Berger, and Robert Ashmore—that I wanted to write a dissertation that spanned two millennia, in which I could think comparatively about Tang poetry and contemporary film. It would have been easy for them to dismiss this plan as ill conceived. Instead, they listened carefully, took my ideas seriously, and encouraged me to pursue them. What I did not realize then was that they were also signing on without hesitation to the mammoth task of guiding me through this project. As my co-advisers, Paula Varsano and Andrew Jones have given me more of their precious time and energy than I am comfortable admitting. They remain my models for what it means to be a good colleague, an exemplary scholar, and a kind human being under even the most trying of circumstances. I am lucky that they remain my mentors, but far luckier that I can call them my friends. I have Dore Levy to thank for encouraging me

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to apply to Berkeley, but also for introducing me to the wonders of Chinese poetry and feeding me so many delicious meals. Fixing Landscape would not exist without her. Many of the ideas that found their way into this book were developed in exchanges at Berkeley and beyond. Katrina Dodson, Emily Drumsta, Toby Warner, and Tristram Wolff joined me in my first (and only) dissertationwriting group. In reading the earliest version of the final chapter, Alan Tansman made a number of transformative interventions. I am indebted to Jason McGrath, whose very careful (and generous) reading of an early version of chapter 5 helped advance the dissertation at a key stage in its development. Thanks also to Michael Cherney and Yun-fei Ji—their art has sustained me through the long process of finishing this project. In one of the first (and hardest) seminars I took at Berkeley, Robert Ashmore gave me a sense of what it really means to read Du Fu. I am still in awe and still trying my best. In that seminar and others, I was privileged to learn from my fellow students—Roy Chan, Laurence Coddere, Menghsin Horng, Liu Xiao, Patrick Luhan, Lawrence Yang, Yueni Zhong, and many others. The winter after my exams, I was lucky to find a temporary home of unusual warmth with friends and family in Berlin—Lydia Brotherton, Marion Detjen and family, Gunnar Klack, Robyn Schulkowsky, and Eike Wittrock. Fixing Landscape really began to take shape during my time in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am eternally grateful to my colleague Michael Berry for his unstinting support through tough times. He is a great scholar and a remarkably kind man. Thanks also to Gillian Osborne, Brian Petit, and everyone else who helped make the Central Coast feel like home, if only for a short time. Northwestern University’s generous institutional support and unfailingly collegial intellectual community made finishing this book not only possible but also pleasurable. I am especially lucky to have had the mentorship of Laura Brueck as well as the support and guidance of Peter Fenves, Susannah Gottlieb, Laura Hein, Rajiv Kinra, Jules Law, Amy Stanley, and Paola Zamperini. Special thanks to all my colleagues in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and to Jean Deven for performing superhuman feats on an almost daily basis. To Patrick Noonan, my Berkeley friend and Northwestern colleague, I am lucky to share an office wall with you. In co-organizing a workshop on the Environmental Humanities through the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, I have had the pleasure of working with Tom Burke, Jill Mannor,

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and Wendy Wall, who have created an intellectual world of rare warmth and rigor in Kresge Hall. To my workshop co-organizer Keith Woodhouse and to all the workshop stalwarts, you have done a great deal to make this a better book. Thanks also to Mario Aranda, Nadim Audi, Lydia Barnett, César BragaPinto, Sarah Dimick, Paul Fagan, Jun Hu, Michelle Huang, Rebecca Johnson, Andrew Leong, Nick Valvo, and many other friends and colleagues for making Chicago winters more than just bearable. A special thanks to Harris Feinsod, Emily Licht, and David Simon, old friends who went above and beyond to make a new city feel like home. A well-timed year at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center under the inimitable leadership of Homi K. Bhabha made the completion of this book possible. My sincere thanks to him for his radical hospitality and to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding my fellowship. To my fellows in the “Slow Violence” seminar—Anna Abramson, Betsy Beasley, Mark Geraghty, Callie Maidhof, Isaiah Lorado Wilner—your exceptional work is an inspiration. To the staff of the Mahindra Humanities Center—Steve Biel, Mary Halpenny-Killip, and Sarah Razor—I could not have asked for a kinder, more welcoming group of colleagues. A special thank-you to Andrea Volpe, the Mellon Seminar coordinator at the Center, for listening, understanding, and knowing when it was time for a drink. This project also benefited from the generous support of numerous other people at Harvard, especially Karen Thornber, who not only invited me to join important conversations about the Environmental Humanities, but also took the time to read my work with care; Eugene Wang, whose feedback on the final chapter helped me suss out the hidden ecology of my book; and David Der-wei Wang, who is as gracious as he is brilliant. During my time in Cambridge, I had the privilege of discussing my work with many exceptional scholars, including Arunabh Ghosh, Brian Lander, Stephanie LeMenager, Elizabeth Lord, Covell Meyskens, Anne Reinhardt, Shu-mei Shih, Amy Zhang, and Ling Zhang, all of whom pushed me to strengthen the interdisciplinary bones of my project, none more convincingly than Ling, an old friend from the other Cambridge and a true ally. Special thanks to my lunch partner Gillian Osborne, who kept me company in the attic of Warren House, and to Brian and Quinn for bringing much needed domestic joy into my life; to Kim Icreverzi, who read (and reread) chapter 5 at a crucial moment; to Daniel Callahan, for introducing me to Provincetown; to Jacob Moses, for taking me to swim in Walden Pond; and to David Francis, Joseph Lee, and Kris Trujillo for their excellent company.

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Laura Brueck, Christopher Bush, Peter Carroll, Peter Fenves, and Paola Iovene generously workshopped my manuscript at a late stage in its development; their perceptive feedback encouraged me to refine key aspects of my argument, and I have no doubt that Fixing Landscape is better thanks to their timely contribution. I am especially grateful to Paola Iovene, who kindly agreed to read my manuscript without ever having met me. Her continued guidance and kindness have been invaluable throughout the revision process. Thanks also to Ari Heinrich for his warm encouragement and to Ruth Mostern for her amazing generosity in reading (and greatly improving) the first two chapters of this book. My sincere thanks to Christine Dunbar of Columbia University Press for accepting this book and ushering it smoothly through the review and production processes, and to Christian Winting for his guidance on design and image-related issues. Thanks also to Kathryn Jorge, my production editor at Columbia University Press, and to Peggy Tropp, who expertly edited the manuscript, and to Ben Kolstad, who oversaw the day-to-day aspects of production. A special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers, who pleasantly surprised me by returning the manuscript only five weeks after I submitted it. Ross Yelsey, publications coordinator for Columbia University’s Weatherhead Institute, contacted me during my first year at Northwestern, when the book seemed impossibly far off. In the years since, he has been my guide through the mysterious world of academic publishing. I am grateful for his help and for the willingness of the Institute and its editorial committee to include my book in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute book series. Last but not least, I would like to thank my closest friends and family. Kathryn Crim, Katrina Dodson, Emily Drumsta, Andrea Gadbury, Rhiannon Graybill, Erin Klenow, Miriam Markowitz, Valeria Mogilevich, Ryan Murphy, Jerry Passannante, Lealah Pollock, David Simon, and Travis Wilds have made my life and this book better than it would otherwise be, and I am beyond grateful to them. To the Wolff-Ireland-Wilkie family, thanks for many restorative meals and walks in Vermont, Princeton, Providence, and London over the years. I look forward to more of the same in the decades to come. In the fall of 2000, my Uncle Mike and Aunt Marie welcomed me into their home in Beijing. Over the course of a long year, they fed, entertained, and supported me in innumerable ways. Their generosity has made this book possible. Thanks also to my departed grandparents and to my brother Kyle for giving me a sense of place that has shaped my approach to landscape in ways great and small. To my parents, who have supported me from the beginning, who let me leave

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college and move to China, who have often wondered at my ability to convince institutions to pay me to travel, think, and write, I owe you more than I can really express.

* Finally, this book is for Tristram. We met in May of 2003, as I was walking across the main green, my freshly bound undergraduate thesis in hand, and we have been inseparable ever since. He is the best person I know and this book lives becomes of him.

O R I E N TAT I O N

a full technical and historical account of the three Gorges Dam project is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, my goal is to offer an alternative to conventional narratives about the dam—whether triumphalist or critical—and to seek its horizons of possibility in the millennia-long history of the Three Gorges region as a famous cultural and material landscape. Against the teleological thrust of standard chronologies, I present a series of overlapping and juxtaposed perspectives that reconsider the connections between a landscape constituted through poetry and painting and one reorganized by steel and concrete. For readers unfamiliar with either modern China or the standard history of the dam project, however, I have prepared a basic introduction to the key figures, texts, and events that I am recontextualizing and to which I refer frequently in what follows.1 1894

Sun Yat-sen 孫中山 (1866–1925), “father of the nation,” addresses a petition to the high-ranking Qing official Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 (1823–1901), offering his scientific expertise in support of

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the waning dynasty. Sun writes of the almost magical power of electricity and introduces Li to the technology of the hydroelectric dam, then in its infancy, as a source of energy “that can be extracted without limit and used without depletion.” Sun does not succeed in presenting his petition to Li, though it is published later that year in the reformist missionary publication Globe Magazine (Wanguo gongbao 萬國公報).2 1911–1925 Sun Yat-sen consolidates the ideas that form his “Three Principles of the People” (Sanmin zhuyi 三民主義), an ambitious program of cultural, political, and infrastructural modernization. A detailed plan for the improvement of the Yangzi, including the damming of the Three Gorges, appears in this and a number of other published sources, including the English-language volume The International Development of China, first published in 1920. 1930s The Republican government of Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (1887– 1975) sponsors exploratory surveys of the Three Gorges, though the dam remains financially and technologically unfeasible. The Japanese also carry out surveys of the area during their occupation of eastern China. 1944–1947 John Savage (1879–1967), chief engineer of the United States Bureau of Reclamation, is invited to China to produce a series of proposals for the damming of the Yangzi. Savage, who led the design of the Hoover, Shasta, and Grand Coulee dams, deems the Yangzi project a “CLASSIC.” In 1945, the Chinese and United States governments sign a provisional contract for a loan of $3 billion for construction of the dam, though this contract is terminated in 1947, during the civil war that led to the Communist takeover of China. 1950s Following significant flooding in 1954, Chinese officials and scientists collaborate with Soviet experts to produce yet another plan for damming the Yangzi at the Three Gorges. In 1956, Mao Zedong 毛澤東 (1893–1976) swims across the Yangzi at Wuhan and pens one of his most famous poems, “Swimming,” which offers a vision of the spatial reorganization of the region. He continues to support the dam through the 1950s, though the catastrophic failures of the Great Leap Forward make construction impossible. 1966–1976 Mao launches the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which lasts until his death in 1976. Leaders continue to discuss the Three Gorges Dam during this chaotic period, but lack the resources to

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launch the project. In 1970, construction begins on the first low dam on the Yangzi River, the Gezhouba Dam 葛洲壩, located near the city of Yichang, just east of the Three Gorges. 1992–2012 In 1992, after decades of debate and planning by multiple governments, teams of scientists, and foreign advisers, the National People’s Congress, under the leadership of Jiang Zemin 江澤民 and Premier Li Peng 李鵬, approves construction of the Three Gorges Dam project. Ground is broken in 1994 and continues until the mid-2000s. The dam becomes fully operational in 2012.

FIXING LANDSCAPE

PA S S AG E I D E PA RT U R E

Set ting O u t at Dawn From the prow of a ship, Chinese tourists gaze out at the riotous greenery and jadeite water of a river gorge as traditional music plays and a tour guide recites a poem over a loudspeaker: 朝辭白帝彩雲間 千里江陵一日還 兩岸猿聲啼不住 輕舟已過萬重山

At dawn depart Baidi midst many-colored clouds Across 1,000 li to Jiangling in a single day return From both banks the sound of gibbons crying without rest The light skiff has already crossed myriad-fold mountains

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When the tour guide finishes her recitation, she praises the Three Gorges Dam project for “once again drawing the attention of the world” to this rugged stretch of river and mountains, as if to make up for a long lapse in interest. Meanwhile, a television on board the ship shows images of the Chinese leaders who first imagined and then finally built the dam—Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping—as well as footage of its early construction, which began in 1994. As the guide mentions the projected water level of the completed reservoir, a ship full of foreign tourists passes in the opposite direction. These nested journeys through the landscape of the Three Gorges take place in Jia Zhangke’s 賈樟柯 Still Life (Sanxia haoren 三峽好人), a 2005 film set in the city of Fengjie as its low-lying neighborhoods were being demolished to make way for the Three Gorges Dam reservoir. If the images that Jia brings together in this sequence speak to the modern history of the Three Gorges as a site of national construction, then the four-line poem that echoes through it testifies to a much longer history of imagining and representing the region. Anthologized for over a millennium and still memorized by countless schoolchildren, “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng 早發白帝城,” by the Tang Dynasty (618–907) poet Li Bai 李白 (701–762), is among the most famous depictions of the Three Gorges region.1 It charts a course from the fortified settlement that lies just west of the Gorges, through the towering mountains that separate the Sichuan Basin from the lakes and plains of eastern China, and on to the city of Jiangling in modern-day Hubei Province. Until recently, the Gorges, which extend for roughly 120 miles between Baidicheng in the west and the city of Yichang in the east, squeezed the Yangzi into a narrow, angry torrent, a string of treacherous rapids, boulders, reefs, shifting sandbars, and swirling currents. Before construction of the dam, the level of the river in the Gorges could rise seventy or eighty feet during major floods before spilling out over the countryside to the east, where it has killed countless millions over the centuries.2 In “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” the mountains that form the Gorges and the surrounding terrain appear only at the very end of the last line, not as part of the scenery, but as territory “already crossed.” We sense their presence in the third line, but only from the cries of gibbons echoing across the river. That the Gorges remain a palpable presence despite their absence reminds us that we are dealing with a cultural landscape so iconic—so fixed in the imagination—that it can easily signify from the edges of the poem. Li Bai does not need to describe this landscape because his Tang readers know to follow the gibbons’ cries back in time to Li Daoyuan’s 酈道元 (d. 527) Commentary to the Classic of Rivers (Shuijing zhu 水經注), the source of many of the

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images and much of the language that was used to describe the Three Gorges region in subsequent centuries: The two banks are chains of mountains with nary an opening. Layered cliffs and massed peaks hide the sky and cover the sun. If it is not midday or midnight the sun and moon are invisible. In summer, when the waters rise up the mountains, routes upstream and downstream become impassible. If there is a royal proclamation that must be spread quickly it sometimes happens that it departs Baidi at dawn and arrives at Jiangling at dusk, a distance of 1,200 li. Even if one were to ride a swift horse or mount the wind they could go no faster. When winter turns to spring, there are frothing torrents, green pools, and crystalline eddies that toss and turn reflections. On the highest peaks strange cedars grow in profusion, hanging springs and waterfalls gushing from their midst. Pure, luminous, towering, lush—there is so very much to delight. Whenever the weather clears or the day dawns with frost, within forests chill and by streams swift, one hears the long cries of gibbons high above. Unbroken and eerie, the sound echoes through the empty valleys, its mournfulness fading only after a long time. For this reason the fishermen [of the area] sing: “Of Badong’s Three Gorges, Wu Gorge is longest; when the gibbon thrice cries, tears drench your gown.”3

Li Bai’s allusions work because his readers already know the landscape as literary myth, but also because, his poem suggests, the physical landscape has not changed in the centuries since Li Daoyuan immortalized it.4 The same summer currents thunder through the gorges; the same gibbons cry mournfully into the chill of clear mornings. For most of its history, the Three Gorges region has existed in the cultural imagination as a remarkably stable collection of images, ideas, and myths. Only recently, with the rise of tourism on the Yangzi, have large numbers of people from around China and the world been able to travel to the region. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, tourists flocked to the gorges and their cities to see them before the completion of the dam and its reservoir, which required the demolition of thirteen major cities and the relocation of upwards of 1.5 million people. Before the rise of mass tourism and the infrastructure and media that support it however, the Three Gorges were first and foremost a literary landscape—more imagined than visited.

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For “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng” to be recited in 2005, in the middle of the Gorges, with the dam nearing completion and its reservoir expanding, as though nothing had changed in nearly thirteen hundred years, demonstrates the enduring appeal of that landscape and the texts that shaped it. In reality, the tour guide’s use of the poem suggests a relationship between poetry and landscape very different from the one that made Li Bai’s original work possible. Its recitation in the place it describes establishes a connection between poem and landscape based less in the recognition of literary allusions than in the ability of tourists to retrace the poet’s journey in real time, even though that journey is mostly absent from his poem. Its appearance in Still Life, a film that captures the demolition of the modern city that now contains Baidicheng, forces us to confront the discrepancy between the air of timelessness that poems like “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng” still lend the landscape and the radical changes the region has undergone in the last two decades. As much as the tourists might imagine themselves reenacting the poet’s journey, the historical footage that plays on the boat and the images of displacement that fill the film tell a different story. The moment the tour guide shifts from poem to dam and reservoir, she reminds us that the shoreline separating mountain from river in Li Bai’s poem will soon be submerged, just as the swift currents that he described will be slowed. Against touristic images of pristine nature, of the landscape of Li Bai protected and promoted as a world-class tourist destination, Still Life presents a landscape of spatial and social ruination.

* Fixing Landscape maps the many points of connection between the seemingly timeless landscapes of the past and the spatial production of modern and contemporary China. We have become habituated to seeing the former as the sacrificial victim of the latter, but this book moves beyond simple narratives of loss to show how the recent reshaping of China as a modern nation-state is grounded not only in the political and economic transformations of the last few centuries, but also in the traditions that preceded them and against which they have so often signified. The story I tell here is not of a hitherto obscured cultural continuity, however, but of the shifting representational and spatial forms that have actively produced the Three Gorges as a famous landscape over the course of more than two millennia. Though the Three Gorges Dam has already been built, its reservoir filled, and many residents of the region displaced, this remains an urgent story. As the scene of touristic wonder from Still Life shows, from certain angles the landscape of the Gorges looks unchanged. The level of the Yangzi has risen by close to six hundred feet, but the mountains that form the Gorges are more

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than three thousand feet high and the river still narrows dramatically when it enters the Qutang Gorge (Qutang xia 瞿塘峽) east of Fengjie. Even Baidicheng is still standing. No longer a promontory, it is now an island, its banks reinforced with concrete to protect them from the enormous water pressure of the reservoir. The Gorges have been flooded but not erased; they remain aweinspiring. With the passage of time, this sense of awe will make it harder to remember what has been lost—not only the sights, sounds, and ecosystems of an undammed river and the fields, farms, homes, and relics of the people who occupied its banks, but also knowledge of the river as something enduring and changeable, a figure for and a site of history’s flux. Fixing Landscape recovers the fluidity of the Three Gorges as a cultural concept and physical reality that has been shaped over time, inscribed and reinscribed to support shifting values. My approach is inspired in part by what Ann Laura Stoler calls “concept-work,” a critical method that rejects stability “as an a priori attribute of concepts.”5 By considering the Three Gorges as a concept that is “provisional, active, and subject to change,” we remain sensitive to its multiplicity and the frequency with which it has been reinscribed to bear new meanings that are, more often than not, grounded in myths of cultural stability.6 The stability of the Three Gorges as a cultural, geographical, and national landscape is an effect, a product of physical and representational processes that have homogenized and simplified the region. These processes have not only facilitated the region’s cooptation by the state, but also obscured how the poetic and pictorial landscapes of the past relate to both the Three Gorges Dam project and the contemporary works of art it has inspired. This book refuses to take the Three Gorges as a given—whether historical, cultural, or even geographical—so that we might better understand how landscape emerges from the interaction of the representational and the physical. To readers interested in technical histories of hydropower and state building in China, my approach may seem unorthodox, but I encourage them to read on and take a closer look at the cultural and aesthetic grounds of our material entanglements. Poems do not build dams, but this book shows that the Three Gorges Dam would not exist as we know it without them. To do this, Fixing Landscape takes seriously the power that supports the Three Gorges Dam’s massive reorganization of space and the power of the landscape traditions that the region has inspired. By tradition, I have in mind neither the academically debunked but still popular vision of an unbroken lineage of cultural production based on a shared set of techniques, forms, or themes nor an “invented traditions” critique of that idea.7 Instead, I treat tradition the way a poet such as Li Bai treats his own poetry—as an iterative

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form that draws on the past but redefines it with each iteration. Holding on to tradition might seem to run counter to the concept of iterability (and hence to go against the Derridean grain), but it allows us to discuss the workings of borrowed language and shared images beyond the old oppositional discourse of tradition versus modernity.8 By focusing on tradition as a process of incremental reinvention that gains cultural potency by maintaining some resemblance to an imagined past, I hope to further bridge some of the many divides that separate the study of premodern, modern, and contemporary culture in the place that we now call China. The forms of representation I discuss here are part of a tradition not only because they draw on a shared cultural vocabulary, but also because they reinstantiate landscape in response to shifting historical conditions and forms of power. To better understand how the Three Gorges has served as an important site for the creation and contestation of Chinese traditions, I have produced a book that ranges over more than two millennia and weaves premodern accounts of famous sites and figures together with modern and contemporary representations of the same places and people. Part I, which moves between the Tang, Song (960–1279), and Qing (1640–1911) dynasties and the present day, shows not only how the Three Gorges landscape was once defined by the fading and often ambiguous traces of historical and mythological figures but also how anxieties about the loss of those traces inspired attempts to “fix” them in and as landscape. Part II centers on the introduction of radically new ways of seeing, representing, and moving along the Yangzi in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It was during this period that the Three Gorges were inscribed as a “Chinese landscape,” first through the cartographic imagination of Western travel writers, explorers, and amateur scientists and then through a nationalist discourse of modernization. Part III centers on contemporary filmmakers and visual artists who documented the transformation of the Three Gorges region in the lead-up to completion of the dam. These artists responded to the nationalist embrace of a development scheme that began as an imperialist project of mapping and penetrating the Chinese interior by reaching back to the premodern traditions that I describe in Part I. The three parts of this book explore the complex and often elusive relationship between the art and science of landscape and the acts of landscaping that have indelibly shaped the Three Gorges region. Though they unfold chronologically, they do not tell a linear story. Each chapter is a microcosm of the project as a whole, a constellation of premodern, modern, and contemporary sources, and a melding of material and symbolic ways of engaging with landscape. Read in dialogue with one another, these diverse sources help us

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navigate the problems we face in confronting a landscape as richly overdetermined as the Three Gorges region is; they show us, for instance, how an eighth-century poem can change our understanding of a twenty-first-century film about a socialist experiment in spatial production developed in part by the American Bureau of Reclamation. To further work against the pull of linear narratives, I have included a sequence of “passages” after parts I, II, and III that lead us back through Li Bai’s “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng.” Like a recurring stratum in the sedimentary record of the landscape’s representational composition, this poem’s repetition as a quintessential expression of Chinese culture continues to lend the Three Gorges landscape an air of timelessness and stability. Its repetition in Fixing Landscape, however, is meant not only to destabilize conventional understandings of the entity that we call the Three Gorges, but also to inspire new ways of thinking about tradition as both concept and iterative practice. This is in some ways a methodological experiment, but I believe it is the method the topic demands. There are few places where the past and the present, the aesthetic and the material, have come together so intimately and violently as in the Three Gorges; this requires new ways of thinking and writing. My hope is that this approach will offer readers in both Chinese studies and neighboring fields new methods for rethinking spatial configurations across the globe with similarly storied cultural meanings. By bringing together genres and media normally segregated from one another, shifting between micro- and macro-temporal frames and intercutting historical moments, I have situated the dam project as an environmentally destructive and socially disruptive structure of “real-world” action and thought inextricably linked to the images and metaphors that constitute the Three Gorges as landscape. That the aesthetic may be an unacknowledged accomplice to material and political worlds is easy to claim, but harder to show; this book is, among other things, an illustration of this claim and a sourcebook for scholars working through similar problems in other real and representational worlds.

Whence the Three G orges (Dam)? A source of power for a flailing empire, a boon to the economy of the nation, a way of fixing the faults of nature—for a century, the Three Gorges Dam has been both a mirror and a cure for the anxieties of the men who imagined it. At 1.4 miles long, more than six hundred feet high, and with a reservoir that stretches four hundred miles, it exists in the realm of the mathematical

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figure i.1 The Three Gorges Dam in operation. See also color plate 1. Source: iStock/Getty Images

sublime, a testament not only to China’s wealth and power, but also, as some would have it, to the spirit of its people (figures i.1–i.3). For those opposed to the project, it has appeared otherwise: as an environmental and social catastrophe, uprooting people, destroying cities and villages, and ravaging the ecosystems of the world’s third-longest river.9 The embodiment of the Chinese spirit stands against the erasure of local culture; the generation of hydropower against the sovereign power of the state; the aesthetics of the

Nanjing Wushan (Mt . Wu) Shanghai

Lesser Three Gorges Three Gorges Dam Chengdu

Wanxian

Fengjie Zigui

Wuhan

Yichang Jiangling

Chongqing Fengdu

The Three Gorges

Changsha Baidicheng

Three Gorges Dam Reservoir

figure i.2 Area affected by the Three Gorges Dam and its reservoir

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engineered against the beauty of a natural landscape. For most, the dam is a Manichean figure, black or white; reality, as always, is a grayer affair. This book does not weigh the benefits of the Three Gorges Dam against its costs. It treats the project first and foremost as a social, environmental, and cultural problem of massive proportions. The dam and its reservoir have indelibly inscribed the power of the state onto the surface of the earth. Its environmental and social consequences are still coming into view and will follow the Chinese people for centuries, if not millennia, to come. They constitute what Rob Nixon calls an “attritional catastrophe . . . marked above all by displacements—temporal, geographical, rhetorical, and technological displacements that simplify violence and underestimate, in advance and in retrospect, the human and environmental costs.”10 If, as Nixon argues, “such displacements smooth the way for amnesia, as places are rendered irretrievable to those who once inhabited them,” this book is an aide-memoire, but one that reconfigures how we see the present and reimagines how we might see the future by tracing the displacements of the Three Gorges Dam into the distant past and back again, into a strange new world just now forming, where memories of the past become haunting visions of the future.11 While I am concerned with what the dam has done, and will address artistic responses to it in the final part of Fixing Landscape, one of my primary concerns is how it came to be, in both the short and (very) long term. How did this particular dam become the Three Gorges Dam? What does it mean to modify the word “dam” with the geographical designation “Three Gorges,” and how does the resulting name link an engineered structure to the rich cultural history of this region? I contend that rather than violently severing the links between aesthetic landscapes and physical lands, the dam reinforces them, even as it ends certain ways of seeing and moving through the Gorges. This is in no way an attempt to wash the dam in the healing waters of tradition—they are not necessarily salutary—but rather an effort to show not only how a geological formation along the Yangzi River became the Three Gorges, but also how the Three Gorges themselves became both a national “Chinese landscape” and a locus of “Chinese traditions.” These are neither unidirectional nor completed processes. Attending to the multiplicity of the Three Gorges as landscape and concept raises fundamental questions about how to define the traditional in contemporary China, a pressing task when both the political establishment and independent artists are appropriating Chinese traditions to promote radically different interests. If the Three Gorges are especially attractive as a site of political inscription and artistic expression, it is due in part to the mysterious qualities long

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figure i.3 Side-by-side satellite images from 1993 (left) and 2016 (right) show the extent of the Three Gorges Dam reservoir after completion of the dam. Source: U.S. Geological Survey

associated with the region. Depictions of the Gorges in literature, painting, and film abound with supernatural figures, clouds and rains that coalesce into beautiful goddesses, howling gibbons, and wildly changeable currents. In early geographical texts, writers even argued about where the Gorges began and ended and which sections of the river should be counted among the three.12 When the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu 杜甫 (702–772), who is central to the story I tell in chapters 1 and 2, confronts the towering mountains that form Kuimen 夔門, the western gate of the Gorges, he invokes these debates by posing and immediately answering a rhetorical question: 三峽傳何處 雙崖壯此門

The Three Gorges—from where do they come down to us? Paired palisades secure this gate13

According to a widely repeated gloss, Du Fu is toying with his readers by invoking old textual debates to ask, “Where, according to tradition, are the

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Three Gorges?”14 The third character in the opening line, chuan 傳, generally refers to the transmission of scholarly learning, moral precepts, modes of governance, and esoteric practices rather than the continuity of a physically extended landmark. It is only by bracketing this interpretation and opting for an unconventional translation of the poem’s first line, however, that we can account for the spatial logic generated by the couplet’s parallelism. While Du Fu is certainly alluding to competing textual traditions, the argument for translating chuan as “according to tradition” is undermined by the transitive verb zhuang 壯 (to strengthen or secure something), which appears in the same position in the second line. As the title of the poem—“The Two Palisades of Qutang 瞿塘兩崖”—reminds us, it is the cliffs of Kuimen that secure the gorges, just as it is the Three Gorges that “come down” or “issue” from this specific spot. The strangeness of Du Fu’s use of chuan is easily smoothed over by translation and our reliance on explanatory commentaries. To disregard it, however, is to miss an all-too-fleeting opportunity for exploring how the textual frames the physical. In both the second line of the first couplet and the next couplet,

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the textual ambiguities to which Du Fu alludes are already gone, overridden by the disorienting monumentality of Kuimen: 入天猶石色 穿水忽雲根

Entering the sky—still the color of stone Piercing the river—suddenly the roots of clouds

That traditions of classifying this imposing landscape clashed must have seemed strange to Du. Formed by towering mountains on either side of the Yangzi just east of modern Fengjie, the gatelike Kuimen channels the river’s surging waters into the narrow confines of the gorges, beyond which they enter the network of lakes and channels that make up the middle and lower Yangzi before flowing into the East China Sea near modern-day Shanghai. As entry to the Three Gorges, Kuimen marks the treacherous boundary separating the riches of Sichuan—the “Land of Heaven’s Storehouse” (Tianfu zhi guo 天府之國)—from eastern China and the world beyond. Despite the grandeur of the landscape that Kuimen opens onto, tourists who travel along the Yangzi today may still find themselves living out the ambiguous grammar of Du Fu’s lines, confused about where the Three Gorges end and begin. The Three Gorges—Qutang, Wu (Wu xia 巫峽), and Xiling (Xiling xia 西陵峽)—are in fact made up of multiple subgorges, each with its own evocative name—Bellows Gorge (Fengxiang xia 風箱峽), Military Texts and Precious Sword Gorge (Bingshu baojian xia 兵書寶劍峽), Ox Liver and Horse Lung Gorge (Niugan mafei xia 牛肝馬肺峽), to name a few. Along a tributary that feeds into the Yangzi at Wushan one even finds Three Little Gorges (Xiao sanxia 小三峽), once famous for their crystalline waters, now made murky by the reservoir. In Du Fu’s time, as now, the neatness of the Three Gorges designation and the seeming solidity of its mountains belie a murkiness on the ground that distracts us from changes—small and great—not only in how the meaning and power of the landscape have been inscribed, transmitted, and contested over millennia, but in how the physical landscape has been altered to suit human needs. The neatness of the Three Gorges designation is the product of a process that rejects the spatial, cultural, and even ethnic messiness of the past for the political and touristic expedients of the present. Fixing Landscape recovers some of that messiness by paraphrasing Du Fu’s question: whence the Three Gorges? It treats the Gorges not as a uniform figure moving ineluctably toward the status of national landscape, but as a surface open to the inscription of personal and political desires and a constantly shifting concept that simultaneously attracts and repels attempts to “fix” it. To fix the landscape is not only to unify its heterogeneous qualities or

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figure i.4 Ten-yuan note: looking east through Kuimen, with Baidicheng in the lower left and the Three Gorges extending into the distance. See also color plate 2.

to preserve and stabilize historical sites, but also to try to improve the Yangzi as a source of power and a route for travel and trade by blocking it behind a wall of concrete and steel. In recounting how people have gone about trying to fix the landscape, this book also shows how the landscape has resisted being fixed, how it has maintained a wondrous multiplicity and changeability. In this I follow Du Fu, who characterized the area around Kuizhou 夔州, the city directly to the west of Kuimen, as having a “changeable nature,” a land of clouds, winds, rains, and mists, a landscape fragmented, obscured, but ultimately made new by its transformations: 江城含變態 一上一回新

This Yangzi city has a changeable nature Once I climbed, now I return, finding all made new15

It is precisely this changeability that the myth of the Three Gorges as national landscape, indelibly fixed as an aerial vista on the back of the ten-yuan banknote (figure I.4), rejects.

Ab ou t L and scape In shaping this book on the Three Gorges as landscape, I have tried to synthesize methods and critical frames gleaned from geography, postcolonial studies, landscape studies, and art history with scholarship on premodern

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Chinese aesthetic traditions. If the former disciplines have provided a critical language for reframing landscape culture as a force for spatial production, the latter has offered a clear sense of the history of Chinese landscape as an aesthetic and ideological form. While I use the English term “landscape” for convenience in the chapters that follow, what I am talking about is really a hybrid concept—landscape/shanshui 山水—that encompasses not only premodern traditions centered on the Three Gorges and the modern landscaping of the region, but also the interaction of the two in the official discourse surrounding the dam and in artistic responses to it. The literal meaning of the Chinese phrase shanshui 山水—is “mountains and water.” Before the seventh century, shanshui described the coexistence of these two elements rather than a generalized “landscape,” which is how the term is conventionally translated. In premodern poetry, shanshui operates as a spatial organizing principle for balanced depictions of the physical world and a symbolic method of conveying internal states, qualities, and religious beliefs. The phrase was adopted as a generic term for a category of painting only in the Tang Dynasty. In classical Chinese texts before and after the Tang, an aesthetically pleasing view is usually described in visual terms as a scene or prospect (jing 景), not a shanshui. In Chinese today, shanshui remains closely associated with pictorial or poetic landscapes done in a recognizably premodern style, while the modern word fengjing 風景 is used to refer to both physical and artistic landscapes produced in a Western style (e.g., fengjinghua 風景畫, or “landscape painting”).16 Though representations of the physical world appear in some of the earliest extant examples of Chinese painting, most scholars trace the rise of shanshui as an independent pictorial genre to the end of the Tang and beginning of the Song dynasties (early to mid-tenth century).17 Images of towering mountains, gnarled pines, and bucolic scenes of fishing villages and eremitic retreats evolved from earlier forms to support the new political and personal identities that defined the postaristocratic order of the Song.18 Rather than mere setting or backdrop, shanshui came not only to serve as a virtual site for religious and philosophical practices of self-cultivation, but also to promote the Neo-Confucian belief in the correspondence between the order of the physical and human realms.19 In images of mountains that embodied the ideal monarch and ancient pines that expressed the loyalty of literati, certain shanshui painters turned Confucius’s famous dictum—“The wise delight in waters, the benevolent delight in mountains 知者樂水, 仁者樂山”—into a model approaching pictorial allegory.20 Art historical and literary scholarship of the last two decades has radically reshaped our understanding of shanshui painting and poetry. Rather

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than simply an emblem of Chinese ideas about “nature”—a modern concept that was misleadingly translated using the ancient philosophical and cosmological term ziran 自然 beginning in the mid-nineteenth century—shanshui has come into view as a dynamic representational form.21 Martin Powers and Foong Ping have helped recover the ideological, political, and bureaucratic origins of shanshui painting in the Northern Song Dynasty, while Lothar Ledderose has offered a provocative theory of landscape’s origins in early religious iconography.22 In literary studies, Paul Kroll and Stephen Owen have undermined the “nature” of medieval Chinese landscape poetry by showing how subjective experiences of the physical world were filtered through texts, producing what Kroll calls “lexical landscapes and textual mountains,” and Owen, “bookish landscapes.”23 More recently, Paula Varsano has offered an important corrective to Kroll’s and Owen’s influential work by drawing attention to how vision and direct experience remained central to landscape poetry despite its textual character.24 These and other scholars of Chinese poetry and painting have illuminated the symbolic power of landscape/shanshui and its relation to subjective experience. Yet their work has not always accounted for the innumerable ways that repeated actions and habits combine to form everyday landscapes or for the mechanisms by which landscape ideas come to act materially in the production of space.25 In the first case, landscape is a lived phenomenon, the gradual and shifting product of paths taken and fields hoed over years, decades, centuries. Scholars working in a range of disciplines have traced the genesis of such “vernacular landscapes” while also describing their frequent cooptation or destruction by powerful political and economic forces.26 Throughout this book, I pay careful attention to the often violent relationship between vernacular and official landscapes. In the second case, which is of special concern here, landscape is more than a symbolic mode or a mirror of the natural world; it is also a cultural practice that actively changes the physical world—landscape is also a verb. When W. J. T. Mitchell first made this claim in his 1994 book Landscape and Power, he drew implicitly on ideas about space that had been percolating for decades in Marxist and Foucauldian approaches to geography.27 Scholars building on the work of Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja have focused mostly on urban space or questions of regional and global uneven development under capitalism and imperialism, but their insistence on linking the social, representational, and spatial together offers an important starting point for my approach to landscape over the course of this book.28 In Part II of Fixing Landscape, I combine methods of spatial analysis borrowed from landscape studies, critical geography, and postcolonial studies

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in order to reframe the contemporary spatial reorganization of the Yangzi in terms of China’s colonial and imperial histories. I argue that the introduction of various spatial and representational technologies—from photography and mapmaking to travel writing and tourism—that supported the “opening” of the Chinese interior in the second half of the nineteenth century marked the proximate, if not ultimate, horizon of possibility for the Three Gorges Dam project. By textually and visually fixing the volatile Yangzi according to the standards of modern science and geopolitics, these technologies made it possible to reconceptualize the river as a stable geographical entity and, eventually, a natural resource that could be harnessed to produce energy. Anti-imperialist motivations notwithstanding, the development of the Yangzi by the Republican and Communist governments continues and in many ways perfects a partial and abortive attempt by foreign powers to master Chinese territory and resources. Aspects of this part of my story will sound familiar to students of imperial knowledge production in other parts of the world. Landscape representation, geography, and cartography have been understood for decades as ways of seeing the world as intimately bound up with the extractionist and expansionist ideologies of capitalism and imperialism.29 I treat these spatial technologies as offering not just visual prospects, but also material ones that are actively produced as objects of exploitation. Although China was never fully colonized, the workings of imperial technology and discourse remained fully operable in China. It is, as Rey Chow wrote more than twenty years ago, “in spite of and perhaps because of the fact that [China] remained ‘territorially independent,’ [that] it offers even better illustrations of how imperialism works—i.e., how imperialism as ideological domination succeeds best without physical coercion, without actually capturing the body and the land.”30 There is, of course, more than one way to “actually” capture the land, just as there is more than one type of imperialism. The construction of China in the imperial imagination has had significant material effects that do not necessarily fit within the normal sequence of colonial conquest, expansion, and decolonization. What happened in Taiwan, Korea, and India or across the South American and African continents is different from what happened in China, but China was still an important site for perfecting imperial technologies and aesthetic forms. Imperialism and colonialism in China are often understood in terms of “free trade,” the semicolonial occupation of treaty ports, or, in the case of Manchuria, settler colonialism. What makes the “opening” of the upper Yangzi so important to our understanding of how imperialism worked (and

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continues to work) in China is that it combined territorial and commercial interests with a nascent discourse of resource imperialism. European, Japanese, and American powers introduced ways of seeing the natural world as a source of extractable resources that could be captured as part of an imperial enterprise or kept under the control of a sovereign nation-state. In their struggle to establish China as a viable nation-state, both the Qing and Republican governments embraced forms of knowledge that made extractionist imperialism possible, even if they were never in a position to fully exploit the Yangzi.31 This form of imperialism lives on not only in the development of the Yangzi and other rivers in southwestern China (many of which flow into south and southeast Asia), projects that blur the line between national landscape and imperial prospect, but also in China’s global search for resources.32 For China to “see like a [modern] state” it first had to see like a modern imperial power.33 Keeping in view the “durability” of colonial and imperial dispositions, which reappear as so many “partial, distorted, and piecemeal” effects, allows us to look beyond the founding myths of the dam project as well as other narratives of origin and rupture that continue to segregate the “past” from the “present.”34

Tr ace Work Fixing Landscape has been shaped by each of these rich approaches to the study of the representation, transformation, and exploitation of the earth. Perhaps its greatest influence, however, comes from two seemingly simple insights: First, the word “landscape” is an inherently ambiguous term that refers not only to a demarcated stretch of land that can be encompassed visually but also to the artistic framing and depiction of such a landscape. Second, our tendency to see these two landscapes as separate and stable concepts establishes a misleading hierarchy between the physical and the representational while obscuring the ambiguities that define their relationship. “Land” does not precede landscape; it is something already transformed, framed in visual and artistic terms, viewed from certain angles and not others, shaped by our experiences of other places and images. The physical land that appears at first glance as the raw material for artistic landscapes is always already artistic, particularly in culturally important places like the Three Gorges. To paraphrase Denis Cosgrove, we have inherited a way of seeing the world as landscape.35 This now-familiar conception of landscape was developed in the context of European and American culture; to make it productive in the story I tell here, I have refracted it through the social and historical lenses of shanshui while also

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triangulating these two concepts with a third figure—ji 跡 (also written 迹 and 蹟), or trace—which appears at the foundations of the Chinese tradition. At its most basic, ji is a “footprint,” an impression on the earth that combines negative space and physical outline to show that someone has stepped in a particular spot. It is a mark of presence that signifies through absence; it is materially empty but culturally full. The footprint is depicted as a generative force in a number of early myths, including the Book of Odes’ (Shijing 詩經) account of the birth of Hou Ji 后稷, ancestor of the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 bce) royal house, who was conceived when his mother “trod on the big toe of God’s [Di 帝] footprint.”36 Footprints also figure at the mythological origin of the Chinese writing system, which was supposedly modeled by the ancient sage Cang Jie 倉頡 on the tracks of birds (niaoji 鳥跡).37 These marks are not simply footprints, but also accidental textual inscriptions—the very first—a prelinguistic script that inspired the invention of the Chinese writing system. In both cases, the trace of the foot produces cultural narratives and forms that are themselves productive, whether of imperial legitimacy or textual tradition. Ranging from the monumental to the microscopic, the traces that follow these mythical footprints are fundamentally paradoxical, simultaneously full (shi 實) and empty (xu 虛), present (you 有) and absent (wu 無). They index the moment and place of their creation and the presence of their creators, but only through the absence of the creator and the passage of time. They materialize the passage of time through decay, gaining in historical power and symbolic presence as they fade; even after they are totally effaced, they linger in the form of surrogate traces (marks adjacent to or commemorating the original trace). As an historically and culturally important landscape, it is inevitable that the Three Gorges region should be considered a palimpsest of such traces. But it is also a single, monumental trace: According to Chinese mythology, the Yangzi, along with all the rivers of China, were dug out by the deity turned founding emperor of the Xia Dynasty (the first dynasty in Chinese history), Yu the Great 大禹, sometime in the late third millennium BCE. For millennia, the Gorges have been described in poetry and prose as traces of Yu’s dredging: “As for the Gorges of eastern Ba, they were dredged and bored by the Lord of Xia. Sheer cliffs that soar 10,000 zhang high, like a wall they stand, streaked and striated.”38 In this book, landscape/shanshui is a way of seeing the world as a site of inscription constituted by innumerable ji/traces and acts of tracing, whether historical (landmarks, ruins, monuments) or aesthetic (poems, travelogues, paintings), which stand always in the shadow of the “traces of Yu” (Yuji 禹跡).

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This approach resonates with Paul Carter’s notion of “dark writing,” the traces of human movements that are so often erased from contemporary renderings of the world, but that constitute “the way in which we figure forth the places we inhabit.”39 To follow traces in a place like the Three Gorges is to “figure forth” the landscape by participating in an endless retracing, covering the same territory that others have covered, and thus touching a range of pasts that extend far beyond those that immediately precede you. Reading the world through the dark writing of these traces allows one “to associate formerly distant things on the basis of some imagined likeness . . . [and] to draw together things formerly remote from one another.”40 It is the capacity of the trace to “draw together things” that makes it possible to write this book not as a strictly linear history of representations of the Three Gorges, but as a juxtapositional account of landscape as the product of overlapping and intersecting traces and acts of trace making.41

Tr acing the Techno-P oetic L and scape Written in the long shadow cast by the completed Three Gorges Dam, Fixing Landscape might appear elegiac—a lament for what once was and could have been—but this is not a work of mourning. I believe that the people and environments of the Three Gorges deserve our anger over the destruction caused by the dam, but the landscape traditions centered there have not died. If anything, they have grown stronger, richer, and stranger in the face of change. What we are witnessing in the artistic responses to the dam project that I describe in chapters 5 and 6 is not an ending, but rather the beginning of new ways of seeing and being in the world, indebted to the past but looking forward to an uncertain future.42 What will become of these new ways of seeing and being is hard to predict. If the past is any guide, they will confront, but also conceivably feed, the powers that brought them into being. Landscape aesthetics are not necessarily benevolent. As a constellation of ideas “embedded in social practices,” the culture of landscape can become a powerful “material force” for historical change, both good and bad.43 One of the arguments of this book is that poetry, film, painting, cartography, travel writing, photography, and other forms of landscape are not simply representational modes but material forces for spatial change. This claim has a structure that will sound familiar to postmodern ears, but one that has also been easier to repeat than to substantiate. Here, through a series of deeply researched close readings of phase states in the transformed

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yet enduring cultural landscape of the Three Gorges, I show that such aesthetic forms have long perpetuated ideas that either contribute directly to environmental ruin or make effective action against threats to the environment more difficult. The complex and often ambiguous interplay between literature and the environment has become the focus of serious scholarly interest, as, for example, in Patricia Yaeger’s focus on the “real world consequences” of literary tropes that “encourage humans to treat [the world] as an inexhaustible storehouse of goods”; Timothy Morton’s critique of nature writing as a form of phenomenological “eco-mimesis” ill-equipped to deal with the temporal and spatial scale of climate change; Amitav Ghosh’s suggestion that many of our most unsustainable desires have been “midwifed” by the modern novel; Karen Thornber’s theory of the “ecoambiguity” of East Asian literatures that have long been seen as emerging from cultures that are somehow closer to nature; and Ursula Heise’s study of the cultural frameworks and narratives that shape our understanding of animal endangerment and extinction.44 Indeed, these are only few examples of how aesthetic forms have been reconceived as more than responses to or reflections of their environments, but also as active cultural and material agents—with a variety of potential consequences, good and bad. To overstate the negative impact of aesthetic forms would be to risk an excessively paranoid form of reading, but to ignore the possibility that dams and poems have something in common, or more especially that the latter might help make the former possible, would be to disregard the material force of representation. In seeking to better understand the connections between landscape and the exploitation of the physical world, I have heeded Yaeger’s call for an ecocritical method that fuses the poetic with the technological, a “techno-poetics” that begins by looking beyond the metaphors that shape our experience of the natural world to the material realities of our current environmental crises and ends by asking not only how those metaphors might blind us to our predicament but also how they have contributed to it. For Yaeger, this method is founded on two observations: first, our relationship with the world “is always-already technological”;45 and second, the world “is [now] more techno than” natural.46 A vision of the Yangzi River as an inexhaustible natural resource or an “organic machine” would not appear until the early twentieth century, but over the course of two millennia, artists and writers have produced an aesthetic landscape grounded in an alternative set of technological images, metaphors, and tropes.47 The Three Gorges that they created is not an unambiguously natural landscape but rather a space produced through

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Yu the Great’s superhuman feat of dredging and clearing as well as a powerfully symbolic landscape bearing traces of some of the most famous figures in the Chinese tradition. The geology and hydrology of the upper Yangzi make the Three Gorges Dam possible, but the structure exists partly because these long-standing technological and cultural tropes have made the region so attractive as a site for the inscription of a technologically modern China. As we shall see, the early lore and literature of the region have been mined for imagery and used to establish a link between deepest antiquity and the technological glories of the present. With the completion of the dam, the Three Gorges region has become a techno-poetic landscape—the ultimate expression of a conception of landscape as an inscribable and trace-bearing surface combined with the modern view of the world as an inexhaustible natural resource.48 If the landscape has become definitively technological, however, then the Three Gorges Dam is more than a feat of engineering; it is also something poetic—a soaring “wall of stone erected across the western Jiang (xijiang shibi 西江石壁),” as Mao envisioned it in his verse.49 It is only by acknowledging the poetic force of the dam that we can fully account for both the cultural legacy of the space it so radically altered and the many new works of art it has inspired. The poetic in techno-poetic refers to more than just poetry; it encompasses the act of making or bringing into being, the productive capacity of representation to do things in the real world. Here we enter the more ambiguous side of the story. In place of oversimplified timelines that trace the dam project from Sun Yat-sen to Mao Zedong to Jiang Zemin, or grandiose speeches that link it to the mythological past, I offer a reappraisal not only of the forms of representation that remade the region in the modern period, but also of the poems, paintings, and works of prose that helped make the landscape famous in the first place and the works of art that have been produced in response to the dam project. It might seem that premodern travelers have, to adapt the old environmentalist guideline for nature-seekers, written only poems and left only footprints, but in reality they have helped fuel a dynamic that opposes poetic conceptions of the region as changeable with a powerful desire to fix it as a cultural site. As we shall soon see, the prestige accorded a poet such as Du Fu, for example, inspired later figures to search for the sites from which he described Kuizhou’s transformations. When they found his traces fading or irretrievable, they simply reinscribed them by repairing or building them anew, despite the fact that Du Fu’s finest poetry on the Three Gorges draws its power from processes of decay and displacement. This is a modest example of how techno-poetic culture works, but it is an important reminder that

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although landscape poetry in premodern China is a complexly intertextual affair, it also deeply influences how people interact with the land. To see the world poetically is potentially to demand that it look more like the texts that have shaped our vision, whether those texts are poems from the mid-eighth century or engineering schematics from the 1940s.

PA R T I A Landscape of Traces

1 T R AC I N G T H E G O R G E S The [Thearch] Di said, “Come Yu, you also must have excellent words (to bring before me)” . . . Yu replied, “The inundating waters seemed to assail the heavens, and in their vast extent embraced the hills and overtopped the great mounds, so that the people were bewildered and overwhelmed. I mounted my four conveyances, and all along the hills hewed down the trees . . . I (also) opened passages for the streams (throughout the) nine (provinces), and conducted them to the four seas. I deepened (moreover) the channels and canals, and conducted them to the streams, sowing (grain), at the same time, along with Ji, and showing the multitudes how to procure the food of toil . . . (In this way) all the people got grain to eat, and the myriad regions began to come under good rule.” Gao-Yao said, “Yes, we ought to model ourselves after your excellent words.” —The Book of Documents1 From antiquity, the Chinese people have undertaken grand historical campaigns to pacify, develop and exploit nature. The myths of Jingwei filling the sea and the foolish old man moving a mountain, as well as the story of Yu the Great’s quelling of the flood, represent the primeval Chinese people’s spirit of tenacious struggle in “transforming nature” and ensuring that “man will certainly triumph over nature” . . . Today, the project that we are constructing in the Three Gorges of the Yangzi River—the world’s largest and most comprehensively beneficial conservancy and hydroelectric project—will greatly stimulate the economic development of the people of our nation. It is an enterprise that will enrich the people of today and spread its benefits over our descendants for millennia to come. —Jiang Zemin2

Imaginary M aps The poetic and technical representations that I describe in this book are forms of landscape that inscribe and reinscribe the physical world, producing poetic landscapes that become technical blueprints and technical landscapes saturated with poetic effects. As a techno-poetic landscape, the Three Gorges region has been shaped over millennia by the images and actions of those who have lived, worked, and traveled there. Many of the changes they made in the land were small and fleeting. Some endured, forming fields, paths, temples, hydrographic markings, and cities—sites that shaped and were shaped by poetry, prose, and painting. The Three Gorges Dam and reservoir have effaced many of these, replacing a landscape built up over time and defined by the pathos of change with a monument to the prowess of the Chinese state.

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From a certain angle, the techno-poetic landscape has undergone a definitive change since the completion of the dam—it has become more technological than poetic. Fixing Landscape approaches the question of change from multiple angles so that we might better understand how the landscapes of the present relate to the landscapes of the past. Much separates the Tang Dynasty from the People’s Republic of China, and poetry from dams; what joins them is a vision of the Three Gorges landscape as an inscribed and inscribable surface. To fully appreciate the complexities of the Three Gorges as inscriptional landscape it is essential to start with one of the richest and most elusive figures in Chinese thought, ancient and modern, the trace (ji 跡). A footprint, a ruin, a famous site, a supernatural omen, an inscription on stone, wood, or silk— the trace is a fragmentary presence of something absent or lost. For those who value the past or wish to make use of it in the present, the trace is also something to be preserved and reinscribed to prevent its disappearance. In his study of ruins in Chinese culture, Wu Hung offers this partial taxonomy of traces: “divine traces” (shenji) [神跡] as ambiguous signs of supernatural power; “historical traces” (guji) [古跡] as subjects of antiquarian interest; “remnant traces” (yiji) [遺跡] as loci of political memory and expression; and “famous historical sites” (shengji) [勝跡] as meeting places of elite and popular culture.3

Drawing on a pattern of external stimulus and artistic and affective response that is at the core of premodern Chinese aesthetics, Wu further characterizes traces “as general signs of the past” that “can stimulate the huaigu [懷古] sentiment,” a profound yearning for the past.4 While keeping its traditional meanings and aesthetic functions in mind, I treat ji/trace as a hybrid concept that opens out onto a range of forms and practices, not only what are known in media studies as inscriptional technologies—writing, printing, filmmaking, photography, sound recording—but also the various ways in which space is shaped by politics and ideology.5 The ji that constitute the landscape of the Three Gorges are produced by and productive of many types of inscription—ke 刻 (to carve), shu 書 (to write), hua 畫 (to paint), and ji 記/紀 (to mark, record, document), as well as shu 疏 (to dredge), zao 鑿 (to chisel), and fu 斧 (to ax). My conception of ji/trace as both objective and active overlaps with but also extends beyond Wu’s taxonomy. By blurring the boundaries that separate things from actions, I hope to show

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how ji/traces act to describe and circumscribe space. More than imprints or remainders on the surface of the earth, ji/traces can also be, or inspire, acts of spatial production that change the earth. The Three Gorges are rich in all manner of ji/traces. Rarely are their complexities and ambiguities—the way they hold presence and absence, the concrete and the imaginary, part and whole in a state of dynamic equilibrium—more fully exploited than in the poetry of Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770), who lived briefly in the city of Kuizhou, near the western entryway to the Gorges, in the middle of the eighth century. A contemporary of Li Bai, Du Fu is perhaps the most famous poet in the Chinese tradition, and the works that he produced in Kuizhou and its environs forever changed poetic and popular perceptions of this region. In Du Fu’s poetry, the Three Gorges are fully integrated into an imaginary map of empire, not as a symbol of the state or proving ground for the spirit of its people—as Jiang Zemin would later describe it—but as a frontier marking the farthest reach of Han culture and a site where past order gives way to present entropy. Du Fu orients himself in this exotic place by invoking the traces of historical and mythical figures he admires, many of whom were similarly displaced during their lifetimes, and by treating the landscape of the Gorges as a surface for the projection of fleeting visions and memories of his distant homeland. In Du Fu’s poetry, the Three Gorges appear not as a proto-national landscape, but rather as a site for the spatialization of a poetics of personal failure and imperial fragmentation. This is a profoundly different use of the region and its mythic dimensions than Jiang Zemin and other Chinese leaders have made, with far less tamable political effects. In the centuries following his death, Du Fu was transformed from a minor if respectable figure to the greatest poet in the tradition. With canonization came a newfound interest in the traces that he had left behind in the Three Gorges. These were far more than evocative “traces of the past.” During the Song Dynasty (960–1279), they became sites of pilgrimage that needed to be spatially fixed in order to maximize their sacred qualities. It is perhaps no coincidence that the elevation of Du Fu over the course of the Song coincides with one of the most important conceptual and physical transformations of the Three Gorges region: from a landscape of traces defined by flux into a landscape of landmarks fixed by a burgeoning geographical and touristic literature. As part of this transformation, the ji that appear in Du Fu’s poetry as figures of decay, threatening always to become illegible, are succeeded by “landmarks” or “famous sites” (shengji 勝跡), legible figures of cultural revival and flourishing.

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As the landscape was being reconceptualized, it was also undergoing demographic and spatial changes brought about by the ongoing expansion of Han settlements into areas south of the Yangzi that had long been dominated by non-Han tribes.6 As the spatial reach of Song administrators and Han settlers extended south, the strangeness of the region, much of it grounded in local myth and religion, was gradually secularized and folded into the cultural orthodoxy of Song China. The exotic allure of the Gorges remained powerful, as it does today, but it was rendered morally meaningful as part of a shift in spatial thinking that produced a landscape defined more by its edifying sites than its suggestive traces. Although the expansion of Han culture and control was already well under way by Du Fu’s time,7 the Three Gorges that he experienced in the mid-eighth century was still an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous place, integral to the lore of the greater empire but nonetheless foreign, as Du Fu reminds his readers: 三峽樓臺淹日月 五溪衣服共雲山

In towers and terraces of the Three Gorges lingering for days and months With the tribes who wear the clothing of the Five Streams sharing cloud and mountain8

* Du Fu was the scion of an illustrious family with roots in a suburb of the Tang capital at Chang’an, near modern-day Xi’an. His grandfather, Du Shenyan 杜審言 (d. ca. 705), was one of the most eminent poets of the early Tang. As a boy, Du Fu received an exemplary education in the classics and literary composition. Though he had the pedigree and training for a glorious political career, he twice failed the imperial examinations (in 736 and 745) that were a prerequisite for service in the state bureaucracy. It was only in 751, at the age of thirty-nine, that Du Fu, after submitting a number of long poems to the throne as evidence of his qualifications, succeeded in passing a special examination set by Emperor Xuanzong 玄宗 (r. 712–756). Even with the emperor’s support, however, his career never took off. When a massive rebellion broke out in 755, he was well connected but politically insignificant. Having failed professionally, Du Fu dedicated himself to writing poetry. Steeped in the classics, formally inventive, and technically virtuosic, the more than fourteen hundred poems that make up his collected works are revered in China. Of these, the roughly four hundred that he composed in Kuizhou are generally considered among his finest. For well over a millennium, they have generated countless commentaries, exegeses, translations, and works of praise and imitation. Du Fu is famous for more than his poetry, however.

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After his death he became known as a man of unimpeachable integrity who, “despite his unsatisfied desire to serve the state, through all his vicissitudes . . . never for the space of a meal forgot his sovereign.”9 By the end of the Song Dynasty, Du Fu the failed official and invalid had become Du Fu the “historian poet” (shishi 詩史) and “poet sage” (shisheng 詩聖), titles that “evoke the two roles, historian and sage, which were most esteemed by Confucius.”10 In 766, however, when Du Fu arrived in Kuizhou with his small family in tow, he was an impoverished refugee, sick with malaria, diabetes, and other ailments.11 He had already been displaced for nine years, having fled Chang’an in the spring of 757 after a brief period of incarceration by rebels. In 755, the forces of the traitorous general An Lushan 安祿山 (ca. 703–757) had torn through the northeastern capital at Luoyang. The next year, they captured the northwestern capital at Chang’an, forcing Emperor Xuanzong south to Sichuan.12 Du Fu remained in the ravaged north for a number of years after hostilities began. By 759, finding himself politically isolated and unable to support his family, he followed some of his political allies to Sichuan. By 760, he was established in Chengdu, capital of modern-day Sichuan, where he experienced a period of relative stability. By 765, however, he was on the move again, traveling slowly down the Yangzi and longing always for an end to the conflict and a clear route home.13 Du Fu would remain a wanderer for the last decade of his life, an accidental exile in the southern reaches of a foundering empire, a “soul not yet summoned” (wei zhao hun 未招魂) home.14 In the spring of 766, Du Fu and his family sailed east down the Yangzi (then known simply as the Jiang 江) to Kuizhou for a stay that would last until the autumn of 768. Located just upriver from Kuimen, the entryway to the Gorges, Kuizhou was a transportation and commercial hub linking the Chengdu basin to the northwest with the fertile plains and expansive lakes of modern Hubei and Hunan to the east.15 Famous for its deadly rapids, changeable weather, and scenic beauty, the Three Gorges region was, and still is, closely associated with a number of cultural and literary heroes—Yu the Great, Liu Bei 劉備 (161–223), Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181–234), Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 343–ca. 277), and Song Yu 宋玉 (third century BCE), among others. Though central to Han culture, Kuizhou and the Gorges were on the frontier of the Tang state, nodes in a zone of contact between Han and non-Han peoples. The latter occupied much of the countryside around Kuizhou, especially southwest of the Yangzi, and the region had long served as a setting for tales of otherworldly encounters, rain maidens, and dragon spirits. During his time as a refugee, Du Fu wrote prolifically about both his experience living on the frontier and the traces of the cultural heroes who had also

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spent time there, integrating both into a poetic map of empire and exile. At one end of this map stand Kuizhou and the Gorges, points from which Du Fu looks outward to take the measure of personal and imperial history. Casting his gaze across space and back in time, he considers the forces that constitute his many worlds—social, aesthetic, political, physical. Through his observations and imaginative journeys, he establishes Kuizhou not as symbol of, or synecdoche for, empire, but as the antipode of Chang’an, the gridded capital that had defined the imperial spatial imagination for a millennium. Joined by sheets of clouds and the night stars, these two places loom large in Du Fu’s most famous poetry of exile, especially the eight poems of the “Autumn Stirrings 秋興八首” series, in which visions of abandoned imperial gardens and blinding glimpses of the deceased sovereign dissolve into images of the Gorges, which are established in the opening couplets of the first poem as a harsh and volatile landscape: 玉露凋傷楓樹林 巫山巫峽氣蕭森 江間波浪兼天湧 塞上風雲接地陰

Jade dew wilts and wounds the forests of maple trees On Wu Mountain, in Wu Gorge—the air is bitter harsh In the middle of the Jiang, waves join the sky, surging Atop the pass, wind and clouds touch the earth, darkling

The most common type of ji—physical traces of the past directly experienced by the poet—play a limited role in “Autumn Stirrings.” Yet the spatial bipolarity of the series and its alternation between images of plenitude and emptiness exemplify the aesthetic and affective qualities of the ji/trace as it operates in Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry. In the poems of this series, the Gorges function as a surface for the projection of immaterial traces that refuse to adhere, appearing from and disappearing into a formless void. Through their play, they constitute the landscape not as a fixed monument, but as a site of change, decay, and chaos. The “Autumn Stirrings” series is long and complex, and an analysis of each of its eight poems is beyond the scope of this chapter.16 To illustrate how Du Fu poetically produces the Three Gorges as a landscape of ji/traces that are not simply material or historical, but also atmospheric, elemental, textual, and affective, I offer a focused reading of the second poem, which includes an allusion to the same crying gibbons that appear in Li Bai’s

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“Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” and of select lines from poems six, seven, and eight. 秋興，其二 夔府孤城落日斜 每依北斗望京華 聽猿實下三聲淚 奉使虛隨八月槎 畫省香爐違伏枕 山樓粉堞隱悲笳 請看石上藤蘿月 已映洲前蘆荻花

Autumn Stirrings, Poem Two17 When on the solitary city of Kuizhou the setting sun slants I always follow the Big Dipper to look toward the capital Hearing gibbons truly I shed tears at their “three cries” Sent out to serve vainly have I pursued the “eighth month” raft18 The painted ministry’s fragrant censers so far from my sickbed19 The mountain hall’s whitewashed battlements hide a doleful flute Look! the vine and creeper moon that was atop the rocks Shines already on the reed flowers before the islet

Opening at dusk in Kuizhou, the second of the “Autumn Stirrings” poems is organized around a back-and-forth motion that draws Du Fu’s gaze and mind north to Chang’an, only to leave him where he started, ailing and homesick in Kuizhou. A study in oscillation, this poem helps establish the bipolar structure of the entire eight-poem series, in which the imagined connection between Chang’an and Kuizhou grows stronger and stronger, until by the sixth poem, the astral triangulations and waking dreams that transport Du Fu in the second poem are replaced by an almost material conduit leading him north to Chang’an: 瞿唐峽口曲江頭 萬里風煙接素秋

From the mouth of Qutang Gorge to the head of the Serpentine Ten thousand li of wind and fog link hoary autumns

Here, the “mouth” (kou 口) of Qutang becomes a portal that leads across ten thousand li of wind and fog to the banks of the Serpentine, a stream that flowed through a royal park in the southeast corner of Chang’an, allowing

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for a journey back to the capital and through its long history.20 According to Stephen Owen, it was during the Tang that mist was established as an important “poetic signifier” for hiddenness.21 Against a Tang imperial geography that was carefully “mapped, inventoried, administratively partitioned, [and] crisscrossed by post stations . . . misty scenes poetically resist imperial space, where everything is illuminated and perspicuous.”22 In Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry, mist, clouds, and fog do block the poet from the center of Tang imperial geography, but they also bridge the spatial and temporal rifts that define his exile, making possible his dazzling visions of that center. The “Autumn Stirrings” series contains a number of aqueous and atmospheric images of linkage, though in poem two, the gulf between where Du Fu undeniably is and where he so desperately wishes to be remains wide. Gazing north, he sheds the southern tears that Li Daoyuan made famous in his description of the Three Gorges in the Commentary to the Classic of Rivers. When Li Bai writes of the “sound of gibbons crying without rest,” he evokes the place through its textual traces.23 When Du Fu makes the same allusion, he insists on the authenticity of his experience—he “truly” (shi 實) sheds the tears described in the song.24 For Du Fu, to look at and listen to the landscape carefully is to discern the traces of a literary discourse that subtends and validates the physical, and vice versa. Du Fu’s real (shi) tears are paired with the emptiness or futility (xu 虛) of his dreams of service (and of a Chang’an that has yet to materialize fully). Full and empty, actual and imagined, material and immaterial, shi and xu form a “bipolar concept” that structures contrastive poetic imagery while also serving as a traditional literary critical pairing used to distinguish language describing concrete (shi) scenes from language that “subordinate[s]” the scenic to an abstract (xu) mood or effect.25 Shi and xu are a complementary rather than oppositional pair, each term establishing not only the condition of possibility for the other but also the possibility for the transformation of one into the other (just as the immaterial sounds of gibbons crying produces Du Fu’s material tears). Shi and xu also happen to be among the most important terms in the so-called “Li-Du” debate in Chinese literary criticism, the venerable practice of comparing Li Bai and Du Fu, usually to determine who deserves top place in the canon. In her study of the poetry of Li Bai, Paula Varsano describes how xu, which she translates as “unfounded” or “unfoundedness,” came to be associated (not always positively) with the imaginative poetry of Li Bai, and shi, which she translates as “substantive,” with the classically grounded poetry of Du Fu.26 Du Fu’s tears seem, at first glance, to support this traditional dichotomy. In reality, they form the substantive counterpart to a series of immaterial and

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fleeting images. Unlike “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” which centers on a journey so fast that it is over almost as soon as it begins, Du Fu’s “Autumn Stirrings” suspend the poet-wanderer between the hard facts of his exile and the fevered memories of a past to which he can only return in reverie. If Du Fu’s past journeys in search of employment and away from the chaotic north were taken in vain, the journeys he takes in his Kuizhou poetry are little more than fantasy. They offer a temporary escape that only reinforces his immobility, reminding him that the one journey he so wishes to take— back home—remains impossible.27 Throughout his Kuizhou poetry, Du Fu finds himself in the space between—waking and sleeping, south and north, the real and the imagined, shi and xu. When he moves from one to the other, as in his alternation between the “painted ministry” and the “mountain hall,” his poetry reflects a painful awareness of the gap that separates the northern spaces and traditions that will always feel most substantive to him from the amorphous and disorienting southern landscape he now occupies. In the final couplet of the second “Autumn Stirrings” poem, that gap takes the form of an elusive and immaterial trace—the light of the moon: 請看石上藤蘿月 已映洲前蘆荻花

Look! the vine and creeper moon that was atop the rocks Shines already on the reed flowers before the islet

Temporarily lost in reverie, Du Fu has lost the time it took for the light of the moon to move from the vines atop the stones to the reed flowers before the islet, and he calls out for confirmation of this, for a trace of the passage of time. The materialization of this temporal gap in the space between the rocks and the flowering reeds provides him with only a temporary and partial means of orienting himself. The riverbank comes into view, but this is not really the object of his gaze. The stones, vines, and reeds are merely what give solid form to the light of the moon, which both marks the passage of time and also serves as a conventional poetic figure linking distant places and separated loved ones (who always look on the same moon no matter how far apart they are). In the second couplet, real tears in line 3 lead into the vain journeys of line 4. By the third couplet, the alternation between xu and shi accelerates: in line 5, the imagined painted ministry is replaced by Du Fu’s sickbed; in line 6, the solid battlements conceal the immaterial sound of the flute. Xu leads into shi and back to xu, and so on and so forth. “Autumn Stirrings” is so deeply poignant in part because Du Fu cannot fully sustain his reverie and

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must thus suffer the constant alternation between the real and the imagined, presence and absence, past and present. As Paula Varsano writes of the highly allusive (and elusive) poetics of Li He 李賀 (791–817), it is “only by entering a dream-state, wherein presence and absence are so fluid as to be one . . . [that] the speaker [can] escape their unceasing and tortuous alteration.”28 For Du Fu, there is something even darker beyond such torture: a formless abyss that threatens to swallow the poet, removing all reference points and effacing the solid surfaces onto which he casts his visions and memories. In the last couplet of the penultimate “Autumn Stirrings” poem, the series and the poet seem to reach a point of exhaustion. The link between Kuizhou and Chang’an dissolves, and the realm now appears as an expanse of mountain passes, endless skies, and spreading waters: 關塞極天唯鳥道 江湖滿地一漁翁

Unshakable passes to sky’s end—only a bird’s path Rivers and lakes fill the land—a solitary fisherman

The waters and skies that once linked Du Fu to other places and times cease to transport him in this moment. Endless mountains hold him fast, and the rivers and lakes of the south make him a permanent and solitary transient. The one path that he can see is no path at all, and the only movement that is open to him will leave no trace, not even a footprint. Facing oblivion, Du Fu has wandered through his past, conjuring images of glory that rise and fall like empires. By the final couplet of the eighth and last poem, he is a man defeated: 綵筆昔遊干氣象 白頭吟望苦低垂

My colored brush has wandered through the past, forging atmospheres and images My gray head, chanting and gazing, now hangs low and bitter

Nowhere in the “Autumn Stirrings” poems does Du Fu use the word ji 跡. In fact, the literary figure that structures the series is xing 興, which I have translated above as “stirring.” As a verb, xing has a range of possible meanings, including to stir, to stimulate, to give rise to, and to effloresce. As one of the Six Principles (liuyi 六義) in the “Great Preface” (daxu 大序) to the early anthology of Chinese poetry known as the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經), xing is also a technical poetic term that refers to an external image or “stimulus,” which gives rise to internal emotions that are then

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externalized through poetry. Poetry can in turn stimulate the reader affectively or creatively, or both.29 Owen translates the term as “affective image,” and describes it as “an image whose primary function is not signification but, rather, the stirring of a particular affection or mood: [xing] does not ‘refer to’ that mood; it generates it.”30 As a nonreferential image, the archetypal xing is empty of content but capable of filling a viewer or reader with profound emotion. While the xing in the title of “Autumn Stirrings” (qiuxing 秋興) is generally taken as referring to the feelings inspired by autumn and not the technical term of the “Great Preface,” its appearance there cannot help but evoke the affective images of the Book of Odes.31 What ultimately distinguishes those xing from Du Fu’s natural images, however, is that the latter function referentially, as traces of a mostly obscured exilic landscape. In “Autumn Stirrings,” Du Fu’s emotions are stimulated by the physical traces that autumn has left on the landscape of the Three Gorges—jadelike dew and withered maples, wind and fog—and by a series of powerfully evocative immaterial traces—the cries of gibbons, the wail of a mournful flute, and the shifting light of the moon. This second set of traces makes Du Fu aware of things that he cannot see or that he failed to observe because his mind was elsewhere. Though their sources (gibbons, flute, moon) are absent or invisible, they map the poet’s surroundings while also stimulating his emotions. As traces on and of the Three Gorges, they are the substantive counterparts of an imagined Chang’an, yet they never cohere to form an integral landscape. Instead, they reveal the physical world through its fragments, flickering across a space that is mostly concealed by atmospheric effects or swallowed by spreading waters. The Three Gorges of “Autumn Stirrings” is a landscape of traces that will bear no permanent mark, a place where nothing seems to have changed but everything is revealed to be impermanent.

Yu’s Tr aces I In “Autumn Stirrings,” the Three Gorges are simultaneously solid and changeable. They trap the poet in his exile, but they take form as a shifting mosaic of traces—traces heard but not seen, disappearing as they appear. They constitute a highly personal landscape in which space, time, light, and sound are filtered through the prism of Du Fu’s senses. Du Fu’s fragmentary landscape bears little resemblance to the national landscape that the Three Gorges has become. As I show in this section, politicians and planners in The People’s Republic of China have promoted a view of the Three Gorges as the monumental trace of a semidivine act, a form of landscaping that prefigures and justifies

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contemporary interventions in the region. In the next section, I return to Du Fu, who makes use of the same mythology in more ambiguous ways. According to mytho-historical sources, one of which appears as an epigraph to this chapter, Yu the Great, mythical founder of the first dynasty in Chinese history, is said to have created the Three Gorges by boring through the granite, limestone, schist, and shale of this mountainous area so that the excess waters of an epic flood could drain into the sea. Yu’s contributions extend far beyond flood control, however. According to early accounts, his taming of the waters bolstered the centralization of state power, led to the creation of an empire-wide travel network, and established a system of tribute and taxation.32 Yu’s dredging and clearing were seen as civilizing acts that definitively inscribed the boundary between watery chaos and the (spatial and moral) order of a society grounded in agriculture and ruled by a bureaucracy. It was in the course of traveling through the realm to teach the people “how to procure the food of toil” and reminding them to pay their taxes in kind, that Yu left behind another set of traces, those formed by his feet. During the imperial period, “Yu’s traces” (Yuji 禹跡) served as a poetic term not only for his footprints and the marks that his ax and spade left on the surface of the earth, but also for the entirety of the geographical entity associated with Han cultural and political influence. Indeed, early maps of the realm were often simply called “charts of Yu’s Traces” (yuji tu 禹跡圖) (figure 1.1). Over the last two decades, Yu the Great, like other Chinese mythological figures, has enjoyed a revival, with statues, shrines, and other memorials appearing all over China.33 One of the most remarkable of these is the Yu the Great Mythology Park (Dayu shenhuayuan 大禹神話園), opened in 2006 in the city of Wuhan, just beneath the Wuhan First Yangzi Bridge, along the northern bank of the Yangzi. Approximately four hundred meters long and sixty meters wide, the park consists of three groups of statues and an exhibition hall dedicated to ancient Chinese flood mythology. The first group of stone statues is arranged along a short avenue and details the story of Yu’s father, Gun 鯀, who failed to quell the flood and was executed as a result.34 They lead to a central plaza dominated by a wall of carved marble close to three hundred feet long and eighteen feet tall, with a twenty-foot-tall bronze statue of Yu in the center. The relief carvings on the wall depict episodes in the mythology of Yu. To the east of the plaza is another avenue of stone relief carvings showing Yu’s quelling of the floods. Two large statues depicting episodes from Yu’s life mark the junction of both the first and third groups with the central plaza. Robin McNeal describes the park “as a visual narrative in three dimensions” leading visitors through Yu’s life story and on toward the Qingchuan

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figure 1.1 Rubbing of an 1136 Yuji tu in the Forest of Stone Steles Museum, Xi’an, China. Source: U.S. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, call number G7821. C3 1136.Y81

Pavilion 晴川閣, a shrine that has been dedicated to the worship of Yu the Great since the sixteenth century.35 The Yu the Great Mythology Park is an example of how mythical figures like Yu have been monumentalized and materialized in statues, parks, and other memorials as part of a postreform revival of interest in Chinese mythology. According to McNeal, contemporary interest in Yu the Great represents a continuation of early-twentieth-century attempts to forge a “coherent Chinese mythology” that could compete with the systematized accounts of Greek mythology that Chinese intellectuals first encountered in the late

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nineteenth and early twentieth century.36 As an “instance of mythmaking writ large,” the park updates and gives monumental physical form to these intellectuals’ search for a solid ethnocultural foundation for China’s modernization efforts.37 While the park may address long-standing Chinese insecurities vis-à-vis the West, it also demonstrates how China’s new global power and prestige operate domestically, through the reinscription of the banks of the Yangzi as a national landscape grounded in ancient mythology. Yu’s role in this act of spatial production is not as a culture hero, but as an action hero, vanquishing monsters, quelling floods, and bringing order to the realm (figure 1.2). In addition to embodying the spirit of the people, as Jiang Zemin claims, this new Yu is also an allegory of raw national power (figure 1.3). An English-language text inscribed in stone at the park’s entrance, for example, compares Yu’s feats with those of the people of Wuhan, who “defeated” the floods of 1954 and 1998, and explains that the park was built to “glorify the unbending will and superb wisdom of Yu.” The prevention of floods, which have killed millions over just the last century and a half, has been one of the main justifications for building the Three Gorges Dam.

figure 1.2 The Yu the Great Mythology Park with the First Yangzi River Bridge. See also color plate 3. Source: Image courtesy of Robin McNeal

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figure 1.3 A heroic Yu the Great killing a nine-headed snake. Source: Image courtesy of Robin McNeal

To open this park in 2006, along the recently flooded banks of the Yangzi, as the dam neared its long-anticipated completion is to send a clear and confident message about the institution of a spatial order that is simultaneously new and as old as Chinese culture itself. For the average visitor, presumably unschooled in the mythography of early intellectuals, the massive sculptures representing Yu and his exploits will not conjure up old debates about the status of Chinese mythology. They will mark the contemporary revival of Yu’s spirit and the current leadership’s replication of his superhuman feat of quelling the floods. By making the banks of the river a site for monumental art, with its claim to permanence, the creators of the park scorned the natural variability that has defined the Yangzi for millennia. This is possible because as the Three Gorges Dam neared completion, it was on the verge of finally fixing the river—controlling its flow, clearing the many obstacles it posed to trade and travel, and ending its pattern of destruction. In this sense, the Yu the Great Mythology Park stands in stark contrast to other memorials and monuments that have been built along the Yangzi over the course of the twentieth century, not to mention the hydrographic markers

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and landmarks that have aided navigation for millennia. One example from the first category is the fifty-foot-tall obelisk of Changsha granite that was erected in the Three Gorges village of Xintan in 1924 to commemorate Cornell Plant, one of the first men to pilot a steamship through the rapids of the Gorges as far as Chongqing. Building on the work of the mid- to latenineteenth-century travelers and adventurers that I discuss in Part II, Plant systematically charted the rapids of the Yangzi Gorges and instructed steamship pilots on how to navigate them safely. As one admirer said after his death, “the best monument to Captain Plant is the work he has left behind, which will ever remain the foundation of what is hereafter done for the improvement of the navigation of the Upper River.”38 By inscribing the river textually and visually to improve navigation, Plant’s work laid the foundation for the Three Gorges Dam project, which clears the obstacles imposed by nature and fixes the flow of the river behind a massive wall of concrete and steel. Plant’s contribution to the remapping of the Yangzi helped make the dam possible, but the monument erected in his honor, by virtue of its original positioning, expresses an earlier understanding of the river as an obstacle that could be overcome through navigational technologies but not physically transformed. Whereas the Yu the Great Park in Wuhan stages a narrative of control performed within a space consolidated by the dam project, the Plant Memorial, which was first constructed above one of the most treacherous rapids in the gorges to serve as a beacon to steamships and native craft, stood in dialogue with the landscape as it existed in 1924. Built as a monument to a man, it was also a monument to the Yangzi. Ironically, the locals of Xintan were forced to move the obelisk in 2002–2003 to avoid its being inundated by the rising waters of the reservoir (figure 1.4). They took this opportunity to restore the Chinese and English inscriptions that had been defaced during the Cultural Revolution. By reinscribing the monument, they erased one set of historical traces in order to recover another; by moving it, they bowed to the new spatial order enshrined in the park in Wuhan. Although cultural artifacts of sufficient importance were generally shifted beyond the reach of the reservoir, others were simply too large to relocate. Among these were a number of boulders and outcroppings that local residents and navigators used to gauge changes in the water level.39 For millennia, all along the Yangzi, but especially in and around the treacherous gorges, residents and travelers often carved markers to indicate normal and abnormal water levels and aid in navigation. Perhaps the most elaborately carved of these hydrographic stations is the only one to remain accessible in situ. Located near the city of Fuling, west of the Gorges, White Crane Ridge (Baiheliang 白鶴梁)

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figure 1.4 The relocated Plant monument. Source: Photo by Peter Simpson. Courtesy of the South China Morning Post

is a sixteen-hundred-meter-long sandstone ridge on which fourteen carvings of fish and 165 inscriptions, some dating back to the mid-Tang Dynasty, are discernible. The eyes of the fish once indicated normal water levels, and the inscriptions recorded especially low levels and their dates, though they were sometimes far more detailed.40 White Crane Ridge, which now rests near the bottom of the Three Gorges Dam reservoir, has remained visible through the construction of China’s first underwater museum. This structure, promoted by UNESCO as preserving important “underwater cultural heritage,” encircles the ridge (which remains exposed to the water) and is punctuated with windows that allow visitors to look through the murky water of the Yangzi at the famous carvings. White Crane Ridge provides evidence of some of the navigational challenges that the dam was built to overcome, but it is also a record of a long local tradition of direct observation of, and engagement with, the variability of the river. As one of the few objects beneath the reservoir to remain visible, the ridge has become a relic for and of different ages. An ancient text that until recently could still fulfill its original function, it is now a trace of the past enshrined as

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a monument for a future when the pre-dam shape of the gorges and the river will have become only a distant memory.

* If the Plant Memorial marks an early moment in the reinscription of the Yangzi, and the White Crane Ridge Underwater Museum memorializes vanished ways of recording its variability, the Yu the Great Mythology Park attempts to inscribe indelibly its successful conquest. The park’s position within a landscape defined by monuments from the golden age of post-revolution China, the most important of which is the Wuhan First Yangzi Bridge, reminds us that its ultimate referent is not Chinese mythology, but the Yangzi as a site of socialist construction. In an excerpt from his 1956 poem “Swimming” (Youyong 游泳), which was written shortly after deadly floods in 1954 and inscribed on a 1969 memorial to that tragedy in Wuhan, Mao imagines the dam as counterpart to the bridge then under construction across the Yangzi: 起宏圖 一橋飛架南北 天塹變通途 更立西江石壁 截斷巫山雲雨 高峽出平湖

I raise a grand plan— A single bridge, flying, will span south and north Transforming a natural moat into a thoroughfare And across the western Jiang we shall erect a wall of stone That will rend Mt. Wu’s clouds and rain Till lofty gorges rise from a placid lake41

In “Swimming,” to which I will return in later chapters, Mao imbues imagery from the Three Gorges poetic tradition with the spirit of socialist voluntarism to laud the ambitions of the young People’s Republic. The bridge and dam will knit together a nation broken by decades of strife and a century of imperial exploitation, transforming its troublesome geography into a landscape pacified by man. Mao, like Sun Yat-sen before him, envisioned modernization as an act of landscaping on a national scale. The Yu the Great Mythology Park embodies that vision in a number of ways. As a carefully designed landscape, it demonstrates control over civic space, making strong claims for both the integrity of the riverbank and the city, province, and nation that maintain it; it not only brings order to the scattered stories of Yu the Great, but it also provides a deep mytho-historical foundation for the spatial imaginary that supports the Three Gorges Dam and the Wuhan First Yangzi Bridge. The spatialization of this approach to “Chinese” history is mirrored in the discourse that justified and celebrated the Three Gorges Dam. When Jiang Zemin praises Yu the Great as the embodiment of “the primeval Chinese people’s spirit of tenacious

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struggle in ‘transforming nature’ and ensuring the ‘certain triumph of man over nature’ ” in his speech marking the diversion of the Yangzi in 1998, he borrows slogans associated with “Mao’s war on nature” to fuse the mythology of the recent and distant past.42 By tracing the network of local, regional, and national sites that imbue the park with meaning, we see more clearly how Yu the Great has been enlisted in the recent reorganization of the Yangzi. To visit his park is to experience not only a new conception of Chinese mythology as national allegory, but also to place oneself at the nexus of multiple historical moments and in the shadow of multiple historical figures and structures. The shaping of Chinese history and identity in the present is still inextricably linked to the inscription of national space. That Yu is credited with creating that space and embodying the spirit of the Chinese people makes him a particularly powerful avatar of the state, though he has not always played that role. What is obscured in the creation of new sites in the cult of Yu are older and more ambiguous traces— Yuji. The Yu who appears amidst the fading traces of Du Fu’s poetry is, as we shall see, not the muscled hero of the present day.

Yu’s Tr aces II It is through the interplay of absence and presence that Du Fu imagines Yu’s traces in a poem describing a temple dedicated to him in the city of Zhongzhou, upriver from Kuizhou: 禹廟 禹廟空山裏 秋風落日斜 荒庭垂橘柚 古屋畫龍蛇 雲氣噓青壁 江聲走白沙 早知乘四載 疏鑿控三巴

Yu’s Shrine43 Yu’s Shrine stands within empty mountains Where autumn wind and setting sun slant In overgrown courtyards hang tangerine and pomelo In ancient halls are painted dragons and serpents44 Clouds and mist respire over verdant cliffs45 River sounds race across white sands Long have I known that by riding the four vehicles,46 Dredging and carving, he mastered the three Ba47

“Yu’s Shrine” resembles other temple poems by Du Fu, many of which contrast the cultural fullness (shi) of the dead and the ritual promise of continued presence with the vacancy (xu/kong 空) of the temple.48 In the first and third couplets, Yu’s shrine is presented as a lonely building, hidden away within

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“empty” mountains and surrounded by immaterial phenomena: autumn wind and slanting sunlight, clouds and mist exhaling over green cliffs, the sound of water rushing over sand. The courtyards and rooms of the temple that appear between these images of emptiness are empty too, overgrown by weeds and occupied only by painted images. Few worshippers come to trample the grass that fills the temple’s courtyards, but their citrus trees are traces of a ritual program dedicated to the worship of Yu’s feats. Tangerine and pomelo were the local specialties presented as tribute to Yu following his quelling of the flood and subsequent survey of the realm. Inside the temple’s aging halls, the images of dragons and snakes refer to the pestilential creatures that invaded the central states along with the waters of the flood. In some versions of his myth, Yu is heralded as much for driving away these creatures as he is for ending the floods. Within the religious context of the shrine, a space dedicated to maintaining a connection with the dead, the citrus trees and paintings are designed to materialize and illustrate Yu’s mythology. Whether they fulfill that function is another question. The temple’s desuetude suggests that this attempt to institutionalize Yu’s traces in the mountains of Zhongzhou may not have succeeded as planned. In his study of the Sichuan frontier in the Song Dynasty, Richard von Glahn cites this poem as early evidence of the secularization of the cults of the ancient kingdom of Ba, which included the Three Gorges.49 Though it conforms to a poetic pattern in Du Fu’s work for describing isolated temples, the lack of interest that Du Fu notes might also have something to do with Yu’s transformation from a local deity to a Confucian exemplar. Against the impermanent spatial and pictorial inscriptions that celebrate this particular Yu, the immaterial phenomena that fill the first and third couplets of the poem appear newly stable—they not only predate the temple buildings, but they will also outlive their passing. In the final couplet, Du Fu moves from natural images to a statement of personal knowledge: 早知乘四載 疏鑿控三巴

Long have I known that by riding the four vehicles, Dredging and carving, he mastered the three Ba

The archaic phrases “four vehicles” (sizai 四載) and “dredging and carving” (shuzao 疏鑿), which echo much older accounts of Yu’s feats, give these lines a triumphant ring. Du Fu’s characterization of them as things he’s known for a long time, however, adds an ambiguous undertone. Why does it matter that

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this is something that he’s long known, and what does this knowledge have to do with the scene before him? In the second “Autumn Stirrings” poem, Du Fu tests his literary experience of the Three Gorges against his personal experience—he not only hears the crying gibbons, he “truly” sheds the tears of the old folk song. Is he is simply saying, as one commentator suggests, that he is now able to match his knowledge to the realities of a landscape dredged and carved?50 “Yu’s Shrine” is an atmospheric poem that turns enigmatic in its last couplet.51 The tenor of Du Fu’s claim to previous knowledge remains opaque, but the interaction of shi and xu images in the first three couplets and the personal tone of the final couplet suggest that he is not only comparing his knowledge of Yu against the physical realities of Yu’s shrine or the landscape he mastered, but also his own fate against that of the Yu enshrined in the temple. If even the traces of Yu the Great are subject to the vagaries of time, then what claim to permanence can the poet hope to stake? The doubts that “Yu’s Shrine” raises about the status of Yu’s traces and deeds continue to echo through “At Qutang Contemplating the Past 瞿唐懷古,” a poem Du Fu wrote in Kuizhou, not long after his visit to Zhongzhou:52 西南萬壑注 勁敵兩崖開 地與山根裂 江從月窟來 削成當白帝 空曲隱陽臺 疏鑿功雖美 陶鈞力大哉

In the southwest myriad streams converge Where fierce enemies are divided by paired palisades When the earth from its mountain roots was rent The Jiang from the Moon Cave came Pared to perfection it stands opposite Baidi In an empty bend it hides the Yang Terrace Though his feats of dredging and carving were glorious The power of the Potter’s Wheel was greater yet

If “At Qutang Contemplating the Past” looks back to “Yu’s Shrine,” it also offers an alternative answer to the question that Du Fu poses at the beginning of “The Two Palisades of Qutang 瞿唐兩崖” (see Passage I): “The Three Gorges—from where do they come down to us?”53 Instead of a reference to competing textual traditions, however, here Du Fu compares Yu the Great’s primordial dredging with the generative forces of nature, “the Potter’s Wheel” (taojun 陶鈞), which he deems “greater yet.”54 Du Fu calls Yu’s “feats” (gong 功) “glorious” (mei 美), but it is the focused and sustained power of flowing water that actually separates these “fierce enemies,” the mountains that form the great chasm of Qutang and its gate, Kuimen.55

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In the first two couplets, Du Fu layers images in a dramatic sequence of geological processes framed by a mythical geography: streams converge from myriad sources, rending the earth and creating a channel that allows the Yangzi to arrive from the Moon Cave, mythical resting place of the moon and a poetic image for distant lands. “Pared to perfection” (xiaocheng 削成) in line 5, Kuimen and Qutang are then joined by two built structures: the first is Baidicheng, the fortified settlement constructed in the first century CE by Gongsun Shu 公孫述 (d. 36), a rebel leader who immodestly titled himself (and his base) Baidi 白帝, or White Emperor, after the mythological Lord of the West (a deity associated with autumn). Located just east of Kuizhou, directly opposite Kuimen and the Qutang Gorge, Baidicheng was the site of one Du Fu’s homes during his Kuizhou years and appears in many of his poems. The other structure is the Yang (sunny/sun) Terrace (Yangtai 陽臺). Discreetly hidden in a bend of the river downstream from Kuimen, this is the site of the romantic encounter between an ancient king of Chu and the goddess of Mt. Wu immortalized in Song Yu’s famous “Gaotang Rhapsody 高堂賦,” which I discuss in chapter 2. Just as the manmade fortifications of Baidi are placed opposite the natural gate of Kuimen, the Yang Terrace rests partially hidden in one of the great river’s bends. Against the ordering impulse embodied by these structures, Du Fu pits the physical products of gradual but irresistible natural forces. The title of the poem conveys something of this tension. The phrase that I have translated as “contemplating the past”—huaigu 懷古—refers not simply to a thought process and its object, but also to the emotions that traces of the past give rise to in one’s body (the literal meaning of huai 懷 is “bosom/ breast” or “to carry in the bosom”), as well as to the category of poems inspired by those traces.56 In “At Qutang Contemplating the Past,” the manmade structures in the third couplet are precisely the kinds of traces that inspire poets to meditate on the past, but they are not Du Fu’s primary focus. What occupies him is the topography that supports those traces—Qutang Gorge and Kuimen—both of which are traditionally described as among the most impressive of Yu the Great’s traces. As if in response to that tradition, Du Fu ends the poem with both a concession and an exclamation: Though Yu’s feats have been called glorious, it is the power of “nature,” expressed through the image of the endlessly generative “Potter’s Wheel,” that truly impresses. Du Fu is not simply reviewing these two options and coming out on the side of nature, he is using a textual allusion to oppose the forces of nature to the human desire to will order on a world that is always decaying and being made anew. In so doing, he implies

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that the narrative of transmission—though “glorious”—pales in comparison to the might of nature and its dominion over humans. He makes this point by echoing (but changing the subject of ) a passage from the Zuozhuan 左傳, one of the earliest histories in the Chinese tradition: The king by Heaven’s grace sent duke Ding of Liu to the Ying to compliment Zhaomeng on the accomplishment of the toils of his journey; and [he accompanied him] to his lodging-house near a bend of the Luo. “How admirable,” said the viscount of Liu, “was the merit of Yu! His intelligent virtue reached far. But for Yu, we should have been fishes. That you and I manage the business of the princes in our caps and robes is all owing to Yu.”57

Du Fu borrows the language of the Duke of Zhao’s exclamation—“How admirable was the merit of Yu 美哉禹功”—but silences the tone of awe conveyed by the exclamatory particle zai 哉, replacing it with the conditional sui 雖 (although) and transposing it to the final line, where it elevates a new and even greater power: 疏鑿功雖美 陶鈞力大哉

Though his feats of dredging and carving were glorious The power of the Potter’s Wheel was greater yet

According to the Duke of Zhao, it is not simply the draining of the empire that should be attributed to Yu, but also the establishment and maintenance of its system of rule and order, which is carried out by those who wear “caps and robes.”58 For the exiled Du Fu, confronted with the present impressive riverscape, the correlation between Yu’s heroic hydraulic engineering and the smooth functioning of the “business of the princes” must have seemed a bitter irony. Not only had Du Fu repeatedly failed in his desire to don “cap and robe” and serve the Tang royal house, he had also been forced from his ancestral lands to this dreary hinterland by a catastrophic breakdown of political, spatial, and cultural order. No longer a trace of the mythical act on which the imperial order was based, the Gorges become an emblem both of Du Fu’s personal failures and of the fragmentation of that imperial order. As a deity who became the founder of a dynasty, Yu was both a god and a man. His feet marked out the entirety of the realm, but he was not unscathed by his tremendous labors. According some accounts, Yu’s efforts left his hands horribly calloused and his body partially paralyzed, forcing him to walk with a strange hopping movement. If the “traces of Yu” testify to his superhuman

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strength, the shambling “gait of Yu” (Yubu 禹步) is a reminder of his infirmities.59 Celebratory but also sometimes ambivalent references to “Yu’s feats” appear in many of Du Fu’s Kuizhou poems, but this lame Yu does not. Had Du Fu embraced the more human Yu, he might have found a partner in his nearly constant physical suffering. Instead, he destabilized the mythology of Yu’s in more subtle ways, by comparing them to the generative and destructive forces of nature, forces against which the human will to inscribe order on the world would always fail. If, as Mark Edward Lewis has argued, early Chinese texts conceived of civilization as emerging from a state of primordial chaos, the cosmogonic narratives of the progressive ordering of the world that they offered coexisted with a cultural memory of that original chaos, which “survived as a permanent background condition to human existence.”60 In Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry, the threat of chaos is ever-present; it can be diminished for a time by imposing order on the world—real order for Yu and imaginary order for Du Fu—but it can never be entirely eliminated.

Singing One’s Feeling s on Tr aces of the Pa st Du Fu was a man rich in words but poor in the kinds of deeds recorded in China’s great histories. Lacking proof beyond his poems of his unfailing loyalty to the empire, he became an “autobiographer of ‘being’ rather than ‘deeds.’ ”61 This being encompassed not only the thwarted civil servant and invalid poet, but also alternative avatars, from the “lone fisherman” of his “Autumn Stirrings” and the “single gull of the sand” (yi sha ou 一沙鷗) in his famous “Writing My Feelings While Travelling at Night 旅夜書懷”62 to the many earlier poets and historical figures associated with the southern lands of Du Fu’s exile. These avatars were integral to his attempt to refigure space and time in response to his displacement to the frontier of a culture in crisis. The acts of mapping that they made possible helped Du Fu make sense of his immediate visual and aural experience of the Three Gorges by filtering it through the lenses of personal experience, memory, and textual learning. Du Fu’s mapping is defined at every stage by competing and contradictory forces: the aching pull of homesickness and the resignation that comes with the realization that he and his family may never leave the south. His thoughts often turn to the places and people of his past, but he can transcend neither his own corporeality nor his exile in the Gorges. Forced to live by the gaping maw of Kuimen, he speaks not of Yu the Great’s mastery, as he did in “Yu’s Shrine,” but of the greatness of nature’s power. In “At Qutang Yearning for

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the Past,” the accounts that promote the “glory” of Yu’s feats give way to a landscape that is the product of natural, not supernatural, forces. As Du Fu becomes more comfortable with the lore and history of the Gorges, he continues to remap the landscape, envisioning it as a ground for the immaterial but enduring traces of language and cultural memory. The Three Gorges allow for such disparate figurations because they represent a spatial concept that encompasses a spectrum of culturally coded markmaking—at one end, they stand as an enduring monument to Yu’s mastery, which poets before and after Du Fu describe as still legible on the walls of the Gorges;63 at the other, they are the unstable ground of fading traces of human dwelling that endure through accidental survival or through the more reliable medium of words. It is through the textual trace in particular that Du Fu poetically repopulates the Three Gorges with its former residents—sympathetic locals and fellow exiles—figures at the periphery of empire who have come to occupy central positions in the culture Du Fu so loves. Embodied in Du Fu’s poetry, their words and stories are far more substantive than the physical traces that are attributed to them. Without the fixity of home, unable to repair the fractured empire, Du Fu orients himself through their traces. The centering power of the textual trace is at the heart of the five poems of “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past 詠懷古跡五首,” which immediately follow the “Autumn Stirrings” series in Qiu Zhao’ao’s 仇兆鰲 widely read edition of Du Fu’s works. In “Autumn Stirrings,” Du Fu attempts to anchor himself in the glorious imperial history of Chang’an, but he can do so only through the mediation of a volatile and inhospitable natural world. In “Singing My Feelings,” Du Fu orients himself not by moving between Kuizhou and Chang’an, but by establishing his affinity with exemplary figures of suffering and exile from the past. Its title notwithstanding, this series does not revolve around physical historical traces (guji 古跡). Instead, it explores a collection of figures with connections to the area in and around the gorges. Though important to the lore of the region as developed by Du Fu, the figures in the first, third, fourth, and fifth poems are not part of the larger story that Fixing Landscape tells.64 To close this chapter, I focus on the series’ second poem, in which Du Fu juxtaposes the affective and cultural power of the textual ji/trace with a countervailing conception of the ji as a concrete landmark. As we shall see in chapter 2, the idea of ji as something to be located in space, personally visited, and physically reinscribed in order to preserve it became common over the course of the Song Dynasty, dramatically reshaping the textual, pictorial, and physical contours of the Three Gorges as Du Fu knew it.

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The second poem of “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past” centers on the Chu poet Song Yu, about whom little is known. According to tradition, he served as a court official during the reign of King Xiang of Chu 楚襄 王 (r. 298–263 bce), but was cashiered for speaking too forthrightly.65 Most consistently associated with modern Hunan, but sometimes extending as far west as Kuizhou, Chu was a peripheral but powerful state for well over six hundred years leading up to the unification of China by the state of Qin in 221 bce. Song Yu is credited with authoring a number of influential works in the southern or “Chu” style included in the Songs of Chu (Chuci 楚辭), an anthology famous for preserving secularized traces of shamanistic songs used in regional cults, including those centered on river deities, many of whom came to be anthropomorphized as gods and goddesses.66 Song Yu is often paired in the literary imagination with his more famous contemporary Qu Yuan, the archetypal exile, suicide, and author of one of the most important poetic laments in the tradition, “Encountering Sorrow 離騷.” Despite Qu Yuan’s fame, Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry draws more deeply on works associated with Song Yu, perhaps because the region was littered with traces associated with his poetry, including his former residence, the royal palaces of Chu, and the Yang Terrace atop Mt. Wu, which appears in a bend of the Yangzi in “At Qutang Contemplating the Past.” 詠懷古跡，其二 搖落深知宋玉悲 風流儒雅亦吾師 悵望千秋一灑淚 蕭條異代不同時 江山故宅空文藻 雲雨荒台豈夢思 最是楚宮俱泯滅 舟人指點到今疑

Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past, Second Poem67 Amidst autumn’s decay, deeply I understand Song Yu’s sorrow A dashing romantic, learned, elegant—he too is my teacher In despair, gazing across a thousand autumns— a single scattering of tears Forlorn, isolated in different ages—no contemporaries we Tales of his former home midst river and mountain are baseless literary stylings But clouds and rain by the ruined terrace—how could they be the yearnings of a dream? Most of all, the palaces of Chu have been totally effaced Boatmen point them out, but these days they are full of doubt

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The location of Song Yu’s house varied depending on one’s sources: some said that it could be found downriver, past the Gorges in Jiangling, while others claimed that it was further west in Zigui, in the heart of the Gorges.68 Du Fu is less confident, suggesting that references to his house are nothing more than “baseless literary stylings” (kong wenzao 空文藻). The precise connection between literary style and Song Yu’s house is obscure, though it is possible, as I have suggested in my translation, that Du Fu is referring to “baseless” texts produced by locals or traveling writers who wished to embellish their accounts of the landscape by exploiting Song’s aura.69 Du Fu contrasts these suspect accounts of Song Yu’s house with the ruins of the Yang Terrace, a structure most commentators locate in the mountains of the Wu Gorge, downriver from Kuizhou.70 For Du Fu, the ruination of the Yang Terrace gives it a materiality that both Song Yu’s “former residence” and the completely effaced “palaces of Chu” in line 7 lack. Famously described in Song Yu’s “Gaotang Rhapsody” as the location of a sensual dream assignation between a Chu king and the goddess of Mt. Wu, the terrace’s materiality is confirmed by its desolation (huang 荒). In other Kuizhou poems, including “At Qutang Yearning for the Past,” Du Fu describes the terrace as an integral, if secluded, part of the local landscape, though there is nothing in these works to suggest that he actually visited this site. Had he climbed to the ruins, what would he have found there?71 The terrace to which Du Fu and so many other poets refer was probably not the physical trace of the “original” immortalized in Song Yu’s rhapsody. More likely, it was the ruin of a structure intended for some other use but repurposed as a literary-historical trace, one of many Yang Terraces found throughout the ancient state of Chu (and as far east as modern Anhui Province) that were used to commemorate and give tangible form to the supernatural events described in Song Yu’s poem.72 These Yang Terraces, like the former residences of Song Yu, are examples of a common desire to seek, and if necessary fabricate, physical coordinates for poetic sites. This search for physical traces exemplifies how literary discourse (especially the belief that poetry documents actual experiences, places, and times) concretely shapes and transforms the landscape. The “lexical landscapes and textual mountains” that Paul Kroll has described in another context had a way of materializing long after the poems had been written and their poets buried. By calling into question the historical reliability of structures purported to be Song Yu’s former home, Du Fu reflects on one consequence of this search for physical landmarks. Competing claims to authenticity lead to the atomization of ji like Song Yu’s house. No longer limited to one site, they appear throughout the landscape.

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In contrast to such dubious physical traces, Du Fu begins the poem with a series of textual traces that form a more solid connection between Song Yu and himself than any building possibly could. The first line opens with a quotation from one of the “Nine Disputations 九辯” of the Songs of Chu, which are traditionally attributed to Song Yu. The phrase I have translated as “autumn’s decay”—yaoluo 搖落—describes the withering and decay of vegetal life (“fluttering falling” is a more literal translation) and evokes a rich tradition of autumnal poetry and meditations on mortality.73 In the second line of the opening couplet, Du Fu describes Song Yu by borrowing a list of qualities— dashing romantic, learned, elegant—from a poem by the famous poet and exile Yu Xin 庾信 (513–581), the subject of the first poem in this series, and, according to tradition, a former resident of Song Yu’s house in Jiangling.74 Perhaps the strongest link between Song Yu and Yu Xin, however, comes from the latter’s magnum opus, “Mourning the Southland Rhapsody 哀江南賦,”75 which takes its title from a line in another Songs of Chu poem attributed to Song Yu, “Summoning the Soul 招魂”: 目極千里兮, 傷春心 魂兮歸來, 哀江南!

The eye extends for one thousand li—ah—how it pains this spring heart Soul—ah—return, come! How I mourn for the Southland!76

By the end of the second line, these embedded textual links between Song Yu and Yu Xin open out onto Du Fu. Song Yu—along with Yu Xin—is not simply a source of poetic language, he is “also” (yi 亦) Du Fu’s “teacher” (shi 師) in poetry and life. If the physical landmarks that Du Fu mentions in this poem are either out of view or no longer present, traces of Song Yu’s famed words and upright character have found new homes, first in Yu Xin’s poetry and then in both the person and the poetry of Du Fu. These words and traits, formulated poetically, transmitted textually, and embodied by Du Fu, have endured; Song Yu’s home and the palaces of Chu have not. Those who seek out these structures in order to establish a physical link to the past fail to understand, as Du Fu does, the nature of the ji/trace. It is both more elusive and more common than the historical site—reflected moonlight, an echo of an earlier text, a way of seeing the landscape, or a personal or literary quality studied and absorbed through poetry. The pointing fingers of the poem’s final line are the traces they seek, evidence of Song Yu’s enduring literary legacy. The homes of both the ancient poet and the king he immortalized may be gone, but they live on in those fingers.

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In Du Fu’s poem there is no longer anything concrete at which to point, but that is not the end of the matter. “Totally effaced” traces can be reinscribed. Supported by sufficient fame or other cultural values, even immaterial literary traces have a way of metamorphosing into stone and wood. As early as the tenth century, Du Fu’s southern connections came to capture literati interest, helping to define a moral and literary image of the poet that spoke to contemporary concerns. An important corollary to this shift was the establishment of Du Fu as a figure of local fame in many of the cities, towns, and villages through which he passed during his time in the south. Though still viewed as a homesick northerner, Du Fu was posthumously embedded in multiple locales by officials and writers who rebuilt his “former residences” (guju 故 居), established shrines, and systematically reinscribed his lingering traces. Kuizhou and surrounding areas offered many such sites of memorialization and pilgrimage, and men of later generations worked hard to reinscribe Du Fu in the landscapes that he helped make famous.

2 F RO M T R AC E T O S I T E Tracks are what is left behind; they bear witness to something that was never there, but always departing, disappearing . . . They are vestiges of the stride and the instant between strides. To notice them, to retrace them, to make sense of them, is to engage with the leftovers of history and to harness their potential to indicate different paths into the future. —Paul Carter1

P ointing Fingers For Du Fu, traces are not necessarily solid. Structures like the “palaces of Chu” might disappear altogether, but the clouds and rain that cloak Mt. Wu linger on. As traces of the divine made famous by Song Yu, these atmospheric phenomena continue to shape how travelers see and imagine the Three Gorges. In the second poem of Du Fu’s “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past 詠懷古跡,” the guji 古跡 is something the poet embodies—a fragment of the past inscribed in the self. What literal-minded travelers fail to recognize when they ask boatmen to point out the palaces of Chu or when they search for Song Yu’s house is that they are traces of the things they seek. Over the course of the Northern and Southern Song dynasties (960–1279), Du Fu became the object of many such seekers, men who searched the landscape for

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places he had occupied and about which he had written. Some reconstructed buildings associated with the poet, establishing them as sites of literary pilgrimage and worship; others physically inscribed his poems in the landscape. Equally inspired by his fame as a poet and as a moral exemplar, they altered the landscape to make his traces legible or to produce legible traces where none could be found. In the process, they tried to fix the shifting traces of Du Fu’s world, reinscribing them as sites that could be easily identified and visited, a process that continues to this day. Writers, including Du Fu, had long been interested in locating and describing famous historical sites, but it was during the Song Dynasty that ji became the object of systematic textual and empirical research as part of a larger revolution in spatial thought. The new “modes of space making” that Song scholars developed “formed the basis for spatial ideas throughout the rest of the imperial era and beyond.”2 Their reinscription of the Three Gorges as a landscape of sites was supported by a group of related literary forms—local and empire-wide gazetteers (fangzhi 方志 and zongzhi 總志, respectively), the travel essay, and the travel diary (both youji 遊記)—the development of which coincided with the elevation of Du Fu to the pinnacle of the literary pantheon. According to Eva Shan Chou, Du Fu’s reputation as poet and cultural hero crystalized during the Northern Song (960–1127) as part “of a larger contemporary preoccupation with self-definition, in which Northern Sung [sic] literati sought precedents in the figures of the past.”3 Literati turned mostly to texts for these precedents, but they also sought more tangible links. By searching out what Paul Carter calls the “leftovers of history” in landscapes that were already well known through texts and images, they reinscribed familiar spaces in order to create “paths into the future” by way of the past. Thanks to his prestige as well as the large number of poems he wrote in and around Kuizhou, Du Fu figures prominently in Song geographical and travel writing on the Three Gorges region. When describing sites directly associated with Du Fu, authors are careful to locate them in relation to the contemporary landscape (as “X miles from the city wall,” for example). When introducing topographical features or other sites of interest, they often cite Du Fu’s poems, not only to add literary depth to their spatial description, but also to give readers a concrete sense of places they might only know through poetry. Du Fu’s role in these texts makes him an indispensable figure for understanding how the Three Gorges region has been reinscribed and reconceptualized over the last millennium. This chapter explores this process by looking at two sites that appear frequently in Du Fu’s poetry: his “Lofty Retreat” (gaozhai 高齋), which was located in the village of Dongtun 東屯 on the outskirts of Kuizhou;

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and Mt. Wu (Wushan 巫山), the tallest peak in the Wu Gorges and mythical home of the goddess of Mt. Wu. “Lofty Retreat” (gaozhai 高齋) is the name Du Fu gave to three different homes he occupied in the Kuizhou area. By triangulating the status of his Dongtun “Lofty Retreat” in the eighteenth century, the present day, and the twelfth century, I show not only how the fixed site comes to supplement (and in some cases supplant) the immaterial trace in the cultural imagination, but also how the contemporary spatial reorganization of the Three Gorges has inspired a newly pressing interest in locating remnants of the past. My second site, which takes us away from Du Fu, is Mt. Wu, the supposed setting for Song Yu’s “Gaotang Rhapsody” (Gaotang fu 高唐賦), in which an ancient Chu king sleeps with a goddess in his dreams. The most famous erotic figure in early Chinese poetry, the goddess of Mt. Wu (Wushan shennü 巫山神女) remains a symbol of otherworldly sensuality. Beginning in the Tang Dynasty, and gaining momentum during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279), however, a small number of writers worked to sanitize her mythology. Attempts to reform the goddess were based not only in the reinterpretation of Song Yu’s rhapsody, but also in the study of texts that recounted her role in helping Yu the Great bore through the Three Gorges and in the reappraisal of conventionalized descriptions of the landscape of Mt. Wu. Writers who traveled to the region cast a skeptical eye on Mt. Wu and the Wu Gorge, comparing what they saw with what they had read in order to render the landscape spatially and morally unambiguous. Both Mt. Wu and Du Fu’s house at Dongtun provide vividly realized examples of how ephemeral and ambiguous traces of the kind that characterize Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry have been fixed as legible and enduring sites in the more than twelve hundred years since his death.

From Ancient Tr ace to Famous Site The embrace of the clearly defined “site” over the more ambiguous “trace” (both ji 跡) required clear physical referents for textual knowledge—things to point at and visit, even if only in the mind’s eye. When the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) emperor Qianlong 乾隆 (r. 1735–1796) sat down to admire The Shu River (Shuchuan tu 蜀川圖), a prized Song Dynasty painting of the Yangzi River as it flows through Shu (modern Sichuan), for example, it was the clear labeling of sites of special interest that inspired him to inscribe Du Fu’s “Autumn Stirrings” in an open space near the upper edge of the handscroll:

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Historical sites [guji 古跡] are so clear they can be picked out one by one [lili keshu 歷歷可數]. Imagining [xiang 想] old Du in his river pavilion wielding his brush, my inspiration was by no means shallow, so I inscribed his poems on the scroll to mark [志] them as paired treasures.4

For Qianlong, who was steeped in the literary traditions of Shu (modern Sichuan), the clarity of the textualized landscape, which allows him to “imagine” Du Fu in his riverside home, comes not from the painter’s success in capturing the likeness of famous landmarks, but from the addition of 189 written labels that offer the kind of information one finds in gazetteers and maps, including place names and historical landmarks, distances between major towns, brief descriptions of how place names have changed since the Tang, and citations (or, in some cases, paraphrases) of important geographical texts such as the Commentary to the Classic of Rivers and the ninth-century Treatise on the Prefectures and Counties of the Yuanhe Era (Yuanhe junxian zhi 元和郡縣志) (figure 2.1). While many of these labels are inscribed over carefully rendered topographical features, such as the mountains that form the Qutang Gorge, or well-known cities, such as Kuizhou, others are simply placed within the negative space that the artist uses to represent the river or cloud-covered mountains. The label for Du Fu’s thatched hall at Dongtun, for example, seems to hang in the air of an empty valley, just beyond the walls of Kuizhou (figure 2.2). Brought to life by texts that have long mediated the materiality of the region, The Shu River in turn reanimates those texts by providing a panoramic landscape in which to inscribe the sites they describe or at which they were written. That many of the painting’s labels mark sites that are not represented suggests that learned viewers would have been able to produce their own mental images, images that might inspire the further inscription of the painting, as was the case for Qianlong. The Shu River is both an object combining pictorial and textual approaches to geography and an object for aesthetic use—not simply something at which to look and point, but an object inscribed and inscribable. Qianlong, who is famous for writing on many objects in his vast collections, was more than a little inspired by The Shu River. Altogether, his additions on the painting and in colophons that follow it total more than seventeen hundred characters and include not only the complete text of the “Autumn Stirrings,” but also two quatrains, a number of prose passages, a small painting of a flowering plum branch, and two long poems. The second of these long poems, a 406-character heptasyllabic poem from June 19, 1746 (the same day he inscribed the “Autumn Stirrings”) restages a viewing of the painting by tying its landmarks to the historical, mythological, and literary figures associated with them. It treats the

figure 2.1 The Shu River (Shuchuan tu 蜀川圖) (detail), attributed to Li Gonglin 李 公麟 (ca. 1041–1106). This portion of the scroll contains the walled city of Kuizhou, labels for Du Fu’s “lofty retreat” and his home at Dongtun (see figure 2.2), Baidicheng, Qutang, and a host of other local landmarks. See also color plate 4. Source: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1916.539

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figure 2.2 The Shu River (detail): The label for Du Fu’s “Dongtun thatched hall.” Source: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1916.539

landscape painting as a mnemonic device that evokes Shu not through mimetic representations of its landmarks but through the inscriptions that label those landmarks, including those associated with Yu the Great’s feats: 岷山導江幾千里 神禹底績猶堪指

The Min Mountains channel the Jiang for thousands of li The God Yu’s feats of merit can still be pointed out5

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Beginning with this opening couplet, Qianlong’s poem synthesizes the experience of simultaneously reading and viewing the painting, while also providing a hint of what that experience might have looked like—a group of learned men leaning over a prized painting and excitedly pointing out (zhi 指) sites of interest. They point to identify what Qianglong calls guji古跡—traces of the past or historical sites—but which might be more accurately termed shengji 勝跡—“famous sites” rich with cultural meanings brought to life by the knowledgeable viewer. Guji and shengji are sometimes used interchangeably, though they describe slightly different kinds of ji. Scholars have suggested a range of translations for guji, including “heritage sites,”6 “traces of the past” (which sometimes refer to places that no longer exist),7 “ancient sites,”8 and “historical trace[s] in a narrow sense.”9 Shengji, which Wu Hung translates as a “renowned place,” generally refers to a site of scenic or historical interest (or both), “which has become a persistent subject of literary and artistic commemoration and representation.”10 Though guji and shengji overlap in meaning and usage, shengji refers more consistently to physical sites that make up a particular landscape. They may be associated with specific figures or literary moments, and may even take the form of ruins, but they are generally welldefined landmarks enriched by “countless layers of human experience.”11 If the aesthetics of guji depend on a spatialized historical consciousness—a sense of one’s relation to and distance from a particular past—the aesthetics of shengji are based in an appreciation of how the well-defined historical trace contributes to a sense of place in the present. As a form of imaginative spatial production centered on famous sites, Qianlong’s virtual journey creates a powerful sense of place through text and image. While “sense of place” normally connotes an affective, phenomenological, and cultural connection to one’s immediate surroundings, here it describes an appreciation for place mediated by the textual and visual expressions of other people.12 It is this sense of place that inspires the emperor to further mediate the landscape through a creative act of poetic chorography that links the painting’s sites into a journey that is simultaneously literary, spatial, and historical. This is possible because Qianlong has access not only to poetic works such as Du Fu’s “Autumn Stirrings,” but also to geographical writings designed to fix famous sites in time and space. If his appreciation of Du Fu’s poetry puts him in the long tradition of ji as aesthetic and affective stimuli, his use of the latter hints at how ji functioned as physical sites in spatial thinking in the millennium following the fall of the Tang. In his long poetic journey and introductory inscription, Qianlong alludes to many such sites, including Du Fu’s former home in Chengdu and his “river

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pavilion” (jiangge 江閣). By the mid-eighteenth century, Du Fu’s homes and the Three Gorges sites he had written about had been important landmarks for over six hundred years. What distinguishes the posthumous status of Du Fu’s homes from that of the many historical traces Du Fu wrote about, is that the former were defined by literary and visual forms that drew on post-Tang empirical research methods to fix ji as geographically locatable sites. The men who produced such texts, guides, maps, and paintings might have been inspired by Du Fu’s depiction of the Three Gorges as a literary landscape made up of a patchwork of immaterial traces, but they sought to identify and reinscribe Du Fu’s own traces as part of a landscape of sites. In our own time, some scholars, inspired perhaps by the urgent timeline of the rising waters of the Three Gorges reservoir, which reached capacity in 2009, have revived these reinscriptional practices as part of their own attempt to fix, once and for all, the “present location” (xiandi 現地) of Du Fu’s Kuizhou homes or the palaces of Chu that appear in the second of his “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past” poems. In a 2000 article published in the Chinese-language Journal of Du Fu Studies, for example, Tan Wenxing 譚文興 launched an extended critique of a book titled A Study of the Current Locations of Sites in Du Fu’s Kuizhou Poetry, by the Taiwanese scholar Jian Jinsong 簡錦松.13 Jian’s is the first monograph dedicated wholly to identifying the present locations of sites associated with Du Fu, including his Kuizhou homes at Dongtun and Rangxi 瀼西.14 It draws on an extensive body of geographical writing, including travel essays, diaries, and gazetteers, as well as close to a millennium of commentaries on Du Fu’s poetry, scientific literature on the hydrology of the Yangzi, reports produced by the Three Gorges Dam Project, historical and contemporary maps, and onthe-ground research carried out before completion of the dam. Jian’s goal is to break free from what he sees as the circular logic common among Mainland Chinese scholars such as Tan Wenxing, most of whom, he argues, rely on unscientific, error-prone commentarial traditions to identify the present-day locations of sites associated with Du Fu.15 Tan’s critique, in turn, takes Jian to task for contradicting himself and failing to read Du Fu’s poetry with sufficient care. The substance of this cross-strait argument is less compelling than the shared ideas that underlie it. Despite their disagreements, Tan and Jian are both participating in a contemporary, GPS-calibrated version of the premodern search for precisely located and authenticated sites. The precision that they seek does not contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of the spatiotemporal logic of the ji/trace in Du Fu’s poetry. Instead, xiandi research

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operates according to the primarily spatial logic of the famous site or shengji, though it seems oblivious to the possibility that its acts of location are also acts of spatial inscription. Like the sources on which it draws, xiandi research contributes to the ongoing production of local, regional, national, and cultural landscapes as constituted by sites of special interest. My point in drawing attention to this approach is not, of course, to rebuke it with the counterclaim that Du Fu’s poetry is pure invention.16 What the literal-mindedness of xiandi scholarship excludes is the way that Du Fu layers citation or “bookish landscapes” together with the fevered visions of memory and the physical geography of Kuizhou.17 The sites that xiandi scholars seek to fix were not fully fixed in Du Fu’s poetry—they were “always departing, disappearing.”18 That is the source of their power. They were experienced by the ailing poet as part of an almost hallucinatory itinerary that led, across a sea of stars or an expanse of water, to other times and other places.

* Though they are heirs to the same Song Dynasty revolution in spatial thinking, today’s xiandi scholars and the Qianlong emperor do very different things with their knowledge of physical sites associated with Du Fu. In 1746, Qianlong and his companions approached The Shu River with a “spatial historical consciousness” that held the scholarly search for concrete sites and the evocative poetics of the ji/trace in balance as part of a creative enterprise combining calligraphic inscription, poetic composition, and painting.19 When Qianlong envisions Du Fu’s river pavilion from the luxurious confines of his Beijing palace, he begins a lyrical-inscriptional detour (by way of the “Autumn Stirrings”) that opens onto Kuizhou and the Three Gorges. Although he dedicates a few lines to the region in his long 1746 poem, the emperor does not describe his vision of Du Fu and his home in any detail. It is only at the end of the collection of colophons that follows The Shu River—where we find an image by the court painter Ding Guanpeng丁觀鵬 (active ca. 1740–1768)—that we get a full sense of how the lyrical immediacy of the Kuizhou landscape interacts with the narrative of the regional panorama of sites. Ding’s painting (figure 2.3), produced by command of the emperor, is meant to capture the “poetic intention” (shiyi 詩意) of the final couplet of Du Fu’s second “Autumn Stirrings” poem: 請看石上藤蘿月 已映洲前蘆荻花

Look! the vine and creeper moon that was atop the rocks Shines already on the reed flowers before the islet

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figure 2.3 Ding Guanpeng’s illustration of the final couplet of Du Fu’s second “Autumn Stirrings” poem.

Ding’s interpretation of these lines takes the form of a moonlit scene in which Du Fu stands on a riverbank looking across the water toward a rocky outcropping, a vine-choked pine tree, and the reflection of the moon in the water. To his right, a fisherman in midstream rows toward the bank; to his left is a small group of partially visible buildings. Whereas The Shu River presents an imagined panorama of the Yangzi as it flows through Sichuan—a massive geographical, historical, and administrative region synthesized as a unified cultural scene—Ding’s painting draws on a more intimate landscape style to present the unfolding of a single lyrical moment.20 In chapter 1, I characterized the shifting light in Du Fu’s second “Autumn Stirrings” poem as an immaterial trace with multiple valences—a reflection of the moon, a manifestation of time’s passage, and a reminder of the temporal and spatial chasms that keep him from where he so badly wants to be. For Du Fu, fragments of his past appear and disappear on the surfaces of the Three Gorges like light and shadow cast by the moon. In his visualization of this particular moment, Ding does not try (and indeed cannot hope) to capture the alternation of appearance and disappearance, fullness and emptiness that define the “Autumn Stirrings.” Instead, he focuses on giving shape to Du Fu’s immediate surroundings, including a cluster of buildings, one of which might be the “river pavilion” that first inspires Qianlong’s lyrical detour through the Gorges. Partially obscured at the edge of the image, these structures link Ding’s painting, Qianlong’s inscriptions (both of which refer to Du Fu’s homes), and

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the larger landscape of The Shu River (on which Du Fu’s homes in Chengdu and Kuizhou are labeled). Though it retains the historical significance of a guji, Du Fu’s home also functions here as a shengji that is legible as part of a larger cultural landscape of sites comprising the region of Shu. This is precisely how Ding describes The Shu River in a short text that accompanies his painting: “in a single glance across one thousand li of river and mountains nothing is omitted. Each and every noted site and famous region [shengji mingqu 勝蹟名區] follows one after the other in an instant [zhigu jian 指顧間].” The literal meaning of the colloquial phrase, zhigu jian 指顧間, which I have translated as “in an instant,” is “within the time it takes to point and nod.” Just as Qianlong describes pointing out (zhi 指) the physical traces of Yu the Great in his long poem, Ding reminds us that ji are not simply evocative sources of artistic inspiration but also objects in and of the landscape—sites to be pointed out or nodded at while traveling along the river.

Finding D u F u at Home It is easy to see how thoughts of Du Fu’s home might inspire artistic acts or contribute to a general sense of the Three Gorges as a culturally important landscape. What is not immediately obvious, however, is the extended process by which Du Fu’s home came to be imbued with carefully determined cultural values. During the Song, travel writers and local officials began to produce essays and other texts centered on structures that were presented by locals as Du Fu’s former homes. These same structures appear in empire-wide gazetteers of the thirteenth century, such as Zhu Mu’s 祝穆 (d. after 1246) Fangyu shenglan 方輿勝覽 (first published 1246), and in local gazetteers for Kuizhou, the earliest extant of which was published in 1512.21 Gazetteers are encyclopedia-like texts in which the topography, mythology, history, economy, literature, and other aspects of a county or prefecture were collected and categorized to produce an epistemology of place designed not to question, but to bolster, local claims to fame. Though their approaches to Du Fu’s homes vary, the scholars and officials who compiled gazetteers and composed travel essays and diaries worked to locate them not just historically, but also spatially, in relation to the landscape of Kuizhou in their own time.22 For more skeptical authors, this sometimes meant questioning local claims, as the famed statesman, diarist, and poet Fan Chengda 范成大 (1126–1193) did when he moored his boat at Baidicheng on August 14, 1177:

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My fellow travelers [and I] went to Qutang to sacrifice [si 祀] to the White Emperor and to climb to the Three Gorges Hall and visit the Lofty Retreat, all within the old fort [at Baidicheng]. Although the Lofty Retreat is not necessarily the one about which Du Fu wrote, it still overlooks Yanyu Islet and affords a spectacular vista.23

This entry comes from Fan’s Record of a Wu Boat (Wuchuan lu 吳船錄), one of the earliest and best-known examples of the long-length travel diary genre (youji 遊記).24 It not only exemplifies the skepticism of certain forms of travel writing that became popular during the Song, it also provides evidence of the common practice of making historical claims for preexisting structures or even building new structures and identifying them as the “former residences” of famous figures. While the status of the “lofty retreat” is of only passing concern to Fan Chengda, for other Song travelers and officials, Du Fu’s homes were objects of special interest. During the long period of comparative neglect between his death and literary resurrection, however, the physical landmarks associated with his life in Chengdu, Kuizhou, and a host of sites were allowed to decay. Not yet enshrined as “former residences” of a figure of great fame, they were treated like normal buildings and often fell into disrepair. Some of them, including Du Fu’s famous Chengdu thatched hall (caotang 草堂), which was restored by Lü Dafang 吕大防 (1027–1097) in the eleventh century, or his Dongtun “lofty retreat” in Kuizhou, were rebuilt as memorial structures, sites of pilgrimage for the devout reader. The story of Du Fu’s literary influence is well known. What has been less thoroughly studied are the complex processes by which the unfolding of that influence, over generations of writers and readers, contributed to the reinscription of Du Fu’s poetic traces as coordinates comprising an itinerary of physical sites and landmarks. And what has been almost entirely ignored are the representational and material effects of this mapping, which slowly reconfigured how certain visitors perceived and experienced the landscape of the Three Gorges. The most direct way in which these processes reconfigured the landscape was through simple architectural intervention. Men like Lü Dafang, who rebuilt Du Fu’s Chengdu thatched hut, sought to reestablish a lost material connection to Du Fu by reconstructing the structures in which he had lived. To produce a sense of place often entailed physically reshaping the landscape and its built structures. This is not to say that “new” structures were seen as fake. Their authenticity depended on their status as sites of ritual and cultural practice, activities that created a powerful connection with the deceased figure of fame.

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Physical acts of spatial production were often bolstered by short essays (categorized as ji 記, or in some cases, youji 遊記) written by local officials.25 The literature of sites of interest was designed not only to promote the local, however. In many essays, the reinscription of the ji serves as a way to instantiate important values spatially, as in Lu You’s 陸游 (1125–1210) 1171 essay, “An Account of the Dongtun Lofty Retreat” (Dongtun gaozhai ji 東屯高齋記), which begins as an exercise in locating and attempting to adjudicate the current status of Du Fu’s three Kuizhou Lofty Retreats.26 Part of a larger class of what Lu You calls “lingering traces” (yiji 遺跡), each of these structures is associated with a specific section of Tang Kuizhou, a complex space comprised of walls, temples, and markets that no longer exists. Like all of these structures, Du Fu’s homes were not only located within Kuizhou and its environs, they also helped to constitute those now absent places. According to Lu You, at Baidicheng and Rangxi the physical substrate necessary for even the faintest of traces has been totally effaced.27 The only spot where it is still possible to envision both the location and surroundings of one of Du’s Lofty Retreats is at Dongtun, though Lu You says nothing of actual ruins and provides very little evidence for his conclusion. The link that he does establish is through one Li Xiang 李襄, whose family has lived in Dongtun for several generations and who claims to possess ancient scrolls from the Dali 大曆 reign period (766–779). These scrolls are perhaps the only things actually “still there” (youzai 猶在) from Du Fu’s time in Kuizhou. But what exactly do they have to do with the Tang poet? Are they manuscript copies of his work, perhaps in his own hand, or are they land deeds bearing his signature? Lu You does not answer these questions, but it is clear that the Dali era scrolls play an important role in confirming the spatial and temporal continuity of Du Fu’s presence in Dongtun. As objects from Du Fu’s lifetime, they differentiate Dongtun from Baidi and Rangxi as a place that still bears legible traces of the past, thus offering a site suitable for “visiting and mourning” (diao 弔). These objects are paired with a description of the surrounding area, which is “very reminiscent” (liangshi 良是) of that found in Du Fu’s poetry. As in the opening section of the essay, where Lu You judges Li Xiang’s property against the place described in Du Fu’s poetry, text and landscape are correlated as a way of locating people in space and time. Lu You’s focus on Dongtun is largely a function of what he claims is the original object of the essay—to “make note” (ji 記) of Li Xiang. Unlike Du Fu, who was an ambitious “man of the world” (tianxia shi 天下士), Li Xiang never even set off on the road to glory, thus avoiding suffering and humiliation. Instead, he chose to stay in place, living as a recluse without having had

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to seek office and then retire from the world. In this, he continues his connection to Dongtun and maintains the agricultural base necessary for a life of contemplative leisure. By comparison, Du Fu was unable to stay in Dongtun for the span of a single year. Lu You thus implicitly judges Du Fu a failure (shi 失) and Li a success (de 得) in navigating the travails of life while maintaining righteousness and propagating a family line. There is a clear irony to this: not only does the majority of the essay, ostensibly about Li, center on Du Fu, but the text itself is proof of the immortality that literary fame offers. From a certain perspective, Lu You’s essay is about the relative merits of different methods of “turning death into life” (shi si fu sheng 使死復生), ways of maintaining some form of presence in the face of absence. Li Xiang has achieved this by staying in place and becoming an integral component of the landscape of Dongtun. In contrast, Lu You’s failure to find hard evidence of any of the other Lofty Retreats renders Du Fu’s immortality almost totally immaterial. Only at Dongtun, where the poet is evoked by the landscape and the “ancient scrolls” embedded there, does he finds something worthy not only of mourning, but of “expending the effort” (chuli 出力) to memorialize. If the Dali scrolls are a textual surrogate for the poet, allowing the Li family to legitimate their Dongtun property as an authentic ji, then Lu You’s essay functions as a textual surrogate for readers who are unable to access Du Fu’s “lingering traces” in person. It fulfills this function not by recounting Lu You’s travels around Kuizhou or providing a description of the Lofty Retreat—as the essay’s title seems to promise—but by memorializing the values embodied by Li Xiang and Du Fu and embedded in the landscape of Dongtun. By making Li Xiang a mirror image of Du Fu—possessing a similar loftiness but a different fate—Lu You goes as far as he possibly can with the tools at his disposal towards reinscribing Du Fu in Dongtun. Those tools—the essay, brush, paper, printing, communities of readers and writers—create a sense of Dongtun as a cultural and historical place that can circulate textually throughout the realm. Text not only diffuses the ji, however; it also helps to fix it as an empirically authenticated site while also offering clear spatial details that allow readers to visit it in person, if they so desire. Essays like Lu You’s reinforce the relationship between people and places, but they only reflect one aspect of the reinscriptional practices that shaped the Three Gorges during the Song. Another aspect is the rebuilding of ancient structures or “former residences” (guju 故居) to serve as sites of pilgrimage. What Lu You does not tell us is that Li Xiang’s residence was just such a reconstruction. For this information, we must turn to an 1197 essay by the Kuizhou official Yu Xie 于䏶28 (fl. later twelfth to early thirteenth century):

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After Shaoling left the Gorges, his land changed owners three times. In recent times it came into the possession of a certain Li family, and scrolls in Du Fu’s hand were still there. Eventually, it [passed to a] son [of the Li family], Li Xiang, who was inclined to good deeds [po haoshi 頗 好事] and interested in ancient sites [jiangqiu guji 講求古蹟]. [Li Xiang] once again reconstructed a Lofty Retreat, and, in imitation of the old fellow of Fuzhou’s [efforts to] spread the reputation of Shaoling’s poetic intent, built a Hall of the Great Odes [daya tang 大雅堂]. Overlooking a stream he also built a thatched hall and painted his [Du Fu’s] posthumous portrait. Many years having passed, the roof had fallen into disrepair and was left unrepaired, the scrolls too had been spirited away by someone wielding great power and this former refuge of a past worthy had been all but reduced to a mound of brambles and shrubs [jingzhen zhi xu 荊榛之墟].29

From Yu Xie we learn that Li Xiang was worthy of praise not simply because he led an exemplary life of seclusion, but because he created a popular tourist attraction dedicated to Du Fu, complete with a reconstructed lofty retreat, a thatched hut containing Du Fu’s portrait, and a Hall of the Great Odes, modeled on another Sichuan structure that contained inscriptions of all of Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry in the hand of Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅 (1045–1105), “the old fellow of Fuzhou.” Li was more than simply “interested in ancient sites”; he created one to serve as a shrine to Du Fu. His Shaoling Shrine (Shaoling ci 少陵祠) was by no means unique, however. According to a dictionary of place names in Du Fu’s poetry, there have been at least eight Shaoling Shrines throughout China, some of which are still active today.30 Perhaps the most famous of all monuments to Du Fu was the Hall of the Great Odes (daya tang 大雅堂) that Li Xiang imitates in Dongtun. The original hall was built in 1100 by Yang Su 楊素, an official in the Sichuanese city of Danleng, in order to fulfill Huang Tingjian’s desire to “write out all of Du Fu’s poems on the two Chuan and the Kui Gorge and have them inscribed on stone.”31 In the essay he wrote to commemorate the construction of the hall, Huang complained that readers who “delight in making far-fetched interpretations [chuanzao 穿鑿; literally, drilling and boring], discarding [a poem’s] greater purpose [dazhi 大旨] and grasping after its inspiration [faxing 發興], believing that each and every object with which they meet—forests and springs, men and things, grasses and trees, fish and insects—is imbued with allegorical significance [yousuo tuo 有所託]  .  .  . are like those who guess at riddles and codes.”32 For Huang, the hall is meant to reverse the decay of a

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literary and moral culture (siwen 斯文) grounded in the ancient Book of Odes (which contains a section titled “Great Odes”) and the Songs of Chu, but “lost” (weidi 委地)—literally “cast into the dirt”—since Du Fu’s death. Just as Yu Xie and his peers would “resurrect” (xing 興) the Dongtun lofty retreat from a “mound of brambles and shrubs” at the end of the twelfth century, Huang Tingjian and Yang Su sought to reverse the loss of a shared literary culture by inscribing Du Fu’s poems in stone and embedding them in Sichuan at the beginning of the century.33 Cultural decay is figured in both cases as a process of ruination that marks a tipping point in a cyclical pattern leading to revival. In Yu Xie’s essay, the character I have translated as “mound”—xu 墟—is also one of the most common words for what we might call a “ruin.” According to Wu Hung, the xu that appeared in premodern poetic and pictorial contexts was most often “an empty site  .  .  . [that] generated visitors’ mental and emotional responses not through tangible remains,” but rather by stimulating their historical consciousness.34 As with ji, “it is the visitors’ recognition of a place as a xu that stimulates emotion and thought.”35 And like traces, ruins not only inspire subjective reactions, but can also drive visitors like Yu Xie to look past the emptiness of the site to the materiality of the ruin as a thing that can be restored to its original state and inscribed with important cultural values. For Yang Su and Huang Tingjian, it is the values of a literary tradition exemplified by Du Fu and his poetry rather than a physical structure that are in a state of ruination. To revive them, however, requires the construction of a physical site of worship that materializes the right kinds of reading and writing. Skill in determining the author’s “intention” (yi 意)—both by paying meticulous attention to the original text and by looking beyond it to its sources and context of composition—was an indispensable first step. In Huang’s essay on the Hall of the Great Odes, both comprehension and revival are figured as spatial practices of “ascending the hall” (shengtang 升堂) and “entering the room” (rushi 入室), phrases borrowed from the Analects of Confucius, where they describe the stages of a student’s assimilation of the master’s teachings.36 This upward journey, from the dirt to the master’s inner sanctum, is enabled by the construction of the Hall, but it is by no means assured. It is only by approaching Du Fu through the foundational texts of the literary tradition— a hermeneutic recommendation concretized by the inscription of his poetry within a structure named after the poetry of the Book of Odes—that one can capture their “greater purpose” and avoid tossing the entire tradition into the dirt. For Yu Xie, writing twenty-six years after Lu You penned his celebration of Li Xiang and nearly a century after Huang Tingjian’s essay on the Hall of the

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Great Odes, the shrine to Du Fu at Dongtun was neither a “trace of the past” (guji) nor a “lingering trace” (yiji), but a ruin (xu) totally “incapable of bringing about the intended effect of inspiring one to yearn for worthies and venerate moral virtue” (wuyi zhi sixian shangdezhi yi 無以致思賢尚德之意).37 Conveniently, at this time, Li Xiang was looking to sell his property, so one of Yu Xie’s friends donated the necessary funds and placed the land under the control of the local government. The men then set about restoring its buildings and grounds until it became one of the finest sites in all of Kuizhou. In the same essay, Yu Xie complains that by allowing Du Fu’s Dongtun lofty retreat to decay, Kuizhou had failed to maintain a sense of historical propriety (quedian 缺典).38 For Yu Xie, reconstruction was about far more than promoting sites of local interest for the casual tourist: “As for this labor [shiyi 是役], how could it have been carried out simply for the sake of wandering and gazing [youguan 游觀; i.e., pleasure travel]!”39 Du Fu had long since come to surpass mere literary fame. He was a man who embodied the values and intentions of the classics, “never forgetting his sovereign, even for the space of a meal.”40 When Yu praises his friends’ role in reconstructing the lofty retreat, he uses the language of cultural revival, rather than architectural repair, proclaiming that “they alone were able to revive [xing 興] 400 year old ruins [yizhi 遺趾] and make them new [gengxin zhi 更新之].”41 If Du Fu was important for more than his poetry, it is little wonder that the structures that were built to memorialize him could become more than buildings and the images placed therein more than representations. As sites for the veneration of moral virtue and objects of worship, they were essential to the sacralization of Du Fu. In an essay commemorating the renovation of Du Fu’s famous thatched hall in Chengdu, the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) writer Yang Tinghe 楊廷和 (1459–1529) places Du Fu squarely within a lineage of figures who have been “universally worshipped [si 祀] in antiquity as in the present” in Sichuan. That Du Fu, “who was merely an impoverished refugee, is arrayed loftily alongside” men famous for “great deeds and virtue [gongde 功德] . . . is truly not just because of his poetry.”42 Du Fu is more than an object of worship; he is an object of worship in Shu, arrayed alongside famous Shu men of the ages.43 The perpetuation of this geographically specific tradition of worship, whether by Yang Tinghe in the Ming, Yu Xie in the Southern Song, Huang Tingjian in the Northern Song, or Qianlong in the Qing, ensured that Du Fu would always be at home in Shu, despite the fact that he had so often ached to leave the south. If Du Fu was forced to share the “clouds and mountains” of Kuizhou with the tribes of the Five Streams, those who worshipped his traces experienced a landscape that was no longer defined by its peripheral

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heterogeneity.44 The collective acts of spatial inscription that they carried out served as a means of promulgating a new moral and literary orthodoxy from a point in time and space central to Han culture. It also created an entirely new set of traces and itineraries, those grooved and creatively “regroove[d]” by the men and women who traveled to find Du Fu in the landscape, often from the comfort of their studies.45 Instead of textually mapping unfamiliar places (and possibly making them famous in the process), Fan Chengda, Lu You, Yu Xie, Yang Tinghe, and their peers judged the appearance of the landscape against well-known literary works and narratives, and in the case of Du Fu’s former homes, laid out the coordinates of a route for cultural pilgrimage.46 By actively contributing to the production of spaces of tourism and worship, their writings also changed how certain people experienced the landscape. To produce a site of worship legitimated by its status as historical trace was to help foster a moral way of seeing and being in the world. Viewed from this perspective, the qualities of objective observation and description often attributed to Song travel writing in general, and to the essay in particular, seem inadequate. Rather than simply evidence of an objective embrace of gewu 格物 (the “thorough investigation of things”), observation and the modes of reading and writing it supported were tools in the active production of sites and landscapes of cultural devotion.47 For Lu You and Yu Xie, the essay form helped to produce Dongtun as a site of cultural devotion. Since what mattered most was the active creation of a sense of presence through worship, neither writer worked very hard to confirm that Du Fu had actually lived there. Lu You describes the scenery as “very reminiscent,” but he relies primarily on Li Xiang’s claims, which once reproduced in his essay, acquire the air of historical fact. With Yu Xie’s arrival, this historical fact becomes an official one that is repeated through the ages. This is a serious problem for xiandi scholar Jian Jinsong, who suggests that Li Xiang’s story about Dongtun and its Tang-era documents was fabricated to improve his reputation.48 Setting aside the impossibility of judging Li Xiang’s motives from a distance of more than eight hundred years, why does any of this matter? What might we gain from pinpointing the “real” location of Du Fu’s Dongtun home? We will never know if Li Xiang was as devious as Jian believes him to have been, though it is safe to assume that Lu You and Yu Xie believed his land had once belonged to Du Fu. At the very least, if they had doubts, they kept them to themselves. Their goal was not to prove or disprove Li Xiang’s claim, but to reinscribe Du Fu in the landscape made famous by his poetry. Through this reinscription, the men who wrote about and restored Du Fu’s Dongtun house helped produce a space imbued with meaning and authenticated through

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pilgrimage and worship. As Yu Xie’s essay makes clear, textual inscription and the reinscription of physical traces on the surface of the earth often went hand in hand. The ji 記 (essay/record) does not simply spread word of the authentic ji 跡; it helps to produce it.

* The history of Dongtun after Du Fu’s death shows how questions of authenticity and spatial continuity are shaped by ritual and worship. There are still pilgrims today to demonstrate this. In his 2015 book, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past, the American translator and poet Bill Porter—who also goes by the Buddhist penname Red Pine (Chisong 赤松)—chronicles a thirtyday pilgrimage to sites associated with poets across China, interspersing a prose travelogue with translations of famous poems written at the sites he visits. As part of his search for “source[s] of inspiration,” Porter seeks out the tracks of the ancients in order to see what and how they saw and to commune with them spiritually by offering libations of whiskey.49 When he travels to Fengjie, the city known in the Tang as Kuizhou, he makes two stops. First, he follows in Fan Chengda’s footsteps to Baidicheng, where he finds a “replacement . . . carved out of rock near the summit” for Du Fu’s original lofty retreat, which is now submerged.50 For his second stop, he uses none other than Jian Jinsong’s xiandi book to search out Du Fu’s Dongtun property, which he also estimates to be some “fifty meters below the water level.”51 Porter’s project would be impossible without a strong faith in the authenticity of the many “present sites” and “former homes” scattered throughout China. His search for Du Fu seems to prove this faith, but what he does at Dongtun transcends the assumptions of xiandi scholarship. Porter arrives not only to find Du Fu “gone,” but also to discover the erasure of the landscape he made so famous. While it proves impossible to retrace Lu You and Yu Xie’s footsteps to Li Xiang’s Dongtun shrine, Porter inscribes a new site of worship, climbing down a “dirt ridge for several hundred meters” and offering his whiskey to the roots of an orange tree as “intermediary.”52 The search for poets of the past is a search for such intermediaries—objects in the landscape made numinous by faith.

The Dangers of L a zy Reading Few thinkers concerned with the links between specific places and poetic intentions could imitate Yu Xie and Huang Tingjian in constructing a physical site that spatialized the steps leading toward correct interpretation.

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Yet anyone with the proper training could draw on a set of scholarly practices—described variously as bian 辯 (adjudicate, clarify), kao 考 (investigate, research) and xiang 詳 (explain thoroughly, explicate)—that were designed to support accurate interpretation. It is these practices, combined with observations made in the course of travel, that allow Fan Chengda and Lu You to combat questionable interpretations of Du Fu’s poetry, often by comparing poetic landscapes against the physical spaces on which they were supposedly based. Given the otherworldly appearance of its cloud-shrouded landscapes and its evocatively ambiguous poetics, the Three Gorges region was ripe for this type of adjudication, perhaps because it resisted it so enticingly. Efforts to correct faulty readings entailed not only the demystification of the landscape through the collection of accurate topographic information, but also the reinterpretation of older textual sources and the creation of new ones. Fan Chengda and others carried out just such a reform project on the goddess of Mt. Wu and the Chu poet Song Yu, the subject of Du Fu’s second poem in the “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past” series.53 They sought to clear the erotic clouds that had cloaked the goddess for over a millennium and to fundamentally change how people looked at and represented the landscape of the Three Gorges.54 As described in the preface to Song Yu’s “Gaotang Rhapsody,” the goddess is an endlessly changeable being who once shared her bed with a king of Chu: Once in the past, King Xiang of Chu and Song Yu were strolling the terrace at Yunmeng and gazed at the Gaotang tower, the top of which was covered by clouds and mists, rising peak-like to the apex, when suddenly the appearance [of the vapors] changed and in the briefest span began to mutate and transform ceaselessly. The King asked Yu: “What manner of qi is this?” Yu responded: “These are the so-called morning clouds.” The King said: “And what are morning clouds?” Yu said: “Once in the past, when the previous king was wandering around Gaotang, he grew fatigued and took a nap during the day. In a dream he saw a woman who said: “I am the lady of Mt. Wu; the sojourner of Gaotang. I heard that milord was wandering around Gaotang and wished to offer you my pillow and mat.” The King thereupon honored her with his company. Parting, she took her leave and said: “I reside on the sunny side of Mt. Wu and on the treacherous reaches of Gaoqiu. At daybreak I am the morning clouds, at dusk the driving rain. Morning after morning, evening after evening I am here beneath the Yang Terrace.” The next morning he looked for this and it was as she had said.55

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For millennia, writers have embraced the goddess and her lore as a rich source of erotic imagery, an approach that continues to this day, as evidenced by the many pages of kitschy semi-pornographic images of the goddess generated by a simple internet search for Wushan shennü 巫山神女.56 For as long as the goddess has been an erotic figure, however, scholars have taken pains to note that Song Yu’s “Gaotang Rhapsody” is not an erotic poem, or at the very least, that it does not promote sensuality.57 For some, the scenario described by Song Yu, with its mingling of worlds and its suggestion of kingly negligence, offered a negative example through which to establish the bounds of sexual propriety.58 Since at least the Tang, writers have worked this skeptical tradition into their poetic treatments of Mt. Wu and the goddess, arguing that Song Yu’s account is either woefully misleading or embarrassingly misunderstood. One scholar links this approach to the influence of Song Dynasty Neo-Confucianism, which sets up a strict distinction between humans, who experience desire and emotion, and spirits, which do not.59 This is close to the argument that Du Guangting 杜光庭 (850–933) offers in his collection of biographies of Daoist goddesses and saints, the Record of the Assembled Immortals of the Round Citadel (Yongcheng jixian lu 墉城集仙錄), which identifies the goddess as Yaoji 瑤姬, official title Lady Cloudflower (Yunhua furen 雲華夫人 ).60 According to Du’s account, which was repeated almost verbatim in Li Fang’s 李昉 (925–996) Taiping guangji 太平廣記, “Song Yu wrote his goddess rhapsodies [shenxian fu 神仙賦] to allegorize his passions [yuqing 寓情], [in the process] debauching and besmirching the most illustrious and perfected high immortal. How else could this slander have descended on her?”61 In Du’s Record, Yaoji becomes a skilled practitioner of the Daoist arts of transformation who decides to reside on Mt. Wu after passing the mountain and becoming enamored of its spectacular scenery. Sometime after settling there, she meets Yu the Great, who, in the midst of forming the Three Gorges, was beset by a mysterious wind and interfering demons near Mt. Wu. Unable to finish his work, Yu requests Yaoji’s help, and the goddess responded by “presenting Yu with a stratagem in the form of a text for summoning the hundred spirits and ordering her [attendant] spirits . . . to help Yu split stones and clear a way for the waves, to relieve blockages and carve a channel through obstructions in order to follow the water’s flow.”62 Du Guangting’s focus on the violation of the goddess is typical of a revisionary approach with precedents in Tang poetry. In an early example, Li Bai describes the goddess as approaching the king of Chu “without desire” (wuxin 無心) and asks his readers:

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茫昧竟誰測 虛傳宋玉文

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Who will finally fathom this confusing muddle This fantasy transmitted by Song Yu’s writing63

Devoid of the moralistic tone of Du Guangting’s Record, Li Bai’s eighth-century poem describes the entire encounter between the goddess and the Chu king as a humorously empty fantasy transmitted as fact by Song Yu’s writing. It does so by drawing on a strain of doubt that hinges on the mystifying relationship between reality and illusion, waking and dreaming and the world objectively observed and as seen through texts. Doubt and ambiguity are highly conventionalized characteristics of poems on Mt. Wu, especially those collected under the title “How High Mt. Wu” (Wushan gao 巫山高) in Guo Maoqian’s 郭茂倩 (b. 1094) famous anthology of Music Bureau (yuefu 樂府) poetry.64 Most of these highly intertextual poems, written between the sixth and tenth centuries, use the ambiguous qualities of the landscape to heighten its atmosphere of erotic possibility and suspense. Others, however, reject familiar clichés, demystifying the mountain’s clouds and rains and complaining that more than a thousand years of slander had been heaped on the goddess and the kings of Chu.65 In the Song Dynasty, doubts about the erotic nature of the Goddess came to inspire a more careful investigation of the language of the rhapsodies attributed to Song Yu. Before even traveling through the Three Gorges, Fan Chengda had written a preface to a poem in which he reappraised the final lines of Song Yu’s “Goddess” rhapsody: Previously, when I investigated Song Yu’s talk of “morning clouds,” [and the common claim] that it slandered the kings of ancient times, I discovered it to have absolutely no basis in fact [benwu juyi 本無據依]. As for King Xiang’s dreaming [of the goddess] and his ordering [Song] Yu to compose a fu, [the text] only says: “Her face turned red in anger and she held fast to herself, never could she be trifled with in such a manner [頩顏怒以自持, 曾不可乎犯干]!”66 Later generations did not look into this carefully, uniformly besmirching [Song Yu and the goddess] with their slander . . . Who will counter all of this baseless derision?67

The playful poem that follows this preface was written in response to a poem by Fan’s friend, which was itself inspired by a painting of Mt. Wu owned by another acquaintance. It presents a capsule history and a symbolic geography for both the spread of a licentious interpretation of Song Yu’s rhapsodies and also for the influence of that licentiousness on poetic representations of other goddesses. In the first half of the long poem, Fan echoes the erotic imagery

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and language that have made Mt. Wu famous, while also casting doubt on the “standard theme”: 瑤姬家山高插天 碧叢奇秀古未傳 向來題目經楚客 名字徑度岷峨前 是邪非邪莽誰識 喬林古廟常秋色 暮去行雨朝行雲 翠帷瑤席知何人 峽船一息且千里 五兩竿頭見旛尾 仰窺仙館至今疑 行人問訊居人指

Yaoji’s mountain home—so high it pierces the heavens Of the exquisite fineness of its emerald groves, since antiquity nothing has been transmitted Without break, a standard theme has come down to us from that wanderer of Chu [Song Yu] Whose name has spread straight past Mt. Min and Mt. E But is it true or is it false? Who can comprehend this muddle?68 Lofty forests and ancient shrine—forever the color of autumn At dusk departs the driving rain, at dawn come scudding clouds Verdant canopy and jasper mats—do you know to whom they belong? Gorge boats in a breath’s span cross one thousand li At the ends of paired poles appear pennants’ tips Gazing up to sneak a look at the immortal’s lodge—to this day one remains unsure The traveler makes his enquiries, the locals point the way

The always-autumnal landscape that Fan describes is the composite product of language and imagery borrowed from earlier poems and texts. Even the mountain’s “emerald groves” (bicong 碧叢) come from a “How High Mt. Wu” poem by the Tang poet Li He 李賀 (790–816).69 What those texts have not communicated, however, at least according to Fan, is how “marvelous and fine” the mountain’s trees are. Inspired by hackneyed accounts of Yaoji’s sensuality, travelers look past the lush greenery to sneak a prurient look at the goddess’s home. When they cannot locate it, they turn to locals, who are only too happy to point the way. In lines 11 and 12, Fan reenacts the dubious pointing that closes out Du Fu’s poem on Song Yu. Whereas Du Fu’s travelers failed to understand how one might embody immaterial traces of the past, Fan Chengda’s have failed even to understand the texts that draw them to the landscape.

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In the second half of the poem, Fan explains that the popular understanding of the goddess is based on a sloppy reading of Song Yu’s poem that has been “carelessly spread” (langchuan 浪傳) by “hungry travelers, their eyes ever cold” (jike yan changhan 飢客眼長寒), through the “How High Mt. Wu” poems. Like the “palaces of Chu” and Song Yu’s home in Du Fu’s poem, Mt. Wu of the “How High Mt. Wu” tradition hovers between past and present and illusion and reality, inspiring travelers to seek and locals to point the way, even though their shared object always eludes them. This indeterminacy finds expression both in the lingering “wonder” (another possible meaning of yi 疑) that surrounds the location of the Yang Terrace or the Gaotang tower and the sense of doubt that surrounds the story itself. If Li Bai’s poem represents a charming exception to the erotic tradition of Mt. Wu poetry, Fan Chengda’s represents a direct attack on it. Fan tries to rehabilitate not just the kings of Chu and the goddess of Mt. Wu, but also Song Yu, whom he sees as a victim of poor reading comprehension. In both his preface and his poem, Fan singles out readers and writers who neglected to “investigate” (cha 察) both the intent and the wording of Song Yu’s rhapsodies, thereby spreading “slanderous language” (xieyu 媟語) and “silly talk of boys and girls” (ernü yu 兒女語) in their own poems. The implications of this failure to read and write correctly are by no means limited to Mt. Wu: Fan identifies it as the origin of a wantonness that spreads, through space and time, and from literary woman to literary woman, till it reaches even the Milky Way and its lonely weaving girl, who becomes a popular figure for romantic longing. What Fan neglects to mention in his poem on the Mt. Wu painting are any texts—aside from Song Yu’s rhapsodies—that might support his assertions. This changes when he is finally able to visit a temple across the river from Mt. Wu, where he finds stone inscriptions that tell the story of Yaoji’s role in helping Yu the Great carve out the Three Gorges. In the preface to the “How High Mt. Wu” poem that Fan writes to commemorate his visit, he stands by his earlier poem: “in investigating [kao 考] the intent of Song Yu’s rhapsodies, I judged [bian 辨] the matter of Gaotang with extreme thoroughness [shenxiang 甚詳].”70 The stone inscriptions not only confirm this, they also make it possible for him to put an end to both the doubt and the erotic wonder that define the “How High Mt. Wu” poems. Fan does not name the inscribed texts that support his conclusions in his poem and preface, but he does provide more detailed information in the travel diary entry that he wrote at the same time:

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The Goddess’s Temple is located atop a small ridge on the bank opposite the peaks [of Mt. Wu]. . . . A stone carving within the present-day temple cites the Yongcheng ji: “Yaoji, daughter of the Queen Mother of the West, was called The Perfected One of Cloud and Flower. She assisted Yu in driving out the ghosts and demons [from the area of the Gorges] and in cutting through the stone to let flow the waters.” Having merit, she was memorialized in writing [yougong jianji 有功見紀] and is now enfeoffed as the Perfected One of Miraculous Efficacy.71

Du Guangting’s Record provides Fan with an alternative history that is based on deeds of action inscribed in the landscape of the Gorges rather than on clouds gyring atop the mountain. Referring to her assistance of Yu and her inclusion in Du Guangting’s text, Fan Chengda writes: “having merit, she was memorialized in writing.” This phrase is key to both Fan’s interest in Yaoji and to our understanding of how authors inscribe historical and mythical figures in the landscape through the correct types of reading and writing. In this case, Fan uses the word ji 紀 (to record, to be included in a historical record), which is cognate with and often used interchangeably with ji 記 (write, record; essay), to refer to the stone inscriptions of Du Guangting’s text that fill the goddess’s temple. The version of the goddess’s life contained in those inscriptions differs from the salacious account found in the many texts that misread Song Yu’s rhapsody. Du Guangting does describe her famous capacity for transformation—into clouds and mists, rocks, dragons, and countless other forms—but balances it with the monumental permanence of Yu the Great’s flood control project. In the previous chapter, I described how Yu’s feats and the landscape they produced are classified not only as his traces—his literal footprints and axe marks— but also as marks of his meritorious deeds. Though the surface of the earth is inscribed with the traces of Yu’s and Yaoji’s deeds, and though Du Guangting has described the true history of their connection, careless travelers and readers have preferred to cover their eyes with the clouds and rain of poetic lore. Fan Chengda responds by invoking a form of writing—the record of merit carved in stone and embedded in the landscape—that reflects the goals of his larger literary project. Like his travel diary and the poems that he wrote alongside it, these inscriptions on stone, if read correctly, force readers to reconsider a physical landscape they had previously known only through faulty practices of reading and writing. Both ji 紀 (to record) and ke 刻 (to inscribe) are inscriptional practices that function primarily to memorialize and

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preserve a text that makes accurate interpretation possible. For Fan Chengda, Du Guangting’s record and its inscription in the goddess’s temple beneath Mt. Wu supply him with the textual evidence he needs to redeem the goddess and her mountain. It is no coincidence that he cites these inscriptions in the preface to his own “How High Mt. Wu” poem. As he makes clear in the poem itself, he does so to replace the ambiguous clouds and mists of a misguided erotic tradition with the stony permanence of the Gorges as traces of heroic acts carried out by “the perfected one of the west” (the goddess) and Yu: 西真功高佐禹跡 斧鑿鱗皴倚天壁

How lofty the feats of the perfected one of the west, who helped to produce the traces of Yu So that the scaly marks of ax and chisel could rest on these heaven-soaring cliffs72

In his first poem on Mt. Wu, Fan Chengda attempts to capture the materiality of the mountain, to offer a vision of the landscape as more than just a figure for the goddess’s transformations. By emphasizing the hitherto neglected fineness of the mountain’s “emerald groves,” Fan not only suggests that there are topographic truths that lie beneath the shapeless mists of innuendo, he also reminds us that his initial topic is not the goddess or King Xiang of Chu, but a painting of a mountain dotted with trees. It is hard to say with any certainty what this painting of Mt. Wu would have looked like. At the very least, its presence in the narrow confines of the Wu Gorge would seem to pose significant challenges for artists. In The Shu River handscroll, the Wu Gorge is depicted from a distance with what appears to be a combined aerial and lowangle perspective (figure 2.4). In a sixteenth-century hanging-scroll painting of the Wu Gorge in the collection of the Cleveland Art Museum, the landscape is dramatically elongated and includes a boat struggling across dangerous rapids (figure 2.5). To date, I have not been able to identify a single extant painting solely dedicated to the depiction of Mt. Wu or the Wu Gorge from the Song, though it is clear from poetic evidence that the mountain was a pictorial theme as early as the eighth century,73 and Fan’s poem is proof that the tradition of “Mt. Wu paintings” (Wushan tu 巫山圖) paintings continued into the Song. While we may never know exactly what such paintings looked like, we can be sure that most of them failed to satisfy Fan Chengda. In his final extended discussion of Mt. Wu, in his travel diary, he complains that painters of this landscape consistently failed to capture its changeable weather:

figure 2.4 The Shu River (detail): The Wu Gorge. Source: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1916.539

figure 2.5 Clouds and Waves in the [Yangzi] Gorge of Wushan, Xie Shichen 謝時臣 (1487–ca. 1560); hanging scroll, ink and light color on paper. Source: Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund 1968.213.

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At Mt. Wu’s finest spots, no matter whether dark or bright, there are always clouds and mists belting the mountains with their shadows and scudding gently about—this [simply] cannot be painted! I have passed beneath it twice and what I have seen has always been like this. Could it be that it just happened to be so when I passed, or is this region really [perpetually] like this? Perhaps the phrase “scudding clouds” even has some basis in fact [yousuo juyi 有所據依]? As for the paintings of Mt. Wu that have come down to us, they are none of them like this; even those in the official lodge in Kuifu do not resemble [the landscape]. I ordered an official painter to take a small skiff out into the middle of the current in order to make a careful copy [moxie 摹寫], which for the first time achieved a formal likeness [xingsi 形似]. Now, as for those images collected by men of catholic tastes, none of them compare to my painting’s verisimilitude [zhen 真].74

A well-known manifestation of the goddess, “scudding clouds” are present not only in the literary tradition, but also each time Fan passes through the Gorges. Surprised by this correspondence between text and reality, Fan wonders if the atmospheric phenomenon might have something to do with the climate and topography of the region. Having established and reestablished the respectability of the goddess, he is excited by the possibility that even this most immaterial trace of the old stories “has some basis in fact.” It is only by actively engaging with the landscape that one can make such observations, a lesson missed by previous artists who have tried to capture this “unpaintable” scene. Even those images embedded in the landscape (collected in the local government office) “do not resemble” (bulei 不類) what Fan sees. Fan’s poems and diary are built on the desire for such elusively accurate resemblances. He is mostly comfortable achieving them textually, through the thorough description that constitutes his record of action and through his poetry, but there are places in his journey, including Mt. Wu, where text alone does not suffice.75 Through his commission of a new view of Mt. Wu, he hopes not only to surpass other collectors, but also to create (with the aid of a skilled intermediary) a factual image, the product of an act of dedicated copying (moxie 摹寫) that takes place in the landscape that it represents. It is easy to imagine this painting as a pictorial counterpart to Fan’s diary and the many essays and gazetteers that transformed spatial thinking in the Song— reaching for the objective and the accurate, a product of skilled actions executed on the ground (or water). By accurately inscribing the appearance of the landscape, the painting reinscribes the clouds and rains of the goddess as verified traces of regional climate. As a memento of his journey through the

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gorges, Fan’s painting also fixes the landscape so that he can return to it from the comfort of his garden in Suzhou, just as the emperor Qianlong casts his gaze across the sweep of the Yangzi from the confines of his Beijing palace.

C oda: “Till l of t y g orges rise from a pl acid l ake” This book is grounded in the contention that the representational traditions inspired by the Three Gorges can help us better understand how the region has been transformed physically in the past and present. As imaginary and prospective interventions in the material, landscape poetry, prose, and painting, as much as cartography and engineering schematics, embody forms of spatial thinking that mark the horizon of possibility for such changes. In this chapter and the one that preceded it, I have tried to show how landscape representation inscribes values in place, sometimes through acts of spatial production, as in Dongtun or the Yu the Great Mythology Park, and sometimes by trying to change how people perceive landscape. To change popular visions of Mt. Wu and its goddess, Fan Chengda and others look beyond the conventional landscape imagery of “How High Mt. Wu” poems to capture the “real” appearance of the region in prose, poetry, and painting. Fan’s goal is to restore what he sees as the broken links between materiality, representation, and morality, not to alter the physical landscape. Yet he pursues this goal by reinscribing the goddess into the spatial mythology of Yu the Great. To inspire readers to see Mt. Wu and its goddess again for the first time, he must remake them as a site and force in the production of landscape. Despite their best efforts, Fan and his peers never succeeded in making flood-control activities a compelling alternative to sexual adventures. To this day, the phrase “clouds and rain of Mt. Wu” (Wushan yunyu 巫山雲 雨) remains code for sexual intercourse, and the goddess continues to excite the imagination of artists, poets, and filmmakers. Fan’s approach to Mt. Wu, however, shows how the ji/trace can function not only as an evocative aesthetic figure but also as a physical site to be inscribed and reinscribed with values. It is the fame of the landscape and its sites that not only attracts such acts of reinscription, but also, in some cases, contributes to their success. When Mao Zedong invoked the goddess of Mt. Wu in his 1956 poem “Swimming,” he drew on nearly two millennia of erotically atmospheric poetry, prose, and painting. The techno-poetic landscape that Mao describes in the second half of the poem may be a radical departure from the poetry of past centuries, but it draws on a shared vocabulary and set of images:

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起宏圖 一橋飛架南北 天塹變通途 更立西江石壁 截斷巫山雲雨 高峽出平湖 神女應無恙 當驚世界殊

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I raise a grand plan— A single bridge, flying, will span south and north Transforming a natural moat into a thoroughfare And across the western Jiang we shall erect a wall of stone That will rend Mt. Wu’s clouds and rain Till lofty gorges rise from a placid lake The goddess will surely come to no harm Though she will have to marvel at how altered is our world76

Written in a traditional poetic idiom favored by Mao—the ci 詞, or lyric, which is closely associated with the literature of the Song Dynasty—“Swimming” makes no mention of the people who will be displaced from the Gorges or the engineering feats that it will require. Instead, it repeats the poetic clichés associated with the goddess while claiming that the world no longer needs such a figure, that it has changed. The political and technological change to which Mao alludes is imagined here as a violent assault on the landscape that embodies the goddess. At the center of this rape fantasy is a soaring phallic wall holding back a placid lake, a glossy, reflective surface that naturalizes Mao’s developmental ideology and fixes forever the changeable Yangzi and its Gorges as a national and cultural Chinese landscape. “Swimming” exemplifies what Ban Wang describes as Mao’s poetic sublime, an “aesthetic of grandeur [that] maintains masculine dominance by suppressing the feminine.”77 In Mao’s poetry, the feminine represents a dissipating force that threatens the telos of revolutionary history, which can only be achieved through heroic acts of sublimation.78 If Fan Chengda dispels the swirling clouds and rain of the “How High Mt. Wu” tradition to expose the lush greenery of the mountains that spread out along the Yangzi’s northern bank, Mao cuts through these sensual images, to the dirt and stones that will support his dam. Both men appropriate and repurpose the erotic tradition to inscribe the landscape with specific values, but as Fu Baoshi 傅抱石 (1904–1965) imagines it in a 1959 painting, Mao’s poetic transformation is also a promise of a massive physical transformation that overshadows the goddess—no less than the landscaping of a modern China and its positioning within a new world order (figure 2.6). As we shall see in Part II, while the cultural importance of the Three Gorges remains undiminished across millennia, it is redefined in the mid-twentieth century in relation to a new set of political, spatial, and aesthetic ideas. The threat of imperialism, the creation of the Chinese nation, the communist revolution,

figure 2.6 The Goddess Will Surely Come to No Harm (Shennü ying wuyang 神女應無恙, 1959), Fu Baoshi 傅抱石 (1904–1965); ink on paper. See also color plate 5. Source: Nanjing Museum of Art, Jiangsu

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the “reform” of China’s society and economy after Mao’s death—all of these have contributed to the reinscription of the Three Gorges as a modern national and cultural landscape. As in “Swimming,” the “traditional” is an important part of this process, not simply as a foil for the modern, but as a source of tropes and images for a new kind of Chinese landscape. If “Swimming” has a special place in the mythology of the Three Gorges Dam, it is because it lends affective and aesthetic weight to the technological development of the Chinese nation. It testifies to the “real world consequences” of literary tropes that “encourage humans to treat [the world] as an inexhaustible storehouse of goods.”79 The wonder of Yu’s dredging, the endless transformations of the goddess of Mt. Wu, and Li Bai’s impossibly swift journey in “Leaving Baidicheng at Dawn” have all helped make possible Mao’s vision of the Yangzi gorges as not only the object of a “great plan,” but also a site of magic easily assimilated to his messianic vision of socialist development. Like Jiang Zemin’s celebration of the “Chinese people’s spirit of tenacious struggle in ‘transforming nature’ ” that appears as an epigraph to chapter 1, “Swimming” frames the dam project as not just inevitable but as an expression of Chineseness defined in national, cultural, spiritual, and even racial terms.

PA S S AG E I I ONE THOUSAND LI I have read the accounts of travel in Sichuan and the ancient state of Chu, all of which contain the lines about leaving Baidi in the morning and lodging in Jiangling by nightfall. Those who have taken Li Bai as a model for their poetry invariably speak of light boats that fly easily, traveling a thousand li in a single day like a bird in flight or a galloping cloud. But how is one to learn about vortices in the rapids or striking submerged rocks. If one disregards the ends [of these rocks], danger will certainly appear time and time again. —Tu Zongying 涂宗瀛1

Navigation was of limited interest to the writers I discuss in Part I. It was the landmarks that line the river that really captured their imaginations. This is partly because they were not responsible for manning their own boats, but mostly because the literary forms they practiced offered few conventions for recording such information. As a result, the pilots who guided their boats and the laborers who pulled them rarely appear in their work. For Li Bai and the poets who followed him, boats “fly easily, traveling a thousand li in a single day like a bird in flight”: 朝辭白帝彩雲間 千里江陵一日還

At dawn depart Baidi midst many-colored clouds Across 1,000 li to Jiangling in a single day return

one thousand li

兩岸猿聲啼不住 輕舟已過萬重山

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From both banks the sound of gibbons crying without rest The light skiff has already crossed myriad-fold mountains

Li’s quatrain alternates between the fixity of the local and the journey’s blur of space and time. The first and third lines offer familiar reference points— Baidi, colored clouds, and crying apes—that situate the reader within a physical and textual landscape. The second and fourth lines respond to these stock images with an almost cinematic blur of movement. The river’s extension in space is reduced to the pointlike “single day” in the second line, while the single point of the boat in the fourth line spins out to encompass a mountainous panorama. Li renders the downstream journey fantastical, a premodern experiment in representing the “annihilation of space and time” that would accompany the modernization of transportation in later centuries.2 Like a steamship, the boat in Li Bai’s poem flies across 1,000 li and an expanse of mountains with no trace of human labor, as if by magic.

PA R T I I Reinscribing the Three Gorges

3 C H I N E S E L A N D S CA P E As for electricity—without form or matter, thing-like but intangible, its qi inheres within all things and moves throughout the universe. Its utility is broader and more marvelous than that of all other things; it can be used for illumination, for transmission, for transportation, for rearing animals, for digging mines. . . . And yet, to draw on electricity one relies, of course, on power, and to produce power one depends on coal. Recently, however, there are those who have thought up a new method, which is to use the waterpower of waterfalls to generate electricity. If you store the energy mechanically then you could save it for use out of season anywhere it was needed. This is, moreover, something that can be extracted without limit and used without depletion. —Sun Yat-sen, 18941 The Yangtze Gorge Project is a “CLASSIC.” It will be of utmost importance to China. It will bring great industrial developments in Central and Western China. It will bring widespread employment. It will bring high standards of living. It will change China from a weak to a strong nation. The Yangtze Gorge Project should be constructed for the benefit of China and the World at large. —John Lucian Savage, 19442

A Cl a ssic Mao Zedong’s vision of the damming of the Three Gorges in his poem “Swimming,” which closes chapter 2, is one of the most enduring elements of the modern mythology of the People’s Republic of China as developmental state. Soaring bridges and towering dams were part of a “grand plan” (hongtu 宏圖) of socialist construction that is still being implemented (albeit in radically expanded scope and ambition). Though tailored to the politics and aesthetics of the new state, Mao’s plan was deeply rooted in both the high modernist ideology he had inherited from early reformers, especially Sun Yat-sen, and in the even earlier scientific remapping of the Yangzi, which began in the mid-nineteenth century as part of an imperialist project to “open” China’s interior. The classical Chinese language that Mao uses in his poem obscures not only these imperial entanglements, but

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also what makes the Three Gorges Dam a “CLASSIC” expression of high modernist planning, as John Savage describes it in the second epigraph to this chapter. Chief design engineer of the American Bureau of Reclamation between 1924 and 1945, Savage was commissioned by Chiang Kai-shek toward the end of the Second World War to collaborate with Chinese engineers in producing a feasibility study for damming the Three Gorges (figure 3.1). For Savage, who oversaw the design of the Hoover, Shasta, and Grand Coulee dams, the “Yangtze Gorge Project” was a dream; massive in scale and far-reaching in impact, it promised to change China and the world forever. Savage, Sun, and Mao all followed in the footsteps of a long line of nineteenth- and twentieth-century travelers, scientists, and merchants who had fantasized about transforming China by mastering the Yangzi. To reconsider myths of the national origins of the dam project in relation to these earlier efforts to reconceptualize the river, Part II investigates a broad range of representational and material processes, including the systematic remapping of the landscape according to the metrics and optics of modern science and commerce—from geology and cartography to mining, shipping, tourism, and hydroelectric power generation; the reinscription of the Three Gorges as both a symbol of China’s status as modern nation state and a site for that state’s ongoing creation; and the projection of a set of “national characteristics” onto the people and places of the river. What is at stake in all of these processes is not simply the construction through representation of an imaginary “China” for Euro-American or Chinese audiences, but rather how imagination and reality interact to shape China’s “undeniable presence in the world that represents it.”3 The imaginative production of the Three Gorges as a national and cultural Chinese landscape began in the 1860s, when the first Western survey and travel account of the Upper Yangzi was produced. This attempt to reinscribe the landscape cartographically and textually marks the proximate (if not ultimate) horizon of possibility for the “undeniable presence” of the Three Gorges Dam. Much of my archive for this chapter consists of nonfiction English-language travel accounts, maps, and related visual materials produced between 1861 and the early 1930s by British subjects. The earliest of these materials appear just after the Chinese interior was forcibly opened to Western merchants and navies by the treaties that were signed in the wake of the “opium” wars. The latest come from the period when steam travel and shipping were regularized, fundamentally disrupting earlier technologies and ways of knowing, seeing, representing, and moving on the river. Though I compare these sources to important Chinese maps and route guides from the same period, I have dedicated much of this chapter to the

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British because they were the earliest and most systematic Western explorers of the Yangzi Valley, a region that came to be seen by the end of the nineteenth century as a British “sphere of influence.” As a result, there is a body of highly intertextual British travel accounts and surveys that is mostly untouched by the rich Yangzi lore I introduced in Part I. It is in these and related sources that the river and the Three Gorges were first conceptualized not as a landscape of historical traces or important cultural sites, but as a national landscape integral to the economic and political development of the modern Chinese state. That this newly “Chinese” landscape often functioned in Western accounts as a symbol of eastern stagnation does not change the fact that the region was seen as a prospect for modernization. Mao and Jiang Zemin would eventually blend the mythopoetic and technological in their celebration of the Three Gorges Dam project, but the Chineseness of the landscape was first articulated in very different terms. Despite the ambitions of the British, the “opening” of the Yangzi was by no means a one-sided affair, and the story I tell here is not of Western imperialists dominating passive Chinese. British travelogues, navigational guides, and photographs bear traces of an unequal and exploitative but also collaborative and competitive process whereby the Yangzi was reinscribed as an object of economic and national development. Westerners exploited Chinese knowledge of the river, but the new technologies and spatial ideas they introduced were soon adopted by both the Qing and Republican governments and Chinese merchants as part of a nationalist project to establish Chinese control over shipping. Chinese and Western forces were never equally matched during this period, but to assert a rigid distinction between Western imperialism and its Chinese object is to miss the “patchwork nature [and] . . . improvisational aspects” of China’s modernity.4 The materials I explore in this and the next chapter are an integral part of the history of the Three Gorges Dam as a project that is simultaneously imperial and sovereign, international and national, aesthetic and material. They force us to confront the collaborative (rather than collaborationist) aspects of imperialism as well as the deep bonds between European imperial power and the “ ‘imperial’ view of nature” that underlies certain forms of national development.5 In this chapter and the next, I approach these aspects of the history of the Three Gorges from two interrelated perspectives—the production of Chinese landscape and Chinese bodies. By tracing two histories of the Three Gorges and the Yangzi between the 1860s and 1930s, I show not only how Western ideas about landscape and labor interacted with a burgeoning discourse of Chinese nationhood to produce the Three Gorges as a Chinese

figure 3.1 A proposed dam design from John Savage’s Preliminary Report on the Yangtze Gorge Project (1944).

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landscape, but also how such ideas came to support the technological capture of the Yangzi as a natural resource—a source of energy “that can be extracted without limit and used without depletion.”

To Realize China With the establishment of the lower Yangzi city of Chinkiang (modern Zhenjiang) as a treaty port in 1858, the Qing Dynasty and its European counterparts launched a process that would forever change the Yangzi and the Chinese interior.6 The travel narratives, scientific surveys, drawings, photographs, and maps that travelers produced soon after they gained access to the interior strove to make Yangzi River landscapes legible and visible according to a set of universal standards. This had a number of effects. First, by collecting and disseminating information about rapids, currents, and seasonal variations in water level, these writers diminished the dangers of the river as well as the power of local and often oral forms of knowledge that had previously been used to negotiate them, preparing the way for the introduction of steamships around the turn of the twentieth century. Steam travel, which was carefully controlled by the Qing government and quickly adopted by Chinese merchants, further challenged earlier ways of knowing and moving on the Yangzi, beginning its transformation from a space defined by long-standing patterns of use and representation to what Richard White has described as an “organic machine,” a techno-landscape engineered for maximal control.7 Second, by remapping the Yangzi according to supposedly “universal” scientific standards, early European travelers worked to insert China into a world system in which any one place could be compared to another. Insistence on commensurability helped foster a view of China beyond the Qing, sometimes as a colonial prospect and sometimes as a nascent (if ineffectual) nation-state. The Qing was similarly concerned with establishing its sovereignty in universal terms. Shellen Xiao Wu argues that the use of Zhongguo 中國 (China) in place of Da Qingguo 大清國 (The Great Qing State) in 1902 mining regulations parallels a shift in the conception of natural resources from a means of supporting the welfare of the population to a material possession of the sovereign nation, which monopolized all rights of access and development.8 For Western writers, however, straightforward comparison based on universal standards was complicated by continued attempts to account for Chinese racial difference, which was often framed as a difference in “national character,” a topic I discuss in the next chapter. It is in the

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space between the production of a standardized China and the belief in Chinese difference that two interdependent and still active modes of “Chinese landscape” came to maturity. As ways of conceiving, visualizing, and mastering the Yangzi and its Gorges, these modes—one developmental, the other fantastic—perform an important division of labor. The developmental mode approaches landscape as a physical stretch of land made legible through scientific surveys, mapmaking, military reports, and travel writing. It helps produce not only a geographical landscape primed for territorial and commercial conquest, but also a national landscape in need of development. The fantastic mode treats landscape as an aesthetic or symbolic form, a reservoir of Chinese difference and a figure for the romance of travel. Though no less symbolic than the second, the first is based in an objectivist ideology that demands complete faith in the realism of its representational modes. If the rationalized Chinese landscape is the product of processes of knowledge production that represent the Yangzi in order to transform it, the fantastic Chinese landscape serves as an alibi for that process by proclaiming the enduring Chineseness—however and by whomever it might be defined—of the river. The fantastic landscape lends both imperial and national projects an affective power that can be channeled through poetry, landscape art, touristic imagery, and other forms. Though distinct and even superficially antithetical, these modes of “Chinese landscape” are complementary manifestations of a single process of producing and “opening” the Chinese interior. If one looks carefully enough, it is easy to discern the geometric logic of the chart in even the most scenic of prospects.

* When the Three Gorges made their first impact on what Mary Louise Pratt calls European “planetary consciousness” in the 1860s, they were seen as the greatest obstacle to the opening of Sichuan, a region admired for having avoided the faults of more accessible provinces.9 Its people were considered friendlier, its land richer and better administered, and its opportunities for trade far greater than in coastal regions. It maintained, in short, a hint of the utopian aura that had surrounded China in early modern Europe.10 To access (and remove the commodities of ) the commercial utopia of Sichuan, however, one had to pass through the treacherous Yangzi gorges, a landscape that was both forbidding and awe-inspiring, as it appears in the frontispiece to Thomas Wright Blakiston’s 1862 travel account, Five Months on the Yang-tsze.11 The image shown in figure 3.2, with its geological strata and towering cliffs, is simultaneously a rebuke to fantastic ideas about China’s landscape, a call for a generalized scientific understanding of the world, a reminder of the physical

figure 3.2 Frontispiece to Five Months on the Yang-tsze (1862); etching based on a sketch by Thomas Blakiston’s travel companion, Alfred Barton. The small Western figure in the foreground sketching the gorge informs readers at the outset that Blakiston’s book and the images it contains were based on personal observation carried out on the ground. Note the two Chinese onlookers to the right of the artist.

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obstacles that isolated Sichuan, and an early expression of a discourse of adventure and grandeur that grew up around the Three Gorges. It was in the interest of penetrating this landscape and developing the Chinese interior that Blakiston, a British military officer, led one of the earliest trips by a foreigner through the Gorges into Sichuan in 1861. As the progenitor of the English-language genre of Three Gorges travel accounts, Blakiston’s narrative not only laid the foundation for the production of the Yangzi as national Chinese landscape, it also inspired an enduring vision of the Three Gorges as a land of wonder. Blakiston and his companions began their journey at Shanghai as part of the British military flotilla that inaugurated new navigational and commercial rights established by the 1860 expansion of the 1858 Tianjin Treaty. The Royal Navy went only as far as Hankou, but Blakiston had more ambitious plans—to travel along the Yangzi “through China, thence into Tibet, and across the Himalayas into North-western India.”12 His plan to explore beyond the newly opened treaty ports was made possible by a clause in the Tianjin Treaty that allowed for the establishment of an overland trade route between India and China. Rebellions along the route to Chengdu made Blakiston’s journey impossible, but the prospect of linking British South Asia and China would continue to draw British adventurers, including Augustus Margery, whose 1875 murder in Yunnan resulted in the Chefoo Convention treaty, which hastened the development of British trade on the Yangzi. Though Blakiston did not complete his journey, he succeeded in navigating farther up the Yangzi—some 1,600 miles—than any other Englishman. Blakiston’s stated goal of “open[ing]the Yang-tsze Kiang to foreign trade” makes him a direct forerunner of more commercially oriented travelers. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the development of the river, however, was in carrying out the first modern scientific survey of the Upper Yangzi, the portion of the river extending west from Yichang through the Three Gorges and up to the confluence of the Yangzi and the Min River, which led north to Chengdu. The luggage that his Chinese crew carried included a small collection of scientific instruments: “an eight-inch sextant and artificial horizon, prismatic compass, pocket compasses, and thermometers, together with a couple of aneroid barometers furnished by gentlemen in Shanghai, [and] telescopes and binoculars.”13 Blakiston used these devices to keep careful geographical, geological, meteorological, and hydrological records, measure distances for the production of a map, and keep a detailed field-book that marked, among other things, navigational hazards, depth soundings, topographical features, coal deposits, villages, and other landmarks.14

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According to Blakiston, one purpose of his narrative and visual account of the Yangzi was to sweep away inaccurate conceptions of China back home. Coming late to the European pastime of representing the “Orient,” he struggled against tenaciously picturesque ideas of the Chinese landscape. In his introduction to the city of Wan (now Wanzhou), he calls on his readers to “cast [off ] the ‘willow pattern,’ ” and rails against “preconceived notions of China, as derived from geographies; where it is represented as one immense fertile plain . . . in which golden-pheasants innumerable nestle . . . where porcelain pagodas and high-arched bridges meet the eye at every turn.”15 For Victorians, the fantastical China of mass-produced willowware porcelain, which loosely imitated earlier Chinese import ware, was ubiquitous. In the example shown in figure 3.3, two highly repetitive and involuted borders surround a dense garden scene of pagodas, an arched bridge, and stylized trees. The only empty space on the dish lies between these borders and in portions of the image corresponding to air or water. This is a landscape outside of time and space, an

figure 3.3 The “willow pattern.” Source: Wikimedia Commons

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object of contemplation accessible only by passing through its two fantastical frames. The viewer is drawn not so much into the image as toward a fixed, flat tableau in which the same frozen scene unfolds, a European emblem of Chinese timelessness—China as china.16 It is not simply the fantastical nature of this “ ‘fertile valley’ notion, and . . . ‘willow pattern’ ” landscape that disturbs Blakiston, but the failure to understand that geography is a universal rather than a particular phenomenon, though this must be taken on faith: “We must believe in mountains, in inland seas, and all the usual physical features of other parts of the world . . . before we can even begin to realize China” (emphasis added).17 In the midst of this call to cast aside one’s illusions of China, to see it as commensurate with the rest of the world (and open to the same forms of knowledge), Blakiston both advocates a leap of faith (“we must believe”) and suggests that this landscape of “physical features” is yet to be realized. For Blakiston and those who followed him, to “realize” China is not simply to understand it fully or to correct misconceptions about it, but to make what is popularly conceived in fantastic terms real. It is also to make money from it and even, potentially, to possess it as a form of colonial real estate. The semantic range of “realize” illuminates the intimate connections between knowledge, fantasy, economics, and imperial force that underlay the British contribution to the production of the Yangzi as Chinese landscape. As an officer in the Royal Artillery, Blakiston was trained at the Royal Military Academy in basic methods of surveying and mapmaking, skills essential to managing the logistics of warfare and colonial occupation. These are the same skills that helped maintain what James Hevia has described as a British imperial “information system . . . designed to command and control the space of Asia.”18 One of Blakiston’s greatest contributions to this information system are the charts of the river he produced. Though Chinese painters and mapmakers had been producing images of the river for centuries, Blakiston’s survey yielded the most mathematically precise inscription of the Yangzi above Hankou that had ever been produced. The layout of his book reinforces the importance of mapmaking to his project: its final numbered page consists of an image of a river chart taken from his field-book (figure 3.4), and the book ends with a foldout map of the Upper Yangzi. Together with the frontispiece, these maps form a visual frame that marks the starting and ending points of a symbolic narrative that runs parallel to his textual one. From a sublimely forbidding gorge to a gridded river chart, Blakiston’s book fixes this unfamiliar landscape as visual and material prospect. While this design suggests a passage through an awe-inspiring, albeit objectively rendered, landscape to a cartographically ordered space, the drama of the intervening travel

figure 3.4 A “specimen page” of Blakiston’s field book; published as an appendix to Five Months on the Yang-tsze. Note the label “Coal?” that appears to the left, just below center.

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narrative reminds us that the latter is contingent on the former, that there is an affective and aesthetic undercurrent to Blakiston’s universal geography. The type of precision mapping that Blakiston practiced aimed not only to inscribe the Yangzi and its dangers graphically—no easy task given its length and enormous seasonal variability—but also to situate the river in hierarchical relation to other nations using the global locational system of longitude and latitude, the latter measured “from Greenwich.” Only the careful remapping and representation of the Chinese landscape based on firsthand observation could establish China’s status as a geographical entity like any other nation, overturning earlier fantastic visions and the “geographies” that generated them. Blakiston sought to achieve this with an assiduity bordering on the obsessive. The work of collecting data so preoccupied him toward the end of his trip that he had nightmares about being “tied down” so that he “could not get out to take the times and bearings” or losing the field-book in which he constantly traced the river. Time and again, he explains, he awoke suddenly in the middle of the night to carry out his tasks, only to find “not a sign of morning in the eastern sky.”19 Blakiston’s anxieties notwithstanding, he attributes his health throughout the trip to the rigors of the journey and the constancy of his labors: “I do not know how many half-sleepless nights I endured . . . but this I know, that, had I been living luxuriously . . . I should have been prostrated by fever long before the work could have been accomplished.”20 Despite his narrative of British fortitude, the success of Blakiston’s intellectual labor was in fact dependent on the physical labor of others. These included the “Seikhs,” who guarded the four “Europeans” (one of whom was American) from a sometimes very hostile population, as well as the trackers and the boat’s other Chinese crewmembers. It is in the relationship between these racially divided modes of labor that one can discern the careful institution of what Pratt describes as a “secular, global labor that, among other things, made contact zones sites of intellectual as well as manual labor, and installed there the distinction between the two.”21 Working in a state between hallucination and obsession made possible by the labor of his crew, Blakiston collected material for the creation of a detailed chart of the Yangzi from Hankou (modern Wuhan) to Pingshan. The full-size version, which was produced by the London mapmaker John Arrowsmith, consists of seven separate two-page sections and includes information regarding “the nature of the banks, the shoals, rocks, and country adjoining the river.”22 The smaller “Index” chart represents the entire stretch of the Upper Yangzi in one sheet and was included as a foldout map at the end of Five Months on the Yang-tsze (figure 3.5). If Blakiston’s narrative plots the diachronic experience of

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moving through space over time, Arrowsmith’s map frames the Upper Yangzi synchronically, realizing it as a single prospect. It flattens both the human and natural landscapes into a series of “divisible segments” that were “optically consistent” with other forms of representation.23 Consistency allowed for comparison and cross-referencing, but it also had important logistical functions. By linking together Britain and its imperial prospects, universal geographic and cartographic systems facilitated the predictable movement of people, goods, resources, and military bodies across the globe. Arrowsmith’s chart conveys this sense of movement in a number of ways. First, by tracing the sequence of place names (some coined by Blakiston) along the river, the viewer can journey virtually. Unlike narrative accounts, which tend to emphasize the episodic difficulties of travel and the danger of the river, the virtual journey is effortless and continuous. Later modifications of the river can be understood partly as an attempt to render the physical journey as close to the seamless virtual journey as possible. To fix the river inscriptionally is to begin the process of fixing it materially. Second, in the near absence of information beyond the river, the rectangular frames that provide coordinates and form a regular grid take on a temporal quality, the minutes and seconds of latitude and

A

B

figure 3.5 The first (A) and last (B) sections of the “The Yang-Tsze Kiang from Han-Kow to Ping-Shan.” This index chart was produced by John Arrowsmith based on Blakiston’s survey.

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longitude beating out a steady tattoo for surveys and journeys to come. The spatial and temporal regularity of the map is disturbed only by the cities and rivers that break through the outer frame, as well as by the Yangzi itself, which flows east past present-day Wuhan, almost to the edge of the page (figure 3.6). These breaks link the rationalized territory of the chart to both the nation that surrounds it and the globe that contains it. They also imbue it with a dynamism that neither frame nor page can contain. The sense of free movement and

figure 3.6 Arrowsmith index chart (detail) showing the Yangzi flowing east through the frame. Note the English names that Blakiston has given to landmarks and other topographical features.

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spatial control offered by Blakiston’s narrative and map was powerful, even if, in the 1860s, mastery over the Yangzi remained mostly aspirational. Though travelers like Blakiston were not directly engaged in territorial conquest, by the turn of the century they were part of a global debate on “spheres of interest,” which some considered a step in the partition of China. Typically more economic than administrative, spheres of interest were conceived to give individual European nations and Japan a large measure of control over development in specific regions. The English staked claim to the entirety of the Yangzi Valley, “an area of 600,000 square miles inhabited by about 18,000,000 of the most industrious and peaceable people in the world.”24 “If Chinese partition is inevitable,” as an American reviewer of Archibald Little’s 1888 Yangzi travelogue, Through the Yangtse Gorges: Or, Trade and Travel in Western China, writes, “this is the portion which Great Britain would demand as her share of the spoils.”25 Chinese partition was not inevitable, but Britain’s territorial ambitions—as boldly outlined on the cover of Little’s book (figure 3.7)—helped drive the textual and graphic reinscription of the Upper Yangzi as imperial prospect and modern Chinese landscape.

figure 3.7 Cover of Archibald Little’s Through the Yangtse Gorges (1888) with the “British Sphere” outlined in red. See also color plate 6.

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If Blakiston launched the reinscription of the Upper Yangzi, Archibald Little’s efforts to promote steam travel on the Yangzi over the last two decades of the nineteenth century greatly advanced it. In both cases, their contributions to the spatial production of the region were grounded in the sequence of “unequal treaties” signed by the Qing and foreign powers. While the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin made possible Blakiston’s exploratory survey, it was not until 1876, with the signing of the Cheefoo Convention between the British and the Qing, that a path was opened for direct foreign access to Sichuan.26 In addition to opening Yichang, eastern gateway to the Gorges and a major economic center, as a treaty port, section III of the Convention stipulated that “British merchants will not be allowed to reside at Ch’ung K’ing, or to open establishments or warehouses there, so long as no steamers have access to the port. When steamers have succeeded in ascending the river so far, further arrangements can be taken into consideration.”27 Supplementary articles added to the treaty in 1890 weakened this condition, proclaiming that Chongqing was to “forthwith be declared open to trade on the same footing as any other Treaty Port” (this happened in 1891), though it limited British merchants to the use of Chinese boats between Yichang and Chongqing and further stipulated that British steamships could access Chongqing only once Chinese-owned steamers had achieved the same feat.28 The Chinese government was well aware that the introduction of steamships on the Upper Yangzi as far as Chongqing represented the final stage in the opening of the river to foreign merchants and navies.29 Despite attempts to control this process through the introduction of various conditions in the treaties they signed, it was only a matter of time before maritime technology caught up with the economic and political desires of the British.30 In 1898, Little, who had actively lobbied to make an experimental steamer journey up the Yangzi as early as the 1880s, succeeded in navigating the Chinese-owned steamer Leechuan (Lichuan 利川) between Yichang and Chongqing.31 Two years later, another Englishman, Cornell Plant, piloted Little’s new steamship, Pioneer, through the Gorges, finally meeting the conditions laid out in the Cheefoo Convention’s supplementary articles.32 When the Leechuan powered through the Gorges in 1898, it loosened (without fully breaking) the ties binding travel and trade to the wide seasonal fluctuations and the forms of labor and technology that had defined life on the river for millennia. The successful navigation of the Gorges in steamships still depended on the expertise of Chinese pilots, but it was made possible by the kinds of spatial knowledge disseminated in Blakiston’s and Plant’s charts. As graphic inscriptions of nature scientifically ordered, these charts allowed the

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traveler to plot a course in the real world, imposing on the flux of the river fixed routes and anchorages. Though designed to help travelers negotiate and not change the river, they were far more than representations; by fixing the Yangzi as inscription, they aimed to fix some of the many geographical and hydrological problems that hampered “free trade.” Steamships did not simply master the river, leaving its obstacles unchanged; they transformed the cities of the Yangzi into “nodes in a dynamic transport system,” and made demands on its spatial organization (the demolition of reefs and other large obstacles as well as the construction of docks and treaty port settlements) that were only fully met with the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, a key function of which is to allow oceangoing vessels access to Chongqing.33 There is, to be sure, a much longer history of physical changes made to the banks and bed of the Yangzi in the Three Gorges region. Nanny Kim, for example, has written about a philanthropic project carried out by two Hankou (modern Wuhan) merchants after they were nearly drowned in the Ox Mouth Rapids (Niukou tan 牛口灘) in 1804.34 These men and their descendants sponsored not only the repair of the paths used by “trackers” but also the clearing of erosion debris and the removal of “massive amounts of solid rock” in especially dangerous sections of the Gorges.35 At least two things distinguish these improvement projects from later attempts to develop the Yangzi, however: First, whereas later projects, such as the dynamiting of large rocks that began in 1889 and became systematic between the 1930s and 1970s,36 made permanent changes to the river, earlier projects were often erased by it fairly quickly.37 Second, if the primary goal of nineteenth-century philanthropic projects was to make travel and trade safer for local residents and regional travelers, later changes to the region were part of an effort to integrate the Yangzi into a national and international transportation and commercial system. It is the reinscription of the Yangzi and its Gorges as Chinese landscapes that can be compared to other national landscapes that makes possible not only physical changes that facilitate shipping but also the eventual development of the river into a source of power.

Displ acing Knowledge Blakiston’s efforts to “realize” China introduced forms of spatial knowledge that forever changed how Westerners and Chinese saw and moved along the Yangzi. In the nearly four decades between his 1861 journey and the successful introduction of steamships on the Yangzi, the British—as well as the French, Americans, Japanese, and Chinese—continued to reinscribe the river textually

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and visually, while also reshaping it physically.38 What began as part of an attempt to situate the river in relation to the nation and the world that contained it took on an increasingly fine-grained quality in the construction of a string of treaty ports between Shanghai and Chongqing, the creation of ever more detailed charts of the river, and eventually the construction of a network of signal stations and lighthouses that managed river traffic. By 1920, nearly sixty years after Blakiston’s journey, Western knowledge of the river extended to its seasonal and historical variations in flood level, its currents, its whirlpools, and the individual rocks and rapids that made travel so dangerous. The throroughness of such knowledge is evident in a plate from Cornell Plant’s Handbook for the Guidance of Shipmasters on the Ichang-Chungking Section of the Yangtze River (1920), a publication of the Chinese Maritime Customs (figure 3.8). Plant was one of the most important figures in the reinscription of the Yangzi. A well-respected ship captain, he worked in the employ of both the Chinese Sichuan Yangzi Steam Navigation Company (Chuanjiang lunchuan gongsi 川江輪船公司) and the French navy between 1898 and 1915, when he was appointed the first river inspector of the Chinese Maritime Customs, an organ of the Qing government that was staffed by a combined Chinese and international bureaucracy, with British subjects dominating the upper levels.39 Founded in 1854 to assess customs on maritime trade, its responsibilities gradually expanded to include the collection and publication in English and Chinese of information related to trade, weather, navigation, and a wide variety of other topics. Produced by a Qing governmental organization but for a combined Chinese and “foreign” audience, this body of material constitutes perhaps the best-developed “information system” centered on China’s coasts and rivers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Part guide to the Yangzi and part tool for its commercial capture, Plant’s Handbook was conceived of not only as an aid to Western navigators but also as a tool for ending their reliance on Chinese pilots: The study of it, it is hoped, will be most useful in assisting the master to learn the ropes quickly and thus not leave him so long entirely in the hands of the Chinese pilot, a situation which has been very keenly felt since the advent of steamers on the river and is a constant menace not only to the reputation of the master himself but to the best interests of his owners, to say nothing of lives and property on board.40

Described as a menace to life and property, the Chinese pilot embodied an imbalance of power unacceptable to Western ship captains and owners.

figure 3.8 A plate from Cornell Plant’s Handbook showing routes for steamships through the Xintan 新灘 or “New Rapid.” It was in the village of Xintan that a monument to Plant was erected after his death and subsequently shifted to make way for the Three Gorges Dam reservoir (see chapter 1). Note the signal stations in the upper left and lower right corners, as well as the “tracking bunds” near the top of the plate. The latter were built to provide trackers with level paths for towing boats over the rapids. See also color plate 7.

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Despite advances in the mapping of the Yangzi, in 1920 most steamships could not function without local Chinese knowledge (navigational and linguistic) when confronting the dangers of the Three Gorges.41 Plant’s goal of making Chinese pilots unnecessary was still unmet a decade after the first edition of his Handbook was published. According to the Shanghai-based journalist H. G. W. Woodhead, writing in 1931, “piloting . . . [was still] entirely in the hands of the Chinese. The pilots serve an apprenticeship of six or seven years and usually have had considerable practical experience as helmsman of junks. They have no theoretical knowledge of navigation, never look at a compass, and could not take a cross bearing. But they are able to read underwater conditions from the appearance of the surface with almost uncanny accuracy.”42 Drawing on more than two decades of experience on the Upper Yangzi, Cornell Plant sought to render the uncanny skills of the Chinese pilot unnecessary by producing a comprehensive visual and textual guide to the river. The publication of his Handbook roughly coincided with a shift in the balance of power on the river, from Chinese-owned (and government-backed) companies often employing Western steamship captains, which dominated trade between the late 1890s and early 1920s, to a more mixed configuration of competing Western and Chinese shipping concerns.43 That Plant’s Handbook, a Chinese government publication, was designed to benefit Western ship captains and merchants might seem strange in this context, but his actions were not necessarily contrary to Chinese interests. As Thongchai Winichakul argues in his classic study of cartography and the modern Thai state, it is the displacement of indigenous spatial knowledge—often by the state and its agents—that “has in effect produced social institutions and practices that created nationhood.”44 Plant’s Handbook was designed to benefit Western ship captains and merchants, but it also helped fix the river in its broader national and international contexts. By creating charts that could be used by anyone with the proper training, Plant contributed to the reinscription of the Yangzi as part of a modern China that could be conceived of as both a semicolonial trading partner and a homeland. The Chinese development of the Yangzi over the last century is at least partly an extension of a Western imperial project that was simultaneously improvised, contested, and collaborative, even as it was based in an imbalance of power. If Plant’s Handbook was designed to benefit Western merchants, it also serves as a reminder that Western efforts to reinscribe the Yangzi textually and physically would have been impossible without the “uncanny” (i.e., local, oral, embodied) knowledge of the Chinese pilots who knew the river so well, not to mention the countless Chinese officials and merchants who employed them as well as the river trackers who pulled boats over the most difficult

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rapids in the Gorges. There is evidence, for example, that foreign travelers made extensive use of the 1883 route guide, Xingchuan biyao 行川必要 (Essential Guide to Traveling in Sichuan), and its accompanying chart, Xiajiang tukao 峽江 圖考 (A Critical Chart of the Yangzi Gorges), both of which were produced by the Qing official Luo Jinshen 羅縉紳 (figure 3.9).45 Luo’s Essential Guide and Critical Chart include information from gazetteers, poetry, and other textual sources as well as folk sayings and oral knowledge gleaned from Yangzi boatmen.46 Together, they constitute only one example of a number of combined guides and charts of the Upper Yangzi produced by Chinese officials, merchants, and cartographers between the early 1880s and the mid-1920s, the period during which steamship navigation on the river was first conceived, inaugurated, and finally regularized as a multinational enterprise.47 Though they were intended as practical navigational guides, these new charts draw on many of the same premodern geographical and cultural sources that are inscribed on both the The Shu River, which I discussed in chapter 2, and the closely related Changjiang wanli tu 長江萬里圖 (10,000 li of the Yangzi River)

figure 3.9 This section of Luo Jinshen’s Critical Chart of the Yangzi Gorges (Xiajiang tukao 峽江圖考; 1883) depicts Yichang, just east of the Gorges.

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painting tradition.48 As in The Shu River, blank spaces on these maps are often inscribed with excerpts from gazetteers or other geographical works, poems, and folk sayings, as well as information about navigational dangers and distances between major settlements. Despite their incorporation of “traditional” Chinese mapmaking techniques—particularly in their placement of text and their pictorial landscape style—these Qing and early Republican charts are nonetheless marked by traces of the kinds of spatial knowledge and technology that Western mapmakers deployed in their reinscription of the river. By the 1920s, Chinese map and guide makers were well schooled in the most up-to-date methods used by Western cartographers and were eager to deploy them for both commercial and nationalistic purposes. In one 1923 work, a patriotic editor borrowed portions of Plant’s Handbook (without attribution) and included them within a navigational guide that drew on older pictorial mapping techniques (see below). In a publication from 1920, a team of Chinese surveyors produced a guide to the river’s obstacles that also borrows from Plant but frequently surpasses him in detail and scope.49 Plant’s Handbook was deeply indebted to the forms of knowledge that it sought to displace, but it also provided raw materials essential to the Chinese reinscription of the river. Such acts of appropriation mark an important transition in the production of the modern Yangzi—from a Chinese river scientifically fixed as an imperial and commercial prospect to a Chinese river reinscribed as part of a sovereign nation. These processes of appropriation and adaptation are evident in the evolution of a group of closely related charts and navigational guides that drew, as did many British texts, on Luo Jinshen’s 1883 Essential Guide and Critical Chart. The earliest of these, the Xiajiang tukao 峽江圖考 (A Critical Chart of the Yangzi Gorges), shares a title with Luo’s chart. Though it was compiled by the Qing official Guo Zhang 國璋 (dates unknown) in 1889, it does not seem to have been published until 1901.50 According to the preface to his chart, Guo Zhang combined, amended, and expanded three earlier charts (including Luo’s), each of which covered a series of shorter stretches of the river. Unlike Luo’s chart, Guo Zhang’s Critical Chart (figure 3.10) adopts an orientation sometimes found in official charts and topographical images: For journeys upriver (east to west), one opens the book from the title page and follows the normal right to left orientation of premodern Chinese texts. For journeys downriver, one flips the book upside down and reads it in reverse (though still from right to left). Regardless of the direction of the journey, the bank on the “bottom” of the chart appears upside down. Designed to give equal prominence to the course of the river as well as its southern and northern banks, this “opposed scene” (duijing 對景) format depicts the river and its obstacles from overhead while

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figure 3.10 Yichang and its environs from Guo Zhang’s Essential Reading for Sichuan Travels: A Critical Chart of the Yangzi Gorges (Chuanxing bidu xiajiang tukao 川行必讀峽江 圖考; undated [1901?] but identical to the 1916, 1919, and 1926 editions). Note the upside-down landscape at the bottom of the page. Though more detailed than Luo Jinshen’s Essential Guide, this map still depicts Yichang and its environs using a stylistically generic landscape scene.

representing each bank from an angle that maximizes detail while also leaving space for the printed annotations that are so central to this type of chart. By contrast, the woodblock images in Luo’s 1883 Critical Chart (see figure 3.9) render the river’s southern bank little more than a foreground frame for its depiction of the northern bank and the river, which occupies an extended vertical field. These differences can be attributed at least partly to the different functions of the charts. Luo’s chart was produced to accompany a text that promoted the workings of a philanthropic lifeboat system with roots stretching back to the early Qing.51 Because it predates the introduction of steamships on the river, it is geared toward junk traffic and the organizations and physical infrastructure that supported it. While Guo Zhang’s Critical Chart contains much of the same

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visual and textual information, it was designed first and foremost as a navigational guide for merchant shipping at a time when steamers were being introduced to the Three Gorges region. It is in Guo Zhang’s chart that one first finds small traces of the new technology of steamships and the spatial demands they made on the region. Mapmakers continued to reproduce Guo Zhang’s Critical Chart through the 1920s, though as steamships became more common and their impact on the Upper Yangzi more pronounced, they altered its basic template to reflect changing spatial and political realities. A comparison of the undated version of the Critical Chart (figure 3.10) with an adaptation of it contained in the 1923 Zuixin chuanjiang tushuo jicheng 最新川江圖說集成 (Updated Compendium of Illustrated Guides to the Yangzi in Sichuan) (figure 3.11) shows how the latter was rearranged to reflect these new realities.52 The chart contained in the 1923 Updated Compendium, which also bears the English title Guide to the Upper Yangtze River, Ichang-Chungking Section, is borrowed

figure 3.11 Yichang and its environs as depicted in the Updated Compendium of Illustrated Guides to the Yangzi in Sichuan (Zuixin chuanjiang tushuo jicheng 最新川江圖說集 成; 1923). In this image, the landscape east of Yichang’s walls has been replaced by a street map with detailed labels.

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directly from Guo Zhang’s Critical Chart, but with two changes. The lithographic plates for the starting and ending points for journeys on the Upper Yangzi—Yichang and Chongqing—have been significantly altered. In all editions of the Critical Chart (figure 3.10), the northern bank of the river leading up to the city walls of Yichang is depicted as a landscape of rock formations, trees, and other foliage as well a walled pagoda and other timbered structures. In the Updated Compendium (figure 3.11), however, the engraver has replaced the trees, temples, and low hills closest to Yichang with a crudely drawn map of a street running parallel to the river and smaller streets running north from it, up the sides of low hills. The names and locations of official offices, foreign consulates, pontoons for mooring boats (dunchuan 躉船), and foreign and Chinese shipping firms are printed along the road and the banks of the river. A previous owner has added a key to the map in blue ink as well as additional labels, including one for the American consulate, which is located just beyond the easternmost of the city’s gates (figure 3.12, far left). That both this chart and the various

figure 3.12 Updated Compendium (1923) chart (detail). The landscape that comprises the lead-up to Yichang in Guo Zhang’s Critical Chart has been replaced here with a crudely drawn street map. Note the addition of a symbol key in blue ink: open circles mark foreign shipping concerns, triangles mark pontoon docks, X’s mark consular offices, and closed circles mark government offices. The Chinese-owned Sichuan Yangzi Steam Navigation Company is labeled at far right as Chuanjiang gongsi 川江公司. At far left, the American consulate (Mei lingshi 美領事) is marked with an X. See also color plate 8.

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versions of the Critical Chart from which it has been adapted include a paddle steamer belching smoke by the river’s northern bank suggests that steam technology had become a familiar component of the landscape, at least in Yichang, as early as 1901. It is only the “updated” 1923 edition, however, that fully depicts changes in the spatial organization of the river and its ports necessitated by this technology. By altering Guo Zhang’s Critical Chart to highlight the well-developed infrastructure of steam shipping and international trade, the producers of the Updated Compendium addressed an audience that included merchants and officials directly engaged with (or concerned about) foreign shipping firms and steamships. Compiled by Yang Baoshan 楊寶珊, one of the founders of the Chinese Sichuan Yangzi Steam Navigation Company, which employed Cornell Plant starting in 1908, the Updated Compendium introduces a number of additional features beyond its alteration of the plates depicting Yichang and Chongqing.53 These include a preface that provides a history of the introduction of steamships on the Yangzi (in which Little and Plant figure extensively) as well as two large foldout pages. The first of these is a map of the Upper Yangzi produced using “naval surveying techniques” (haijun celiangfa 海軍測量法) but in reality copied directly from Plant’s Handbook (place names are written in Chinese characters). In his preface, Gao Zongshun 高宗舜 frames the Updated Compendium as part of a commercially driven patriotic imperative to support Chinese steam navigation skills, without which “shipping rights will certainly fall into the hands of foreigners.”54 Gao’s geopolitical anxieties, along with the new views of Yichang and Chongqing and the inclusion of material copied from Plant’s Handbook, visualize the river as an object of international commercial and political rivalry. In framing the Upper Yangzi for a Chinese audience, Yang Baoshan and Gao Zongshun also encourage its reinscription as a national Chinese river, on which the rights of Chinese merchants should predominate. As an artifact of conceptual and economic transitions, the Updated Compendium responds to and participates in the reinscription of the river by drawing on a seemingly traditional cartographic technique—the use of pictorial landscape representation. This is perhaps the most obvious difference between the group of Chinese charts I have been discussing in this section and those produced by Plant and Blakiston for a Western readership. In the former, major cities are not depicted from above, fixed within the relational grid of longitude and latitude, but rather framed by stylized mountains. Information about distances and administrative boundaries is conveyed not through scale measurements or conventionalized symbols, but through the annotations that occupy blank space above the landscape and the textual route guides that

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accompany the chart. At least superficially, the maps contained in Luo Jinshen’s Essential Guide (1883), Guo Zhang’s Critical Chart (1901), and Yang Baoshan’s Updated Compendium (1923) seem to have more in common with The Shu River painting of the Song Dynasty than with Blakiston’s chart or Plant’s diagrams. It is only in the Updated Compendium’s alterations to Yichang, with its simple street plan, that we find anything that resembles a “modern,” planimetric map, which renders objects independent of elevation, as though seen from the air. Tempting as it is to read this addition as a crude attempt to modernize a work of traditional cartography, such an interpretation reinforces a misleading dichotomy between landscape representation as a quintessentially traditional form and mathematical cartography as a modern one. What constitutes the “traditional” in traditional Chinese cartography is, in fact, open to debate. For one Mainland Chinese scholar writing about Guo Zhang’s Critical Chart, “traditional” mapping is described as following a “pictorial landscape method” (shanshui huifa 山水繪法), a “freehand sketch landscape style” (shanshui xieyi shoufa 山水写意手法), or an “impressionistic perspective” (xieyi toushi jiaodu 寫意透視角度) and is contrasted with the “realistic perspective” (xieshide toushi jiaodu 寫實的透視角度) and “symbolic notation” (xiangxing fuhao 象形 符號) of Western “planimetric representation” (pingmian fuhao biaoshifa 平面 符号表示法).55 As Cordell Yee has argued, however, to judge traditional Chinese cartography based on a perceived lack of modern (i.e., Western) scientific characteristics is to establish criteria that are irrelevant to the form. “Geometric and mathematical fidelity to observed reality was not an overarching aim” of Chinese cartography before the twentieth century.56 Instead, cartography was part of a “unified conception of the arts” in which “oppositions between visual and verbal, cartographic and pictorial, mimetic and symbolic representation may not apply.”57 Landscape painting does not provide the same information as contour lines or triangulation, but it reflects ways of seeing and moving through space no less informative and no less capable of responding to change. Perhaps more importantly, “landscape,” or shanshui 山水, is not a homogenous or ahistorical form. It may be true that the Critical Chart uses a “pictorial landscape method,” but such a designation provides no information about its particular style of landscape or its artistic medium. While the chart draws on earlier woodblock images, including those of the 1883 Essential Guide, Guo Zhang and the artists with whom he collaborated also had other influences. The fluid lines of their chart closely resemble an orthodox landscape style typical of topographical paintings and woodblock prints of the high Qing.58

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The ability of the artists and printers to echo and mass-produce such a finely detailed style, however, was contingent on a technology that was central to China’s “visual modernity”—lithography.59 Introduced into China in 1826 by the English missionary Robert Morrison, lithography became commonplace only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when it was used to publish books, periodicals, and visual materials.60 Capable of producing images quickly and cheaply, lithography is what made the mass print culture of the late Qing possible. The links between Guo Zhang’s Critical Chart, its adaptation in the Updated Compendium, and earlier images of the river are easy to see. What is less obvious is how these examples of “traditional” landscape-based cartography embody the shifting technological and representational currents of a modern China in formation. They remind us that the reinscription of the Yangzi and its Gorges as national Chinese landscapes was not based solely in the universalizing methods of Western cartography. Planimetric maps would eventually supplant pictorial charts of the Yangzi, but the popularity of Luo Jinshen’s Essential Guide and the existence of multiple editions and updates of the Critical Chart suggest that older ways of knowing and navigating the river remained important to both Chinese and Western travelers and merchants through the 1920s.

“A L and of Legend” If Guo Zhang’s chart appears “traditional,” perhaps it is because modern Western maps of the Yangzi eschew landscape, even as their makers and users produced landscape images in great quantities for a readership hungry for scenes of China. It is this dissociation—explicitly promoted by Blakiston— that makes landscape such an important counterpart to and alibi for commercial, territorial, and resource forms of imperialism. By promoting a systematic geography against the fantastic landscapes familiar to British readers, the maps produced by Blakiston, Plant, and others framed the Yangzi in order to open it up to forces eager to exploit it. Despite their scientific pretensions, these maps are not so much descriptive as prospective tools—a class of treasure maps. They depict China “as it is” for the benefit of those invested in what it might become. In this sense, they are as much objects of fantasy as the timeless landscape of the willowware pattern. And like the willowware pattern, they frame the Chinese landscape in repeatable form—emptied of local detail and offered up as a commodity (and source of commodities). Contrary

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to Blakiston’s claims, the romance of the “willow pattern” landscape and the universal objectivity of Arrowsmith’s chart are two sides of a shared method of producing and exploiting Chinese space. As the Yangzi and its Gorges became increasingly legible over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the fantastical Chinese landscapes that Blakiston rejected began to return in new guises. No longer scenes of “golden-pheasants innumerable  .  .  . porcelain pagodas and high-arched bridges,” landscapes in the age of steam signaled their Chineseness in more subtle ways. In a 1930 travel poster for the Hong Kong– and Shanghai-based trading and shipping company Butterfield & Swire (figure 3.13), for example, a traditional structure with upturned eaves and a tiled roof looks down serenely on two steamships crossing in opposite directions. The Gorges are promoted here as a landscape of “beauty and grandeur” that is made accessible, but otherwise unchanged, by modern technology. The Chineseness of the landscape plays an equally large role in an advertisement that precedes H. G. W. Woodhead’s The Yangtsze and Its Problems (figure 3.14), a collection of newspaper articles written in the spring and summer of 1931 and originally printed in the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury.61 This advertisement (figure 3.14), for the American-owned Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co., occupies a full page between the text’s Introduction and opening plate and is split into two pictorial fields.62 The upper field (I discuss the lower field in the next chapter) is contained within a circular frame and consists of a river gorge formed by steep, corrugated cliffs. A steamship enters the scene at lower left through a break in the frame. The sleek boat, accompanying text, and landscape promise not only a wondrous experience, but a modern one—motorized and express. Despite such promises, few travelers of any nationality were likely to be traveling with such ease on the middle and Upper Yangzi in 1931.63 According to Woodhead, the presence of Communist snipers shooting “indiscriminately” at boats from the banks of the river caused a precipitous drop in Chinese shipping and travel on the middle Yangzi around 1930.64 Because they could call on the protection of gunships of the “British and Other Navies,” foreign steamers were less adversely affected, though they could still be commandeered by Chinese troops looking for transport upriver.65 Woodhead’s own boat, which was owned by the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co., was seized for such purposes in February of 1928.66 The Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement shows no evidence of the many “problems” that Woodhead catalogs. Instead, it offers not only the promise of speed and comfort but also a taste of the cultural difference that gives the river journey its exciting exoticism for Western travelers. The

figure 3.13 A 1930 travel poster for the Hong Kong– and Shanghaibased trading and shipping company Butterfield & Swire. See also color plate 9. Source: U.S. Library of Congress

figure 3.14 Yangtzse Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement from H. G. W. Woodhead’s The Yangtsze and Its Problems (1931).

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landscape’s Chineseness is subtle, almost subliminal. It appears first in the circular frame, its variations in thickness suggesting the trace of a calligraphic brush, and is reinforced by what look like ripples or reflected light on the water of the river. The artist has rendered this pattern as a small, open box topped by a series of seven horizontal lines that grow larger as they approach the center of the circle, where they are topped by an eighth horizontal line and a small vertical line. The overall effect is of an elongated variation on the Chinese character yan 言, which means “to speak.” Though few of the expatriate readers or tourists targeted by this advertisement would have read these ripples as 言, their textual character makes a powerful promise: that the artist and the advertisement, and by extension the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co., “speak the language,” that they offer unmediated access to this “land of legend.” To see the Chinese script “writ large” on and as landscape was nothing new.67 For centuries, it had been idealized as a form of pure writing, a natural language or pictographic script. With origins in seventeenth-century philosophy and a legacy that extends to contemporary tattoo parlors, the idea that Chinese signifies without recourse to speech, that it maintains a natural connection to the realm of things and actions, has long “functioned as a sort of European hallucination.”68 The textlike lines at the center of this advertisement rely on just such a mirage: they draw on the imagined legibility of Chinese as natural language to promise the viewer and traveler access to a Euro-American “hallucination” of China as a land of wonder. The steamship notwithstanding, we seem far removed from Blakiston’s universal landscape. What brings us back to it, however, is the circular frame that contains this Chinese “text” and landscape. Though designed to look as though it were drawn with a traditional ink brush, the frame’s perfect roundness also evokes the technical extension of the eye in the camera, telescope, binoculars, and theodolite, optical technologies central to attempts to “realize” the Chinese landscape by fixing it scientifically. A form of porthole picturesque, this encircled scene distills the structural logic at the heart of landscape representation in an imperial mode—it represents the physical world as a discrete visual field, isolated from its surroundings and consumable as landscape from the perspective of a sovereign viewer. As in the map that completes Blakiston’s narrative (see figure 3.6), the frame directs an act of penetration that is literalized by the break in the circle and the boat that moves through it.69 Designed to enclose, it also opens the landscape to the viewer as imagined traveler. This particular frame does not capture territorial prospects, however; it offers up an image

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of the natural world as object of both touristic consumption and technological domination. As touristic images, both of these advertisements represent the goal of a fully commercialized cultural landscape, a conflation of the economic and aesthetic interests that remain segregated in a work like Blakiston’s. As poetic images of technological domination, they use landscape to promote a version of what Donald Worster calls the “ ‘imperial’ view of nature.”70 It is this form of imperialism, which makes the Chinese landscape not only accessible through the introduction of new technologies and the removal of physical obstacles to movement but also productive through the extraction of resources, that further links British legacies of territorial and “free trade” imperialism with national development projects such as the Three Gorges Dam, which reduces the entirety of the Yangzi to a natural resource.71 The “ ‘imperial’ view of nature” is grounded in the idea “that man’s proper role on earth is to extend his power over nature as far as possible.”72 Worster’s use of “imperial” is analogical, but the imperialism that he attributes to Baconian and Linnaean natural history did, in fact, undergird the modern scientific disciplines that developed alongside European imperialism and colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.73 As expressions of an imperial view of nature developed as part of imperial and colonial enterprises around the world and later adapted to support national development through the management of natural resources, the scientific disciplines of geology, geography, natural history, hydrography, and cartography were deployed to rationalize and control Asian space. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, scientists working in a range of disciplines, as well as explorers, artists, tourists, and merchants, contributed to the reinscription and reconceptualization of the Yangzi and the Three Gorges by using increasingly sophisticated technologies, many of them visual. Intentionally or not, they helped advance not only territorial and commercial imperialisms, but also a form of resource imperialism that relied on the visual framing of the land as a means of supporting (and sometimes distracting from) the exploitation of its natural resources. They also laid the foundation for a touristic conception of the landscape that was contingent on its spatial reorganization but invested in promoting its immutability. Territorial and commercial forms of imperialism in China have been well studied, but modern resource imperialism and its links to both Qing empire and post-Qing national development have received far less attention, partly because, with the exception of the Japanese annexation of Manchuria beginning in 1931, foreign imperial powers were not able to gain control over large

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areas and the resources they held.74 This does not mean, of course, that such resources were not of interest to European travelers. The people of the Upper Yangzi had little trouble intuiting the link between the seemingly innocent use of cameras, binoculars, and telescopes and the extractive desires of foreign travelers, even if they had no knowledge of modern geology and the types of mining it made possible: The men asserted, as they did everywhere on the river, that with my binoculars and camera I could see the treasures of the mountains, the gold, precious stones, and golden cocks which lie deep down in the earth; that I kept a black devil in the camera, and that I liberated him at night, and that he dug up the golden cocks. . . . They further said that “foreign devils” with blue and grey eyes could see three feet into the earth.75

This passage from Isabella Bird’s 1899 travelogue is intended to illustrate the ignorance of the Chinese population, a variation on the more familiar theme of the camera as soul-stealing device.76 The Scottish photographer John Thomson dismissed Chinese anxieties by drawing on similar tropes: The literati, or educated classes, had fostered a notion . . . that, while evil spirits of every kind were carefully to be shunned, none ought to be so strictly avoided as the “Fan Qui” or “Foreign Devil,” who assumed human shape, and appeared solely for the furtherance of his own interests, often owing the success of his undertakings to an ocular power, which enabled him to discover the hidden treasures of heaven and earth.77

What the locals that Bird and Thomson encountered accurately divined was the complicity among travel, commerce, political interests, and the optical technologies that framed the Chinese landscape in order to realize it. Regardless of what the upper and lower classes of China actually believed about photography, the fear of the “ocular power” of the “Foreign Devil” that is ascribed to them is prescient. As cultural producers, Bird, Thomson, and others used their binoculars and cameras to mine the land for Chinese scenes and figures—fantastical, amusing, picturesque, typical—exporting them to eager reading publics around the world. The technologies they deployed were often identical to those used both in the imperial production of rationalized Asian landscapes for military and commercial conquest and in the resource imperialism that sought to exploit those landscapes. In framing the Yangzi as geographic, commercial, and scenic prospect, cameras, telescopes, binoculars,

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artificial horizons, and theodolites created the conditions of possibility for those eager to exploit the landscape, reconfiguring the entirety of the Yangzi as a natural resource capable of producing not only exotic adventure but also raw materials and massive amounts of energy. One of the early steps in the reconceptualization of the landscape as a source of energy can be traced not to British interest in “golden cocks,” but to a less glamorous “treasure”—coal. Through the end of the nineteenth century, European travelers paid careful attention to the distribution of coal seams and active mines along the Yangzi (see figure 3.4).78 They were concerned not with exporting the raw material, or using it for domestic and industrial purposes as Chinese residents of the region did, but with using it to fuel the steamships they hoped to introduce on the river. Steam travel’s demand for coal encouraged travelers to see and make seen the region surrounding the Yangzi not just as a massive market or source of raw goods, but also as a ready reserve of potential energy similar to what Martin Heidegger, in “The Question Concerning Technology,” calls a “standing reserve” (Bestand). For Heidegger, the act of “revealing” the natural world as a source of power constitutes “a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.”79 Revealing and challenging are not simply ways of using modern technology to act on nature; they change how one experiences and sees the earth: under modern geology and mining, “the earth . . . reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit.”80 In Heidegger’s account, nature is “revealed” as “standing-reserve” through a process he calls “enframing” (the German word is Gestell, a noun meaning frame or skeleton that Heidegger turns into a verb). Heidegger compares “enframing” to the Greek word poiesis, a form of making or “bringing forth” that he famously identifies as a “saving power” against the more destructive forces of modern technology.81 What concerns me here is not the purported saving power of the poietic, but rather the ways in which the visual, textual, and conceptual reinscription of the Yangzi and its Gorges as Chinese landscapes contributed to their enframing as a natural resource and standing reserve of energy “that [could] be extracted without limit and used without depletion,” as Sun Yat-sen describes hydroelectric power generation. Landscape in all its many forms is contingent on framing—the demarcation of a discrete unit from a larger whole, which stands within its frame as a unified entity. Framing is the ur-condition for landscape, both in its sense as an art genre and in its extended meaning as a distinct tract of land. The framing of a poem or landscape image does not simply “reveal” the landscape; it abstracts and challenges it, transforming it into a sign that can be emptied and filled at will—it

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makes of it a standing reserve of the symbolic, which can then be mobilized in the physical transformation of the landscape. The landscape in the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Company’s advertisement does not simply sell a fantasy of oriental ease and adventure; it also prefigures the dammed Yangzi’s future as a reserve of energy, a route for commerce, and a touristic object. It does the last by presenting the river and its landscape as inviting prospects accessible through the break in the frame. There is no trace of the obstacles that still made the Yangzi so dangerous in 1931. Instead, we see the river as placid lake and the old promise of “free” access fulfilled by the convenience of modern travel. The circle and the landscape it contains are no longer a Chinese mirage or imperial prospect but a touristic target, the linguistic ripples its bull’s-eye, the steamship its luxurious arrow. The river is revealed here as a touristic destination forever on reserve. The aesthetic and affective claims of the advertisement are contingent, however, on the long history of rationalization and scientific framing that led to the enframing of the river as a source of natural resources and, eventually, a resource in its own right. As in the river charts, it is the advertisement’s frame that enframes the landscape, offering it up as visual and material prospect. What I am suggesting here is that technological enframing is sometimes prefigured by aesthetic framing and that framing can also challenge the earth. In other words, poetic and pictorial landscape representation might support, directly or indirectly, the construction of dams, and vice versa. Before the Three Gorges Dam extended across the Yangzi, it first towered in Mao’s “Swimming.” For decades, many scholars have understood landscape art in the West as a way of seeing the world that is intimately bound up with the extractionist and expansionist ideologies of capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism: landscape frames the world it seeks to possess. In contrast, Chinese shanshui 山水 traditions in poetry and painting are frequently described as a way of seeing the world not as it appears to the eye, but in its conventionalized forms, according to systems of cosmological, political, and literary symbolism. In such accounts, landscape frames the underlying structures of the world, but does not necessarily seek to represent it mimetically, let alone possess and transform it physically. But what if the relationships between symbolism and mimesis, idealization and possession, traditional and modern, Eastern and Western and landscape, were blurrier than they seem? How might framing, as both the formal feature of aesthetic landscape and the ground of enframing, persist across cultures and over a timescale far greater than that proposed by Heidegger or those scholars writing about Western landscape since the 1400s?

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The Three Gorges Dam is a monument to the imperialist-modernist exploitation of nature updated for China’s global rise. It is also an expression of a 2,500-year-long representational tradition manifested in multiple media, technologies, and languages. The mythology of Yu the Great, the lyrical prose of Li Daoyuan’s Commentary to the Classic of Rivers, Li Bai’s and Du Fu’s poetry, Blakiston’s, Plant’s, and Guo Zhang’s charts, the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement, Mao’s “Swimming,” and the Three Gorges Dam are historically distinct expressions of a landscape tradition that not only frames but also enframes the earth. Over the course of more than two millennia, the poetry, prose, and painting of the Three Gorges have produced a cultural landscape grounded in a set of images, metaphors, and tropes that have remained remarkably stable, even as the natural and built environment of the region has changed in significant ways. This landscape is in turn deeply rooted in an inscriptional tradition that makes the Three Gorges Dam thinkable as a simultaneously symbolic and material form of landscaping. The dam exists not simply because the hydrology of the Yangzi makes it practicable, but because, starting with Yu the Great, the Three Gorges have been inscribed and reinscribed as a land of wonder. It is the enduring fame of this inscriptional landscape that makes it an especially attractive site for a project that links the “Chinese people’s spirit of tenacious struggle” against nature with the political and economic triumphs of contemporary China (as Jiang Zemin does in the second epigraph to this chapter), while also concealing the environmental and social consequences of a mega-dam behind timeless images of rugged gorges and tales of mythical flood-quellers.

4 CHINESE LABOR 我們船工的生活真悲慘 風裡來雨裡去牛馬一般

The life of us boatmen is tragic indeed In wind we come, in rain depart, same as oxen and horses

—A Yangzi River boatmen’s song1 All work such as tracking boats against the swift current of the Chinese rivers . . . is done by overtaxed hand labour, and thus the mass of the people are little better than the beasts of burden, docile to a degree, but with few more wants than the animals, with the additional quality of being a cheaper machine for the work. —Archibald Little2

The Tr acker—A Chinese Type In the previous chapter, I argued that the characterization of the Three Gorges as a land of wonder overlapped with its scientific reinscription as an empirically knowable Chinese landscape. The demystification of the region not only made travel easier, it also supported touristic fantasies that were grounded in tropes of Chinese difference. As the Yangzi’s rapids, boulders, and cyclical rise and fall were fixed in charts, maps, and graphs, and as local, embodied knowledge was displaced by a well-developed “information system,” the Chineseness of the river began to appear as an object of special interest for Western writers. Like conceptions of wilderness that emerge only as wild spaces become rare, the Chineseness of the river as a cultural value is tied to discourses of endangerment and, eventually, preservation through physical

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reinscription. The concrete retaining walls that shore up the new island of Baidicheng, the underwater museum surrounding White Crane Ridge, the creation of the Yu the Great Mythology Park, and even the relocation of Plant’s memorial at Xintan are all examples of how endangerment feeds the desire for preservation. As much as such acts might claim to preserve the outlines of the river as cultural space, they are, in fact, monuments to its erasure and traces of a new configuration. Discourses of cultural specificity and endangerment are not new to the river. Long before the dam project was first imagined, changes in shipping technology and commerce threatened to displace the landscape’s most characteristic figure, the Yangzi River tracker. For the Western travelers who began to reconceptualize the Yangzi and its gorges beginning in the 1860s, the working people of the river were Chinese figures to match and meld with the Chinese landscape. By far the most fascinating of these were the Yangzi “trackers,” men who pulled boats up the river and over its treacherous rapids—sometimes in gangs of hundreds—before and well into the age of steamship travel.3 Though trackers do appear periodically in Chinese paintings, woodblock prints, poetry, and travel writing between the Song and late Qing, they play a relatively minor role in literati representations of the Three Gorges, especially when compared to the historical, mythological, and literary figures that made the region so famous.4 Yangzi boatmen play a similarly minor role in route guides and gazetteers through the late Qing and early Republican era, the period when they “emerged [as a group] with a fully developed system of organization,” thanks to increases in economic activity on the river.5 Chinese travel essayists of the 1930s sometimes mention them in passing, though they tend to focus primarily on the same natural and cultural landmarks that occupied travelers during the Song and Tang Dynasties.6 During the 1930s and early 1940s, trackers did become a theme for Chinese painters, woodblock artists, and folklorists who collected their work songs (haozi 號子), but they received their most sustained interest from Western travelers.7 This chapter explores how the tracker appears as a specifically Chinese type within the Western articulation of the Three Gorges as both a Chinese landscape and a source of power to be extracted, stored, and transmitted throughout the modern nation. It not only brings the tracker into view as a harbinger of key shifts in the conception of the river, it also places him within a genealogy of dispossession that links the writers and artists of the Tang and Song, from Part I, with the men and women displaced by the Three Gorges Dam project, as depicted by the artists I discuss in Part III. Part I drew together premodern and contemporary materials to explore how the immaterial aesthetics of the

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trace relate to the materiality of the landmark and the large-scale reinscriptional practices of national development. As I have argued, though the poems of Du Fu and Li Bai may seem far removed from the dreams of dam-builders, they contribute to a larger spatial imaginary that drives the production of space. The artists I describe in Part III, as we shall shortly see, take up the aesthetics of both the ephemeral trace and the landmark, but redirect them away from the literatus and toward the peasant, the worker, the displaced villager. How do we get from Part I to Part III—from those early coalescing coordinates composing the spatial imaginary of a gradually stabilized Three Gorges landscape, to the most recent interpreters of this same spatial imaginary, now drastically realized in the dam’s completion? To bridge these representational regimes—to understand how the landscape comes in various ways to include its human inhabitants—we must locate the figure in the landscape and zoom in. The tracker is the forgotten forebear of the displaced figures that appear in this book’s final chapters; like them, he comes into view only as he is on the point of being swept away, victim of forms of progress that are all too frequently presented as inexorable.

The Gr andeur of the G orges Between the “opening” of the Yangzi in the 1860s and the 1930s, the tracker appears as a figure of special interest in Western travel writing and visual culture. For Western observers, the tracker differs from the “coolie” in degree rather than kind; he is presented as poorer, more indifferent to pain, more abject, and more animal-like. If the coolie was associated with the global circulation of Chinese labor in the nineteenth century, the Yangzi River tracker was a quintessentially local figure. He is an object of fascination not only because he performs a kind of labor considered too cruel even for beasts of burden, but also because his livelihood is directly threatened by Western travelers, who researched the river with an eye to the introduction of steamships. Shaped by the physical labor of the tracker, the narratives produced by the Western writers and artists I discuss in this and the previous chapter established the spatiotemporal patterns that would come to define the Upper Yangzi River journey. Within the texts and images that these travelers produced, the tracker assumes mythic status as a natural or animal feature of the landscape to be counted alongside the stratigraphy of the gorges and the rise and fall of the river. His disappearance not only supports that natural history with a social-Darwinian narrative of extinction, it also brings to an end the

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Chinese modes of transport and forms of spatial experience that are so central to the Western travel narrative. If the romance of the landscape was diminished by the disembodied power of steam travel, it could still be restored by the journey by native boat. It was the temporality of tracking, for example, that made Donald Mennie’s landscape images possible. Though he photographed the river on two separate trips, it was only his second, by “native boat” pulled by trackers (figure 4.1), rather than his first, by steamer, that allowed him to “reveal perhaps a little of [the river’s] mysterious fascination and convey an impression of the wild grandeur of those high forbidding Gorges of the Upper Yangtze.”8 Published in Shanghai in 1926, only six years after Plant’s Handbook, The Grandeur of the Gorges reinvests the demystified landscape with a sense of wonder that is unmistakably Chinese. The book’s promise to combine cultural authenticity objectively rendered by the camera with a sense of “mysterious fascination” is given material form by the cover of the first edition, which is bound in silk brocade with an embroidered image of Kuimen (figure 4.2). The Grandeur of the Gorges is not simply an account of the Chinese landscape made visible by the labor of the tracker, but also a piece of chinoiserie. Even when it was not possible or desirable to “go native”—as was the case for most travelers—the tracker remained a potent symbol of the Three Gorges as a Chinese landscape, as in the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement from H. G. W. Woodhead’s The Yangtsze and Its Problems (figure 4.3). Filling the bottom third of the full page advertisement, under the italicized phrase “The Gorge Line” and above the company’s address and phone number, two trackers strain to move an unseen object, their taut ropes paralleling the waterline of the ship in the landscape image above them. These men are nearly featureless, their front sides swallowed by shadows that hollow out their already skeletal forms. The rightmost man is doubled over, his right hand dangling close to the ground in front of him. The man to the left looks more vigorous, though he is cut off just below the knees by the edge of the image. The advertisement makes no explicit reference to them; it seems to assume that we will know them by sight, that they are part of what makes the gorges “a land of legend.” But if this is so, why have they been separated from the landscape, squeezed between text that reads “The Gorge Line” and “Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co.”? What role do they play in an advertisement for a form of technology that makes their labor irrelevant? According to H. G. W. Woodhead, author of the travel account in which this advertisement appears, by 1931 “the steamer [had] to a large extent eliminated the tracker” from the river.9 The circular landscape above the trackers seems to illustrate this by erasing all signs of labor (see figure 3.14). Not only is

figure 4.1 A photograph of trackers from Donald Mennie’s The Grandeur of the Gorges (1926).

figure 4.2 The embroidered cover of Mennie’s The Grandeur of the Gorges (1926), featuring a view looking east toward Kuimen. See also color plate 10.

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figure 4.3 Detail of the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement from Woodhead’s The Yangtsze and Its Problems (1931). See also figure 3.14.

the mechanical apparatus that propels the steamship out of sight, the smoke that would normally betray both its existence and its place within a global economy dependent on the extraction of fossil fuels has also been omitted. Even if we were to imagine a team of soot-blackened men stoking furnaces below decks, it would bring us no closer to the labor of the tracker. If this carefully framed scene simultaneously reveals and conceals the technologies that helped enframe the river as a modern Chinese landscape, its juxtaposition with the lower image reifies the displacement of embodied knowledge and labor by preserving the tracker in a space outside but still parallel to the landscape. The realization of the Chinese landscape is contingent on both the displacement of the tracker and his elevation to the status of a Chinese type. When Woodhead actually encounters a group of trackers, he finds the animal metaphors of earlier accounts insufficiently dehumanizing.10 Instead, he proclaims with perfect confidence that “the trackers’ daily task would not be performed by any beast of burden”: At Shantaoping I caught my first glimpse of the Yangtsze trackers. They were only hauling a small junk—about a dozen of them—but if anyone

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wanted to devise an intolerable form of hard-labour he might well select this. Wholly naked, or at best half-clothed, harnessed to loops in the long bamboo rope, these men were straining every muscle of their bodies to move their craft onward. Several of them bent double, others were literally crawling on their hands and knees over the boulder-strewn foreshore.11

Woodhead might as well be describing the men in the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement that precedes the first photographic plate in his book. The primary difference is that in that advertisement one cannot see the “craft” the trackers are straining to move. With the object at the other end of the ropes beyond the frame of the image, the trackers’ tremendous efforts appear futile, as though their invisible load has stopped them dead in their tracks. If the magic of this Chinese landscape is enhanced by a vision of propulsion without labor, then the image of the trackers presents a Sisyphean vision of labor without progress. In this book, I argue that the Three Gorges are a product of multiple forces and processes—the imperial and national reinscription of the region, an “ ‘imperial’ view of nature” that treats the region as a source of natural resources, and an inscriptional landscape tradition more than two millennia old. What is harder to see is that the Gorges are also a landscape marked by the working people who have known them “through the labor [they] demanded of them.”12 Those who looked closely at the landscape before the filling of the reservoir would have seen that the Gorges were inscribed by the labor of the tracker: not only did their towpaths shape the river, however feebly, to ease their labor, but the friction of their hawsers left deep ridges and grooves on the sandstone of its banks.13 Like so many other traces of earlier forms of spatial consciousness and presence, these marks are now deep beneath the Three Gorges Dam reservoir. It was on the tracker and his trade that the “opening” of the Yangzi and the introduction of steamships had their greatest impact. By altering the forms of labor and power necessary for navigating the river, “steam travel collapsed time and space [in] a kind of technological alchemy [that] turned” hard labor and lengthy journeys into “comparatively relaxing travel,” as it had done decades earlier on the Mississippi and other rivers around the world.14 Steamships did more than reduce labor, however; they eventually deprived the tracker of his livelihood.15 As he faded slowly from the rocky banks of the river, the tracker appeared regularly in Western travel accounts, photographs, advertisements, and literature through the mid-twentieth century. Defined by the subhuman cruelty of his labor, he was an object both of touristic wonder

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and of Christian sympathy. Though not as famous as the coolie, he was a more extreme example of the physical laborer as both a specific Chinese type and a representative of Chineseness.

“A Cheaper M achine for the Work” The work of tracking was harrowing. While Chinese sailors had mastered methods of ascending portions of the river by sail, boats had to be pulled by trackers through much of the Gorges, where massive rapids, whirlpools, hidden reefs, shoals, and boulders created formidable obstacles. Individual boats generally had their own crews of trackers, though they frequently supplemented these with seasonal laborers, including large numbers of men and women who established temporary villages during the winter season at especially difficult spots, such as the Xintan rapids.16 Cargo was often transshipped there and at other rapids, though large boats still sometimes required upwards of three hundred trackers (or “Rapid coolies,” as one traveler called them) to pull them across serious obstacles.17 At best, trackers inched their way along the towpaths constructed on sections of the river, some of them little more than narrow, low indentations hacked into the sides of sheer cliffs.18 More often, they clambered over enormous boulders and precipitous, rocky shores, wading through frigid waters (the upriver journey was easiest during winter, when the water level was at its lowest) or diving into the river to free the thick bamboo hawsers that yoked them to their boat. Men who fell while tracking were often dragged along until they could extricate themselves. To fall overboard in midstream meant almost certain death. Trackers worked naked or wearing only a thin jacket, with no protection from the elements or the dangers of their work; the harshness of their labors was etched onto their bodies. By Woodhead’s time, the tracker, with his naked body and “immemorial methods,” had long been a potent symbol of both the Chinese ability to endure pain and the “Chinese Lack of Imagination” that had locked that nation in its eternal past.19 The failure to rationalize the work of tracking by introducing mechanical devices rendered it a tragicomic ritual of endless, crazed repetition. For Lawrence John Lumley Dundas, second Marquess of Zetland, tracking was little more than a farcical allegory of geopolitics: The thought that not unnaturally occurred to me was, what a marvellous thing it is that in the whole course of the two or three odd millenniums

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during which the Chinese have been struggling with the navigation of the Yang-tse, they have failed to evolve so simple a mechanical contrivance as a windlass! With the most primitive hand-winch a couple of men could have effected all and more than the dozen delirious maniacs in a quarter of the time, and at an expenditure of an infinitesimal fraction of the human force. It would be difficult to find a more striking example of that complete lack of imagination which has doomed China to a perpetual back seat among the competing Powers in the present advanced stage of the progress of humanity.20

Without the spark of imagination necessary to move beyond human limitations or the willingness to adopt innovations from abroad, China was doomed to a struggle of repetition without progress. Dundas’s equation of progress with labor-saving devices and stagnation with the “delirious” movements of Chinese bodies shows how the interaction of labor, technology, and race in the navigation of the Three Gorges was filtered through the lens of popular conceptions of national difference. The idea of hard labor with minimal gain that figures in many Western descriptions of trackers evokes not only the “not unnatural” idea of Chinese history as stagnant but also a more complex conception of labor in a specifically “Chinese” mode. In the late nineteenth century, the figure of the “coolie” was seen to possess a “biological” capacity to work hard and long on a meager diet of rice (and opium) while “endur[ing] low levels of constant pain.”21 This trait made him a “machine” far better suited (economically and physiologically) to the depredations of industrialized work or hard labor than the meat-eating white man, whom he threatened to supplant.22 Beneath the surface of this “yellow peril” rhetoric lurked even greater perceived threats—that familiar forms of labor would be (or had already been) supplanted by transnational and industrialized modes of production, and that the appearance of such modes and the men who brought them into being destabilized what Eric Hayot describes as “the measure of ‘humanity’ itself.”23 For the “measure of ‘humanity’ ” to have been thrown into doubt at the end of the nineteenth century must have seemed especially dire. Just as the world was measured, mapped, and scientifically reinscribed during this period, so too was the human body subjected to an unprecedented degree of measurement and classification. With the articulation in the middle of the nineteenth century of the First Law of Thermodynamics (which holds that the energy of a closed system remains constant), French and German scientists came to see “nature as a vast machine capable of producing mechanical work or . . . ‘labor power.’”24

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The physiologists who followed in their footsteps treated the body as a “human motor” that worked according to the same principles found in nature. If the energy contained within nature was inexhaustibly productive, then the same might hold for the human body, assuming that it could be managed properly. Freed from earlier religious and moral frameworks, the human body entered a realm of scientific measurement, rationalization, and systematization that promised to unlock its natural capacity for work, and with it, the door to social progress (i.e., increased production).25 As a paragon of Chinese endurance—and “a cheaper machine” than even a beast of burden, as Archibald Little describes him in the second epigraph to this chapter—the tracker would seem to pose two related problems for European productivist theories. First, his “labor power” is disconnected from the models of socioeconomic development in which the idea was first developed. The foreign visitor was confronted by a system in which the transfer of natural forces through the human failed to fuel the progress of society. The human machine and the natural machine found along the Yangzi seemed in many ways superior to those in the West, but its social manifestation was profoundly out of order. As a result, energy was wasted in the maintenance of an ancient way of life, absorbed by the vacuum of Chinese history. Second, while his capacity to perform backbreaking work on a meager diet seems to fulfill the dream of labor without fatigue, he achieves this ideal without scientific rationalization, through a specifically racial/national and thus threatening capacity. It is his Chineseness that allows him to work in a manner that is not simply unlike the work of Euro-Americans, but subhuman, animal, and thus potentially superhuman. The idea that one could clearly define such racial and national qualities was developed over the course of the nineteenth century through the pseudosciences of phrenology, physiognomy, eugenics, and social Darwinism. As part of far-reaching expansionist ideologies, the bodies of non-Europeans were subjected to methods of physiological and ethnographic measurement that naturalized racial difference, usually defining the other as deficient, degraded, or primitive.26 Popular racial theories were even used to distinguish between different types of Chinese. Archibald Little refers to his boat’s lead sailor and his brother—among the “first specimens of the “Four Streams” (Szechuan meaning Four Streams) province [he] had yet met”—as “tall, fairskinned [and] dolicocephalic,” a term used in craniometry, phrenology, and eugenics to describe a long, thin head type associated with Northern Europeans.27 In European accounts of China, this sort of racial typology was based mostly on anecdotal information (from travelers and missionaries, exported

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images, and journalistic and scholarly works) rather than direct “scientific” measurement (though medical missionaries did perform such work).28 By the turn of the twentieth century, it had developed into part of an extensive discourse of racialized bodies and national “types” distinct from universalist scientific theories of human productivity.29 The ideal body might still be a “human motor,” but there were as many makes and models of motor as there were nations and races. The most influential account of Chinese difference was Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics, published in 1890 and reprinted numerous times since, which presents a taxonomy of Chinese national character in twenty-six chapters (on topics ranging from “Face” to “Indifference to Comfort and Convenience”), with a twenty-seventh chapter dedicated to “The Real Condition of China and Her Present Needs.” Smith’s style, what Lydia Liu calls his “grammar of truth,” relies on a “discursive power that reduces the object of its description to a less than human animal through rhetorical and figurative uses of language.”30 In his chapter on the “Absence of Nerves,” Smith begins with a description of nervous agitation as an inescapable effect of “modern civilization,” a condition that “include[s] all our readers.”31 It is against the ubiquity of nervous afflictions in “modern” nations that the Chinese “absence of nerves” signifies. He is careful to point out, however, that this difference is unlikely to be physiological: It is not very common to dissect dead Chinese, though it has doubtless been done, but we do not hear of any reason for supposing that the nervous anatomy of the “dark-haired race” differs in any essential respect from that of the Caucasian. But though the nerves of a Chinese as compared with those of the Occidental may be, as the geometricians say, “similar and similarly situated,” nothing is plainer than that they are nerves of a very different sort from those with which we are familiar.32

Through an imaginary, but still gruesome dissection of “dead Chinese,” Smith repeats the dialectic that structures his entire work: though part of a single humanity, defined here by the geometrical arts of modern medical science (note the affinity with Blakiston’s universal “physical features” of Chinese geography described in chapter 3), the Chinese remain unmistakably different. Having failed to find this difference under the skin, Smith locates it in a catalog of Chinese characteristics: the ability to “remain in one position” for a long time, to go without exercise, to “sleep anywhere,” to breath without ventilation, to bear overcrowding, and to endure “physical pain.” In each

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case, “freedom from the tyranny of nerves” is not only empirical evidence of a Chineseness that leaves neither outward nor inward trace, but also a reminder that the Chinese may one day pose a threat to “the Caucasian.”33 As throughout, Smith’s catalog of difference poses the Chinese as not just other, but also threatening, especially in an imagined future in which China has modernized: “We have come to believe, at least in general, in the survival of the most fit. Which is best adapted to survive in the struggles of the twentieth century, the ‘nervous’ European, or the tireless, all-pervading, and phlegmatic Chinese?”34 Smith makes only one reference to “boat-trackers,” in a chapter titled “Content and Cheerfulness,” on the “chronic state of good spirits . . . [called] ‘cheerfullness’ ” and the form of “conservatism” that makes the Chinese perfectly content with “the system under which they live.”35 He describes trackers as “some of those whose labour is most exhausting . . . [and yet] not only are not heard to murmur at the unequal distribution of this world’s goods, but when they have opportunities of resting do so in excellent spirits, and with an evident enjoyment of their humble fare.”36 As the most extreme, and thus most typical, of laborers, they prove the general rule of Chinese industry and endurance that Smith and others are at pains to establish, and of which cheer and contentment are merely subsidiary characteristics. But even this easy accommodation to harsh conditions poses a potential threat, as he reminds his readers: “We repeat that if the teaching of history as to what happens to the ‘fittest’ is to be trusted, there is a magnificent future for the Chinese race.”37 The tracker is poised to enter the future with pain as pleasure and biology as destiny. In reality, trackers and other boatmen were all too conscious of their physical and economic vulnerability. What appeared to the Western writer as contentment and cheer belied a tragic sense of self. Linguistically inaccessible to most Western travelers, this sense of self was expressed orally through the boatmen’s work songs, or haozi 號子.38 As numerous travelers note, these songs and chants were an integral part of the Yangzi “soundscape,” though usually they registered as little more than “tremendous noise,” loud enough to drown “the roar of the rapid” or damage one’s hearing.39 According to Igor Iwo Chabrowski, the most common haozi consist of a call-and-response structure that provides a clear and flexible system for pacing the work of tracking, while others constitute “mind maps” of the region or express romantic longing.40 Songs complaining about meager pay, cruel bosses and middlemen, and the dehumanizing labor of tracking were also common. Not unlike the Westerners who were so shocked by their labor, boatmen frequently compared themselves to animals:

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日子不如牛和馬

Our lives cannot compare to those of oxen and horses41

船工終年如馬牛

The boatmen through the year are as horses and oxen42

我們船工的生活真悲慘 風裡來雨裡去牛馬一般

The life of us boatmen is tragic indeed In wind we come, in rain depart, same as oxen and horses43

Unlike Western writers, whose animal metaphors were grounded in racist conceptions of Chinese atavism, however, boatmen described themselves in this manner to draw attention not only to the harshness of tracking but also to how their poverty impinged on their ability to establish and maintain proper social ties, especially marriage.44 As in the leftist literature that made rickshaw-pullers iconic urban workers, the haozi of Yangzi boatmen drew attention to the bestial nature of tracking to reassert the humanity of the tracker.45 The “all-pervading  .  .  . Chinese,” of which the tracker was an extreme example, were both excluded from and deemed to possess a super/subhuman capacity to weather the shocks of modernity because they offered a site for the schizoid marriage of the West’s superiority complex and its anxiety over modernity’s enervating effects. If the First Law of Thermodynamics made possible a productivist ideology of labor power, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which holds that entropy in a closed system increases over time, forced a reckoning with the “inevitability of decline, dissolution, and exhaustion.”46 According to Anson Rabinbach, “the paradoxical relationship between energy and entropy is at the core of the nineteenth-century revolution in modernity: on the one side is a stable and productivist universe of original and indestructible force, on the other an irreversible system of decline and deterioration. . . . The powerful and protean world of work, production, and performance is set against the decrescent order of fatigue, exhaustion, and decline.”47 Whereas the fatigue, nervous ailments, and physical illnesses of modernity in industrialized Europe and America threatened to blunt the competitive edge that had raised the Caucasian races so far so quickly above the Chinese, the Chinese “absence of nerves” conjured the (enduring) specter of a role reversal. As both proof of Western progress and promise of Western decline, the tracker of Smith’s Chinese Characteristics was an essential partner within the “paradoxical relationship” of modernity.

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In Smith’s account, the tracker as coolie functions as both harbinger of a Chinese future and symbol of the Chinese past because he embodies a timeless racial essence—the telos of progress could be just as easily fueled as foiled by the stagnant East. There is no irony here. After decades of scholarship dedicated to dissecting orientalist and colonialist discourse, it is easy to recognize such antinomy as the engine of difference propelling colonial power structures and maintaining their latter-day manifestations. Just as the “Chinese landscape” might refer to a timeless land of wonder or a region scientifically mapped and measured, the tracker came to embody contradictory conceptions of Chineseness. Shaped by the rhetorical template of Smith’s book, the tracker and the coolie were simultaneously primitive and primed for future dominance. What is missing from Smith’s secondhand account, however, but present in most firsthand accounts of trackers, is a sense of horror at the brutality of their labor and sympathy for their suffering. If evolving ideas of “labor power” allowed observers to pit the tracker and coolie against laborers of other nationalities and races, an older and more powerful discourse of sympathy encouraged them to consider the tracker as part of a shared humanity, even as they described him as a “less than human animal.”

Sympathetic L ab ors The Victorian travel writer Isabella Bird frames her sympathy for trackers with that of earlier travelers, while also reminding us that the figure of the coolie had global currency at the century’s end: Capitan Blakiston, Captain Gill, and more lately Mr. A. J. Little . . . have all expressed both sympathy with these men and their wonder at their hardihood, industry, and good-nature, and with my whole heart I endorse what these writers have said, and regard this class as typifying that extraordinary energy of the Chinese which has made and kept China what it is, and which carries the Chinese as thrifty and successful emigrants to every part of Eastern Asia and Western America.48

Bird, who based her travelogue on observations made during a trip up the Yangzi and into the mountainous Tibetan regions of far western Sichuan in 1897, is the most thorough source on the organization of the work of tracking. In two chapters mostly dedicated to them, “Rapids and Trackers” and “Life on

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the Upper Yangtze,” she describes both their work and their suffering in detail and with frequent recourse to the language of sympathy. I quote her here at length to give a sense of the paratactic fervor of her writing when she focuses on these men: Away they go, climbing over the huge angular boulders of the river banks, sliding on their backs down spurs of smooth rock, climbing cliff walls on each other’s shoulders, or holding on with fingers and toes, sometimes on hands and knees, sometimes on shelving precipices where only their grass sandals save them from skipping into the foaming race below, now down close to the deep water, edging round a smooth cliff with hardly footholds for goats, then far above, dancing and shouting along the verge of a precipice, or on a narrow track cut in the rock 300 feet above the river, on which narrow and broken ledge a man unencumbered and with a strong head would need to do his best to keep his feet. The reader must sympathetically bear in mind that these poor fellows who drag our commerce up the Yangtze amidst all these difficulties and perils, and many more, are attached to a heavy junk by a long and heavy rope, and are dragging her up against the force of a tremendous current, raging billows, eddies, and whirlpools; that they are subject to frequent severe jerks; that occasionally their burden comes to a dead stop and hangs in the torrent for several minutes; that the tow-rope often snaps, throwing them on the their faces and bare bodies on jagged and rough rocks; that they are continually in and out of the water; that they are running many chances daily of having their lives violently ended; and that they are doing all this mainly on rice!49

Bird’s prose channels the violence of the river to convey the precariousness of the tracker’s labor as an object of sympathy. It does this not by giving these men psychological or biographical depth, but by carrying out a figurative dismemberment (and symbolic castration through omission), rendering them so many backs, shoulders, fingers, toes, hands, knees, heads, and feet. Even at the moment that they seem to regain a measure of wholeness as men (after being compared to goats), Bird draws a comparison between the straining tracker and the hypothetical “man unencumbered,” the two falling within separate categories. Only after he has been systematically picked apart does the tracker come into integral focus as a “poor fellow” whom the reader “must sympathetically bear in mind.” Bird’s exhortation has a moral but not a practical function; there is no call to improve the condition of the trackers or change the way in which

pl ate 1. The Three Gorges Dam in operation. Source: iStock/Getty Images

pl ate 2. Ten-yuan note: looking east through Kuimen, with Baidicheng in the lower left and the Three Gorges extending into the distance.

pl ate 3. The Yu the Great Mythology Park with the First Yangzi River Bridge. Source: Image courtesy of Robin McNeal

pl ate 4. The Shu River (Shuchuan tu 蜀川圖) (detail), attributed to Li Gonglin 李公麟 (ca. 1041–1106). This portion of the scroll contains the walled city of Kuizhou, labels for Du Fu’s “lofty retreat” and his home at Dongtun (see figure 2.2), Baidicheng, Qutang, and a host of other local landmarks. Source: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1916.539

pl ate 5. The Goddess Will Surely Come to No Harm (Shennü ying wuyang 神女應無 恙, 1959), Fu Baoshi 傅抱石 (1904–1965); ink on paper. Source: Nanjing Museum of Art, Jiangsu

pl ate 6. Cover of Archibald Little’s Through the Yangtse Gorges (1888) with the “British Sphere” outlined in red.

pl ate 7. A plate from Cornell Plant’s Handbook showing routes for steamships through the Xintan 新灘 or “New Rapid.” It was in the village of Xintan that a monument to Plant was erected after his death and subsequently shifted to make way for the Three Gorges Dam reservoir (see chapter 1). Note the signal stations in the upper left and lower right corners, as well as the “tracking bunds” near the top of the plate. The latter were built to provide trackers with level paths for towing boats over the rapids.

pl ate 8. Updated Compendium (1923) chart (detail). The landscape that comprises the lead-up to Yichang in Guo Zhang’s Critical Chart has been replaced here with a crudely drawn street map. Note the addition of a symbol key in blue ink: open circles mark foreign shipping concerns, triangles mark pontoon docks, X’s mark consular offices, and closed circles mark government offices. The Chinese-owned Sichuan Yangzi Steam Navigation Company is labeled at far right as Chuanjiang gongsi 川江公司. At far left, the American consulate (Mei lingshi 美領事) is marked with an X.

pl ate 9. A 1930 travel poster for the Hong Kong– and Shanghai-based trading and shipping company Butterfield & Swire. Source: U.S. Library of Congress

pl ate 10. The embroidered cover of Donald Mennie’s The Grandeur of the Gorges (1926), featuring a view looking east toward Kuimen.

pl ate 11. Han Sanming stands before Kuimen.

pl ate 12. “Man’s Whole World Is Mutable, Seas Become Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects Areas South and North of the Yangtze River” (1968), designed by Zheng Shengtian 鄭勝天. Source: U.S. Library of Congress

pl ate 13. Han Sanming looks out at the ruins of Fengjie and the destabilized banks of the Yangzi.

pl ate 14. Shen Hong and the repurposed socialist realist gaze.

pl ate 15. Four People Leaving Badong (2009), Yun-fei Ji; watercolor and ink on xuan paper, mounted on silk. Source: The Carolyn Hsu and René Balcer Collection. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

pl ate 16. The East Wind (2003), Yun-fei Ji; watercolor and ink on xuan paper. Source: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

pl ate 17. Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (2009), Yun-fei Ji; hand-printed watercolor woodblock mounted on paper and silk. Source: Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

pl ate 18. Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (detail).

pl ate 19. Last Days Before the Flood (detail), Yun-fei Ji.

pl ate 20. A Monk’s Retreat (2002), Yun-fei Ji; ink and mineral pigment on xuan paper. Source: Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

pl ate 21. A Monk’s Retreat (detail).

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“our commerce” is dragged inland. What she asks of her readers is to convert the physical labor of the trackers (whose terrestrial brothers were often called “bearers”) into the mental, moral, and affective work of sympathy. The sympathetic act entails an effort of internalization, a bearing of the tracker inside the otherwise “unencumbered” mind. If they can bear such inhuman travails, then surely the reader can take a moment to bear them up in turn. It proves to be only a very brief moment, however; the inward turn spirals out almost immediately into the “tremendous current, raging billows, eddies, and whirlpools” of the river and from there, back to the “bare bodies” of the trackers. Arthur Smith may have been correct when he claimed that “it is not very common to dissect dead Chinese” (italics added), but there was no such prohibition against dissecting living Chinese, especially when the goal was the moral good of greater sympathy.50 For Bird, the lure of the internal proves irresistible. Even as she tries to move away from the topic of trackers, she finds herself drawn ever closer, from their appearance as seen from afar to an intimate dermal inspection of their battered bodies, and on to the liminal space of their wounds: There is much more to be said about the trackers and their work, but the reader is weary, and I forebear. No work is more exposed to risks to limb and life. Many fall over the cliffs and are drowned; others break their limbs and are left on shore to take their chance—and a poor one it is— without splints or treatment; severe strains and hernia are common, produced by tremendous efforts in dragging, and it is no uncommon thing when a man falls that his thin body is dragged bumping over the rocks before he extricates himself. On every man almost are to be seen cuts, bruises, wounds, weals, bad sores from cutaneous disease, and a general look of inferior rice.51

Bird sweeps her readers up in a maelstrom of sympathy until they are drawn through “cuts, bruises, wounds, weals, bad sores” almost inside the body of the tracker. The inward trajectory of the reader’s embodiment—their bearing the tracker in mind—is reversed through the near invagination of the latter’s wounds. This reading is not intended as a psychoanalytic diagnosis of Isabella Bird as a prototypically repressed Victorian, nor is it designed to pass judgment on her personal sympathy for the tracker. What we see in action here is not only a colonial discourse of eroticization more typical of descriptions of women’s bodies, but also an expression of a discourse of sympathy in which Chinese suffering plays a constitutive role.

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David Spurr has explored how eroticization (a “cliché of colonial history”) rhetorically constructs—through “metaphors, seductive fantasies, expressions of sexual anxiety”—the bodies of women as symbols of the colonized nation, “assign[ing] to subject nations those qualities conventionally assigned to the female body.”52 That Isabella Bird was writing during an extended period of anxiety over the “opening” of China (she was against the “sphere of influence” and for the U.S.-backed “Open Door” policy) further aligns her with a masculinized version of this discourse.53 The trope of “unveiling” served as a “visual metaphor for ideas of opening and discovering everywhere implicit in this discourse.”54 That the trackers are already naked precludes a literal unveiling but allows for a more piercing gaze, one that recalls both the nineteenth-century colonial turn toward the interior and the gendered imagery of penetration that is a nearly universal trait of contemporary travel accounts of journeys up rivers.55 Bird’s call to understanding through penetration and unveiling also draws on a discourse of sympathy that had long functioned “as a kind of affective and cultural surplus” to the uneven political and commercial exchange between the British and the Chinese.56 One of the primary foci of this sympathy was a symbolic Chinese body, which was measured out most precisely in the course of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “sympathetic revolution” that Hayot describes as producing “modernity’s dream of a universal subject.”57 As an abstraction of both absolute physical distance and cultural difference, the Chinese, in the form of what Hayot calls the “hypothetical Mandarin,” became a favored test case for the creation of a universal subject as object of human sympathy. The expression of sympathy toward Chinese people was contingent on their bodily suffering and deeply entwined with discourses of Chinese cruelty and resistance to pain. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, with the completion of the two “opium wars” and the signing of their punitive treaties, sympathy became both companion of and alibi for the European “opening” of China. The expression of sympathy required either an already suffering body or a body (politic) that one must maim in order to fulfill the commercial logic of “sympathetic exchange.”58 As a symbol of a degraded form of labor power and an object of sympathy, the tracker was also a limit case at this moment for what it meant to be human and what might happen to human beings when fully subordinated to or excluded from progress.

* As much as Bird’s descriptions of trackers might have been predetermined by earlier discourses of national character, eroticization, and sympathy, she seems genuinely concerned with their plight. If the space between

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her concern and the often violent discourses that help shape it constitutes “a kind of affective and cultural surplus,” it is an ambiguous surplus and one that we continue to produce today. The suffering of Chinese laborers—from Foxconn employees who assemble iPhones to migrant workers who build dams—remains an object of deep concern, not only for observers outside of China, but for the many Chinese artists who have worked to document their experiences of a changing homeland. We are still using the Chinese laborer to trace the borders of the human, and the affective surplus of the past has come to fuel a cultural industry in the present. But are we merely voyeurs when we watch Chinese documentary films about migrant laborers, coal miners, factory workers, or dispossessed farmers? Do we feel sympathy for Chinese suffering (generated by the representation of suffering) in order to assuage the guilt we feel for our complicity in the uneven economic and political systems that perpetuate it? Is the sympathy of Chinese observers less tainted by discourses and histories that have shaped sympathy in Euro-American cultures? And if all sympathy proves, in fact, to be unavoidably tainted and thus of dubious morality, is the only alternative to look away?59

An Engineered China If sympathy for the Chinese was part of the affective labor of opening China for writers like Bird, it posed serious dangers for others. According to some writers, to get close to the Chinese was potentially to absorb their Chineseness; to “go native” was to relinquish what made the Westerner morally superior. H. G. W. Woodhead expressed just such a concern when he wrote of his shock in finding “disturbing evidence of the assimilation by foreigners of Chinese legal conceptions”: “I have heard foreign business men in Shanghai talk airily about the prospects of improved trade resulting from greater understanding of and sympathy with the Chinese on the part of the younger generation of foreigners who is [sic] now coming out to this country.”60 For Woodhead, “Chinese legal conceptions” and “justice” amount to little more than a joke, albeit a dangerous one. To understand and sympathize with the Chinese in legal matters is to embrace the methods of the “crook” and to discard the “integrity and scrupulousness” for which the “British merchant” was supposedly renowned.61 It is a form of going native, an “assimilation” to be resisted at all costs. Woodhead does not consider what it might mean to understand and sympathize with the Chinese beyond the realm of commerce. There is only

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one type of exchange in his accounting, one sorely limited by political unrest, excessive taxation, Chinese stubbornness, and a host of other ills. In this he is quite different from Bird. To understand why certain types of sympathy were regarded as dangerous, it helps to look to fictional texts that imagine the transformational processes that they supposedly initiated. There are few better examples than John Hersey’s novel A Single Pebble—published in 1956, the same year as Mao’s “Swimming”—in which an unnamed American engineer journeys up the Yangzi River in the early 1920s to assess the viability of building a hydroelectric dam in the Three Gorges. Traveling by native craft, the engineer finds himself in close quarters with the boat’s owner, his young wife, and the trackers who pull the boat up the river. Beyond the outlines of the plot, which the engineer narrates retrospectively, Hersey’s novel takes the form of an allegory of national difference and a defense of the organicity of the Chinese people and their landscapes against the incursions of Western technology. Simultaneously a critique of the evangelical zeal of American progressivism à la John Savage and an acknowledgment that such “progress” is inevitable, A Single Pebble figures the Yangzi and the Three Gorges as the site of a clash of modes of knowing and shaping the Chinese landscape. If the engineer’s sympathy for the people of the river threatens to undermine his national character, to make him more Chinese, it ultimately takes on a more violent character. To free the tracker from his labor by ushering in an “engineered China” is to make him obsolete, to eradicate him as a type. Hersey was very much aware of the conceptual and physical transformation of this landscape begun by earlier British travelers, and his novel reads at times as a pastiche of episodes and attitudes culled from Blakiston, Little, Bird, Plant, and others. Yet his narrative relies less on any one source than on the deep structures of colonial discourse and narrative. Chief among these are the tropes of the inland river journey as an act of penetration and the sovereign gaze that establishes possession over the racial and cultural other. Hersey’s engineer does not aim to possess the land as colony, but he looks on the landscape with no less an imperial impulse. His goal is not territory, but resources; he seeks to enframe the river as a natural resource, a standing reserve of energy that remains nonetheless in/of the Chinese landscape: The strength of the Great River, rushing through the diversion tunnels . . . created a vast hum of ten million kilowatts of light and warmth and progress flowing out through high-hanging wires over six widespread provinces . . . A terrible annual flood . . . was leashed in advance

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by this beautiful arc. Beyond the tall barrier, junks sailed forward with their wares, to Chungking and farther, as on a placid lake.62

The river as power work bleeds into the river as artwork here, blurring any distinction between the aesthetic framing of the landscape and the enframing of the river. Over the course of the novel, the engineer’s visions of the landscape as a site of the technological sublime build in number and intensity until they possess him. Hersey’s critique of his megalomania is not ecological, but rather historical and allegorical, at once a reference to a high modernist ideology of progress and a figure for the American democratic evangelism of the Cold War. Yet he frames this critique through a landscape mode that presents the Yangzi as a tightly integrated ecological, cultural, and geological system. For Hersey’s engineer and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century travelers on which he is based, the scientific survey reinscribes and enframes the Yangzi as a (potentially) modern landscape, paving the way for exploitation of the river as a natural resource. That the engineer is a representative of an American company that wishes to sell “a vast power project in the river’s famous gorges” to the Chinese government in no way alters the basic relationship between power and the physical world that underlies resource imperialism as it operates in the contexts of both imperial exploitation and national development. In A Single Pebble, the appropriative gaze is always operative, even when the engineer proclaims his impotence: At length we erupted from the gorge. The limestone formations fell away, and we moved all at once into a region of plutonic rocks. In a valley nearly a mile wide huge boulders of gneiss and granite, larger by far than our junk, lay strewn about, and straight across the line of the river, relenting only enough to grant it a shallow channel, curious dykes of greenstone and porphyry rose up out of the other stone. It was a primeval landscape, and it seemed to have been arranged by some force of fury. I was deeply moved and humbled by the sight of the trackers scrambling like tiny, purposeful crickets over the rough and intractable banks. We were all hopeless insects in this setting. My career, engineering, seemed only nonsense here. Nothing—absolutely nothing—could be done by man’s puny will for this harsh valley littered with gigantic rocks.63

From the narrow confines of the gorge, which directs the gaze vertically, the engineer moves into the horizontal spaces of a valley, which frame and

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envelop him, rather than the other way around. In contrast to the experience of gazing out at a prospect from a high point, which places the viewer in a position to encompass the landscape, the engineer looks up from the low point of the river, over which the boulders and dykes loom. Struck with a sense of horror, he proclaims not only his own impotence, but the impotence of man in general to challenge the natural “forces of fury” that have shaped the earth. The narrative of progress and the myth of timelessness collide here in and through a particular type of landscape and landscape experience. The engineer calls it “primeval,” but that is not accurate. The scene he describes could not exist without the language and representational modes of modern geology and Romantic aesthetics. The gneiss and granite might be many millions of years old, but the “landscape” is no more than a few hundred years old. As the product of historically and culturally specific ways of seeing and knowing the world, it comes into focus through acts of framing, of cutting out extraneous matter to present a coherent “view,” in this case, of a sublime “land of pre-history” (figure 4.4)64 This is certainly not the landscape experienced by Hersey’s trackers. Not only are these men not equipped with the scientific knowledge to recognize the valley as “primeval,” they have no access to the literal and figurative viewpoints without which one cannot encompass and frame space in this way. They are part of the landscape itself, insects scrambling across the valley’s plutonic rocks. The engineer’s claim to a shared impotence—“we were all hopeless insects in this setting”—thus masks the most important forms of

figure 4.4 “Directly beneath the sandstone lies the gorges-limestone formation, which, rising up in an anticlinal limb, has again been transected by the Yang-tzi in a magnificent and grand gorge.” Source: E. C. Abendanon, “Structural Geology of the Middle Yang-Tzïkiang Gorges,” Journal of Geology 16, no. 7 (1908): 601.

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power one can possess in relation to landscape: the power to see, frame, and thereby enframe. Puny as it may be, man’s will is still the will to power, especially when compared to the supposed “indolence” of the Chinese. As the story progresses, the narrator’s faith in his ability to change China is challenged not only by his belief that it exists outside of the temporality of progress but also by his assimilation of native ways of seeing the river. The dam’s “beautiful arc” rises in his mind’s eye, as it did in Sun’s and Mao’s, but the image he presents closes with the graceful junk— “a craft well designed forty centuries ago”—rather than the steamships that had plied the waters of the Yangzi since the turn of the twentieth century.65 It is in wavering between visions of an “engineered” and a timeless China that the engineer undergoes an abortive process of Sinicization, which begins when he takes sick after passing through the first of the gorges: I feared the typhoid, but now from this distance I can guess that I was ill of mystification and disappointment, and of a churning up of inner forces I had never known. I had approached the river as a dry scientific problem; I found it instead an avenue along which human beings moved whom I had not the insight, even though I had the vocabulary, to understand. What bothered me, and was incomprehensible to me, was their indolence, their lack of drive, their indifference to goals I held valuable. . . . The central idea of my energetic country meant nothing to them, I thought. Since I had pinned my hopes for China, for an engineered China, upon that idea, I was prostrated, I suppose, as I floated through the awesome terrains of the wild Great River, by what I imagined to have been a terrible discovery—as well as by some trivial germ of that district.66

The engineer conflates his biological illness with a spiritual infection caused by the realization that the Chinese “had no desire to get ahead.” He comes to this realization as he watches the crew entertain themselves with jokes and “slapstick” and wonders: “How could they have traveled all day through this land of pre-history only looking forward to an evening of pranks and cackling.”67 Posed as a violent reaction to Chinese “indolence” and the type of cheer that Smith praises, this passage voices the engineer’s unspoken fear that the “trivial germ” he internalizes is in fact a vector for something far more dangerous, an assimilation of Chinese ways of inhabiting the “primordial river.” There are few Chinese ways more foreign to the scientifically minded Western traveler than Chinese superstition. Little deems China a land “more

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given to superstition than science” and complains that “it is as hard to lead a Chinaman to believe that natural phenomena are due to natural causes . . . as it is in the West to convince a devout believer in witchcraft of the non-existence, or rather non-interference of the supernatural in current mundane affairs.”68 Little’s comparison grounds Chinese superstition in a failure to recognize the relationship between phenomena and causes, to accept that nature is always natural. It is precisely in his search for “natural causes” that the engineer in A Single Pebble comes to develop his own superstitions. Though he mocks the superstitions of the crew and rails against the Chinese faith in fengshui (as did the real travelers who preceded him), he fails at times to see the river as merely a scientific problem. At such moments, it is more than a symbol of China’s stagnation; it is an ominous force, ready to react against his desire for change: A queer thing I did observe in certain deeps of the gorges was this: However strong the gale and however open the reach, no waves ever formed on the surface in those places. All the water there had an ugly slickness, laced with froth, and the wind slid over it as if it were molten metal. . . . This smoothness of the water, together with the awesome cliffs of the gorges, gave certain passages of the channel on which we rode a supernatural and malevolent atmosphere, at least in my mind. Yet the slickness was easy enough to explain; the Yangtze’s waters, I could see, moved not only seawards but also up and down, stirred by rocks beneath, and none of the water was ever on the surface long enough to be moved by mere wind. It fought stone, not the plastic sky. It was sheer power, and should have lifted the heart of a young engineer—but instead the sight of it made me uneasy.69

The engineer’s ability to read the river as a source of “sheer power” to be measured and harnessed cannot forestall his growing sense of doom. The “slickness” of the river can be explained scientifically, but it cannot be explained away. It clings to the engineer with an uncanny viscosity, engendering a superstitious belief that the river is somehow “supernatural and malevolent.” Unlike the ship’s crew, he cannot assuage his fear of the river through ritual—whether the maintenance of behavioral taboos or the use of pagodas to improve poor fengshui. He has assimilated a Chinese belief without its cultural apparatus. As in Woodhead’s disgust at the “assimilation by foreigners of Chinese legal conceptions,” cultural interest and sympathy were seen as potential seeds of racial transformation. “Going native” was far more than a sympathetic

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affectation or even an active decision. According to one anonymous “old China hand,” no one, least of all the dedicated student of China, is immune to its contagion: [Sinologues] are all in the clouds, lost in the fogs and mists of the Chinese language and the poetry of 2000 B.C. Something queer comes over the best of men when they get very far in the Chinese language and its classical literature. They become abnormal, impersonal, detached, dissociated from the living world, from the white-skinned, red-blooded human races of the West. Something in the climate, some mental microbe, gets into all of us here in China. The longer we stay here the less we see, the less we are fitted to judge.70

Residence among, and especially intimacy with, the Chinese threatened to change the “red-blooded” Westerner.71 Such beliefs appear throughout the literature of colonial encounter, both unreflectingly, as above, and as objects of (qualified) critique, as in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.72 Hersey’s novel owes its greatest debt to perhaps the most famous literary treatment of the threat of racial and cultural transformation, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.73 In that work, a trip into the African interior exposes the brutality of the colonial enterprise and refigures the inland journey not as an act of penetration but an experience of envelopment, of being swallowed by and swallowing the other. Though it relies on a similar narrative structure, A Single Pebble does not descend to the abject depths of Conrad’s novel. It presents both a more sympathetic picture of the other and the Western archetype and also a milder version of racial transformation. It also diverges from its predecessor in the mode of resource extraction it describes (the creation of a standing reserve of energy versus the extraction of ivory) and how the protagonist is transformed through contact with the racial and cultural other (through a romantic attachment and interest in Chinese lore versus the adoption of “savage” customs). Hersey’s narrator speaks of man’s will and progress as tenets of faith. A secularized missionary, his is a vocation rather than an occupation, one that demands rationality, objectivity, and manly vigor, but one that is also driven by something darker and more protean—desire. It is the quickening and the thwarting of desire that fuel the dramatic turns of the plot. Desire is also what aligns A Single Pebble with what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “anti-conquest strain” of colonial discourse, which promotes its appropriative goals under cover of narratives of sympathy and reciprocity.74 It is through the allegorization of the

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desire for exchange, for example, that anti-conquest narratives moved beyond their origins in “objectivist science” into sentimentalist strains of travel writing, where tales of reciprocity and transracial love refigure capitalist expansion as an affective union of the European and non-European.75 In stock figures such as the “nurturing [female] native,” European travel writers found a way to reconstitute the colonial other as subject rather than object of sympathy, a welcoming figure in a hostile land and a willing participant in free exchange. Yet as a narrative trope, the Utopian erotics of reciprocity can never be realized.76 When the engineer finds himself attracted to the boat owner’s wife, who nurses him during his illness and provides him with knowledge of the river, Hersey reenacts the old trope of transracial romance as a potential form of nonexploitative reciprocity. When he discovers that she is already in love with Old Pebble, however, the promise of romantic exchange crumbles and he becomes fixated on the transformation of the river, which he justifies as a way to improve the subhuman lives of the trackers. Rather than a fantasy of reciprocity enacted through transracial love (which is exposed almost immediately as a narrative dead end), the novel meditates on the relationship between landscape and identity and the threats posed to that relationship by a particular form of modernity. For the unnamed engineer, the journey upriver briefly opens him to Chinese ways of seeing and inhabiting the river that render his scientific knowledge irrelevant. He rediscovers his progressivist faith, but he is tainted, his career ruined and his plans “tagged by sound men as impractical.”77 For the Chinese characters, the journey seems at first to have the opposite effect: it reveals and reinforces the timeless material and cultural bonds that tie them to the river. Despite the fact that they are named and the engineer is not, however, Old Pebble and Su-ling are not so much individuals as animal-like creatures, manifestations of earth and water. For them, changing the landscape is unthinkable because it represents a fundamental threat to their existence. The engineer, of course, is a harbinger of such change, a figure whose sympathetic engagement with Old Pebble leads to his demise. As in Euro-American travel narratives, the tracker in A Single Pebble is simultaneously a figure of sympathy and a sacrificial victim, a superhuman laborer and beast-man: I thought of my dam, and of what a crime it was that this man confronting me should have to spend the years of his life towing a junk up this dangerous river. I thought: we speak of donkey engines, horse power—how horrible to use the strength of men for the work of animals and motors!78

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More than a means of producing power, the dam has become a way of sparing the tracker his subhuman efforts, but only by ending his trade. Hersey is attuned here to the real-life paradox contained in the rhetoric of development that has been directed at the river, whether through the introduction of steamships or the construction of dams. The salvation of progress requires a sacrificial offering—of people, of land, of landscape. The sacrifice demanded by progress in the novel is less Christian than pagan, more murderous than messianic. Its violence comes to a head when the engineer attempts to befriend Old Pebble and is humiliatingly rebuffed. Pebble mocks the American’s talk of engines and steamships, and the latter responds with petty anger and the conviction that the dam is a necessity: “what this river certainly needed was a dam!”79 The engineer can justify his project because it will improve the hard lives of the trackers and their families, though he knows full well that any improvement will also render them redundant. In this he follows his predecessors, for whom the impact of steam travel on native labor was a perennial question. Although Hersey updates this discourse by personalizing the head tracker, Old Pebble, and placing him within a web of cross-cultural libidinal attachments, he continues to rely on animal and mineral metaphors that dehumanize him, rendering him, yet again, allegorical—not only of China, the Chinese, and their landscapes, but also of mankind’s grounding in the earth. Though the “ordinary Chinaman” that Archibald Little once called an “unsympathetic creature” has been rendered undeniably sympathetic by Hersey, he remains, in the language of A Single Pebble, a creature.80 Rather than a figure against the ground of the landscape, he is coterminous with the landscape, the rock that forms the gorges, and the creatures that make up its ecosystems. When the engineer describes the landscape beyond the first gorge as primeval, it is the trackers as much as the rocks that make it so. Symbol of the intractable patterns of Chinese history and the harsh realities of the Chinese landscape, Pebble has a name but no identity beyond his trade and his Chineseness. And so a man said to be in his mid-thirties becomes “Old”—primeval stone made flesh, and flesh made stone.81 By drawing on nonhuman metaphors and images, Hersey echoes those Westerners who actually visited the gorges in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who almost invariably described the trackers as “howling and bellowing like cattle,” “little better than beasts of burden,” or “like quadrupeds.”82 A Single Pebble is full of similar descriptions: the trackers are “beast men” and “lynx-footed”; Old Pebble is like a “glistening crustacean” crawling along the riverbed and a man with “animal reflexes.” In nearly every

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example, it is the appearance of the trackers’ naked bodies in motion that justifies such comparisons, a reminder that in colonial discourse, “the body is that which is most proper to the primitive, the sign by which the primitive is represented.”83 For the engineer narrator, the tracker’s body is a site of obsessive scrutiny. Sometimes mineral, sometimes animal, it is subjected to a descriptive dismemberment that conjures up images of both morphological analysis and vivisection, as in Bird’s rhapsodic descriptions. This tendency toward disassembly appears in the very first detailed description of Old Pebble: I noticed that one of them, a lumpy, broad-faced fellow with a shaven head, who was dressed in new blue cotton pants and a drab ragged jacket, took the lead in all that was done. From his powerful larynx to his square feet, this man, whom the owner addressed with a nickname, Old Pebble, seemed to be one whole, rhythm-bound muscle. Everything he did had rhythm. . . . His head was spherical, and he had the crow’s feet of cheerfulness all the way from his narrow eyes back to his ears.84

Old Pebble comes together as a physical specimen best understood by isolating and describing his characteristic features: face, head, larynx, feet, eyes, and ears. His most important asset, however, is his musculature, which supplants the other features in Hersey’s synecdochic description of Old Pebble as “one whole, rhythm-bound muscle.” The tracker as human is reduced to his physical capacity to perform labor, to the rhythmic muscular vitality that allows him to pull ships up the massive rapids of the Yangzi. In this he not only stands in opposition to but also resembles the river, which the engineer describes earlier as “an enormous sinew, a long strip of raw, naked cruel power waiting to be tamed.”85

C oda: Human P ower While Euro-American writing around the turn of the century saw the Chinese laborer’s capacity for work as a threat to Western dominance, Chinese reformers writing in the first decades of the twentieth century often had less sanguine views of their countrymen’s abilities. In what is generally taken as locus classicus for the idea of damming the Yangzi at the Three Gorges, Sun Yat-sen presents Chinese labor as a major obstacle to national development. He dreams of sidestepping this obstacle by translating the Yangzi’s flow, first

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into a mechanical measure of force, and then into a form of labor power as standing reserve: If we were to take the waterpower of the Yangzi and the Yellow Rivers and use the new methods to produce electric power, we could probably produce 100,000,000 in horsepower. The power of a single horse is equal to the power of eight hearty men; to have the power of 100,000,000 horses is to have the power of 800,000,000 men. . . . If you use manual production [this amounts] to no more than eight hours everyday, whereas horsepower production can be used everyday for a full twenty-four hours. According to this type of calculation, the labor of a single unit of horsepower, over the course of a whole day would equal the labor of 24 men. If we can manage to exploit the waterpower of the Yangzi and the Yellow Rivers to produce 100,000,000 horsepower of electricity, then that would be like having 2,400,000,000 laborers show up for work. . . . Of China’s 400,000,000 people how many really do work? China’s young and elderly certainly do not labor, and to be sure, many hearty youths, such as landlords who collect agricultural rent, also rely on the labor of others to support themselves. Thus the great majority of Chinese people do not labor; they all share the benefit of others’ work and produce no benefits of their own. As a result, China is very poor. [But if we] were to put such massive electric power to work for us, it would be extremely productive and China could surely transform poverty into wealth.86

Hydropower appears here as a technological solution to a series of problems: the fundamental limitations of the human body, the suboptimal structure of the body politic, and the expense and difficulty of converting fossil fuel into industrial power. It is in the articulation of these problems that we can discern the roots of an important shift in Chinese conceptions of the relationship between human labor and the natural world. First, for “human power” (renli 人力) to be found wanting required a conception of labor divorced from the human body and vested in the mechanical. Even Sun’s horsepower metric, which seems at first to pit forms of biological power against one another, refers primarily to the measure of the power of an engine, each unit equivalent to 745.7 watts or 550 foot-pounds per second. The human body is thus judged against and ultimately absorbed by that of the working animal, which is itself merely a sign of the technological and its capacity for unceasing production. The sign of the animal not only supplants the human in technological discourse, it also stands for the human in

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an evolutionary-inflected discourse not unlike what we see in descriptions of the tracker. Second, for the human and the animal to be figured in terms of labor and power required a conception of the natural world as a source and store of energy. What Sun’s text does is reveal—in the Heideggerian sense of the word—the Yangzi and other rivers of China, not as routes for transportation, communication, or commerce, or as historical and aesthetic sites, but as sources of latent power/energy (li 力) superior to that available elsewhere. Chinese engineers had long made use of waterpower for various kinds of labor. The difference was in the conception of rivers not simply as a source of power for labor but as a form of energy that could be stored, extracted, and “used without depletion.”87 In this sense, Sun draws on the imperialist and productivist approaches that first made the Yangzi an object of modern scientific knowledge, but radically expands them by envisioning the transformation of the river into a power plant. Whereas European imperialist forces failed (or never tried) to capture “the body and the land” of China, the Chinese nationalist project made the mastery of natural resources a priority from its inception.88 For Sun, the technology of the hydroelectric plant is the primary means of revealing, challenging, and unlocking the river as energy, a process that Hersey would envision decades later in poetic terms: “ten million kilowatts of light and warmth and progress flowing out through high-hanging wires over six wide-spread provinces.”89 As a combined decryption and transmission device, the large-scale dam—with its turbines and high-tension wires—decodes and disseminates the river, which recedes into the shadows cast by the electric lights it now powers. In Sun’s vision of the river as standing reserve, its power is measured through and against that of the Chinese population as labor pool. As this metaphor suggests, Sun’s accounting constitutes a process in which the social character of labor and the social life of the laborer are gradually effaced by a set of natural metaphors (horsepower, labor pool) and abstractions (energy). The naturalization of labor signals both its passing and the rise of a technologized nature (and a naturalized technology). This is true not only of Sun’s technocratic plan, but also of British accounts of the demise of the tracker and the elemental characters in A Single Pebble. In each case, the most vividly imagined consequence of the technologized Yangzi is not the alteration of ecosystems or the destruction of ancient cities, but the erasure of labor and the laborer. As we have seen, however, the tracker did not simply disappear. He lingered on for decades, a spectral remainder of earlier forms of embodied knowledge

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and a reservoir of naturalized Chineseness. This is how he appears at the bottom of the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement—erased from the landscape, but frozen in the posture of his labor, a Chinese figure within the techno-poetic landscape. Without him, the history of the Three Gorges and its dam would be incomplete. Famous for both the traces he left behind and the processes that effaced him, he is an unlikely figure of transition between the literati men who inscribed the landscape and the modern laborers who disassembled the cities and villages of the gorges brick by brick to make way for the dam.

PA S S AG E I I I ONE THOUSAND YEARS

Li Bai’s image of flying downstream across one thousand li of the Yangzi in a single day seems utterly fantastical when read against the slog of the upstream journey as fictionalized in A Single Pebble. There was nothing magical about hauling boats through the Gorges; it required labor that was simultaneously superhuman and subhuman. In Hersey’s novel, the Yangzi of Li Bai is reimagined as a “vernacular landscape” defined by the hard labor and embodied knowledge of the tracker.1 It comes as something of a surprise, then, that that knowledge encompasses not only the dangers of the river, but also the mythopoetic landscape culture of Li Bai’s poem. When the trackers pulling the engineer’s boat falter in the middle of the Xintan Rapids, Old Pebble carries them through by singing a “haunting melody . . . in a kind of ecstasy.”2 A few pages later, the boat owner’s wife recites this song for the engineer:

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At dawn we leave Paiti in rainbow mists, A millennium’s span to Kialing we skim in a day, From both banks the weeping of monkeys comes like a song: The skiff floats by ten thousand mountains of stone. “Is that not beautiful?” she said. “It is,” I said. “Is it not beautiful that that song lifted our heavy boat over Head Rapid this afternoon.” “It is,” I said. “This is a beautiful thought.”3 Old Pebble’s work song is a version of Li Bai’s “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” though Hersey neither attributes it to him nor quotes it precisely. Where Li Bai collapses the space separating Baidicheng and Jiangling to suggest the disorienting speed of a downstream journey, Hersey collapses time—one thousand li becomes one thousand years. What is most striking, however, is not the reappearance or alteration of Li Bai’s poem, but rather Su-ling’s claim that it is the “song,” not the trackers, that lifts the boat over the rapids. In her retelling, the poem becomes a form of power independent of labor. Old Pebble’s “song” echoes throughout the remainder of the novel in the abbreviated form of a “millennium-in-a-day.” Further removed from the embodied context of its first performance and reduced to Hersey’s interpolation, it becomes a tropological pivot—referring either to the trip upstream as a journey into a timeless Chinese landscape or to the engineer’s desire to catapult the river into a technological future, to produce an “engineered China.” As an expression of the impossibility and inevitability of damming the Yangzi, Hersey’s “millennium-in-a-day” pits the power of the river as both vernacular and mythopoetic Chinese landscape against the promise of the river as source of power for the nation. If Li Bai’s quatrain is grounded in the materiality of labor when it first appears, however, each subsequent reference pushes Old Pebble and the other trackers further into the margins. Even in a novel that offers us a tracker as a central character, there seems to be no fixed place in the landscape for the laborer. How is it that the boatman’s labor comes to be obscured not only by Li Bai’s “one thousand li in a day,” but also by Hersey’s “millennium-in-a-day”?

* Hersey’s appropriation of Li Bai’s poem is one example of how “tradition” can become a Chinese background for the technological reordering of the Three

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Gorges. It also alerts us to the advantages (and pitfalls) of the imaginary journeys that allow novelists, artists, and scholars to move a “millennium-in-aday.” By juxtaposing works that are culturally and historically distant from one another, we open ourselves to the ways artists and writers take up the traditions of the Gorges in new ways for new times. Despite their monolithic air, these “traditions” are defined not by their timelessness but by their mutability. By moving from the distant past to the present day, we catch sight of what has often been hidden from view—the Three Gorges as a landscape shaped not only by poetry and prose, but also by labor. It easy to forget that even the indelible image of crying gibbons and weeping poets was first inspired by an old fishermen’s song: “Of Badong’s Three Gorges, Wu Gorge is longest; when the gibbon thrice cries, tears drench your gown.”4 The view afforded by leaping across widely disparate moments in historical practices of representation—encapsulated here by Hersey’s citation of Li Bai—helps us access these hidden layers of the landscape. To keep within narrow historical boundaries would be to risk missing not only the still-vital life of aesthetic cultures called “premodern,” but also, by removing certain types of people from the landscape, how such cultures have prefigured and perhaps inadvertently supported the material and social transformations brought about by the Three Gorges Dam and reservoir.

PA R T I I I For the Record

5 A R E C O R D O F T H E T R AC E When I went to look at Fengjie, the location where we shot the film, every county we saw had basically been reduced to rubble. Seeing this place, with its 2,000 years of history and dense neighborhoods left in ruins, my first impression was that human beings could not have done this. The changes had occurred so fast and on such a large scale, it was as if nuclear war or an extraterrestrial had done it. —Jia Zhangke1

Leaving Baidicheng At the beginning of this book and at each of its points of “passage,” I have reflected on the enduring popularity of Li Bai’s “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng.” For over a millennium, this short poem has shaped the popular imagination of the Three Gorges. With each recitation and in each translation, Baidicheng, shrouded always in the clouds of morning, serves as a point of departure. Li Bai’s poem and many other famous accounts of the Three Gorges have lent Baidicheng an air of timelessness for those who wish, if only temporarily, to look past all that has changed since the Tang. One of the best-known landmarks in the Three Gorges, Baidicheng has been central to the seeming stability of the region as cultural concept. As Fan Chengda and Lu You discovered in the Song Dynasty, and Red Pine/Bill

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Porter rediscovered only a few years ago, however, Baidicheng’s stability is as much an effect of historical re-creation as it is a fact of historical preservation. The temples and other ancient buildings that make this topographical feature a famous cultural site are not always what they seem to be. With the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, even the geographical status of Baidicheng has changed. Thanks to the inundation of the low-lying land that anchored it to the banks of the Yangzi, the former fortress is no longer a promontory, but an island, connected to the banks of the Yangzi by a high, Chinese-style bridge punctuated by tile-covered pavilions. Before the completion of the dam, the banks of this soon-to-be island were reinforced with a wide band of concrete added to prevent erosion caused by the increased pressure of water in the reservoir. Still connected to the surrounding land, Baidicheng was primed for a new spatial reality. This is how it appears in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (figure 5.1), to the left of Kuimen, its concretized banks extending up from the waterline. Beset by forces that threaten its continued existence, Baidicheng has been armored to preserve the look and feel of the Three Gorges as a certain kind of Chinese landscape. For the region to remain a coherent cultural concept despite the enormous changes it has undergone, landmarks like Baidicheng had to be carefully fixed in place, even as others were dismantled, moved, or inundated. The goddess of Mt. Wu from Mao’s poem “Swimming” might marvel at this epochal reinscription of the Three Gorges, but thanks to such acts of preservation she will not find her world completely altered.

figure 5.1 Han Sanming stands before Kuimen. See also color plate 11.

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What this image from Still Life allows us to see is neither the landscape of Li Bai nor the Baidicheng of today, but a trace of the material interventions required to maintain a sense of continuity in the face of displacement, a spatial reality effect made possible by tons of concrete. In Still Life, Jia folds multiple aesthetic influences—from premodern painting and poetry to Cultural Revolution posters and contemporary popular music—into a cinematic style that makes visible the time and space of displacement, a surreal zone of “noncorrespondence” between the moment and site of cinematic capture, when familiar landscapes were already in the process of disappearing, and the viewing context, when those landscapes have been reduced to memories.2 The viewer experiences displacement through the “good people” (haoren 好人) who wander the Three Gorges city of Fengjie as it is being demolished (the film’s Chinese title is Sanxia haoren 三峽好人—The Good People of the Three Gorges).3 At the center of the film are the coal miner turned demolition laborer, Han Sanming (played by Jia Zhangke’s coal miner cousin, Han Sanming 韓三明), and the middle-class nurse, Shen Hong 沈紅 (played by Zhao Tao 趙濤), both of whom have traveled to the Gorges from the northern province of Shanxi in search of their estranged spouses. Split into four sections, each of which bears the name of a basic consumer object (cigarettes, liquor, tea, candy), the film traces the movements of these characters (and commodities), watching as they are delayed or thwarted in their objectives. Simultaneously swept along by and out of pace with the temporality of contemporary China, Shen, Han, and the local people they encounter negotiate the ruins of Fengjie by creating bonds that defy, if only for a time, the circulatory logic of capitalism. Though not in thrall to the yuan or the dollar, they are still driven by economic pressures; in the face of displacement, they strive (and sometimes fail) simply to live. By its completion in 2009, the Three Gorges Dam had displaced upwards of 1.5 million people from thirteen major cities and more than a thousand smaller towns and villages. As Jia Zhangke shows us in Still Life and his documentary Dong 東, most of these settlements were dismantled by their own inhabitants, men and women tasked with removing the built environment from beneath their feet.4 Some of these people were relocated to new towns and cities bearing the same names as the old ones, while others became part of the massive internal migration that has reshaped Chinese society since Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms.5 Through their displacement, a region inscribed by its inhabitants past and present was transformed into a surface for the realization of a national myth born out of Sun Yat-sen’s vision of a modern China, rendered lyrical by Mao, and finally made material by Jiang Zemin and his fellow technocrats.

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In parts I and II of this book, I explored how the Three Gorges region has been inscribed and reinscribed through texts, images, maps, parks, monuments, and engineering projects that have fixed it as a national, imperial, cultural, and racial landscape. The preceding chapters demonstrate that the power of the ji/trace and the act of inscription have long been part of elite cultures in which landscape is not only an object of appreciation or an aesthetic form but also a manipulable object—a surface for the inscription of power and ideology. As we have seen throughout, it is far harder to access how nonelite people have experienced the landscape and the aesthetic traditions that have made it famous. For Du Fu and other premodern writers, the folk songs and lore of the Gorges are a source of local color easily assimilated into elite literary forms. For John Hersey and the Western travel writers on whom he draws, the Yangzi boatman is a symbol of China and an exemplar of a certain kind of Chineseness. For Isabella Bird, the tracker is a figure one must “sympathetically bear in mind” by scrutinizing his body and the traces that his subhuman labor have left on it. The links between concern for the tracker and the earlier forms of sympathy that helped establish Chinese people as a limit case for the human threaten to taint even the most compassionate observation with voyeuristic violence. Do we risk making the same symbolic reductions and perpetuating the same kinds of violence when we look at the displacement or suffering of Chinese people today? Are there ways of looking that acknowledge hardship without encouraging voyeurism and violation? The first question is both personal and general; it is one those of us who write about violence—whether slow or explosive, environmental or structural— must always ask, even if we can never provide a fully exculpatory answer. The second allows us to approach the ethical complexities of consuming images of displacement, dispossession, and suffering through the primary question that guides this book: in what ways does aesthetic form shape how we see and act in the world? In Still Life, landscape is not simply the product of cultural traces experienced by the informed traveler or viewer; neither is it the backdrop for a human tragedy or part of an allegory of national and racial grounding in the earth. Instead, it is the central component of a larger aesthetic system that absorbs earlier forms in order to change how we see the relationship between the working people of the Three Gorges region and the famous landscape they inhabit, even as they are being displaced from it. Jia uses landscape not only to structure how his characters—the “good people” of the Three Gorges— experience the spatial and temporal reorganization of the region, but also to focus attention on how the film viewer observes and acknowledges the layering of those people and their surroundings.

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Still Life does not speak for these people—indeed, it keeps us at a remove from locals by focusing primarily on the experiences of Han and Shen, both of whom have traveled to the region from the north—but it does acknowledge their existence by imagining how personal and collective experiences of the present and recent past might intersect with the long history of the Three Gorges as a famous Chinese landscape.6 For Jia, acknowledging entails not only recognizing an external reality, condition, or human presence, but also accepting that they have a moral claim on the artist and his viewers. Still Life encourages a way of looking that restores working people to the landscapes from which they have so often been omitted and to the built environment from which they were on the point of being displaced, while also acknowledging the disproportionate costs they have paid for China’s “rise.”7 It also asks us to join these people in contemplating the unknowable—what follows displacement and inundation. This does not necessarily make Still Life a more moral work of art than the writings of Bird or Hersey—such comparisons are of limited use—but it does create an opportunity for a different mode of viewing, one that renegotiates the terms of how and why we might “sympathetically bear in mind” the people of the region, while also making it possible to imagine how they see and experience the landscape of the Three Gorges. This mode of viewing is shaped by two interrelated formal schemes. The first is built around the static shot, deep focus, and the organization of deep space into distinct planes. The layering of landscape, architectural, and figural elements in deep space allows Jia to remediate multiple art forms in the same shot, especially landscape and portraiture, while also temporarily embedding his characters within the disappearing spaces of the Three Gorges.8 Given the English-language title of the film, it might seem more obvious to take the genre of still life painting, rather than landscape and portraiture, as a theoretical jumping-off point. Still Life contains a number of assemblages of everyday objects (literal still life images, or jingwu 靜物), such as those that begin the “cigarette” and “tea” sections of the film. If Jia fuses landscape and figure to show how people and places interact, these objects show how the characters behave as active social agents, creating links with one another. Unlike normal commodities, whose exchange value is determined monetarily, these goods are part of a separate economy of social goodwill that persists and grows after they change hands. Though they tell us a great deal about the characters’ class associations and methods of social exchange, they do so not as immobile objects, but as things that circulate among individuals, creating links and strengthening the mutual embrace of landscape and figure within cinematic depth.9

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In the second formal scheme, which frequently emerges from the first, Jia uses sequences of tracking and panning shots to mobilize the gaze, evoking the experience of viewing a traditional handscroll painting as well as the prospective gaze of socialist realist art. If the static shot engenders a mode of cinematic observation centered on characters staring out into space or working in the landscape, the scrolling shot suggests the embodied experience of those characters as they look and move through the Three Gorges. By replacing the implied object of both traditional painting (a transcendent landscape) and the socialist gaze (a utopian future just beyond the frame) with surreal digital effects and strange episodes, Jia marks the limit of our vision and the uncertainty that comes with displacement. Still Life is shaped by a range of cinematic, pictorial, textual, and sonic influences, but its way of looking is ultimately dedicated to the “exposure of traces of a life that is no longer there, or rather a way of life about which there remains only the most basic evidence.”10 This chapter explores how Jia uses the stillness of the static shot and the mobility of the scrolling shot to expose these traces, making sensible the space-time between presence and erasure. By emphasizing Jia’s formal methods, I offer an alternative to the realist discourses and documentary frameworks that are so often applied to his work.11 In Still Life, techniques normally associated with the indexicality of the photographic image or its ability to capture a preexisting reality—the long take, nonprofessional actors, “real time” pacing—instead make visible not only the lingering traces of a passing “way of life” but also the hallucinatory qualities of the cinematic image as “that which contains the unseen in what is visible, the historical in what appears transitory, and the ethical in what seems neutral.”12 Still Life is not invested in a single reality or perspective; instead, it looks beyond the frame, toward the unstable nature of reality in a place that disappears before the camera. For Jia, renegotiating the relationship between landscape and figure and punctuating the narrative with a string of surreal events—an orblike UFO, an unfinished monument that blasts into space, a cast of Peking Opera singers engrossed in handheld video games, a tightrope walker suspended between the shells of two buildings—are ways of giving form and feel to what the science fiction writer Ning Ken 寧肯 has described as the “ultra-unreal” (chaohuan 超幻) quality of contemporary China and its relation to its past.13 But Still Life does not simply capture the unreality of Chinese reality, thereby replicating the logic of realist discourse. It rejects the “unified reality” of China “as a land, a nation or a people” in favor of a sensorium attuned to the scattered fragments of cultural life past and present.14 More than just a record or document (ji 記/紀) of the massive changes that

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have reshaped China over the last three decades, Still Life is dedicated not only to fixing images for posterity but also to evoking their evanescence—it is a record of the trace/ji 跡.15 As a record of traces no longer there and a cinematic trace of forms of labor that erase themselves, Still Life depicts the beauty and struggle of life in contemporary China where it unfolds—in the interstices of the real and the imagined, the past, present, and future, the documentary and the visionary, the global, the national, and the local. The result is a film that reimagines what it means to see the Three Gorges as a “Chinese landscape.”

P eople in P l ace and P l ace in P eople The Three Gorges is a place so richly defined by the poetic imagination that it can be hard to see beyond Li Bai’s roseate clouds or Mao’s goddess to the stones and trees that the poet Fan Chengda asked his readers to consider in the Southern Song. Rather than trying to strip the landscape of its representational layers and return to the underlying materiality of mountain and river, however, Still Life takes us deeper into the workings of the ji/trace. It does this not only by making visible the layered historical and aesthetic traces that comprise the Three Gorges as cultural landscape but also by combining them with an unrelated set of traces, the popular references and everyday objects that mediate its characters’ experiences of the landscape and their relationships with one another.16 These latter traces take a range of forms—from paper money and pieces of candy to Cultural Revolution imagery, shots from other films, theme songs from old television shows, and digital effects more common to blockbuster films. To combine these historical, material, and medial traces within a cinematic frame that gives equal prominence to figure and ground, the spatial and the temporal, Still Life is designed around depth and the forms of embodied movement that animate it. Long takes, deep space, and long, slow scrolling allow Jia to layer his traces and give his characters space to move, but these techniques also create an observational space-time in which he repurposes his sources. In Still Life, the trace is both a link to the past and a building block for new ways of seeing and being in the world. The mechanics of Jia’s visual system are especially clear in the scene that opens this chapter, which begins with a medium shot of Han Sanming from the waist up, looking out at the Yangzi as it flows through Kuimen while holding a ten-yuan banknote in his hand (figure 5.1). When Han looks from Kuimen to the bill, his eyebrows arch in surprise and the camera cuts to a point-ofview shot (figure 5.2). Mao’s Mona Lisa smile confronts Han from the bill’s

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figure 5.2 Mao’s face superimposed on the Yangzi.

front before he flips it over in search of the image of Kuimen on the other side (figure 5.3). Han has climbed to this height to compare the Kuimen before his eyes with the Kuimen on the bill and to orient himself within an unfamiliar landscape. Mao’s appearance is a momentary distraction from this task, but by flipping from front to back—Chairman Mao to Kuimen—Han inadvertently

figure 5.3 Han Sanming compares the image of Kuimen on the ten-yuan note with the vista of Kuimen before him.

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shows how the separation of figure from landscape structures the bill’s underlying symbolism. Though each element is isolated from the other, they operate in tandem—the landscape naturalizes and aestheticizes Mao’s role in reshaping the region while Mao’s face reminds us of the voluntaristic ideology that promises, “man will conquer nature” (rending shengtian 人定勝天).17 Through Han’s misrecognition, the viewer recognizes not only how power speaks through landscape but also how landscape can be used to naturalize power. Han first encounters the ten-yuan banknote the night before, when he meets the local demolition crew he will soon join. Learning that he arrived in Fengjie on a boat that traveled through the Three Gorges, the men ask if he saw Kuimen. When it becomes clear that Han knows nothing about the landmarks of the region, they hand him the banknote. He responds by showing them a fifty-yuan note depicting the famous Hukou waterfall on the Yellow River near his home in Shanxi. If these banknotes are designed to reduce native places to national landscapes that naturalize money and the systems of political and economic power that it fuels, this encounter regrounds landscape and repurposes currency. Both the iconography of Mao and the magic of money are rejected in favor of an alternative form of social exchange and a different way of being present in the world.18 Landscape emerges not as idealized scene or historical setting, but as the product of embodied and cinematic forms of observation. While Han’s embodied observation is mediated through the ten-yuan note and made possible by his movements through Fengjie, the form of cinematic observation that Still Life engenders emerges from its method of combining figure and landscape. To bring them together, Jia and his cinematographer Yu Lik-wai 余力為 rely primarily on the space opened up by deep focus. Whereas shallow focus or soft focus tend to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the screen, creating a visual hierarchy that reduces setting or landscape to backdrop, the static shot in deep focus “open[s] a third dimension,” allowing the camera to focus on foreground, middle ground, and background simultaneously, creating the conditions for a more complex relationship among all elements within the visual field.19 In Still Life, deep focus is more than an optical effect made possible by camera technology; it makes visible the processes that constitute vernacular landscapes and exposes the ways in which ideology displaces the body from the landscape. Jia and Yu achieve these ends primarily by using deep focus to organize deep space into a series of fields or planes, creating what I call multiplanar depth. Compositionally, multiplanar depth is similar to what David Bordwell has described as “planimetric” composition, which he considers “well-suited

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to a ‘painterly’ or strongly pictorial approach to cinema.”20 In Still Life, multiplanar depth does more than create a painterly effect, however; it fixes characters in space in order to draw attention to the many ways they have been or will soon be displaced by the enormous spatial, economic, and social changes that are reshaping contemporary China. The stillness of the static shot and the fusion of figure and landscape that deep focus makes possible stand in contrast to the furious pace of a state project that displaces people and instrumentalizes the Three Gorges, flattening them into a mere surface for the inscription of power. By briefly restoring depth to the relationship between an individual body and the landscape it occupies, Han Sanming’s encounter with Kuimen carves out a cinematic space and time outside of this process. More often than not, however, Jia uses deep focus and multiplanarity not to emplace his characters, but to draw attention to the threat of displacement in a landscape that is slowly disappearing beneath their feet, as when he frames Han Sanming and Shen Hong using the ruined (and in some cases newly constructed) buildings of Fengjie. Normally conceived of as protective enclosures, buildings in Still Life are more often than not gaping, empty hulks, open to the elements and unable to protect life. In the process of losing their original function, however, ruined buildings gain poetic resonance and a new aesthetic utility.21 Throughout the film, these porous structures provide apertures or windows that Jia uses to frame images, enclosing and lingering on them as though they were paintings or photographs hanging on the walls of a gallery. Shen Hong and Han Sanming (and sometimes their companions) often stand before these openings, simultaneously enclosed by the camera’s frame through which we look and the filmed frame through which they look. In place of the windows or doors that accommodate the body and its movements, these holes mark a break in the protective function of buildings, signaling the vulnerability of the people who occupy them.22 The first of these sequences comes on Han’s first day of demolition work, while he is indoors with his fellow workers for their lunch break. The structure they are in seems to be the same structure they have just been dismantling— empty, dirty, pierced with gaping holes in the exterior walls, and surrounded by rubble. As Han wanders off to eat alone, a woman follows him to an empty room. There, she asks if he’s interested in a “girl” (xiaojie 小姐), but when he confusedly responds “What girl?,” she quickly corrects herself, saying “young woman” (shaofu 少婦). Moving over to a large hole in the wall, she yells in the direction of a battered balcony from which four women emerge (none of them particularly young), fanning themselves with shoe inserts and striking awkward poses (figure 5.4).

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figure 5.4 A multiplicity of apertures.

Not only do the jagged bricks to the left and right of the slightly oblique shot frame the camera’s view and the group of women, but within this frame the women are further framed—by the balcony on which they stand and those surrounding it, by a doorway, by windows, and by the building itself and those in the background. Like the Albertian window of perspectival painting, it seems as though the first opening is meant to be looked through, to create a sense of depth that draws the viewer’s gaze, dissolving the frame as boundary. For Renaissance painting, this type of perspective was a tool of immediacy: by using the internal frame to erase the medium, the artist made “the space of the picture continuous with the viewer’s space.”23 In this scene however, we are not dealing with one, or even two frames; we are met by a multiplicity of apertures, their repetition belying the first two frames’ claims to immediacy and signaling that the medium is just as important a component of the scene as is the tenuous, commodified status of these women.24 Unlike the scientifically precise frames I described in chapter 3, which welcome a penetrative and extractive imperial gaze, these jagged frames draw our attention to the act of image-making and establish a mode of viewing designed to acknowledge not just the traces of physical labor and the people who have left them, but also those people whose labor leaves no trace at all, except perhaps on their bodies and psyches. The jaggedness of the frames also serves as a reminder that even the mode of observation made possible by displacement is temporary: through the destruction of the objects that create depth as a visual effect, we

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lose access to depth as a means of acknowledging the relationship between people and the places they occupy. This shot uses a portrait-like composition to draw attention to the relationship between bodies and architecture, while also acknowledging the forms of labor required to survive in the space-time of displacement. Though Han refuses the offer of a young woman, we know from earlier in the film that he purchased his wife from this very region years before—that he is, in fact, someone who has commodified women. He has traveled to the Gorges to look for a young woman, his wife, and a young girl, the daughter that his wife took with her when she left him. The significance (and dark humor) of the scene hinges on the procuress’s language: the term shaofu normally refers to a young married woman. Perhaps this is why Han seems so nonplussed— as if this woman already knows his life story somehow. Though we seem to share the perspective of Han Sanming here, a more common framing composition in Still Life depicts characters standing before or looking out through various openings, as when Shen Hong travels to an unfinished building in the newly constructed city of Fengjie (figure 5.5) or in the shot immediately preceding Han’s discovery of his friend Mage’s 馬哥 (a transliteration of Mark) battered corpse (figure 5.6). In these shots, we watch the characters watching, as if before a painting in a gallery or a film in a cinema. James Tweedie has identified a similar composition in a 1983 film by the Taiwanese New Wave director Hou Hsiao-hsien 侯孝賢, one of Jia’s most important stylistic influences.25 The Boys from Fengkuei (Fenggui laide ren

figure 5.5 Shen Hong framed by an unfinished building in the new Fengjie.

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figure 5.6 Han Sanming and his fellow workers framed by a building they are demolishing.

風櫃來的人) follows a group of young friends from the Penghu Islands in the Taiwan Straits as they relocate to Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan. Wandering the city, they imagine themselves occupying modern buildings and eventually find their way to the eleventh story of an unfinished building, where they have been told that they can watch a sexually explicit European film. Discovering that they’ve been scammed, the men look out over Kaohsiung, framed by a missing window that maps almost perfectly onto both cinematic frame and movie screen (figure 5.7). In Tweedie’s reading, the spectacle of the city is a substitute for the promised cinematic spectacle. Viewed from a height and through the window of an unfinished building, it is simultaneously real and immediate—the city through which they move—and inaccessible, raising “the possibility that a new society will remain an unfinished project, endlessly deferred in favor of new images of modernity that rise to meet and envelop its inhabitants.”26 Still Life echoes both formal and narrative elements of The Boys from Fengkuei, though this particular composition is more than a simple act of citation. Where Hou uses the window as a screen substitute that separates his characters from the scene they observe, offering an ambiguous vision of modernity as an unfinished spectacle that may or may not include the spectator, Jia uses jagged windows, holes, and doors not only to place his poorest characters within a city under demolition, drawing our attention to the traces of a labor that effaces

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figure 5.7 Viewing a “new society . . . endlessly deferred” in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Boys from Fengkuei (1983).

itself, but also to frame a landscape that will soon be underwater, foreclosing even the most ambiguous futurity. In perhaps Jia’s most poignant use of a partially demolished building as frame, Han Sanming and his wife, who is referred to only as “Missy Ma” (Ma yaomei 馬幺妹; yaomei is Chongqing dialect for the youngest girl in a family) wander through the ruins of Fengjie at dusk, threading skeletal buildings and old trees. Having just committed to paying his wife’s brother’s debts in order to buy her out of indentured servitude, Han must now say good-bye so that he can return to Shanxi to earn the promised money. The couple wanders into an empty room, its walls streaked with burn marks and broken by yet another giant opening, even on the top but jagged and blown out at the sides near the bottom. At first, they stand and then squat to the right of this window, remaining almost totally silent except when Han’s wife offers him a piece of candy (the same kind that Mage gave Han when Han last saw him alive), the nostalgia-inducing da baitu 大白兔, or Big White Rabbit brand of chewy milk candy (figure 5.8). The two face each other in silence until a loud sound draws them to the giant hole. Through this opening they look into the distance at a multistory building that implodes and swiftly disappears in a cloud of dust. After it is gone, Han draws closer to his wife and holds her from behind, the first physical connection between the two and a sign of their reconciliation

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figure 5.8 Han Sanming’s wife “Missy Ma” gives him a piece of Big White Rabbit candy.

(figure 5.9). The building’s collapse brings them together, but it is also a reminder of their vulnerability and the many obstacles that will continue to keep them apart until Han can raise enough money to buy her freedom. By framing a scene of demolition and layering it with an image of Han and his wife, Jia asks us to acknowledge his characters’ impending displacement

figure 5.9 The couple watches the demolition of the tallest building in the ruins of Fengjie.

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and provides a cinematic frame that allows us to observe them fixed, if only temporarily, in place.

P lea se L ook (A gain) The scenes I have described up to this point show how Jia uses static shots and deep focus to combine landscape and portraiture, giving cinematic form to processes of emplacement and displacement. They also introduce two overlapping modes of observation: the film character gazing out into the landscape, and the film viewer observing the interaction of figure and ground. Jia’s organization of deep space and his framing of Han and Shen shape how we watch them and acknowledge their relationship with the landscape, while also drawing attention to how they look and what they see (or often fail to see). Standing in profile, gazing up and out into the landscape or beyond the frame, they distantly evoke the literati found in landscape images like Ding Guanpeng’s illustration of the final couplet of the second of Du Fu’s “Autumn Stirrings” poems, which I discussed in chapter 2. Unlike those literati figures, who are depicted from a distance and tend to be quite small relative to the painting as a whole, however, Jia’s characters occupy a much larger proportion of the image, with the landscape in the plane beyond them. This planar composition, as well as the poses his characters strike, are traces of a more recent artistic reference point—the countless images of heroic figures found in propaganda art and film of the Mao era. In images from the 1950s and ’60s in particular, Mao and other socialist heroes are often placed in front of a landscape that stretches into the distance as they gaze resolutely up and beyond the frame of the image, toward a socialist future soon to come. Like the imperial landscape gaze described in chapter 3, their “socialist realist gaze” is prospective, subordinated in this case to the telos of socialist utopia. A gesture with Soviet roots, the socialist realist gaze in Chinese visual culture of the Mao era is directed beyond the frame of an image or the diegetic world of a film, toward an “ideologically resplendent offscreen space.”27 Fundamentally “anti-individual,” it is deployed by revolutionary leaders or “representatives of collective action” to inspire confidence in the certainty of that future and to generate the emotions necessary to pursue it.28 Because it draws both the represented figure and the poster or film viewer beyond the frame, the socialist realist gaze also opens a gap between figure and ground that can easily be ideologically programmed.

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The posters “Keep Close to the Great Leader Chairman Mao As You Bravely March Forward 盡跟偉大毛主席領袖奮勇前進” (1969) (figure 5.10) and “Man’s Whole World Is Mutable, Seas Become Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects Areas South and North of the Yangtze River 人間正道是 滄桑: 毛主席視察大江南北” (1968) (figure 5.11) are typical of the class of images through and against which Still Life’s multiplanar structure signifies.29 In both posters, Mao stands in three-quarter profile, looking up and beyond the frame while revolutionary masses behind him stretch into the distance, indistinguishable from the national landscape—a literal depiction of the proverbial renshan renhai 人山人海 (“mountain of people, sea of people”). Images of this sort exemplify what Ban Wang describes as the Chinese sublime (chonggao 崇高), “an aesthetic that furnishes a gigantic image of the people, the figure of the collective subject engaged in world-transforming practice in order to carry out the telos of history.”30 The separation of this collective subject from their leader into separate planes—one figural and the other landscape—is enhanced by Mao’s steady gaze, which communicates his faith in man’s duty to master and transform the world (as he has mastered and transformed the people). In both images, landscape (in the form of people) is reduced to a background surface onto which the infinitely reproducible image of Mao can be superimposed. The experience of Zheng Shengtian 鄭勝天 (b. 1938), the artist who conceived the idea and base sketch for “Man’s Whole World Is Mutable,” demonstrates how thoroughly detached landscape and figure could be from one another in the composition of socialist realist art. As Zheng recollects: “When I was about to transfer [my sketch] onto canvas, I was told that Mao’s head had to be painted by a young revolutionary Red Guard. Also, the body had to be drawn by a teacher with a stronger revolutionary awareness.”31 As a result of his suspect class standing, Zheng was allowed to paint the “romantic” landscape background free from intervention, an experience he recalls fondly. Zheng’s anecdote suggests that the landscape was considered less important than the sacred image of Mao. In the finished painting, however, it is only in relation to the landscape as embodied by the revolutionary masses that Mao signifies. As a boundary separating and linking China’s southern and northern halves—a “natural moat” become a “thoroughfare,” as Mao describes it in “Swimming”— the Yangzi functions as a synecdoche for a nation united and mobilized by Mao’s prospective gaze. While Mao remains well within the pictorial foreground in both “Keep Close to the Great Leader” and “Man’s Whole World Is Mutable,” his myriad proxies fan out to realize his vision of transforming the natural world in the deeper plane that stretches behind him to the horizon.

figure 5.10 “Keep Close to the Great Leader Chairman Mao as You Bravely March Forward” (1969). Source: International Institute of Social History, Landsberger Collection (BG E12/631)

figure 5.11 “Man’s Whole World Is Mutable, Seas Become Mulberry Fields: Chairman Mao Inspects Areas South and North of the Yangtze River” (1968), designed by Zheng Shengtian 鄭勝天. See also color plate 12. Source: U.S. Library of Congress

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These images establish a hierarchical relationship between figure and ground while also subordinating the space of the nation to the temporality of socialist development. The same relationships are simultaneously concealed and reinforced by the ten-yuan banknote that Han Sanming inspects early in Still Life (figures 5.1–5.3). It conceals them by isolating the portraitist and landscape components on opposite sides of the banknote, eliminating their ability to interact within pictorial depth, and reinforces them, Januslike, by making the images two sides of the same object. Han’s alternation between Kuimen, Mao, and the image of Kuimen stages this very reading while simultaneously creating a composite image of a single figure and the landscape. In Still Life, the balance between figure and landscape is an acknowledgment of the bonds between humans and their environments. These bonds, though imperiled and temporary, are maintained by the quotidian practices of moving bodies. It is the body in motion, and the body at work in particular, that defines the relationship between the film’s characters and the Three Gorges landscape. After cutting away from Han and Kuimen in the ten-yuan scene, the camera pans from right to left across the rubble where Fengjie once stood. In the far distance, through the haze, the famous mountains that make up Kuimen are visible once again. On the steep bank just across the river, one can make out the raw scars of recent landslides, traces of the environmental impact of the dam project (figure 5.12).32 The camera then cuts to Han Sanming, who is framed by the jagged edges of the building he is demolishing and who stands, only for a moment, in front of a graffiti-covered wall (figure 5.13)—a mess of mostly indecipherable inscriptions that bring to mind a calligraphic scroll. In the next series of shots (figures 5.14 and 5.15), we see Han and his coworkers rhythmically pounding a partially demolished building with sledgehammers—their efforts, though smooth and assured, seem futile. What is perhaps most striking is how fit they look, how close their welldefined muscles are to the puffed-up physique of Yu the Great at the Yu the Great Mythology Park in Wuhan. Unlike Yu, however, their physical fitness does not signal a mythologized vision of national prowess and strength in the age of the Chinese economic miracle. Like the Yangzi River trackers of an earlier age, their muscles and sinews bear the unmistakable mark of an economic system in which strength is their only capital. From the moment Han first encounters his coworkers, standing around in their underwear after bathing at the end of their workday, we are invited to consider how their bodies bear traces of their labor.33 The irony, of course, is that their healthy physiques are

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figure 5.12 Han Sanming looks out at the ruins of Fengjie and the destabilized banks of the Yangzi. See also color plate 13.

produced through the demolition of the last few buildings of a city where they are among the last residents—stuck in an economic dead end that makes their bodies their only assets, they are being paid to remove the very ground on which they stand.

* Whether superimposed on the landscape or depicted as a floating head on one side of the ten-yuan note, Mao and his landscapes are both separate and

figure 5.13 Han Sanming, calligraphically framed.

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figures 5.14 Futile labors and well-muscled bodies.

closely related. In “Keep Close to the Great Leader” and “Man’s Whole World Is Mutable,” both of which gain their symbolic reach through the illusion of depth, the two pictorial planes function first as mirrors of one another—the people/nation are Mao and Mao is the people/nation—and second as elements within an ideological hierarchy—Mao as theory, the people as praxis. Jia uses a similar planar composition to expose such ideological flatness, recovering individuals from the formless mass and placing them within

figure 5.15 Han Sanming at work.

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the multiplanar depths of the landscapes they observe and in which they labor. Han and Shen gaze into, not away from, the landscape, where they see the ruination of an imperfect but familiar world and the production of a new one in which earlier values no longer signify and social relations have nearly lost their grounding. By repurposing socialist realist imagery and its methods of combining figure and ground to depict the experience of displacement, Jia creates an ephemeral space-time in which the gaze finds a new set of objects. Together with Han and Shen, we see that the dream of a perfect future has given way to something darker and more complicated, an ambivalent legacy inscribed on but soon to be erased from the landscape of the Gorges. In Still Life, the repurposed socialist realist gaze is a trace of an earlier historical moment and its visual codes that Jia uses to establish a new mode of viewing and representing people in place. In contrast to the earlier images with which it resonates, in which the object of the gaze is always beyond the frame, Still Life allows us to see what its characters see (or sometimes fail to see). In moments of extended looking that echo the socialist realist gaze, Jia often inserts surreal objects and episodes, such as the UFO-like orb that marks a transition between Han Sanming’s search for his wife and daughter and Shen Hong’s search for her husband (see next section). Perhaps the most striking of Still Life’s surreal interruptions occurs when a rocket-like monument launches mysteriously into space in a section of the film dedicated to Shen Hong’s search for her husband.34 After a long day of wandering the partially demolished Fengjie and its newly constructed replacement city, Shen is staying at the apartment of her husband’s old army friend Wang Dongming 王東明 (played by Wang Hongwei 王宏偉), an archaeologist working to recover artifacts from soon to be flooded areas. Visible from the balcony of Wang’s apartment, the monument appears firmly grounded in the distance, framed by a range of hills behind it, a balustrade in front and beneath it, and a clothesline sloping above it. When Shen steps silently out onto the balcony to hang a small blue and white singlet on the line, we hear only the sounds of birds and a baby crying (figure 5.16). For a brief moment after she hangs the shirt, Shen looks up and out beyond the frame of the shot. After she goes back inside, the camera remains fixed on the scene. Soon, the distant monument begins to shake, a cloud of smoke and dust grows from its base, and it launches into space, rumbling quietly as it leaves the frame (figure 5.17). This computer-generated interpolation shatters a scene of meticulous formalism. Just as the banknote mediates between Han Sanming and Kuimen,

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figure 5.16 Shen Hong and the repurposed socialist realist gaze. See also color plate 14.

the flying monument launches itself between the balcony and the mountains, breaking the fusion of multiple layers within depth. Though its launch is a digital effect, the monument itself is not computer generated, but rather an actual, unfinished memorial to the displaced residents of the gorges. Constructed to resemble the character hua 華—a poetic word that refers both to the people of China (huaren 華人) and to People’s Republic of China (Zhonghua

figure 5.17 The monument to the migrants of the Three Gorges launches into space.

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renmin gongheguo 中華人民共和國)—it is a monument to the failed promises of national development, an allegory of national ruin in the midst of unprecedented economic growth. Like the ten-yuan note, it operates through symbolic reduction—in this case, of the people (huaren) to the nation (Zhonghua), and vice versa. As an object embedded in the Three Gorges, the unfinished structure is part of the larger effort to reinscribe the postdam landscape by producing new monuments and landmarks. Along with the Yu the Great Mythology Park, it stakes a claim to the Chineseness of the landscape by drawing on both the mythology of the modern nation of China and the symbolic capital of the ancient Chinese people.35 By displacing it from the depth of the landscape in Still Life, however, Jia Zhangke rejects the ideological cooptation of both the recent and distant past to remind us of the displacement of (the) people, not only from the Three Gorges but also from the goals of the new People’s Republic of China. In Still Life, all that is solid melts not only into air, as Marx so famously put it, but also into water.36 This image from the Communist Manifesto, along with countless Maoist concepts, slogans, and images, are part of Jia’s cultural inheritance. Throughout Still Life we hear strange echoes of Marx’s characterization of the magic of capitalism—the monument that lifts off into space like a rocket, a glowing bridge that emerges from the darkness, Peking Opera performers engrossed in handheld computer games, a tightrope walker crossing the gulf between the shells of two buildings, a flying saucer. It would be easy to write off these scenes as surreal irruptions in an otherwise realist film. Yet, as traces of the recent past and ephemeral present, they provide Jia with a way of making sense of (and poking fun at) not only modern Chinese history but also the inherently strange experience of inhabiting a place as it disappears. We see them not only through Han Sanming’s or Shen Hong’s eyes, but through a socialist gaze repurposed for the ultra-unreal of the postsocialist present. Differences between images of Mao from the 1960s and images of Shen Hong and Han Sanming will be clear to anyone with a passing understanding of the historical and aesthetic contexts of these works. What is important here, however, are not differences, but similarities: a central figure standing resolutely in the extreme foreground, and beyond him or her, a landscape. The comparison I am making based on these similarities is less about issues of influence and filiation than it is about how images travel and change, how they come to function as traces of the past in depictions of the present. Once an image or a style of composition is appropriated and transformed, it begins to age anew; having once traveled, it will often set off again; and

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though it moves on, it leaves traces. Many of the political myths fostered by “Mao-art” have been debunked, but its images continually reemerge as ghostly traces in the visual culture of postsocialist China. In its most attenuated form, this art, much of which is generally grouped under the rubric of “Political Pop” (zhengzhi popu 政治波譜), produces simulacra that repurpose the imagery of the Cultural Revolution for the lucrative market in contemporary Chinese art. If, after the shocking and effective first wave of such appropriations in the mid-1990s, Political Pop and Cynical Realism have lost much of their novelty and most of their punch, then the work of artists like Jia Zhangke points to a new aesthetic in which artistic forms delve deeply into the nexus of historical trauma and visual culture, excavating a set of medial traces to communicate a contemporary experience that has yet to relinquish the ghosts of the past.37

S crolling Breadth Peering into Still Life’s depths and through its frames, we discover a composite of traces that make visible not only the past but also the moving, laboring bodies that occupy the space-time of displacement. If the stillness of the static shot invites the viewer to acknowledge the precariousness of the “good people” of the Three Gorges under such conditions, the film’s scrolling sequences offer the viewer a vicarious experience of looking at and moving through the landscape. Scrolling evokes the visual and temporal experience of viewing a landscape handscroll like The Shu River I discussed in chapter 2, but remakes that traditional format into a method for synthesizing the many historically and culturally disparate traces and aesthetic influences that shape Still Life. Though often set in motion by the gaze of Still Life’s characters, scrolling rejects the fixed stare and hidden object of socialist realist art, compelling not only Han Sanming and Shen Hong but also the film’s viewers to reconsider the links between the “traditions” of the distant past, the ubiquitous political imagery of the recent past, and the everyday images and objects that shape experience in contemporary China. It is by mobilizing the gaze of both the film’s characters and its viewers that Jia produces a work that extends beyond the documentary or the realist to encompass the nature of cultural production and its relation to the recent and distant past in a China that is racing toward an unknown future. The most extended scrolling sequence begins after Han Sanming has rescued Mage, who had been bound inside a large plastic bag and dumped amid

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the rubble of the old city, and concludes soon after Shen Hong’s first appearance in the film. In the scene that anchors this sequence, Han and Mage eat a meal and get to know one another. When Mage learns that Han has come in search of his estranged wife, he calls the older man nostalgic and quotes one of Chow Yun-fat characters: “The world of today doesn’t suit us because we’re too nostalgic.” Unlike Han Sanming, who says very little in the film, Mage speaks a great deal, often channeling the swagger of Hong Kong gangster films and television shows. When the two exchange mobile phone numbers, we learn that although both are indeed nostalgic, they yearn for different times. Han’s ringtone is a MIDI version of the 1990s hit “May the Good Live Forever in Peace” (haoren yisheng pingan 好人一生平安), the theme song of the television drama Yearning (Kewang 渴望).38 When Mage learns the name of the song, he asks, “What ‘good people’ are left in Fengjie now?” Without waiting for an answer, he proudly asks Han to call him and listen to his ringtone— Frances Yip’s Cantopop theme song to The Bund (Shanghai tan 上海灘), a Hong Kong television series set in 1920s Shanghai and staring Mage’s hero, Chow Yun-fat. Released in 1980, the show and its theme song were wildly popular in Asia through the 1980s.39 Unlike Han Sanming’s digitized, instrumental song, Mage’s “Shanghai tan” is a recording of the theme song to The Bund, a superior version that intensifies the technologically and theatrically mediated nature of his character. Both the song and the television show are 1980s iterations of nostalgia for 1920s Shanghai, and their sentimentality and stylized bravado provide the model for Mage’s personal style.40 The theme song to The Bund, like the songs of the Taiwanese chanteuse Deng Lijun 鄧麗君 (Teresa Teng), was part of a wave of foreign and Sinophone popular culture that began arriving in Mainland China in the early 1980s. As Jia Zhangke recollects, these works introduced not only new sentiments but also formerly forbidden types of sociality and individuality: “from this pop culture we learned about new social groups, like triads. Previously we would only sing revolutionary songs. As children, we would usually all begin by learning ‘we are the heirs of socialism,’ all these songs that were always in the plural, that were collective. But then Teresa Teng sang in the singular: ‘The moon stands for my heart;’ she was singing about the individual, the self.”41 If The Bund and Teresa Teng showed children born in the 1960s and 1970s how to form new collectives and assert personal desires, Yearning, which follows two families from the 1950s into the Cultural Revolution, explored the familial and social bonds that defined life in the age of revolutionary tumult.42

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figure 5.18 “Stage Three” water level marker.

As Mage’s ringtone plays in the restaurant, Jia’s camera tracks right to a television showing images of an elderly woman supported by officials as she climbs a flight of stairs, a crying woman, a boat with an English language sign reading “Yangzi River Tourism,” and a man atop a hill waving with his jacket in farewell. The camera then cuts to a shot of a 156.3-meter “Stage Three” reservoir marker taken from a boat on the Yangzi (figure 5.18). At the same moment, the tinny, diegetic ringtone version of the song shifts to a clearer, louder, extra-diegetic version, and the camera, which had been stationary throughout Mage and Han’s encounter, begins more than a minute of panning and tracking shots. Starting on the river, the camera cuts to Han, who stands in his underwear on a rooftop (figure 5.19), then to a view of Kuimen at the left, toward which he walks and gazes and from which appears a glowing, silvery orb. As the UFO moves to the right, the camera reverses direction and pans to follow it, while The Bund fades into a series of deep, percussive rumbles. When the orb leaves the frame that contains Han Sanming, the camera cuts on action to our first shot of Shen Hong (figure 5.20), who continues to follow it to the right until it disappears in the distance above a rusting factory, its whirring replaced by atmospheric music and the sound of creaking metal in the abandoned factory. The stances of both Han and Shen resemble Mao’s in the Cultural Revolution images described above. Where Mao or one of technocratic leaders of postreform China might have seen a factory symbolizing the achievements of the modern socialist state (figure 5.21),

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figure 5.19 Han Sanming watches a UFO approach.

however, Shen sees the rusted hulk of a shuttered factory (figure 5.22), a symbol of the failure of the socialist economy and the tragic effects of that failure on workers. As Shen Hong enters the structure, she walks in front of workers ineffectually trying to demolish the enormous structure with bars and sticks

figure 5.20 Shen Hong’s first appearance.

figure 5.21 “A Daqing Blooms on the Banks of the Yangzi 扬子江畔大庆花” (1975), Song Wenzhi 宋文治. Source: International Institute of Social History, Landsberger Collection, BG E13/411

figure 5.22 Factory as socialist ruin.

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figure 5.23 Demolition workers pound away at the factory with sticks and bars.

(figure 5.23) and, later, an injured man seeking compensation for the loss of his hand in a work-related accident. That the latter scene takes place under the gaze of faded portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao drives home the point that Jia’s characters occupy a transitional world of contradictory temporalities (figure 5.24). These images foreshadow the television clips of Chinese leaders, each of whom dreamed of or facilitated the dam’s construction, that play on the boat that takes Shen Hong away from Fengjie later in the film. Though its media of dissemination have changed, propaganda remains an inescapable presence. The sequence that begins with Han Sanming and Mage in the restaurant and ends with Shen Hong’s arrival at the factory is one of two in which Jia layers images from television sets with disembodied song and shots of the riverscape taken from boats. In this one, the sentimental tone and lyrics of Frances Yip’s song provide a fatalistic pop philosophy that contrasts ironically with the images that play on the television screen immediately following Han and Mage’s conversation, as well as the shot of the high-water mark that appears after the music shifts to extra-diegetic mode: Waves rush, waves roll—for ten thousand li the river’s waters never rest Washing away the affairs of this world—churning them together into a single tide

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figure 5.24 Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

Joy or sorrow? On the waves there’s no distinguishing bliss from misery Success or failure? On the waves there’s no way to see what you have or lack The unending flow of the song’s river is not only a figure for the passage of time, a metaphor based on the clichéd analogy between time and water’s flow, but also for the ineluctability of fate and the impossibility of definitively interpreting the past. Of course, as the dam was being constructed, the Yangzi’s power was no longer defined by its eastward flow, but by its steady upward creep. The mystery of fate and the ambiguity of the past have been replaced with the engineer’s timeline and the ubiquitous water marker, a manifestation of the future that one sees best from “on the waves.” The Bund theme song and the movement that it initiates are echoed in the scene that opens this book and the poem that has served as a point of passage between its sections. After Shen Hong parts from her husband, the camera cuts to a slowly upward tilting shot of Chinese tourists standing at the prow of a ship as it travels downstream through the Gorges. Gone are the ruins of Fengjie; here are the Three Gorges enshrined as national and cultural Chinese landscape. As the camera focuses on the river scenery, we hear traditional Chinese vocal music, over which the tour guide’s voice recites Li Bai’s “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” as recognizable an artifact of traditional

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Chinese literary culture as Frances Yip’s song is of 1980s Sinophone pop culture. Following her recitation, the tour guide begins to describe the dam and reservoir project, which has “today, once again drawn the attention of the world” to the landscape of the Gorges. At this point, the camera cuts to a shipboard television showing a montage of images of Chinese leaders involved in the history of the dam—Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping—as well as footage of its early construction (figures 5.25 and 5.26). In this sequence of shots, Jia seems to position Li Bai’s poem as offering what Jie Li calls a “transcendent vision” of the Three Gorges landscape that stands in contrast to the changes wrought by China’s leaders.43 In order to “once again draw the attention of the world” to the area, the man-made structures and natural shape of the Gorges must be forever transformed. Yet Li Bai’s poem does not stand outside the world that Jia Zhangke depicts. Nor does it necessarily offer a stable cultural position from which to critique the Three Gorges Dam. As I have suggested throughout this book, landscape representation plays an important role in the production of space. Though Li Bai’s poem is only one small part of the enormous body of landscape representations that have depicted the Three Gorges over more than two millennia, I have made it a point of passage because it appears again and again in representations of the region. Its predictable repetition contributes to the “obviousness” of the Three Gorges as a cultural concept.44 By helping to fix the Gorges as a Chinese landscape in the cultural imaginary, “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng” and other famous poems inadvertently prepare the

figure 5.25 Deng Xiaoping.

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figure 5.26 Mao Zedong.

way for (or are used to distract from) the physical and social transformations that the region has undergone. If the scene that opens this chapter exposes the ideological function of isolating figure from landscape on the ten-yuan banknote, this moment shows how poetry might support the ideologically driven reorganization of the Three Gorges by perpetuating a “traditional” landscape vision. As yet another medial trace and a scrolling figure that parallels the Shanghai tan theme song, “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng” evokes the past but speaks to the present. Layered under and in dialogue with cinematic images of the Gorges and televisual propaganda, it becomes part of a composite work of art, no less mediated than Jia’s repurposed socialist realist gaze. Just as the Tang poet “cross[es] 1,000 li in a single day,” Jia crosses thousands of years and a multitude of forms to evoke a place so complexly inscribed and reinscribed that it requires new ways of looking and listening. In this way Jia not only draws on and expands earlier landscape traditions, he changes how we see the landscape and how we understand the connections between people and places.

6 I N K I N T H E WO U N D The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. . . . For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.) —Walter Benjamin1

A Sense of Crisis In 2003, the Pratt Manhattan Gallery launched an exhibition of Yun-fei Ji’s 雲飛季 paintings titled “The Old One Hundred Names.” According to Ji, the works included in this exhibition depict a fictional Chinese “village that existed before the Cultural Revolution and disappeared after the Three Gorges Project”: There is a long process leading to the fading away of the village.  .  .  . Before that [exhibition], I painted a piece about the Opium War, because I think the Opium War is a very important episode in modern Chinese history. Colonialism awakened a sense of crisis in our ancient culture. The pillars of our past—like Confucius and Laozi—collapsed because

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we had to confront the power of the West. The suspicion toward the past persisted through the revolutionary years and the Cultural Revolution. Everything from the past was bad and we had to smash it all to pieces. I feel that there is a connection from the Opium War to the Cultural Revolution, all the way to the Three Gorges Project.2

In Ji’s statement, a clear if partial lineage emerges linking the Three Gorges Dam project with some of the key events of modern Chinese history. These historical moments are joined both by a shared claim to “traumatic experience” and by a self-destructive impulse that developed out of China’s first violent confrontation with the Western nation-state. In Ji’s scheme, the Chinese people’s target at each moment is their own past: the varied traditions, icons, ideas, and spaces that impede progress, whether toward nationhood, revolution, or technological and economic mastery. And yet, time bears no wounds—the real victim (and perpetrator) of these traumas is not the past, but the people themselves: “we had to confront the power of the West” and “everything from the past was bad and we had to smash it all to pieces” (emphasis added). The history of Ji’s imagined village is figured as a process of traumatization and compulsory self-effacement inextricably—if vaguely—linked to Three Gorges Dam project. Born in 1963, Yun-fei Ji experienced the tumult of the Cultural Revolution as a child and came of age in the dynamic period following Mao’s death in 1976. As a schoolboy, he studied various styles of Western painting, and in 1978, at only fifteen, he joined the first class to enroll at the Central Academy of Art after instruction had been suspended during the Cultural Revolution. Though his formal studies were in oil painting, by his graduation in 1982 he was already seriously engaged in calligraphy and Chinese painting, and by the mid-1980s he had begun working with the traditional materials— ink, brush, mulberry paper—that now define his artistic practice. In 1986, Ji moved to Arkansas to pursue an MFA at the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, finally moving to New York City in the late 1980s. Though he continued to experiment with various media and styles during his first years in America, by the early 1990s his idiosyncratic version of Chinese painting and his use of traditional media had crystallized in a series of paintings about the Cultural Revolution. We never learn the name of the fictional village that is haunted by ghosts of the Cultural Revolution. In its place, Ji offers “the old one hundred names,” a translation of the Chinese lao baixing 老百姓, a phrase that refers to the common Chinese people, undistinguished by power, money, or learning—the

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people of the People’s Republic. Within the condensed narrative of “The Old One Hundred Names,” the Three Gorges Dam threatens not a village or a landscape, but the common folk who occupy the village and the landscape. By forgoing a specific place name in favor of a term that suggests the class of people in whose name the state rules, Ji began a process of mapping a human topography that combines landscape and figurative painting to convey the physical, mental, and societal effects of the dam on the people of the Gorges. The earliest paintings in the “Old One Hundred Names” series mark the beginning of Ji’s fascination with the Three Gorges Dam project and its consequences. For more than a decade after this exhibition first opened, he continued to add to a body of work that gives pictorial form to the complex and shifting relationships between the people of the Gorges, the places that they inhabit (and from which they are displaced), and the traumas of recent Chinese history. In his earliest Three Gorges images, Ji often imagines the region at the moment of its transformation by the dam and reservoir as a postapocalyptic wasteland, constructed out of a jumble of conventional landscape elements, historical figures, and all manner of wreckage, not to mention demonic figures and skeletal scavengers. In works produced after 2002–2003, following his first trip to the Gorges, Ji began to experiment with a more understated and documentary style, though even these images are haunted by ghosts and monsters. Stylistic shifts notwithstanding, all of Yun-fei Ji’s Three Gorges works depict a world in which political power has encroached catastrophically on the landscape and its people, leaving both shattered and desolate. The source of this chaos—the Three Gorges Dam—is absent from Ji’s paintings; it is an object of repression nowhere seen but everywhere felt. Ji also eschews the conventional, spatially grand associations of the Three Gorges region as famous Chinese landscape—there are no recognizable vistas of Kuimen, no depictions of Baidicheng and its landmarks, no towering cliffs, no surging Yangzi. In the absence of the region’s famous natural and manmade monuments, Ji constructs his landscapes out of generic forms borrowed from Chinese landscape painting and fills them with representations of ruined buildings, everyday objects, migrants, monsters, and ghosts to create a new, claustrophobic topography. This figural-architectural-landscape hybrid keeps the dam hidden from view but shows how it consumes the Three Gorges and displaces its inhabitants. This chapter explores how Ji reimagines and reinscribes the landscape of the Three Gorges as a site of trauma—both a raw wound that opens onto past

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traumas, especially the Cultural Revolution, and a frame for the physical and psychic consequences of the dam project. In Ji’s work, the trace of the brush gives form to trauma, and the act of tracing constitutes a documentary practice focused on those displaced from the site of trauma. Although I situate Ji’s work in relation to the scholarly literature of trauma studies in the next section, I do not read Ji “through the lens” of trauma.3 Instead, I explore how he gives form to his personal conception of traumatic experience through images of temporal and spatial disorder and physical endangerment. In particular, I focus on what I call “collapsed time,” the space-time of imminent demolition, which brings the future undeniably into the present while transforming buildings, villages, and even whole cities into traces of the past. Although many of Ji’s images display the temporality of belatedness or “afterwardsness” that defines Freudian definitions of trauma, they are just as strongly shaped both by a “pretraumatic” affect defined by the anticipation of trauma and by the need to represent the immediate unfolding of traumatic events rather than their return.4 By populating his paintings of displacement and collapse with images of victims both of the dam and of the Cultural Revolution, which began just three years after he was born, Ji uses the still raw traumas of the latter to imbue the events surrounding the former with traumatic content before their full psychological effect has had a chance to register, producing a record (ji 記/jilu 紀錄) of the present that looks to the future but carries the full weight of history. Both in his paintings and in comments on his artistic practice, Ji presents himself not only as a primary witness to the Cultural Revolution, but also as a secondary witness to the contemporary events that he depicts. He not only remembers and reexperiences old traumas, he also imagines and represents new ones, even though they happen far from his adopted home in America. Understanding the nature of the secondary witness’s empathy for, or identification with, the victim has become a central concern of trauma studies, both as an interpretive tool for judging and describing accounts of trauma and as a methodology for writing trauma on its own terms.5 Ji’s paintings perform an empathic identification with the residents of the Three Gorges that is grounded both in their shared connection to modern China’s historical traumas and in their common national and cultural identity. In this sense, the empathy that Ji performs with the living bodies of the Three Gorges migrants seems to differ from the sympathy that Isabella Bird and other nineteenthcentury Western travel writers encouraged their readers to feel for the battered bodies of the Yangzi trackers.

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If Bird’s depictions of the tracker raise troubling questions about both the ethics of consuming suffering and the violent history of Western sympathy for the Chinese, Ji’s empathy raises equally complicated questions: Are shared nationality or race preconditions for empathic identification? Does Ji’s conflation of historical events personally experienced and contemporary events unfolding halfway across the globe efface the local, turning the Three Gorges into any Chinese place scarred by the past or being swept away by a belated modernization project—in other words, into no place at all? Finally, to what extent is the status of primary or secondary witness a valuable commodity in the global market for Chinese art, and how might the scholarly study of Ji’s art help to domesticate trauma for audiences far removed from the events he depicts and imagines? It is easy to see that Ji is in most ways an outsider to the events depicted in his Three Gorges paintings. Yet the shared ethnic identification of the artist and his subjects, the immediately recognizable Chineseness of his painting style, and the content of his work threaten to reduce him to a native informant for Western viewers (and collectors) or, worse, to conflate him with the primary victims of the dam project, lending his work a traumatic authenticity that translates into added market value. I am in no way accusing Ji of co-opting the trauma of others for financial gain— there is nothing to stop collectors, critics, or galleries from conflating the artist with his subjects if they wish to do so. My goal is simply to indicate some of the ambiguities that come with exploring the intersections between national and personal traumas. Ultimately, while the haunting power of the Cultural Revolution in some of Ji’s Three Gorges paintings raises difficult questions about the representation of traumas past, present, and future, Ji’s primary goal is not to highlight his affective and cultural bonds with his subjects, but rather to produce an aesthetic mode that acknowledges and communicates the human cost of the Three Gorges Dam project. In his later Three Gorges paintings, produced after he traveled to the region, violent floods are almost totally replaced by images of migrants squeezed within the liminal spaces of the landscape and surrounded by their everyday goods. The psychic impact of displacement remains palpable, but it is accompanied by a sober sense of the material and social costs of development. In the text that accompanies a number of these images, including the Three Gorges Migration Scroll and Four People Leaving Badong (figure 6.1), Ji juxtaposes the official narrative of and justification for the dam project with what he describes as a “record” or “document” (jilu 紀錄) of (and for) the people who, “brick by brick, tile by tile,” demolished their own homes and villages.

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figure 6.1 Four People Leaving Badong (2009), Yun-fei Ji; watercolor and ink on xuan paper, mounted on silk. See also color plate 15. Source: The Carolyn Hsu and René Balcer Collection. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

Shared Tr auma s Yun-fei Ji’s The East Wind (2003), from the 2004 “Empty City” exhibition (figure 6.2), is impressively hectic: Red Guards (both human and dog-faced) carry a picture of Mao Zedong and bellow through a megaphone as they walk across a scene of wreckage (figure 6.3); bird-faced and pig-headed monsters peer out from dark corners and edges; emaciated, half-naked humans, some wearing dunce caps, are crushed beneath collapsed buildings; a figure resembling Liu Shaoqi, a favorite enemy of Mao from the early years of the Cultural Revolution, reclines near the bottom of the picture, his emaciated body oddly twisted as he looks directly out at the viewer (figure 6.4); one of the men just above Liu resembles Deng Xiaoping, another victim of Cultural Revolution purges and the leader of the People’s Republic in years leading up to the official decision to construct the Three Gorges dam;6 an upside-down donkey plummets through space beside a woman’s severed head, echoing the carnage of Picasso’s Guernica (figure 6.5). All of these figures inhabit a narrow, gorgelike space, its original shape suggested by the upper edges of the painting, where detritus gives way to cliffs between which stretches a faint line of water. Situated below the water level, the figures in this painting are simultaneously victims of the dam, of the Cultural Revolution, and of the shadowy ghosts and goblins that haunt the wreckage. Like geological strata that have been thrust up and folded into one another, the roughly horizontal fields of The East Wind bear the marks of violent forces. At the center and close to the top of the image, a Red Guard carries a partially effaced but still recognizable picture of Mao Zedong, architect of the

figure 6.2 The East Wind (2003), Yun-fei Ji; watercolor and ink on xuan paper. See also color plate 16. Source: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

figure 6.3 The East Wind (detail): Dog-faced Red Guard.

figure 6.4 The East Wind (detail): Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping lookalikes.

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figure 6.5 The East Wind (detail): Upside-down donkey.

Cultural Revolution and promoter of the Three Gorges Dam. The East Wind seems to conflate these two things, but the nature of the connection between victims of the Cultural Revolution and of the dam is unclear. Are we meant to assume that Liu Shaoqi and the painting’s anonymous skeletal figures are the same kind of victim, or that they are simply victims of a similar type of abuse of power? Should we identify the source of destruction with the water at the upper edge of the painting, or with the eponymous “east wind”? The cause of all this chaos is purposely ambiguous. What is clear is that Ji has chosen to focus on a moment that is simultaneously pre- and postapocalyptic—before the dam and reservoir have fully swallowed up the Gorges, but when the ruins of the contemporary landscape and the ghosts of the Cultural Revolution that it contains are briefly visible, before being hidden beneath the

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opaque surface of the reservoir. In Ji’s ink-and-water-based practice, water is an object and a medium of representation that strives against opacity, making transparent what is otherwise hidden. Joining forces with wind, water wreaks havoc while also exposing a cross section of the landscape, revealing a befuddling mess, the wreckage of a history unyoked from Marxist teleology. The forces of destruction allow us to see the landscape for what it has become: a dump in which the traumas of the past and the present are indistinguishable. As a locus of trauma, the historical trace is a wound that opens onto other wounds, other traumas. The Cultural Revolution has long been recognized as one of the most traumatic events of modern Chinese history, one that appears in the work of many artists and writers born before the 1970s.7 Particularly in his earliest Three Gorges works (those collected in the “Old One Hundred Names” and “Empty City” exhibitions), Ji uses the Cultural Revolution as a widely acknowledged and still potent trauma to imbue the events surrounding the dam with traumatic content before their full social and psychological effects have had a chance to register. According to both Freudian approaches and contemporary clinical definitions of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic experience is predicated on a temporal separation between the traumatic event and its psychological manifestations—it requires a period of latency (and amnesia or disassociation), after which it returns. For Ji, however, the “connection [that he draws] from the Opium War to the Cultural Revolution, all the way to the Three Gorges Project” marks the construction of the dam as an immediately obvious traumatic event, without the need for a period of latency and belated return. The fully formed traumas of the Cultural Revolution offer Ji a solution to the difficulties of deeming traumatic an event that is still unfolding, that has had no opportunity to return, and that does not affect the artist directly. A method of superimposing this event and what he imagines its psychological effects will be (its haunting return) is necessary for Ji because he is keen both to capture the immediate implications of the dam project and to suggest that it is part of a larger network of historical traumas. The precise definition of trauma, both as a diagnostic term and as an interpretive concept, remains a topic of debate. Described by various theorists as a “disorder of memory,”8 a “pathology of history,” “an unfinished relationship with the past,” and a kind of “belated experience,” trauma find its most universally recognizable expression in flashbacks, “hauntingly possessive ghosts” that bring the traumatic event vividly back to life in the present.9 Both a return of the past in the present and a return to the past, the flashback is made possible by the belatedness or “post-ness” of the traumatic event, which Freud describes as Nachträglichkeit, (literally “afterwardsness”).10

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Nachträglichkeit locates trauma neither in the original event nor in its return, but in the “dialectic between (the) two events . . . and a temporal delay or latency through which the past was available only by a deferred act of understanding and interpretation.”11 For Cathy Caruth (following Freud), belatedness is constitutive of trauma, which becomes “fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time.”12 As belated representatives of a past trauma, figures from the Cultural Revolution appear in Ji’s Three Gorges paintings as if from “another place and in another time.” It is only through their departure from their originating event that they can register as traumatic. Though the Freudian model of trauma supports such a reading of the Red Guards and the dunce-capped victims of Ji’s images, it tells us little about Ji’s vision of the flooding of the Three Gorges region, an event that had not yet taken place when he painted this image in 2003. By juxtaposing this flood with the destructive forces of the “east wind,” which seems to be unleashed by the megaphone-toting Red Guard, Ji locates trauma not only in a period of latency, but also in the event itself, which has long been seen as solely an object of dissociation, repression, forgetting, and return.13 The idea that traumatic experience is an aftereffect, the symptom of a disease that can be traced to a specific psychic wound in the past, has been fundamental to psychiatry since the origins of trauma as a clinical diagnosis in nineteenth-century England and France.14 That it remains central to modern psychology and trauma theory confirms the etiology of the disease but threatens to obscure the ways in which vernacular conceptions of trauma have come to infuse contemporary thought. Given the brutal legacy of the twentieth century, not only are we likely to think of all of recent history as traumatic (however much of a cliché this is), we have also entered an era in which technology delivers instantaneous (and constant) traumatic or “triggering” images.15 More and more, it seems that our traumas are neither forgotten nor resurrected through ex post facto testimony or historiographical retrieval, but captured digitally, and simultaneously and obsessively rebroadcast from their inception. One need only think of the televised destruction of New York City’s World Trade Center—images and events that have never returned because they never stopped happening. In the shift from an age of latency and return to an age of documentation, we have become all too familiar with trauma and its manifestations, and seek to capture them as they happen. The flashback now streams live and is archived digitally. For Ji, who has lived in the United States for more than two decades, the events surrounding the Three Gorges were immediately accessible from afar through technology and immediately identifiable as traumatic because they conjured the “hauntingly possessive ghosts” of the past.

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The presence of so many traces of the Cultural Revolution in Ji’s work is a reminder that, for him, that particular trauma remains potent. Though the dam and reservoir have now mostly obscured the physical traces of this complex past in the Three Gorges, in Ji’s imagination, their construction first precipitated a violent exposure and excavation (as in The East Wind), the simultaneous creation of a new wound and the reopening of a familiar, older one. As a meeting point of historical, contemporary, and future traumas, Ji’s version of the Three Gorges allows for the exchange of traumatic signifiers across time and space, so that the events surrounding the dam project can be recognized as traumatic from the outset. Traces of this exchange appear throughout Ji’s oeuvre. In three paintings from his first two major exhibitions, Ji includes the same ruined automobile, a simple object that sheds light on the formal mechanisms he uses to evoke traumatic experience as a form of repetition. The car appears on the left-hand side of The East Wind (figure 6.6), about midway down. An almost identical version appears in two 2002 paintings from the “Old One Hundred Names” exhibition, A Monk’s Retreat (figure 6.7) and The Flooding of Badong. In each of these images, Ji depicts a dense scene of destruction, despite the fact that the flooding of the area was a gradual process that required the methodical disassembly of infrastructure and staggered relocation of residents. The automobile’s reappearance links each painting to the same destructive flood, the same ruined landscape. Located opposite the dog-faced Red Guard’s megaphone in The East Wind, the body of the car also bears the same traces of violence that mark the human figures in the painting, who are crushed beneath buildings or torn to pieces. Traveling from painting to painting, it reappears to haunt the viewer. It finds a home in Ji’s work not simply through a psychological metaphor, but also through the forces of destruction unleashed by the dam. Like so much flotsam, the car rides the trash-choked waves of Ji’s imagined flood. The Red Guards are companions of the auto, symbols of a temporal collapse (made possible by spatial collapse) that allows for the movement of traumatic elements across time and within Ji’s paintings. David Eng and David Kazanjian’s work on how loss and melancholy function as productive temporal disturbances suggests one approach for understanding how such pathways come into existence: “by engaging in ‘countless separate struggles’ with loss, melancholia might be said to constitute, as Benjamin would describe it, an ongoing and open relationship with the past— bringing its ghosts and specters, its flaring and fleeting images, into the present.”16 Rather than focusing on the recursive bind of trauma, Eng and Kazanjian emphasize how the productive forces of melancholy retrieve and emplace

figure 6.6 The East Wind (detail): Ruined car.

figure 6.7 A Monk’s Retreat (2002), Yun-fei Ji; ink and mineral pigment on xuan paper (detail): Ruined car. Source: Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

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the “ghosts and specters” of the past within new “sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future.”17 The poignancy of Ji’s project is that his new site of “memory and history” sits on unstable ground; the human-occupied stretches of The Three Gorges on which Ji focuses can accommodate the past only in the fleeting moments before they “disappear irrevocably” beneath the waves.18 This ephemerality is precisely what draws our attention, forcing us to join Ji in bearing witness to the destruction of the landscape as a site of historical negotiation and a staging ground for visions of the future. Hovering between presence and absence, the past and the future, the Gorges and its inhabitants are simultaneously the objects of loss and their melancholic specters. The new Three Gorges site that is generated by the productive melancholy of loss and the more violent force of trauma disappears almost as soon as it forms. Ji envisions the Gorges not as a famous landscape, but as a mess of human rubble, a convoluted, blurry space with indeterminate horizons, in which traces of the Cultural Revolution are jumbled with vulnerable and violated human bodies and ghostly creatures.19 To make sense of the relationship between the past and the present in a painting such as The East Wind, one begins by sifting through the unstable trash heaps that mark the Gorges as both demolition and construction site. In a socialist nation reconstituted as the pumping heart of global capital, the trash heap is the site par excellence of “memory and history” and the dog-headed Red Guard a Chinese version of Benjamin’s angel of history: “where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”20 In the context of such ruination, Ji’s focus on the Three Gorges takes on an urgency that encompasses both the immediate victims of the dam and the status of history in a time and place bent on transformation. Stripped of identifying marks, the Three Gorges as famous landscape and cultural concept becomes both a generically Chinese landscape and a figure for the nation as trash heap.

C ollec ting from H istory, D ocumenting the P resent The East Wind is a prime example of how Ji uses spatial chaos to link the traumas of the Cultural Revolution and those of the Three Gorges Dam project. As perhaps Ji’s most radically apocalyptic expression of the Three Gorges theme, however, this painting does not exemplify what critics often identify

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as the defining trait of his artistic practice: his synthesis of traditional Chinese landscape painting styles, techniques, and media.21 This synthesis is Ji’s most consistent formal method for making connections between different historical periods. By drawing on a variety of Chinese painting styles without imitating any single school or approach, Ji creates a hybrid, but still recognizably Chinese, style that marshals the aesthetic past in order to document the present. This is not simply a matter of formal resemblance; Ji uses historical styles to create systems of signification for the present. Through his evocation of the Northern Song (960–1127) monumental landscape style, for example, Ji introduces traces of an allegorical system in which the structure of a landscape represents an ideal political and cosmic order that he uses to draw attention to the average people who have been displaced by the dam project.22 In his most recent Three Gorges work, Ji echoes the documentary and admonitory functions of paintings of people displaced by natural disasters, a genre that has roots in the Song Dynasty. He frames a number of these images with blocks of text that not only closely mimic poetic and commemorative inscriptions on traditional paintings, but also more explicitly voice his understanding of the dam and its place in the history of the Three Gorges and the nation. Four People Leaving Badong (figure 6.1), for example, is sandwiched between two inscriptions; the first quotes Li Daoyuan’s Commentary to the Classic of Rivers, and the second details the history of the dam. Produced in 2009, long after Badong had been dismantled and inundated, this image and its text are a visual record and a physical document not only of what happened in the recent past, but also of the severed links between the long cultural history of the region and the experience of the people who have occupied it in our own time. Ji combines premodern styles, media, and discourses in order to establish traumatic affinities between the past and the present, and to produce a language of critique that signifies in relation to Chinese traditions. Ji describes his artistic process in primarily historical terms: My method can be categorized as a process of collecting. Shi Tao, a seventeenth-century painter, used a seal in his paintings that says “searching a thousand strange cliffs to make a sketch.” This describes a method of collecting forms from nature. You might also say that I do the same, but in relation to history.23

If natural forms provided Shi Tao with the raw material for composing his landscapes, then history, as both subject matter and aesthetic form, provides

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one set of building blocks for Ji’s landscapes. Collecting from history, however, is only the start; the real creative work comes in selecting and combining what Ji discovers, and in the relationship that develops between the historical form and the contemporary content of his art. According to Ji, contemporary components enter the picture and join the historical through a related “process of recording, almost a documentary process” based on his own observations within the region of the Three Gorges.24 Ji thus combines two types of collecting: one art historical, and the other contemporary and quasiethnographic. Together they form a multitemporal style that transforms the landscape into a spatial structure of overlapping and communicating traces. In some cases, this spatial structure bears a striking resemblance to Chinese landscape painting styles of the past, perhaps most famously (and frequently noted), monumental landscapes by such early masters as Li Cheng 李成 (919–967) or Fan Kuan 范寬 (active ca. 1023–1031). On close inspection, however, it proves impossible to insert Ji into any one artistic school or lineage. Critics have identified a dizzying range of influences: Guanxiu 貫休 (832–912), Li Tang 李唐 (ca. 1050–after 1130), Xia Gui 夏圭 (fl. ca. 1195–1230), Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫 (1254–1322), Huang Gongwang 黃公望 (1269–1354), Sheng Mao 盛懋 (active 1320–1360), Luo Ping 羅聘 (1733–1799), Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450–1516), Francisco Goya (1746–1828), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Otto Dix (1891–1969), and Georg Grosz (1893–1959), among others.25 Rather than turning directly to the landscape for inspiration, as he describes Shi Tao doing, Ji instead turns to these and other sources for his building blocks, creating composite landscapes that communicate very little about the actual appearance of the Gorges, but a great deal about both his aesthetic influences and the real and imagined effects of the dam. The style generated by Ji’s collecting and recording is idiosyncratic, but his method is very much in line with the conventions of Chinese painting. Painters often followed earlier models to depict landscapes they had never visited in order to capture poetic associations or convey philosophical ideas. As Valérie Malenfer Ortiz has shown in her study of Southern Song painting, the most famous landscape themes, such as the one that developed around the Xiao-Xiang region of modern Hunan, often bear little identifiable relationship to actual places or specific landforms.26 In most literati writing on painting after the Tang, an artist’s ability to achieve mimetic specificity was considered secondary to his or her capacity for capturing the essence of a place, thing, or theme. By participating in this tradition and drawing on so wide an aesthetic palette, Ji forges a vaguely traditional style that suggests the presence of multiple influences without privileging any single forerunner. The indeterminacy

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of Ji’s paintings detracts from the “obviousness” of the Three Gorges as a specific Chinese landscape and cultural concept. This allows him to foreground the women, children, and men who have been dispossessed and disembodied by the dam, while still producing images that appear “Chinese” to both Western and Chinese viewers. The monumental Below the 143 Meter Watermark (figure 6.8) exemplifies Ji’s approach to Chinese painting traditions. A densely composed depiction of mountains and rivers, this image echoes the format of hanging-scroll landscapes of the Northern Song but exaggerates their scale and structure, creating an oppressively claustrophobic painting.27 Below the 143 Meter Watermark gives one the sensation of being submerged or buried beneath layers of mountains and/or fathoms of water, an effect achieved in part through dramatic foreshortening: the landscape recedes sharply into the distance from the bottom edge and foreground of the painting. The majority of the painting is given over to a dense patchwork of trees, hills, waterways, and structures in various states of decay. All of this culminates in a massive, clublike peak that stands just left of center, dominating the upper quarter of the image, and, in the far distance, a handful of similarly shaped mountains. Presumably all of the abandoned, decrepit buildings that fill the massive painting below this great peak lie below the 143-meter watermark and will be inundated. Although the painting “appears from a distance to resemble a monumental classical scroll that draws on the tradition and symbolism of Confucian idiom,” any attempt to read the work according to such logic fails.28 In the language of traditional painting criticism, a monumental mountainscape from a tenth-century master, such as Li Cheng, or a Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) synthesist, such as Wang Hui 王翬 (1632–1717), would have relied on qimo 氣脈 (energy arteries) or shanmo 山脈 (mountain arteries) in order to structure the landscape according to a complex hierarchical system. Such pathways allow for the flow of both energy and vision through the painting, generally beginning near the bottom and snaking their way upward to the peaks at the top (the long 龍, or dragon, is often used to figure this pattern), which were conventionally associated with the seat of power, the emperor. The sovereign peak represented both the pinnacle of a hierarchical pattern and the regulating agent of this pattern.29 If we look very closely at Ji’s painting, we can discern what looks like a similar zigzag pattern and an accompanying flow. Beginning at the bottom left-hand corner, it moves diagonally to a small river midway up on the right and then continues diagonally upward in the other direction before reaching another small empty space below and to the left of the uppermost peak. Though it is faint

figure 6.8 Below the 143 Meter Watermark (2006), Yun-fei Ji; Ink and mineral pigment on xuan paper. Source: Worcester Art Museum. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

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figure 6.9 Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (2009), Yun-fei Ji; hand-printed watercolor woodblock mounted on paper and silk. See also color plate 17. Source: Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

and occasionally occluded, Ji creates this pattern primarily through the application of darker washes and denser strokes in the triangular midsection (with the base of the triangle along the painting’s left edge). The path is there, but does it allow for the flow of energy? The title of the painting—Below the 143 Meter Watermark—reminds us that its focus lies not among the lofty peaks or empty space at the top of the painting, which are typically associated with the ruler as manifestation and source of cosmic order, but below, among the densely packed detritus.30 Rather than creating a sense of perspectival depth or movement, the barely perceptible qimo serve to intensify vertical depth. The flat, compacted quality of the image makes the landscape nearly impenetrable, almost subterranean (or submerged). As Ji has said: “To ancient people, landscape paintings served as imagery where people imagined living and traveling. To me, the subject of the Three Gorges forms a sharp contrast to this ancient ideal.”31 Below the 143-Meter Watermark’s sense of flatness and submersion is comprehensible in relation to the disappointed expectations generated by what appears, at least at first, to be a classical model. But Ji has evoked the monumental landscape not simply to produce an allegory of misgovernment. He mimics but ultimately reverses the hierarchical signifying capacity of Northern Song monumental landscape painting in order to privilege the victims of trauma, not those who have caused it. The painting is an acknowledgment of those whose homes and villages lay beneath the 143 watermark, not a call for those behind the dam to repent. Ji’s Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (hereafter Migration Scroll) is typical of his later Three Gorges work in that it is more closely centered on the people who have been displaced by the dam (figure 6.9).32 In place of an identifiable landscape, Ji offers a human topography confronted by the rising waters of

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the reservoir. This work reproduces in painstaking detail the material and formal characteristics of Chinese handscroll painting, but uses them as vehicles for what Ji calls an historical “record” (ji 記) of displacement and migration. Landscape paintings in the handscroll format are structured according to a panoramic temporality—often likened to cinematic time—in which the gradual movement from the right of the painting to the left indicates passage through space and time. Because the viewer has control over the speed of this journey and can linger wherever she chooses, however, the physical medium also encourages an ongoing dialogue between unfurling and furling. The Migration Scroll relies on both types of movement, but especially on the latter, which creates a palpable reverse momentum. By using the building blocks of landscape—earth, trees, water—to structure the image into five pictorial cells, Ji forces us to linger repeatedly, even as we gradually move toward the painting’s end. Each of these landscape cells is populated by human and semihuman figures whose bodies are positioned so as to slow forward momentum even further. In the first field (figure 6.10), there are eleven human figures and one hairy wild boar on its hind legs. All around them are miscellaneous objects—chairs, tables, a baby carriage, baskets, a bicycle, a laden tractor, a large wooden basin, and bundles fashioned from gaily colored cloth that echoes the similarly patterned clothing of the women throughout the image. In the second group, there are seven figures, six scattered in various states of repose around a mass of objects similar to those in the first field. The lone standing figure, an old man, looks left in the direction in which the handscroll is traditionally viewed. The posture and position of this man mirror those of a woman in the first group. Together, their gazes force the viewer incrementally leftward, even as the scattered arrangement and energies of the other figures hold them back temporarily. The third group (figure 6.11) contains eight figures—six women and two strange fish-headed figures wearing suits and ties. The women in this group

figure 6.10 Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (detail).

figure 6.11 Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (detail).

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have perhaps the most carefully depicted facial expressions in the whole image. With eyes closed or gazes deflected in every direction except toward the viewer, they appear fatigued. Near the left edge of the group, a woman wearing a red, white, and brown flower-patterned shirt bows her head and cranes her neck in the direction of the next group and the water that lies beyond them. The rightmost woman, her face seemingly creased with worry, is separated from the rest of the group by the disturbing fish-men, whose formal clothing marks them as members of a wealthier class, possibly businessmen, possibly cadres (or both). With gaping mouths and tiny, beady eyes, they stand facing each other, their long, feeler-like tongues extended in an image of rapaciousness. In the final land-based group, there are eight figures in two groups of four. The first four are elderly and crowded against the landscape elements that separate this and the previous field. The final four are heavily laden with large bags and move purposefully toward the left (figure 6.12). These figures are immediately recognizable—they are the young men who for the last few decades have left their rural homes to flood the industrial and urban centers of China. They are no longer residents, neighbors, or friends, but rather migrants and laborers. The dam propels them forward, into an economy where their only assets are their bodies. Their own destination, however, is a mystery: at the far left of the painting, the land ends, giving way to an open expanse of water on which a final group of five public security officers float in a pontoon boat, each of them staring directly out toward the viewer. At the end, there is no land, only a watery surface that serves as the medium of state power. Ji’s medium of observation is reconceived here as a technics of power. If the scattered, immobile figures in the first three groups worked against the kinetic, leftward pull of the handscroll format, this last group of migrants finally propels us forward, toward both the floating officials and the inscription that follows the painting.

figure 6.12 Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (detail). See also color plate 18.

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Mao Zedong famously proclaimed that “the people are like water and the army is like fish.”33 This fantasy of harmonious integration resurfaces here through its polar opposite, profound alienation: the water from the fish, the power from the people, the worker from his body, and the people from their land. Water appears not as the medium for the harmonious union between the people and the People’s Liberation Army, but as an existential threat.34 Displacement and alienation are at the heart of Ji’s conception of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam as a traumatic event. In this work, Ji distills this trauma into an imagined migration that leads the residents of the region from the fixity of land to the uncertainty of water, even as he places them within the landscape one last time. The Migration Scroll is a record of things, people, and events observed as well as a fictional narrative in which the spectral and horrific push and pull the migrants on their uncertain journey. For Ji, what really happened—the truth of displacement as an event or process—matters less than producing an image that acknowledges the physical and psychic experiences of displacement. If the pictorial component of the scroll functions as a fictional record based on on-the-ground observation and organized as a narrative of displacement, however, the textual component, which is almost identical to the one at the left side of Four People Leaving Badong, is both a record and a document that details the historical forces that have led to this displacement: Yu the Great’s mastery of the waters is already something from deepest antiquity. Yet year after year the flooding waters of the Yangzi have continued to cause trouble, and the common folk along the river’s banks have suffered great harm as a result. As early as the last century, Sun Yatsen suggested the solution of cutting off the river and constructing a dam in the Three Gorges. Some decades later, Mao Zedong also advocated this proposal. Construction on the reservoir finally began in 1994 and will be completed next year. The reservoir will be 190 meters deep and 500 miles in circumference. Stretching across the provinces of Hubei and Sichuan, it will even allow ocean-going vessels of upwards of 10,000 tons to reach Chongqing, spur the economic prosperity of the interior, solve electricity problems for a broad region, and serve as a major milestone among my country’s engineering projects, as well as a symbol of progress and modernization. With their very own hands, the migrants of the reservoir zone demolished—brick by brick, tile by tile—thirteen cities, 140 towns and 1,300 villages. Forced to leave their ancestral homes, neighbors, relatives and friends scattered to different places. I went to Zigui, Xiangxi and Fengjie, among other places, to personally witness the circumstances

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surrounding the displacement of the common people of Badong. Although this was already six years ago, it remains vividly before my eyes. That is why I have specially produced this Migration Scroll to serve as a record. [Written in the] fourth month of the wuzi year [2008], Ji Yunfei.

The first section of this long inscription places the nearly completed dam project within the context of an ancient and modern history of water management. For Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong in the twentieth century, the dam was a final, technological “solution” (shuofa 說法) to a problem that the mythical Yu the Great failed to solve in antiquity. As Ji notes, there are significant benefits to the modern solution, not least of which is the symbolic capital that it generates for “my country” (woguo 我國). The second section shifts from the dam “as a symbol of progress” to the personally experienced scene of material demolition and displacement, of which this painting serves as a “record” (jilu 紀錄). Against the symbolic, mythical, historical, and economic conceptions of the dam, all of which share a humanitarian justification, Ji presents a visual and textual record of the bodies and personal goods of the people in whose name the dam was actually constructed. He does not attack the dam, but his image suggests that it has failed to fulfill its primary humanitarian function. By producing yet another flood, one far greater than anything that preceded it, the dam has not only not spared “the common folk along the river’s banks” “suffering” (huan 患) and “harm” (hai 害), it has definitively displaced them while also enlisting them in their own displacement. Ji’s visual and textual records draw on the ethico-documentary function of traditional painting and historiography. Writing before the completion of the Migration Scroll, Wu Hung already inserted Ji’s Three Gorges work into a long tradition of paintings of refugees, or liumin tu 流民圖. Said to have emerged out of an act of loyal remonstrance during the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127), liumin tu directly document the suffering of the common folk, whether from war, famine, or unfair government policies.35 Presented to those in control, such paintings were seen as having the potential to transform government policy. While the Migration Scroll does echoes the liumin tu tradition, the context of its production, its intended audience, and its effects are completely different from earlier examples. Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art’s Library Council as an “artist’s book,” Ji’s original painting was transformed into a technically masterful color print by one of China’s most famous woodblock studios and sold as a limitededition luxury art object in the United States. His audience was not the Chinese government or its technocratic officials, but a New York–focused, international

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art world in which Chinese contemporary art (especially if it has the aura of dissent) has become an increasingly hot commodity. This is not to imply a cynical profit motive, but to suggest how thoroughly Ji has adapted a traditional medium to a contemporary context in which artistic works documenting the effects of economic and social change in China have become, as Rey Chow puts it, “ubiquitous.”36 What Ji’s painterly approach contributes to documentary practice and discourse is a sense of the often invisible ways seemingly distinct historical events overlap and interact, not only psychically, but also materially. His work forces us to ask what it means to produce a record of something that you’ve never seen or that never happened at all, at least not as a discrete event. How does our understanding of the event and documentary’s relationship to it change when the event is composite, imagined, spectral, fictional? How does one make visible the invisible histories connecting the present to a past that, as Benjamin puts it, “can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again”?37 By collecting traces of the past, present, and future, Ji produces a new kind of record, not simply of what happened in the Three Gorges as the dam neared completion, but of the hidden ties that bind us to other spaces, other people, other times.

C oll apsing Time , Crushing the Body The need to spatialize trauma has two overlapping sources: first, the unsettled status of historical traumas that exceed not only their temporal but also their spatial bounds; and second, the rapid disappearance of the material reminders of the past, or, in the case of the gorges, the disappearance of the very earth needed to anchor one’s material existence. In Ji’s work, trauma is not only a “disorder of memory” or a “pathology of history,” but also a disorder of space and a pathology of geography.38 Ji responds to a culture of traumatic return and contemporary disappearance not by fabricating historical simulacra as traumatic monuments or attempting to preserve the present, but by resurrecting the past as an assemblage of heterogeneous fragments that he combines and layers with images of everyday life to create a strange new landscape. Aspects of this layering appear outrageous, but this is simply part of life in the ultra-unreal space-time of contemporary China, as Ji discovered when he first traveled to the Gorges region: At that time, I went to a village of displaced people. I showed them a map and asked them which villages they had come from. They told me the

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names of their hometowns, but I couldn’t find them on the map. I don’t know if it was because I was using a new map. Anyway, some place names had already disappeared. It was very strange.39

This meeting between Ji, with his map, and the displaced villagers is a “strange” confrontation between conflicting spatial and temporal realities. The migrants are not merely displaced; they are also unplaced, erased from the scientifically inscribed record (the map). Contemporary Chinese culture is full of similar instances of clashing spatial, temporal, and representational realities. Perhaps the most ubiquitous example from recent decades is the temporal collapse brought about by the character used to indicate a future demolition—the character chai, 拆, which means “to be demolished” (figure 6.13). Another example is specific to the now-flooded areas of the Gorges and comes in various forms—handwritten signs, carved markers, posters, carefully detailed timelines—all of which served to show either the eventual water level of the Three Gorges reservoir or to convey information about the relocation program (figure 5.18). Over the last few decades, the character 拆 has become one of the most omnipresent and iconic images in China.40 For some, it has in fact become a symbol of China itself: when combined with the sentence-ending particle na 哪 to form chai-na 拆哪, it becomes a pun on China. Hastily painted on exterior walls in districts slated for redevelopment, the chai character is the dark side of the Chinese dream, a silently performative utterance that says

figure 6.13 “Chai 拆” (to be demolished), as seen in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life.

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unequivocally: this building will be destroyed. In this context, the linguistic and phonic content of the character have been evacuated, leaving behind a symbol that does not signify so much as embody and bring about demolition. The building upon which chai is written (and often encircled by a line that makes it look like a stamp or official seal) is transformed from a shelter or functional space into a surface for the projection of the national drama of progress—or, depending on your perspective, the national trauma of unbridled development. The certainty of the sign’s pronouncement also collapses time, bringing the future—both the planned skyscraper or mall development and the traumatic experience of displacement—immediately into the present, while simultaneously transforming the present in all its materiality into a ghostly remainder, a bit of a future past.41 As seen in many of the films, photographs, and other works of art produced in the lead-up to the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, areas along the Yangzi slated to be flooded were marked with signs indicating the various future water levels. These signs functioned analogously to the chai characters by serving as physical markers of the future in the present. Unlike chai, however, which pronounces a future demolition without saying anything specific about what is to follow, these markers simultaneously indicate both a future absence and a future presence. Cities, homes, cliffs, and archaeological sites below the markers would disappear, and water would come to take their place. That these signs often stood high above the river offers a ready metaphor for how the future might have impinged on and loomed over the present, pressing down on the residents of the gorges with a psychic weight equal to the water of the reservoir. Though not intended to function this way, reservoir-related markers are the newest manifestations of ancient hydrographic practices of the type preserved by the underwater museum that surrounds White Crane Ridge, which I discussed in chapter 1. Just as residents of Fuling would have been able to read the history of the river and its low points using the old inscriptions on White Crane Ridge, residents of the contemporary Yangzi could see the future of the river in the projected water-level markers for the reservoir. Signs marking the stages of the reservoir materialized information with which residents would have been intimately familiar: instead of 120 or 140 meters, a citizen of Wushan or Fengjie might have thought, “just below the threshold of my house,” or “three stories above my apartment.” In Below the 143 Meter Watermark, Ji does not include an actual marker, instead suggesting the height of the eventual water level through the painting’s title, vertical format, and spatial compression. Many of Ji’s nonvertical images, including Autumn Colors (figure 6.14),

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figure 6.14 Autumn Colors (2003), Yun-fei Ji; ink and watercolor on xuan paper. Source: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

display a similar kind of compression and flatness. In this image, Ji creates an overwhelming sense of inundation: water snakes through the landscape, and even unidentifiable blank spaces begin to resemble liquid incursion into the otherwise densely painted scene. As in Last Days Before the Flood, described below, Autumn Colors incorporates a distant vista (in the upper right-hand corner) that vaguely resembles an aerial view of the Gorges. The scene of scavenging that unfolds in the rest of the painting appears below this landscape (figure 6.15), a spatial effect enhanced by Ji’s use of transparent watercolor washes to fill in portions of the painting, particularly those depicting open water. We look through and at water, and the visibility of this medium reminds us of the omnipresence of the liquid element: it is there both at the moment of artistic creation and at the moment of physical destruction. Another of Ji’s distinctive techniques enhances this simultaneity. Applying what he has called “the method of erasure and montage . . . to collected historical materials” in some of his paintings, Ji uses water to wash away certain images so that he can layer new ones on top, “develop(ing) layers that work together as a whole.”42 This process of controlled, small-scale flooding visibly distresses the mulberry paper with which he works, suggesting both the ephemerality and the fragility of the medium, and also of memory and history. “Erasure and montage” fabricates a trace and promises the continued presence of that which has disappeared.

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figure 6.15 Autumn Colors (detail).

Ji’s focus on spatiotemporal compression and erasure gives form to the psychological effects of occupying a space as it ceases to exist. It also allows him to imagine how the Three Gorges migrants embody the physical processes of dispossession and the constriction of the individual’s place in the world. Ji achieves this by filling his paintings with the most basic and protective extensions of the human body—consumer goods and domestic objects—as he does in his 2006 painting Last Days Before the Flood (figure 6.16). Like Below the 143 Meter Watermark, this large image presents a severely foreshortened, vertical landscape in which hills and trees frame the ruins of villages and homes. Nearly every surface is densely filled, except for a small band of sky at the upper edge of the painting, below which a line of simply painted mountains extends into the distance. Three river-like bodies of water snake down from the mountains—one from the left, one from the right, and one from just right of center—converging to become a single, central river in the second quarter of the painting. This river seems to end abruptly near the middle of the image, where it passes by the ruins of a settlement, but reappears just below and to the right, where it flows horizontally to the painting’s edge. Ji creates a perceptible sense of receding space and depth through the use of both foreshortening and clearly delineated qimo, especially in the top half of the painting.

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figure 6.16 Last Days Before the Flood (2006), Yun-fei Ji; ink and mineral pigment on xuan paper. Source: U.S. Embassy, Beijing, China. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

The pull of this depth is counteracted, however, by the fact that nearly the entire surface of the painting is filled with a dense landscape. Though one can identify a vista and a horizon, when viewing the painting as a whole, this upper edge appears as merely the very top of a landscape defined by vertical depth. The qimo do not lead us up and out, but down and in, toward the bottom edge of the image. The overwhelming sense of flatness and compression redirects the viewer to the painting’s lower left-hand corner (figure 6.17). There, directly beneath

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figure 6.17 Last Days Before the Flood (detail). See also color plate 19.

a laden packhorse, we find four figures: a woman and a child riding a bicycle are followed by another woman carrying a basket, all of whom follow a man carrying an oversize load on his own back. This group is one of many similar groupings that appear in Ji’s Three Gorges paintings. Sometimes sitting atop their belongings like refugees without a destination,43 sometimes ambling out of the frame,44 these people are the only signs of life in landscapes that resemble disaster zones, and all of this well before the water’s arrival. For Ji, the people—their experiences, their hard work, their suffering, their migration—rather than the dam’s environmental toll or the region’s scenic vistas and famous sites, are the central focus of his Three Gorges paintings. Last Days Before the Flood acknowledges these people by capturing a general process of constriction and compression in which the residents of the Gorges are increasingly and irrevocably dispossessed of their land, their homes, and their objects. The formal techniques that I have explored in the context of traumatic and disordered temporality reappear here to give shape to this process of dispossession. Through the spatial composition of his paintings, Ji figures the relatively simple physical process begun by the dam—the expansion of one thing and the contraction of another—and its morally and politically

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dubious companion process—the erection of a symbol of state power on a national and international scale at the expense of the vernacular landscape and its inhabitants. This process can be subdivided into two stages: first, the destruction and dismantling of the manmade landscape; and second, the shrinkage of the land once inhabited and built up by the former residents, now migrants. Demolition and shrinkage represent the often unspoken imbalance between the agents of the dam project and those who have been directly affected. Ji’s incorporation of water thus creates a synecdochical flood narrative in which the stranded survivors and the surging water stand both for the full narrative of the creation of the dam and reservoir and also as a political allegory of its impact. As the nation and the party were glorified, as the scope and size of their reach were theatrically expanded, the material lives of those who lived below the final reservoir level were deconstructed to the point of nonexistence. All that remains in Ji’s pictures, and only temporarily, are the narrow spaces and tiny clearings in which groups of figures huddle, looking more like refugees than participants in a national triumph. These groups are most prominent in the Migration Scroll and in a series of images from Ji’s 2010 exhibition, “Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts.” Even before this motif had developed into a clear compositional structure, however, Ji was already incorporating refugee-like figures into his paintings, most notably in the earlier “Old One Hundred Names” (2003) and “Empty City” (2004) series. In paintings such as the 2002 A Monk’s Retreat (figure 6.18), which was included in “Old One Hundred Names” exhibition, Ji uses natural features, especially trees, shrubs, and stones, to create distinct pictorial cells. Though they provide room for figures, these spaces are notable for how claustrophobic they are, how they constrict the figures that they enclose. A Monk’s Retreat envisions the creation of the dam and reservoir as a catastrophic flood, a maelstrom that engulfs everything in its way—animals (real and imagined), automobiles, homes, water towers. This violent deluge stretches from the left edge across two-thirds of the large image, lapping menacingly at a patch of dry ground on the far right, where a group of five men crowd within a thicket and atop a rock outcropping (figure 6.19). Though a single, pig-faced figure stands beyond the trees and rocks, craning his neck toward the waves, none of the others seem to attend to the flood. Surrounded by everyday goods—hot-water thermoses, electric fans, umbrellas— and isolated from the raging waters, they appear affectless, bored. On closer inspection, however, there is something strange about three of the men and the semi-human-looking outsider: their bodies have no flesh; their bones,

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figure 6.18 A Monk’s Retreat (2002), Yun-fei Ji; ink and mineral pigment on xuan paper. See also color plate 20. Source: Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

organs, and blood vessels are exposed. If Isabella Bird described the “cuts, bruises, wounds, weals [and] bad sores” that marked the naked bodies of the Yangzi River trackers in order to encourage her readers to “sympathetically bear [them] in mind,” then Ji moves past the skin that stops her penetrating gaze, exposing the body’s organs in order to elicit a more visceral sympathy from his viewers.45 Compression, destruction, and disembodiment in A Monk’s Retreat are all methods of figuring the extended process of “unmaking” that precedes the Three Gorges Dam project as a process of landscape production or “making.” In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry explores not only torture and war as acts of unmaking, but also the cultural structures that underlie making. For Scarry, making, or as she divides it, “making-up” and “making-real,” is the process through which humans come to terms with and attempt to protect their fragile physical forms. “Making-up” is an initial imaginative projection of the self out into the world, and “making-real” is a physical projection of the self, what she calls “the action of creating verbal and

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material artifacts.”46 In her scheme, the threat of pain is anterior to all human creation. If, as she imagines it, making is a process of replication and extension of the human body out into the world, then unmaking, as exemplified in torture and war, entails first the constriction of the body and its extensions, and finally the deconstruction of language and the remaking of the resultant pain into an “insignia” of power. The building blocks of one structure are appropriated for use in another. In Ji’s paintings, the insignia of power are everywhere and nowhere—they are the dam that never appears and the dog-faced Red Guards that menace in The East Wind, the roiling waters that wreak havoc in A Monk’s Retreat, and the public security officers that float at the watery edge of The Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll. What Ji captures in his images is a tipping point, the extended moment when the homes and land of the Three Gorges migrants are first appropriated and disassembled in preparation for a dubious act of making through unmaking. This is the process whereby the world of the residents of the Gorges shrinks as the dam and reservoir grow. The various claustrophobic, liminal spaces in Ji’s work are merely temporary resting places where these straggling migrants find a respite before the final, definitive constriction

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figure 6.19 A Monk’s Retreat (detail). See also color plate 21.

forces them elsewhere. Despite their nonchalance, the figures in A Monk’s Retreat are vulnerable, deprived of the human body’s first line of defense, its most basic protective membrane—the skin (figures 6.20 and 6.21). The menacing waters and the sheltering trees thus assume even greater power—one as a threat and the other as a substitute, but equally imperiled, armor. Scarry treats objects as metaphorical extensions of the body, buffers against physical suffering and pain.47 Those who are wealthy enjoy a much greater buffer between their bodies and the world; they are, in Scarry’s terms, “radically embodied.” The poor, on the other hand, are not merely poor but radically “disembodied,” and thus constantly imperiled: Not just suffering but all forms of consciousness are involved in the difference between belonging to the people who are disembodied and belonging to those who are radically embodied, for the very end point of one’s precariousness (after many tiers of objecthood are crossed) is the

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figure 6.21 A Monk’s Retreat (detail).

figure 6.20 A Monk’s Retreat (detail).

starting and stable point of the other’s existence: The second endures in near objectlessness; all his psychic states are without, or nearly without, objectification; hence in all his life activities, he stands in the vicinity of physical pain.48

Scarry’s point here is basic and undeniable: the poor are exposed to all manner of pain and suffering, and objects gain in importance when they are scarce. In their emphasis on the relationship between poverty and pain, Scarry and Ji share an approach to objects as benign and essential components of humanity. The omnipresence of consumer goods in Ji’s paintings is not simply part of his attempt to document authentically what he saw during his trips to the Gorges, but rather another indicator of how

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precarious the lives of these people have become, how literally close they are to danger and pain. Depicted as homeless and refugee-like, the Three Gorges migrants have only the smallest of material buffers between themselves and the nearly apocalyptic world that they inhabit. Their relative lack of material objects increases the significance of what they do have, each object assuming a talismanic importance incommensurate with its commonness. A Monk’s Retreat makes literal the metaphorical connection between the body and its material trappings: if you remove the goods that these men can carry on their backs and the clothes that they wear, you will see that they are not simply naked, but painfully disembodied, stripped of their very skin.49 In Ji’s painting, this dramatic exposure seems to be the end result of the processes that squeeze these men into the tiny space of the grove. As the flood rages and consumes the landscape and its human infrastructure, they are increasingly dispossessed and compressed within an ever-shrinking realm. The residents of the Gorges, as depicted in Ji’s paintings, are not simply homeless; they are victims of a violent dismemberment, a gruesome flaying, and a severing of perhaps the most important human link aside from family relations—that between the fragile body and what protects it.

PA S S AG E I V PA RT O F T H E M OV E M E N T To read traces it is necessary to be a tracker—to let the shadow of one’s intention fall across the track; it is to become part of the movement. —Paul Carter1

Farewell to Baidicheng The desire to inscribe the landscape of the Three Gorges has, unsurprisingly, taken multiple, often contradictory, forms over the last two millennia. What makes it possible to compare these form is their shared preoccupation with change. To reinscribe the fading traces of the past as legible sites, or to mend natural and social systems seen as faulty, is to fight against or rush toward change. Since at least the Song Dynasty, fear of change has inspired layered acts of landscaping designed to preserve sites of cultural importance or to revive lost values in the Three Gorges region. The reconstruction of Du Fu’s home at Dongtun, the reinscription and relocation of the Plant Memorial in Xintan, the creation of an underwater museum around White Crane Ridge—these efforts to give shifting landscapes cultural coherence are

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simultaneously necessitated and thwarted by change. They remind us that landscape is a thing produced and reproduced, inscribed and reinscribed, imagined and material, constantly changing, even (or especially) as it is appropriated for ideological purposes or as a symbol of cultural continuity. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the proliferation of imperial and national discourses on China’s developmental failures made change an existential imperative.2 The scientific remapping of the Yangzi and its reconceptualization as a source of energy, the introduction of steamships and the fight over shipping rights, the reordering of the banks of the Yangzi as commemorated by the Yu the Great Mythology Park in Wuhan, and, of course, the construction of the Three Gorges Dam—in different ways and to different ends, these processes and constructions are designed to bring order to systems seen as dysfunctional, to fix the Chinese landscape as a scientific, imperial, national, and cultural prospect. Because they have long contributed to the consistency of the Three Gorges as cultural concept, premodern aesthetic forms and carefully preserved landmarks help diminish the perceived impact of the dam project as technological fix. From certain angles, the Three Gorges Dam has tamed the river and fueled the nation without diminishing the Chineseness of the landscape. Such seeming continuities are anything but simple, however. For contemporary artists who responded to the Three Gorges Dam project, premodern forms and familiar landmarks have functioned not as timeless expressions or sites of Chinese culture, but as the building blocks of an experimental aesthetics of change in which the ji/trace is repurposed to confront new types of spatiotemporal disorder. Where Du Fu asked us to look with him so that we might see the fractured memories of a past golden age as they formed and dissolved on the surfaces of the Gorges, Yun-fei Ji, Jia Zhangke, and other artists ask us to look at the dissolution of that very landscape as it is reduced to rubble and swallowed by the waters of the reservoir. If writers of the Tang and Song demonstrated how human structures, solid as they might seem, decay and shift and disappear altogether, only to reappear in other places and at other times, the contemporary artists who document the social and environmental consequences of development have shown us that rivers and lakes can dry up too, that even mountains may wear away. This is something that poets of the trace knew all too well; it is a lesson we would be wise to relearn. In the age of climate change and the massive spatial and social transformations that drive it, oceans, mountains, coasts, rivers, and grasslands are changing before our very eyes, not over millennia or centuries, but on shorter and shorter timelines. Retracing

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the long history of how images and texts have inscribed and reinscribed the Three Gorges as a techno-poetic landscape acclimates us to changes in the past, of course; but as a methodologically deliberate way of seeing across time, it also suggests a critical path that might help us attend to, live in, and create for a world made strange by change. Perhaps nowhere are these changes stranger or more widely documented than in contemporary China. Since Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms in 1978, China has industrialized and urbanized at a rate unprecedented in human history, its newfound wealth finally allowing it to realize the grand infrastructural dreams of its founding fathers, among the most cherished of which has always been the damming of the Yangzi River. An engine of growth, mover of goods and people, source of water both near and far, and producer of hydroelectric power on a massive scale, the river has never been so important, or imperiled, as it is today. Pollution, erosion, habitat loss, canalization, and the diversion of its waters to parched regions in northern China have transformed the Yangzi and other Chinese rivers (including those that cross international borders), destroying their ecosystems and effacing the historical traces that happened to survive the ravages of time. The traces that remain in the Three Gorges, such as the temple complex at Baidicheng, are now part of a totally altered geography: once a narrow promontory reaching out into the river, Baidicheng has been transformed by the Three Gorges Dam and reservoir into an island, an accidental parable of rising seas and changing coasts. Travelers headed downstream might like to think they are bidding farewell to the same old Baidicheng—the landscape from which Li Bai’s light boat departed early in the morning—but that ship has long since sailed. In the course of traveling from a place fixed in the poetic imagination to one fixed by concrete, this book has also followed a trajectory from ancient trace (guji 古跡) to famous site (shengji 勝跡), from place to people, from lyrical self-expression to aesthetic forms driven by sympathy for others, from magic transport to arduous labor, from exile to the region to displacement from the region. In another kind of narrative, these movements might bespeak greater concern with material displacement than with its representation, with the reality of the physical world than with how its boundaries and terms are culturally reimagined. But the mission of Fixing Landscape has been to pick out the invisible threads linking the representational and the material, not only the “real world consequences” of techno-poetic tropes that turn changing landscapes into stable cultural concepts, but also the ways literature, film, painting, and photography speak back to the landscape and direct attention toward those who seek to fix it for their own ends.3

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figure iv.1 “Kuifu 夔府,” Michael Cherney (Qiumai 秋麥), from his Ten Thousand Li of the Yangtze River (2015). Image courtesy of the artist.

Though the Three Gorges Dam is completed and its reservoir filled, the landscape is of course neither totally fixed nor fully altered. The river still flows; it is still possible to approximate Fan Chengda’s journey home or to retrace the imaginary itinerary that the Qianlong Emperor took when he viewed The Shu River (figures 2.1–2.4). This is what the Beijing-based photographer Michael Cherney (who also goes by the Chinese name Qiumai 秋麥 or Autumn Wheat) has done in his monumental Ten Thousand li of the Yangzi River (Changjiang wanli tu 長江萬裡圖), a forty-two-scroll photographic work printed and mounted on mica-flecked mulberry paper.4 Inspired by the thematic genre of Yangzi River paintings and a Song Dynasty painting of the same title in the collection of the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., Cherney selected forty-two sites along the Yangzi and Min rivers. Most of these correspond to those marked on the Freer painting, though Cherney has plotted them using modern technology, including online maps and Google Earth, in order to “determine the GPS coordinates of locations that would allow for photography of desired sites from the most ideal angle (rather than from the limited perspective of the river’s surface).”5 These techniques allow for a degree of spatial precision unthinkable in the Song, though the goal for Cherney is neither to fix exactly the locations inscribed on the Freer painting, many of which are only very loosely connected to the landscape, nor to establish his images as having some “basis in fact,” which was Fan Chengda’s goal

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in commissioning a new painting of the Gorges. Instead, he seeks an “ideal angle” that allows for the most compelling picture of the river, as in his image of Kuimen (figure IV.1), entryway to the Qutang Gorge and the repeated point of departure and passage for this book. The mountains that make up Kuimen are among the most recognizable topographical features of the entire Yangzi River. Captured in innumerable travel photographs—and, as we have seen, depicted on the back of the ten-yuan banknote—Kuimen is an endlessly reproduced scene, a virtual landscape that can be tinted with a different ideological color for every new occasion. Cherney, however, drains Kuimen of its customary lurid tones, presenting the river and its mountains in granular black and white, beneath a veil of haze. One small part of a panorama that encompasses the mountains on the river’s southern bank as well as Baidicheng in the foreground at left, the sharply angled peak that forms the northern portion of Kuimen is a distant and barely visible shadow in the upper left-hand corner of the scroll. Though barely perceptible, this image of “Kuifu” is not what remains of a landscape drained of ideology: its contrastive dullness draws attention to the norms of representational manipulation. The gauziness of the landscape also conflates the omnipresent clouds and mists for which the Gorges have long been famous with the thick mantle of caustic smog for which China is increasingly infamous. Present in much of Cherney’s work, this atmospheric pall evokes the fragility of both the environment and the material traces of the past in contemporary China. Cloaked and

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threatened by the shadows of development, the subjects of Cherney’s photographs are rendered spectral: faint traces captured by the camera as part of an ongoing project to explore those places where China’s past and the present converge, or, more often, diverge. Against the impulse to fix the landscape, contemporary artists such as Cherney have embraced techniques that give form to change, that make visible not only the historical traces and representational modes that make the Chinese landscape, but also the more ominous traces of the environmental and social crises that threaten to unmake our world. Confronted with the displacements caused by the Three Gorge Dam and reservoir, artists have been forced to reimagine preconceptions about the relationship between place, materiality, and representation. Where the passage of time and the rising of water make it impossible to locate the physical traces of the past, they have found alternative ways of reinscribing those traces, thereby sustaining and renewing the landscape traditions that developed around the Three Gorges. Through a poetics of disappearance and displacement, they have recaptured the indeterminacy of the trace even as they mourn the erasure of the landscape that once held it. By joining Du Fu in asking us to “please look,” they teach us how to read traces, to become “part of the movement,” and to thereby acknowledge the folly and the danger of trying to fix what can never be fixed.6

NOTES

Orientation 1. For more detailed information about the history of the dam and the politicians involved in planning it, see Covell Meyskens, “Building a Dam for China in the Three Gorges Region, 1919–1971,” in Water, Technology and the Nation-State, ed. Filippo Menga and Eric Swyngedouw (New York: Routledge, 2018), 207–222; and Dierdre Chetham, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002). 2. Marie-Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 36–41.

Pa ssage i. Departure 1. Li Bai 李白, Li Taibai quanji 李太白全集, ed. Wang Qi 王琦 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), 1022. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2. Lyman P. Van Slyke, Yangtze: Nature, History, and the River (Reading, Mass.: AddisonWesley, 1988), 19.

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3. Li Daoyuan 酈道元, Shuijing zhu jiaozheng 水經注校證, ed. Chen Qiaoyi 陳橋驛 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 790. 4. For a full translation of the Commentary’s Three Gorges passage, see Richard E. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 84–90. Later readers treated Li Daoyuan as the first writer to describe the Gorges based on personal observation, though he clearly relied heavily on earlier accounts. The textual history of the Commentary is complicated by Li’s tendency to borrow from earlier texts without citation. Wang Liqun 王立群 has argued that the passage that contains the “three cries” folk song was based on the earlier Jingzhou ji 荊州記, by the Liu Song Dynasty (420–479) scholar Zhao Shenghong 昭盛弘 (dates unknown), who was in turn deeply influenced by Yuan Shansong’s 袁山松 (d. 401) Yidu shanchuan ji 宜都山川記. Wang Liqun, Zhongguo gudai shanshui youji yanjiu 中國古 代山水游記研究 (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 2008), 41–56. For a summary of uncertainties surrounding the Commentary, see Michael Nylan, “Wandering in the Land of Ruins: The Shuijing zhu 水經注 (Water Classic Commentary) Revisited,” in Interpretation and Literature in Early Medieval China, ed. Alan K. C. Chan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 63–102. 5. Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 17. 6. Stoler, Duress, 19. 7. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 8. For more on Derrida’s concept of iterability, see Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 307–330. For a discursive interpretation of tradition, see Talal Asad, “Thinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (2015): 166–214. 9. The most vocal opponent of the dam in China was the activist Dai Qing 戴晴. Two of her edited volumes have been translated into English: The River Dragon Has Come: The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China’s Yangtze and Its People, trans. Yi Ming (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), and Yangtze! Yangtze!, trans. Nancy Liu (Toronto: Earthscan Canada, 1994). Many popular books were published in the lead-up to completion of the dam. The most sophisticated of these is Deirdre Chetham’s Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 10. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 7. 11. Nixon, Slow Violence, 4. 12. The sixteenth-century Sanxia tongzhi 三峽通志 (Comprehensive Gazetteer of the Three Gorges) opens with a short section that lists competing geographical descriptions of

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which gorges comprise the Three Gorges. Wu Shouzhong 吳守忠, Sanxia tongzhi 三峽 通志 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2002). 13. Du Fu 杜甫, “The Two Palisades of Qutang 瞿塘兩崖,” Dushi xiangzhu 杜詩詳注, ed. Qiu Zhao’ao 仇兆鰲 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2004), 1557, abbreviated hereafter as DSXZ. Though all translations of Du Fu are my own, I provide corresponding page numbers for Stephen Owen’s translation of The Poetry of Du Fu (Boston: De Gruyter, 2015) for reference (abbreviated as Owen, followed by book and poem number: Owen 18.9). 14. Qiu Zhao’ao (1638–1717) suggests an interpretation along these lines (DSXZ 1557), which David R. McCraw develops in Du Fu’s Lament from the South (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), 52. Owen’s interpretation (18.9) is similar to Qiu’s and McCraw’s. 15. “On Ascending Baidicheng, First Poem 上白帝城二首, 其一” (DSXZ 1273; Owen 15.8). The second line could also be translated, “With each step and each turn back, it appears anew.” 16. A number of common words for nonpictorial “landscapes” or “scenery” in modern Mandarin also incorporate the word jing 景 (scene/view/vista). 17. Michael Sullivan, Chinese Landscape Painting in the Sui and T’ang Dynasties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); James Cahill, Three Alternative Histories of Chinese Painting (Lawrence: University of Kansas, Spencer Museum of Art, 1988), chap. 2. Landscape poetry (shanshui shi 山水詩) is generally understood to have developed much earlier than landscape painting. For more on the popularization of the term shanshui and the relationship between geographical and aesthetic terminology in the landscape poetry of Xie Lingyun, see Yü-yü Cheng, “Bodily Movement and Geographic Categories: Xie Lingyun’s ‘Rhapsody on Mountain Dwelling’ and the Jin-Song Discourse on Mountains and Rivers,” American Journal of Semiotics 23 (2007): 193–219. 18. Ping Foong, The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), Introduction. 19. Chang Tan, “Landscape Without Nature: Ecological Reflections in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 3, no. 3 (2016), 225; Foong, The Efficacious Landscape, 17. 20. Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin Classics, 1979), 6.23; Lunyu zhengyi 論語正義, ed. Liu Baonan 劉寶楠 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 237. 21. For more on the history of the modern term ziran 自然, see Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 326, and Tan, “Landscape Without Nature,” 224–226. For efforts to translate the natural sciences, see Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

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22. Martin Powers, “When Is a Landscape Like a Body?,” in Landscape, Culture, and Power in Chinese Society, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1998); Foong, The Efficacious Landscape; Lothar Ledderose, “The Earthly Paradise: Religious Elements in Chinese Landscape Art,” in Theories of the Arts in China, ed. Susan Bush and Christian Murck (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 165–183. For the influence of religion on the development of poetic landscape representation, see Xiaofei Tian, “From the Eastern Jin Through the Early Tang (317–649),” in The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, ed. Kang-i Sun Chang and Stephen Owen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 199–285, and Visionary Journeys: Travel Writings from Early Medieval and Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011). 23. Paul Kroll, “Lexical Landscapes and Textual Mountains in the High T’ang,” T’oung Pao 84 (1998): 62–101; Stephen Owen, “The Librarian in Exile: Xie Lingyun’s Bookish Landscapes,” Early Medieval China 10–11, no. 1 (2004): 203–226. 24. Paula Varsano, “Do You See What I See?: Visuality and the Formation of the Chinese Landscape,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 35 (2013): 31–57. 25. Scholars writing on cultural sites, particularly sacred mountains, have focused more carefully on how religious and literary ideas shape space. See especially James Robson, Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue) in Medieval China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); Wen-shing Chou, Mount Wutai: Visions of a Sacred Buddhist Mountain in Qing China (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018); and Robert E. Harrist, Landscape of Words: Stone Inscriptions from Early and Medieval China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). Scholars of Chinese gardens have also been attentive to how landscape ideas are expressed materially; see, for example, Craig Clunas, Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (London: Reaktion Books, 1996). 26. For theories of experiential or vernacular landscapes, see John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984) (among other works), and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). For a work of environmental history that resonates with Jackson’s idea of the vernacular landscape, see Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). 27. W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1. James Elkins and Rachel DeLue, eds., Landscape Theory (London: Routledge, 2008) revisits many of the key theoretical debates in landscape studies. See also Elkins’s reflections on “unsolved problems” raised by this volume, “Report on the Book Landscape Theory,” https://www.academia.edu/163424/ On_the_Book_Landscape_Theory_English_?auto=download.

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28. Jeremey W. Crampton and Stuart Elden, eds., Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). For an adaptation of the “trilectical” methods of Lefebvre and Soja to the context of Chinese spatial and environmental history, see Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State: An Environmental Drama in Northern Song China, 1048–1128 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 7, and throughout. Another important approach to landscape is phenomenological, as in Edward Casey’s studies of place and space. For a work that combines the political insights of Mitchell’s work with Casey’s phenomenological approach, see Jeff Malpas, The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014). For a popular example of landscape as object of historical memory work, see Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1995). The scholarly literature on landscape is voluminous, varied, and scattered among different fields. For a survey of scholarly literature on European and American landscape traditions, see the “Bibliographic Essay” in Malcolm Andrew’s Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 236–242. 29. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008); Mitchell, Landscape and Power; Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). The list of scholars who have subjected landscape and geography to similar critiques is long. See especially Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York: Knopf, 1988), and Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994). I am also building on research on imperialism and technologies of representation in China, including James Hevia, The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Andrew Jones, “Portable Monuments: Architectural Photography and the ‘Forms’ of Empire in Modern China,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 18, no. 3 (2010): 599–631; Liu, Translingual Practice and Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). See also Tani Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). 30. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Interventions in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 7–8. See also Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10. 31. Shellen Xiao Wu makes a similar argument about coal and the development of a “discourse on energy” in late Qing and early Republican China in Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry in the Modern World Order (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015), 194.

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32. It is the search for natural resources as part of economic and infrastructural development in particular that distinguishes contemporary China’s extractionist imperialism from the territorial imperialism of the Qing, which was, of course, one of the most successful empires in history. For more on Qing imperialism, see Magnus Fiskejö, “The Legacy of the Chinese Empires: Beyond ‘the West and the Rest,’ ” Education About Asia 22, no. 1 (2017): 6–10; Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton, eds., Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004); Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and the International History Review 20, no. 2 (1998), a special issue on “Manchu Colonialism,” especially Peter C. Perdue, “Boundaries, Maps, and Movement: Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian Empires in Early Modern Central Eurasia,” International History Review 20, no. 2 (1998): 263–286, and Michael Adas, “Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective,” International History Review 20, no. 2 (1998): 371–388. 33. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). 34. Stoler, Duress, 26. 35. Cosgrove, Social Formation, 13. 36. Shijing 245 (Shengmin 生民), Maoshi zhengyi 毛詩正義 (juan 17, 260), in Ruan Yuan 阮元, ed., Shisan jing zhushu 十三經注疏 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), 1:528. This poem uses an archaic word for footprint, wu 武, rather than ji. This translation is by Arthur Waley; The Book of Songs, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 244. 37. For more on the myth of Cang Jie, see Imre Galambos, “The Chinese Writing System,” in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), ed. Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 3. 38. Guo Jingchun 郭景純 (276–324 CE), Jiang Fu 江賦, in Wenxuan 文選, compiled by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), 557–579. For a full translation of Guo’s poem, see David R. Knechtges, Wen Xuan or Selections of Refined Literature, vol. 2 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 321–352. 39. Paul Carter, Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 6. 40. Carter, Dark Writing, 6. 41. My use of the trace is based in Chinese aesthetic thought, though it is unavoidably shaped by Derrida’s theories of language and writing. In Derridean thought, the

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trace/track is one of the primary figures of différance, the mechanism through which the linguistic sign signifies in relation to that from which it differs, which is necessarily both present and absent. A “mark of the absence of a presence,” the trace is a figure of the present that is equally related to the past (against whose absence and difference it signifies) and the future (which it makes possible as a point of departure). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xvii. In triangulating ji/trace with landscape and shanshui, I am also working against a tendency to romanticize the trace and its “haunting” qualities in order to draw attention to their durable material effects (Stoler, Duress, 5, 6). 42. In the years since the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, Chinese artists have turned to landscape as both an ecocritical form and a means of reflecting on the status of tradition in contemporary China. For more on this phenomenon, see Corey Byrnes, “Chinese Landscapes of Desolation” (forthcoming); Peter Fischer, ed., Shanshui: Poetry Without Sound? Landscape in Chinese Contemporary Art (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2011); Xavier Ortells-Nicolau, “Gray Pastoral: Critical Engagement with Idyllic Nature in Contemporary Photography from China,” Trans Asia Photography Review 5, no. 2 (2015); and Tan, “Landscape Without Nature.” 43. David Harvey, “The Nature of Environment: The Dialectics of Social and Environmental Change,” in The Ways of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 193. 44. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 535; Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 10; Karen Thornber, Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 45. Yaeger, “Editor’s Column,” 526. 46. Yaeger, “Editor’s Column,” 527. 47. White, The Organic Machine. 48. My conception of the techno-poetic landscape overlaps somewhat with what Richard White describes as “hybrid landscapes,” in “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” Historian 66 (September 2004): 557–564. 49. Mao Zedong 毛澤東, “Shuidiao getou, youyong 水調歌頭, 游泳.” For the Chinese text as well as a translation of the entire poem, see Mao Zedong, The Poems of Mao Zedong, trans. Willis Barnstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 82–85.

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1. Fading Tr aces 1. James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics, vol. 3, The Shoo-King (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), part 2, 78; Shangshu Zhengyi 尚書正義 (juan 5, 29), in Ruan Yuan 阮元, ed., Shisan jing zhushu 十三經注疏 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), vol. 1, 141. 2. Jiang Zemin 江澤民, “Ba sanxia gongcheng jiancheng shijie yiliu gongcheng 把三峽工 程建成世界一流工程,” in Jiang Zemin wenxuan 江澤民文選, vol. 2, http://cpc.people. com.cn/GB/64184/64185/180138/10818621.html. 3. Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 64. 4. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 64. 5. For a history of modern inscriptional technologies, see Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). 6. Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1987), 16. 7. von Glahn, The Country, 12–16. 8. “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past, Second Poem 詠懷古跡, 其二” (DSXZ 1499; Owen 17.34). Du Fu refers to the non-Han people of this region as “Man 蠻 [tribes],” “hundred Man” (baiman 百蠻), “southern Man” (nanman 南蠻), or “black Man” (wuman 烏蠻), all catchall phrases for southern tribes. For a description of the ethnic makeup of the region during the early Song, see von Glahn, The Country, chap. 1, and throughout. 9. Su Shi 蘇軾, “Wang Dingguo shiji xu 王定國詩集序,” in Du Fu juan 杜甫卷, ed. the Huawen xuan 華文軒 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1964), 99; cited and translated by Eva Shan Chou in Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23. 10. Chou, Reconsidering Tu Fu, 27. For more on Du Fu’s importance during the Song, see Charles Hartman, “The Tang Poet Du Fu and the Song Dynasty Literati,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 30 (2008): 43–74. 11. For detailed information on Du Fu’s movements during his lifetime, see Chen Yixin 陳貽焮, Du Fu pingzhuan 杜甫評傳 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2003); William Hung, Tu Fu, China’s Greatest Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952); Li Chunping 李春坪, Du Fu nianpu xinbian 杜甫年譜新編 (Taibei: Xinan shuju, 1975); Liu Mengkang 劉孟伉, Du Fu nianpu 杜甫年譜 (Hong Kong: Huaxia chubanshe, 1967); David R. McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament from the South (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1992). For a collection of the best-known premodern writings on Du Fu, see the three-volume Du Fu juan. 12. Xuanzong left Chang’an with his “precious consort” (guifei 貴妃), Yang Yuhuan 楊玉環 (719–756), though the latter, blamed for distracting the emperor from his

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duties, was executed at a post station between Chang’an and Chengdu. For a classic account of the rebellion, see Edwin G. Pulleyblank, The Background to the Rebellion of An Lu-shan (London: Oxford University Press, 1955). 13. Du Fu’s reasons for leaving Chengdu are not totally clear. For some theories, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament, 39–40. 14. “Reflected Light 返照” (DSXZ 1336; Owen 15.57). 15. Though the Yangzi was an important transportation route, most trade during this period was conducted over the land routes that connected the Chengdu Basin and Chang’an. Upper Yangzi ports remained relative economic and cultural backwaters well into the Southern Song (von Glahn, The Country, 198, 214). Shipping on the upper Yangzi was still carried out on a small scale through the Ming Dynasty. The size of ships and volume of cargo transported downriver and upriver increased dramatically during the Qing (due in part to population growth). Nanny Kim, “River Control, Merchant Philanthropy, and Environmental Change in Nineteenth-Century China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 52, no. 4 (2009): 667. 16. For a structuralist reading of the “Autumn Stirrings,” see Yu-Kung Kao and TsuLin Mei, “Tu Fu’s ‘Autumn Meditations’: An Exercise in Linguistic Criticism,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 28 (1968): 44–80. For a book-length exegesis, see Ye Jiaying 葉嘉瑩, Du Fu qiuxing bashou jishuo 杜甫秋興八首集說 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1988). See also McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament, chap. 11. 17. DSXZ 1485; Owen 17.27. 18. This line is built around a common Tang poetic reference that combines two separate tales. The first records an historical expedition taken by Zhang Qian 張騫 (d. 114 BCE), who was imprisoned by the Xiongnu while searching for the origins of the Yellow River. The second tells the story of a man who lived along a coast by which a mysterious raft passed every year during the eighth month. One year he decided to climb aboard, and after a lengthy trip he reached a strange city, where he found a weaving girl and a cowherd. When he asked them where he was, the boy sent him in search of a resident of the state of Chu, who explained that the man had hitched a ride on the “traveler star,” which passes through the Milky Way and the Cowherd constellation at the same time every year. Du Fu’s line refers to both Zhang Qian, who was a prisoner in a foreign land, and the man who traveled on an empty star-raft. 19. The “painted ministry” refers to a government building in Han Dynasty Chang’an in which portraits of meritorious officials were displayed. Du Fu superimposes Tang sites and institutions on their Han equivalents throughout the “Autumn Stirrings.” 20. For a similar image of connected waterways, see “Yearning for my Home on the Brocade River, Two Poems 懷錦水居止二首” (DSXZ 1237; Owen 14.74).

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21. Stephen Owen, “Synecdoche of the Imaginary,” in The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture, ed. Paula Varsano (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 261. 22. Owen, “Synecdoche,” 264. 23. For a study of the gibbon in Chinese literature, see Robert van Gulik, The Gibbon in China: An Essay in Chinese Animal Lore (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1967). 24. Du Fu makes a similar observation in his “Ballad of the Most Skilled 最能行” (DSXZ 1286; Owen 15.19): “ ‘At dawn depart from Baidi, by dusk arrive in Jiangling 朝 发白帝暮江陵’/Just recently I witnessed this feat—truly there is proof 顷来目击信有 征!” Stephen Owen describes a comparable gesture in Xie Lingyun’s 謝靈運 work in “The Librarian in Exile: Xie Lingyun’s Bookish Landscapes,” Early Medieval China 10–11, no. 1 (2004): 206. 25. Paula Varsano, Tracking the Banished Immortal (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2003), 9, and throughout. For more on xu/shi, see Stephen Owen, Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1992), 590. For a summary of approaches to xu/shi as used in the so-called Li-Du debate, see Varsano, Tracking, 4–12, and throughout. 26. Varsano, Tracking, 12, and throughout. 27. The possibility of returning home haunts Du Fu’s late poetry. For examples, see “On Hearing That the Armies Had Recovered Henan and Hebei 聞官軍收河南河北” (DSXZ 968; Owen 11.68), from 763, and “Dreams of Returning Home 夢歸” (DSXZ 1950; Owen 22.33), from 769. 28. Paula Varsano, “Lowered Curtain in the Half-Light: An Introduction,” in The Rhetoric of Hiddenness, 1. 29. The “Great Preface” to the Book of Odes is the most important statement of literary principles and poetic modes in the premodern Chinese literary tradition. For a line-by-line translation and exegesis alongside the Chinese text, see Owen, Readings, 37–56. 30. Owen, Readings, 46. 31. McCraw renders xing as “moods” (Du Fu’s Lament) while Kao and Mei opt for “meditations” (“Tu Fu’s ‘Autumn Meditations’ ”). I have followed Owen in translating the title as “Autumn Stirrings.” 32. Yu appears in a range of early sources, many of which are translated in Anne Birrell’s Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). The earliest sources are the Shangshu 尚書 and the Shijing 詩經. The latter contains at least six references to Yu, in poems 201, 244, 261, 300, 304, and 305. The former is the most important early source for Chinese flood myths related to Yu and his father Gun. The “Tribute of Yu” (Yu gong 禹貢) chapter contains the most thorough account of his feats. There are also lengthy accounts of Yu’s deeds

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in the Guoyu 國語 and Mencius. For more, see Mark Edward Lewis, The Flood Myths of Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 163n28, 164n30, and throughout. 33. In 1995, a lavish, officially sponsored ceremony—the first since 1934—was held at what is known as Yu the Great’s tomb in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Michael Leibold reads this revival of a cult of Yu as part of a mid-1990s attempt to articulate a neo-Confucian philosophy that drew on “Chinese” traditions to reinforce centralized power; see his “Da Yu, a Modern Hero? Myth and Mythology in the People’s Republic of China,” in Perceptions of Antiquity in Chinese Civilization, ed. Dieter Kuhn and Helga Stahl (Heidelberg, Germany: Edition Forum, 2008), 361–375. Recent archaeological surveys carried out in China have been represented as verifying aspects of the mythology of Yu as flood queller; see Nicholas Wade, “Scientific Evidence of Flood May Give Credence to Legend of China’s First Dynasty,” New York Times, August 4, 2016. 34. Gun tried to stop the flood by building dams and dykes. After he was executed, Yu emerged fully formed from his corpse. Faced with the same floods, Yu reversed his father’s work, digging out the land and guiding the water into rivers that drained into the sea. 35. Robin McNeal, “Constructing Myth in Modern China,” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 3 (2012): 690. I have drawn on this article for its detailed description of the park and its statuary. Professor McNeal has also been kind enough to allow me to reproduce two of the excellent images that he took of the park. For more of his images, see https:// www.flickr.com/photos/robin_mcneal/albums/72157636433625894/with/10209018693/. 36. McNeal, “Constructing Myth,” 679. 37. McNeal, “Constructing Myth,” 699. 38. “Correspondence: A Memorial to Captain Plant,” North China Herald, April 2, 1921. 39. Formations such as the Yanyu Rock 灎澦堆, an enormous boulder located directly in front of Kuimen, were integral to both the popular culture of those who navigated the river and the poets who traveled through the gorges, including Du Fu. Yanyu was dynamited in 1958 on Mao’s suggestion. Deirdre Chetham, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 157. 40. Lyman P. Van Slyke, Yangtze: Nature, History, and the River (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1988), 38–39. 41. For the Chinese text of “Swimming” and an alternate translation, see Mao Zedong, The Poems of Mao Zedong, trans. Willis Barnstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 82–85. 42. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 43. DSXZ 1225; Owen 14.60.

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44. Yu is credited with having driven away snakes and serpents from the land (Lewis, Flood Myths, 53). For a version of this aspect of his myth, see Mengzi zhushu jiejing 孟子注疏解經, “Teng wengong xia 滕文公下” (juan 6, 50) in Shisan jing, 2714. 45. DSXZ (1225) gives a variant of sheng 生 (rise from) for xu 噓 (exhale, puff ). 46. In the course of Yu’s work, he used four vehicles (sizai 四載): a boat (zhou 舟), a chariot (che 車) for traveling overland, a sledge (chun 輴) for traversing muddy areas, and a sedan chair (lei 樏) for crossing mountains. Shangshu Zhengyi (juan 5, 29), in Shisan jing, 141. 47. “The three Ba” is a Han administrative reorganization of the ancient state of Ba, which included the Gorges. For an early source on the history and geography of Ba, see Chang Ju 常璩 (ca. 291–361), Huayang guozhi 華陽國志, ed. Ren Naiqiang 任乃強 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987). 48. For other temple poems, see “Zhuge’s Shrine 諸葛廟” (DSXZ 1674; Owen 19.27) and poem four of “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past 詠懷古跡” series (DSXZ 1505; Owen 17.37). 49. von Glahn, The Country, 13. 50. See the collected comments that follow the poem in DSXZ (1225). 51. For alternative readings, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament, 182–183, and Yu-Kung Kao and Tsu-Lin Mei, “Meaning, Metaphor, and Allusion in T’ang Poetry,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 38 (1978): 331–332. 52. DSXZ 1558; Owen 18.10. 53. In both the DSXZ and Du Fu 杜甫, Dushi jingquan 杜詩鏡銓, ed. Yang Lun 楊 倫 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980), “At Qutang Contemplating the Past” follows immediately after “The Two Palisades of Qutang.” Qiu argues that they were written in that order (DSXZ 1558). 54. The image of the “Potter’s Wheel” (taojun 陶鈞) as generative force comes from the second chapter of the Zhuangzi 莊子. See William Callahan, “Cook Ding’s Life on the Whetstone: Contingency, Action, and Inertia in the Zhuangzi,” in Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, ed. Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 184–186. 55. Du Fu may have a poem by Shen Quanqi 沈佺期 (ca. 650–714) in mind here. In the opening couplet of his “Passing by the Dragon Gate of Shu 過蜀龍門,” Shen proclaims: “The Dragon Gate was not carved out by Yu 龍門非禹鑿/its weirdness is the work of Heaven 詭怪乃天功.” Shen Quanqi 沈佺期 and Song Zhiwen 宋之問, Shen Quanqi Song Zhiwen ji jiaozhu 沈佺期宋之問集校注 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2001), 200. 56. For more on huaigu poetry, see David R. Knechtges, “Ruin and Remembrance in Classical Chinese Literature: The ‘Fu on the Ruined City’ by Bao Zhao,” in Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture, ed. Paul Kroll (Boston: Brill, 2015),

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55–89; Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), chap. 1; Hans Frankel, “The Contemplation of the Past in T’ang Poetry,” in Perspectives on the T’ang, ed. Arthur Wright and Dennis Twitchett (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 345–365; and Wu, A Story of Ruins, 64. 57. This translation is by James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 5, The Ch’un Ts’ew with the Tso Chuen (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), part 2, 578. For the original, see Chunqiu zuozhuan zhengyi 春秋左傳正義 (juan 41, 319), in Shisan jing, 2021. 58. Water control, centralized political administration, and moral philosophy were closely linked in early accounts of Yu’s dredging. Lewis, Flood Myths, 32–33. 59. The “gait of Yu” is also the name of a performance form that was used “in many rituals to protect travelers, cure diseases, and perform other functions” (Lewis, Flood Myths, 103). According to Wolfram Eberhard, shamans in the state of Ba performed a one-legged dance that was known as the “Yu step” (Yu bu 禹步). Wolfram Eberhard, The Local Cultures of South and East China (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 74. For more on attributes of Yu’s body, see: Lewis, Flood Myths, 190n87, and throughout. 60. Mark Edward Lewis, The Construction of Space in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 2–3. 61. Stephen Owen, “The Self ’s Perfect Mirror: Poetry as Autobiography,” in The Vitality of the Lyric Voice, ed. Shuen-fu Lin and Stephen Owen (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 92. 62. DSXZ 1228; Owen 1463. 63. By the Tang, it was common to refer to the visibility of Yu’s traces on the mountains and cliffs of the Gorges. For examples, see Chen Zi’ang’s 陳子昂 (d. 702) “At Baidicheng Contemplating the Past 白帝城懷古,” Chen Zi’ang ji 陳子昂集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 17, and Meng Haoran’s 孟浩然 (ca. 689–740) “Entering the Gorges, Sent to My Younger Brother 入峽寄弟,” Meng Haoran shiji jianzhu 孟浩然詩集 箋注 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2000), 136. 64. The first of the “Singing My Feelings” poems centers on the poet Yu Xin 庾信 (513–581); the third on Wang Zhaojun 王昭君, a royal consort who was married off to a Xiongnu leader during the Han; the fourth on Liu Bei 劉備 (161–223), scion of the royal house of the Han; and the fifth on Liu Bei’s military strategist, Zhuge Liang 諸葛 亮 (181–234). For readings of the entire series, see McCraw, Du Fu’s Lament, 186–195, and Hans Frankel, The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), 118–124. 65. For an extensive bibliography of studies on Song Yu, see David R. Knechtges and Taiping Chang, eds., Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature: A Reference Guide (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 1007–1022.

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66. von Glahn, The Country, 13–14. For more on the secularization of goddesses during the Tang Dynasty, see Edward H. Schafer, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T’ang Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). For a translation of the Songs of Chu, see David Hawkes, trans., The Songs of the South (New York: Penguin Classics, 2011). 67. DSXZ 1501; Owen 17.35. 68. Song Kaiyu 宋開玉, Dushi shidi 杜詩釋地 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2004), 394. In a poem titled “Song Yu’s House 宋玉宅,” Fan Chengda 范成大 (1126–1193) explains that, “according to tradition, the county offices of Zigui are [built] on the old remains of [Song Yu’s house]. In a wine shop to the left of the office some frivolous type [haoshizhe 好事者] has put up a sign saying ‘Song Yu’s Eastern House.’ ” Fan Shihu ji 范石湖集 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), 272. 69. Owen treats Song Yu as the one who produces wenzao: “His former house by the river and mountains, nothing but his literary flourishes” (17.35). Song Yu was a master of the fu (rhapsody), a form that was sometimes criticized for its fanciful scenarios and emphasis on virtuosic displays of arcane linguistic knowledge. What the “baselessness” of Song Yu’s own writing has to do with his house in this interpretation is not totally clear. 70. Jian Jinsong 簡錦松 believes that both the Yang Terrace and the Palaces of Chu were located within the immediate environs of Kuizhou. Du Fu Kuizhou shi xiandi yanjiu 杜甫夔州詩現地研究 (Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1999), chap. 2. 71. In a long poem titled “Mt Wu 巫山,” the famous Song Dynasty poet Su Shi recounts a conversation with an old man who in his youth repeatedly climbed to the top of Mt. Wu, where he found inscribed steles and other traces of the goddess and her cult. Su Shi 蘇軾, Su Shi shiji 蘇軾詩集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), 33. 72. See Song, Dushi shidi, 395–396, for more detailed information. Yang terraces may originally have been associated with shamanistic rituals, though the record appears to be silent on such matters. 73. Du Fu uses the phrase yaoluo 搖落 in a number of his poems, including, “Western Tower, First Poem 西閣二首, 其一” (DSXZ 1473; Owen 17.15). This is how it appears in the “Nine Disputations” (jiubian 九辯): “Doleful, ah, this autumn air! 悲哉秋之為 氣/Sere, severe, ah! The grasses and trees wither and decay 蕭瑟兮草木摇落而變衰.” Chuci buzhu 楚辭補注, comp. Hong Xingzu 洪興祖 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983), 182; Hawkes, The Songs of the South, 209. 74. These adjectives come from Yu Xin’s “Rhapsody on a Barren Tree Kushu fu 枯樹 賦,” Yu Zishan jizhu 庾子山集注, ed. Ni Fan 倪璠 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2000), 46. Yu Xin is a figure of special significance for Du Fu. Descended from a northern family that fled south at the fall of the Western Jin Dynasty (265–316), he was technically a northerner born in exile, though he considered himself a native of the Yangzi city of

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Jiangling. He reached lofty political and literary heights toward the end of the Liang Dynasty (502–557). When that dynasty began to implode, he was sent north to sue for peace. From 554 to the end of his life he was held as a captive of northern dynasties. For more, see William T. Graham, Jr., “The Lament for the South”: Yu Hsin’s “Ai Chiang-Nan Fu” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 4–20. 75. Yu Xin, Yu Zishan jizhu, 94. 76. Chuci buzhu, 215; Hawkes, The Songs of the South, 230.

2. From Tr ace to Record 1. Paul Carter, Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 91. 2. Ruth Mostern, “Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern”—The Spatial Organization of the Song State (960–1276 CE) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 99. 3. Eva Shan Chou, Reconsidering Tu Fu: Literary Greatness and Cultural Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 26; Deborah Marie Rudolph, “Literary Innovation and Aesthetic Tradition in Travel Writing of the Southern Sung: A Study of Fan Ch’engta’s ‘Wu ch’uan lu’ ” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996), 56–57. 4. Stephen Allee has done extensive research on The Shu River, attributed to Li Gonglin 李公麟 (ca. 1041–1106), and the Ten Thousand Li Along the Yangzi River (Changjiang wanli tu 長江萬里圖), attributed to Juran 巨然 (active ca. 960–985). For documents that transcribe, date, and translate (nonpoetic) inscriptions, identify collectors’ seals, and list labels, see https://archive.asia.si.edu/SongYuan/F1916.539/F1916-539.Documentation. pdf (The Shu River) and https://archive.asia.si.edu/songyuan/F1911.168/F1911-168.Documentation.pdf (Ten Thousand Li). See also Julia Orell, “Picturing the Yangzi River in Southern Song China (1127–1279)” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2011). 5. Qianlong’s poem is collected in Zhang Zhao 張照 et al., comp., Shiqu baoji 石渠 寶笈 (Haikou: Hainan chubanshe, 2001), vol. 2, 1201–1202, and Qianlong, Yuzhishi chuji 御製詩初集, 32:11b–13a, in Qing Gaozong (Qianlong) yuzhi shiwen quanji 清高宗(乾隆)御 製詩文全集 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2010), vol. 1, 823–824. 6. Mostern, Dividing the Realm, 84. 7. Peter K. Bol, “The Rise of Local History: History, Geography, and Culture in Southern Song and Yuan Wuzhou,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 61, no. 1 (2001): 56. 8. James M. Hargett, “Local Gazetteers and Their Place in the History of Difangzhi Writing,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56, no. 2 (1996): 408. 9. Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 70. 10. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 86. 11. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 86.

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12. For geographical and phenomenological approaches to place, see Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), and Edward Casey, Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 13. Jian Jinsong 簡錦松, Du Fu Kuizhou shi xiandi yanjiu 杜甫夔州詩現地研究 (Taibei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1999); Tan Wenxing 譚文興, “Dongtun, Rangxi ji qita—du Du Fu Kuizhou shi xiandi yanjiu 東屯, 瀼西及其他—讀《杜甫夔州詩現地研究》,” Du Fu yanjiu xuekan 杜甫研究學刊 66, no. 4 (2000): 252. 14. For a sample of xiandi research on Du Fu, see the bibliography to Jian’s Du Fu Kuizhou shi. See also Song Kaiyu 宋開玉’s Dushi shidi 杜詩釋地 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2004), which has entries for every place name mentioned in Du Fu’s poetry as well as a final chapter of forty-five pages dedicated to sites of Du Fu worship throughout China. 15. Tan, “Dongtun,” 252. 16. Xiandi research is deeply invested in the “realism” of Du Fu’s poetry. Du Fu’s status as a supposedly “realist poet” (xianshi zhuyi shiren 現實主義詩人) has led some scholars to treat his poetry more as a meticulous geographical and social record than as a form of creative expression. See, for example, Ren Guiyuan 任桂園, “Gu Kuizhou diwang xingsheng yu Tangshi huzheng (shang) 古夔州地望形勝與唐詩互証,” Chongqing sanxia xueyuan xuebao 重慶三峽學院學報 25, no. 115 (2009): 6. For more on Du Fu’s realism, see Chou, Reconsidering Tu Fu, 75–106. 17. Stephen Owen, “The Librarian in Exile: Xie Lingyun’s Bookish Landscapes,” Early Medieval China 10–11, no. 1 (2004): 203–226. 18. Carter, Dark Writing, 91. 19. Carter, Dark Writing, 84. 20. Ding Guanpeng’s image is reminiscent of the landscapes of Ma Yuan 馬遠 (active ca. 1190–1225), who is closely associated with diagonally composed paintings anchored in “one corner” (yijiao 一角). See Richard Edwards, The Heart of Ma Yuan: The Search for a Southern Song Aesthetic (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011). 21. Zhu Mu 祝穆 and Zhu Zhu 祝洙, Songben fangyu shenglan 宋本方輿勝覽 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986); Wu Qian 吳潛, Zhengde Kuizhou fuzhi 正德夔州府 志, in Zhongguo xinan wenxian congshu, Xinan xijian fangzhi wenxian 中國西南文獻叢書, 西 南稀見方志文獻, vol. 9 (Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue chubanshe, 2003). 22. Most gazetteers provide only basic information about the location of Du Fu’s homes while citing earlier scholarly sources and listing poems written there. There are a number of sources on the origins and evolution of the Song gazetteer, including Hargett, “Local Gazetteers”; Bol, “The Rise of Local History”; Jeffrey Moser, “One Land of Many Places: The Integration of Local Culture in Southern Song Geographies,” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 42 (2012): 235–278; and Mostern, Dividing the Realm. These authors place the development of difangzhi in the context of waning state power,

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decreased official interest in mapping projects at the end of the Northern Song, and the rise of local elite culture. For later developments in gazetteer production, see Benjamin Elman, “Geographical Research in the Ming-Ch’ing Period,” Monumenta Serica 35 (1981–1983): 1–18, and Yongtao Du, “Literati Spatial Order: A Preliminary Study of Comprehensive Gazetteers in the Late Ming,” Ming Studies 66 (2012): 16–43. 23. Fan Chengda 范成大, Wuchuan lu 吳船錄, in Fan Chengda biji liuzhong 范成大筆記 六種, ed. Kong Fanli 孔凡禮 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2002), 217 (hereafter FCDBJ). For a translation, see James M. Hargett, Riding the River Home: A Complete and Annotated Translation of Fan Chengda’s (1126–1193) Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (Wuchuan lu) (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2008). 24. For more on Chinese travel writing in the Song, see Cheng Minsheng 程民生, Songdai diyu wenhua 宋代地域文化 (Kaifeng: Henan daxue chubanshe, 1997); Ronald Egan, “When There Is a Parallel Text in Prose: Reading Lu You’s 1170 Yangzi River Journey in Poetry and Prose,” in Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture, ed. Paul Kroll (Boston: Brill, 2015), 221–250; James Hargett’s translations of Fan Chengda’s travel diaries (see bibliography); Wang Fuxin 王福鑫, Songdai lüyou yanjiu 宋代旅遊研 究 (Baoding: Heibei daxue chubanshe, 2007); and Cong Ellen Zhang, Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011). There are also two unpublished theses on Song travel writing: Beryl Chapman, “Travel Diaries of the Southern Sung Dynasty with Particular Reference to Fan Chengda’s Wuchuan lu” (master’s thesis, University of Sydney, 1985), and Rudolph, “Literary Innovation.” See also Richard E. Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes: Travel Writing from Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), Introduction. 25. The term youji 遊記 refers here not to long-length travel diaries such as Fan Chengda’s, but to short essays that detail the experience of traveling to and visiting specific sites of historical or cultural interest. This form of spatial writing emerged in the mid to late Tang and early Song, with Liu Zongyuan’s 柳宗元 (773–819) “Eight Accounts of Yongzhou” (Yongzhou baji 永州八記), frequently listed as one of the first mature travel essays. Liu Zongyuan ji 柳宗元集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), 762–773. For more on the development of youji, see James M. Hargett, On the Road in Twelfth Century China: The Travel Diaries of Fan Chengda (1126–1193) (Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner, 1989), 17–25. For information on anthologies of travel writing, see Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes, Introduction, and throughout. On the specific lyrical qualities of Liu’s famous works and the Tang essay in general, see Rudolph, “Literary Innovation,” 6–7. 26. Lu You 陸游, Weinan wenji 渭南文集, in Lu You quanji jiaozhu 陸游全集校注, ed. Qian Zhonglian 錢仲聯 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang jiaoyu chubanshe, 2011), juan 17, 100. Lu You’s Dongtun essay is also collected in DSXZ (2251). For a complete translation of Lu You’s Dontun essay, see Corey Byrnes, “Rising From a Placid Lake: The Three Gorges at the Intersection of History, Aesthetics and Politics” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2013), chap. 2.

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27. The Rangxi lofty retreat seems to have been reconstructed sometime after the twelfth century. DSXZ (2253) includes an essay by the Ming official Chen Wenzhu 陳文 燭 (jinshi 1565) titled “A Record of the Reconstruction of the Rangxi Thatched Hut 重 修瀼西草堂記.” 28. Xie 䏶 can also be pronounced che. It seems to be a more common version of the characters 烲 and 䏹, the latter of which is used to write Yu’s name in Quan Shu yiwenzhi 全蜀藝文志, ed. Yang Shen 楊慎 (1488–1559) (Beijing: Xianzhuang shuju, 2003) (hereafter QSYWZ). 29. Yu Xie 于䏶, “Account of the Renovation of Du Fu’s Former Residence at Dongtun in Kuizhou 修夔州東屯少陵故居記,” QSYWZ 1206. 30. Song, Dushi shidi, 653. 31. “Two Chuan” (liangchuan 兩川) refers to eastern and western Sichuan. Huang Tingjian 黃庭堅, Yuzhang Huang wenji 豫章黃文集, in Sibu congkan 四部叢刊 (Taibei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1975), juan 17, 22b–23b (hereafter YZHWJ). In 2015, the government of Danleng, Sichuan, opened a new Hall of the Great Odes containing inscriptions of Du Fu’s Sichuan poetry in the style of Huang Tingjian’s calligraphy. 32. YZHWJ 22b–23b. For more on Huang’s essay, see David Palumbo-Liu, The Poetics of Appropriation: The Literary Theory and Practice of Huang Tingjian (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 34–36. 33. Thorny bushes and similar ground cover are common in poetry on ruins. For the relationship between ruins and wasteland, see David R. Knechtges, “Ruin and Remembrance in Classical Chinese Literature: The ‘Fu on the Ruined City’ by Bao Zhao,” in Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture, ed. Paul Kroll (Boston: Brill, 2015), 65. 34. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 26; See also Knechtges, “Ruin and Remembrance,” 56. 35. Wu, A Story of Ruins, 26. 36. Analects 11.15; Lunyu zhengyi 論語正義, ed. Liu Baonan 劉寶楠 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990), 453. For a translation of this passage, see the Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin Classics, 1979), 108. 37. QSYWZ 1206. 38. By contrast, local governments in other spots made famous by Du Fu’s postrebellion residence, including Tonggu 同谷 (in modern Gansu Province) and Chengdu, both of which had their own thatched huts, had sponsored the maintenance of his former homes. 39. QSYWZ 1207. 40. Su Shi 蘇軾, “Wang Dingguo shiji xu 王定國詩集序,” in Du Fu juan 杜甫卷, ed. the Huawen xuan 華文軒 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1964), 99. Cited and translated in Chou, Reconsidering Tu Fu, 23. 41. QSYWZ 1207.

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42. QSYWZ 1204. 43. Ironically, it was often “celebrated ‘visitors/outsiders’ ” like Du Fu who contributed most to the fame of cultural sites. Zhang, Transformative Journeys, 179. 44. “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past, Second Poem 詠懷古跡, 其二” (DSXZ 1499; Owen 17.34). 45. Carter, Dark Writing, 84. 46. For more on “cultural pilgrimages” during the Song, see Zhang, Transformative Journeys, chap. 7, and throughout. 47. Strassberg frames Song travel writing as a manifestation of gewu (Inscribed Landscapes, 46). For more on gewu, see Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4–6, 441n3, and throughout; Andrew Plaks, trans., Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung (The Highest Order of Cultivation and On the Practice of the Mean) (New York: Penguin Books, 2003); and Hoyt Tillman, “The Idea and the Reality of the ‘Thing’ During the Song: Philosophical Attitudes Towards Wu,” Bulletin of Song and Yüan Studies 14 (1978): 68–82. 48. Jian, Du Fu, 237–244. 49. Bill Porter, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past (Port Townsend, Wash.: Copper Canyon Press, 2016), 162. 50. Porter, Finding Them Gone, 163. 51. Porter, Finding Them Gone, 167. 52. Porter, Finding Them Gone, 166. 53. Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry draws primarily on works attributed to Song Yu in the Chuci anthology, including the “Nine Disputations” and “Summoning the Soul,” rather than on his rhapsodies. For examples of Du Fu’s use of language attributed to Song Yu, see chapter 1. 54. There is little to indicate that Song Yu’s Mt. Wu is the Mt. Wu of the Three Gorges. For foundational research on the goddess of Mt. Wu, with a special focus on the geography of Song Yu’s poems, see Wen Yiduo 聞一多, “Gaotang shennü chuanshuozhi fenxi 高堂神女傳說之分析,” in Qinghua daxue xuebao 清華大學學報 10, no. 4 (1935): 837–866. 55. Song Yu 宋玉, “Gaotang fu 高唐賦,” in Wenxuan 文選, compiled by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), 587. For a complete translation of the “Gaotang Rhapsody,” see David R. Knechtges, Wen Xuan or Selections of Refined Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), vol. 3, 325–339. For a bibliography of studies on the rhapsody as well as a list of translations, see David R. Knechtges and Taiping Chang, eds., Ancient and Early Medieval Chinese Literature Part Two: A Reference Guide (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2014), 1019–1021. 56. The goddess of Mt. Wu, or, as Edward H. Schafer renders her name, the “Divine Woman of Shamanka Mountain,” was “[probably] an ancient fertility goddess whose ritual mating with a shaman-king was necessary to the well-being of

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the land”; Schafer, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T’ang Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 46. For an account of the textual permutations of the goddess of Mt. Wu, see Wen, “Gaotang shennü,” 837–865. By the time she appeared in Song Yu’s rhapsody, the goddess had already begun to undergo a process of secularization that obscured her origins in local cults. In this she shared the fate of the many zoomorphic deities, including “dragon ladies and rain maidens,” who resided in numinous locales throughout the south. Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1987), 13–14; Schafer, The Divine Woman. 57. Paul F. Rouzer, Articulated Ladies: Gender and the Male Community in Early Chinese Texts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), 58–59. 58. For more on goddess poetry in the Tang, see Schafer, The Divine Woman. For an account of how early erotic poetry, including rhapsodies, shaped later discourses on love and desire, see Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), chap. 1. For connections between Song Yu’s two “goddess” rhapsodies and early erotic literature, see Rouzer, Articulated Ladies, 58–72. 59. Liu Gang 劉剛, “Songren guanyu Wushan shennüde bianwu yuqi dui Song Yu shennü miaoxiede piping 宋人關於巫山神女的辯誣與其對宋玉神女描寫的批評,” in Anshan shifan xueyuan xuebao 鞍山師範學院學報 12, no. 3 (2010), 23. 60. Du’s Record is collected in the sixty-volume edition of the Daozang 道臧 (Taipei, 1977) vol. 30, 24154–24207. For a partial translation (not including the entry on Yaoji), see Suzanne Cahill, Divine Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood: Records of the Assembled Transcendents of the Fortified Walled City, by Du Guangting (850–933) (Magdalena, N.M.: Three Pines Press, 2006). This passage is quoted verbatim in Li Fang 李昉, comp., Taiping guangji wubaijuan 太平廣記五百卷 (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1968), juan 56, 132. 61. Li, Taiping guangji, 132. In one essay on the shrine to the goddess, the Song writer Ma Yongqing 馬永卿 (dates uncertain; lived around the Northern Song/Southern Song transition) praises Du Guangting’s Record and another text for defending the goddess (QSYWZ 1059). 62. Li, Taiping guangji, 132. The relationship between Yu and the goddess of Mt. Wu described in the Yongcheng jixian lu might be distantly connected to shamanistic practice. For more, see Wolfram Eberhard, The Local Cultures of South and East China (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1968), 74. 63. Li Bai, “Moved by Poetic Images, Poem One 感興八首, 其一,” in Li Taibai quanji 李太白全集, ed. Wang Qi 王琦 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), 1102 (hereafter LTBQJ). Schafer notes that this poem “departs radically from tradition,” though it is a departure that would become increasingly common (The Divine Woman, 101–102).

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64. Yuefu shiji 樂府詩集, compiled by Guo Maoqian 郭茂倩 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2003), 238–243 (hereafter YFSJ). Though an elite form, Music Bureau poetry has roots in folk music, which provided titles and tunes (now lost) for each theme. See Joseph Allen, In the Voice of Others: Chinese Music Bureau Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), and Anne Birrell, Popular Songs and Ballads of Han China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993). 65. Yu Fen’s 于濆 ninth-century “How High Mt. Wu” poem (YFSJ 240), for example, blames Song Yu for slandering the ancient kings of Chu and making the goddess of Mt. Wu a succubus. This critical tradition seems to have continued into at least the Ming Dynasty. In a poem titled “Mt. Wu” (Wushan 巫山), the travel writer and poet Wang Shixing 王士性 (1547–1598) echoes Yu Fen’s critique of Song Yu. Wang Shixing dilishu sanzhong 王士性地理書三種, ed. Zhou Zhenhe 周振鶴 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chuanshe, 1993), 519. 66. These lines appear near the end of Song Yu’s “Goddess” rhapsody (Shennü fu 神 女賦). Wenxuan, 889; Knechtges, Wen Xuan, 349. 67. Fan Chengda, Fan Shihu ji 范石湖集 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), 116 (hereafter FSHJ). 68. This line alludes to the story of Lady Li 李夫人, consort of Emperor Wudi of the Han 漢武帝 and a famous femme fatale. The best-known version of her story comes from Ban Gu’s 班固 (32–92) Han shu 漢書, which describes the stunning Lady Li’s dubious rise to favor and her deathbed manipulation of the emperor that led to the political ascent of her immoral brothers. Having refused the emperor a final glance before her death, Lady Li comes to obsess the ruler, inspiring him to seek her through occult practices. When a wizard from the state of Qi promises to conjure her spirit, the emperor is only too eager to follow along. Seeing a woman who resembles Lady Li, Wudi composes a poem in which he asks, “Was it her, or was it not her [shiye feiye 是邪 非邪]?” Wudi next composes a rhapsody on Lady Li that draws heavily on the mystical imagery of Song Yu’s goddess rhapsodies and the language of the Songs of Chu. Ban Gu, Han shu 漢書 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1970), vol. 51, 2346. For more on Lady Li, see Stephen Owen, “One Sight: The Han Shu Biography of Lady Li,” in Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture: China, Europe, and Japan, ed. David R. Knechtges and Eugene Vance (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 239–259. 69. YFSJ 242. 70. FSHJ 215. 71. FCDBJ 219. 72. FSHJ 215. 73. See Li Bai’s “Observing Yuan Danqiu Seated Before a Screen Painting of Mt. Wu 觀元丹丘坐巫山屏風” (LTBQJ 1135). 74. FCDBJ 219.

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75. Fan describes commissioning paintings “to take back” (yigui 以歸) with him in two poems from his journey down the Yangzi, “The Tower of Myriad Vistas 萬景樓” (FSHJ 254) and “Upon First Entering the Area of the Great Mt. E 初入大峨” (FSHJ 256). 76. Mao Zedong, “Shuidiao getou, youyong 水調歌頭, 游泳.” For the Chinese text and an alternate translation, see Mao Zedong, The Poems of Mao Zedong, trans. Willis Barnstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 82–85. 77. Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 106. 78. Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, 114. 79. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 535.

Pa ssage ii. One Thousand L i 1. From the first preface to Luo Jinshen’s 羅縉紳 Xingchuan biyao 行川必要 (Yichang: Shuishi xinfu zhongying, 1883). 2. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

3. Chinese L and scape 1. Sun Yat-sen 孫中山, “Shang Li Hongzhang shu 上李鸿章书,” in Sun Zhongshan quanji 孫中山全集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), vol. 1, 8. 2. John Savage, Preliminary Report on the Yangtze Gorge Project (Chungking: Government of China, Ministry of Economic Affairs, National Resources Commission, 1944), 6. 3. Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13. 4. Hans van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 8. For a summary of different approaches to China’s semicolonial status, see Anne Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018), 3–7. 5. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 29, and throughout. For the question of collaboration, see Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 8–14, and chap. 3. 6. The Treaty of Tianjin (art. X) established Chinkiang as a treaty port. Edward Hertslet, Hertslet’s China Treaties (London: Harrison and Sons, 1908), vol. 1, 22–23. 7. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

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8. Shellen Xiao Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry in the Modern World Order (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015), 140–142. 9. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 15. 10. Early foreign visitors to Sichuan noted the friendly natives and the absence of the hated epithet yang guizi 洋鬼子, or “foreign devil”; see, for example, Archibald Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges: or, Trade and Travel in Western China (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1888), 140–141. For the idea of Sichuan as a Chinese “El Dorado,” see Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 69. For more on the complex subject of Europe’s diminishing esteem for China, see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 69–85; Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Verso, 2008), 58; Nicholas R. Clifford, “A Truthful Impression of the Country”: British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1949 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), chap. 2; and Thurin, Victorian Travelers, 5–6. 11. This image is based on a sketch by Blakiston’s travel companion, Alfred Barton; Thomas Wright Blakiston, Five Months on the Yang-tsze; with a Narrative of the Exploration of Its Upper Waters, and Notices of the Present Rebellions in China (London: John Murray, 1862). 12. Blakiston, Five Months, 84. 13. Blakiston, Five Months, 86. 14. Blakiston, Five Months, 177. Blakiston and his associates also collected a small number of ornithological, botanical, and geological specimens to be sent off to the relevant experts in London upon their return (Blakiston, Five Months, 359). Following his Yangzi expedition, Blakiston became a highly respected natural historian. For more, see the entry by H. E. D. Blakiston (revised by Christopher J. Schmitz) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/2598. 15. Blakiston, Five Months, 162–163. 16. For more on the history of willowware, see Patricia O’Hara, “The Willow Pattern That We Knew: The Victorian Literature of Blue Willow,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 4 (1993): 421–442. 17. Blakiston, Five Months, 163. 18. James Hevia, The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 14, and chap. 3. Aspects of Blakiston’s narrative resemble the “route books” produced by the military intelligence organs of the British imperial bureaucracy as part of this “information system” (Hevia, Imperial, 73–78). 19. Blakiston, Five Months, 204.

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20. Blakiston, Five Months, 205. 21. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 26. See also Hevia, The Imperial Security State, 82–83. 22. Blakiston, Five Months, 178. 23. Hevia, The Imperial Security State, 73, 149. For more on optical consistency and the transportability of maps, see James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 125; James Hevia, “The Archive State and the Fear of Pollution: From the Opium Wars to Fu-Manchu,” Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 237–240; Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representations in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael E. Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 19–69; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds., Empires of Vision: A Reader (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 33, 42n27. 24. “Western China: Trade and Travel in the Yang Tse Gorges,” New York Times, May 6, 1899. 25. “Western China.” 26. For more on the Treaty of Tianjin, see Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 48–51. 27. Hertslet, Hertslet’s China Treaties, vol. 1, 77. The treaty did allow for members of the British government to reside in Chongqing “to watch the conditions of British trade.” 28. Hertslet, Hertslet’s China Treaties, vol. 1, 94, 96. 29. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, chap. 1 and 5. 30. Little complained that the “Peking authorities will shelter themselves behind the ambiguous clauses of the Treaty, as long as they can”; Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 352–354. 31. Cornell Plant dates this to 1897, though Little’s own account dates it to 1898. See S. Cornell Plant, Handbook for the Guidance of Shipmasters on the Ichang-Chunking Section of the Yangtze River (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1920), 1, and Archibald Little, Gleanings from Fifty Years in China (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1910), 134. For more on Little in Sichuan, see Thurin, Victorian Travelers, chap. 2. 32. Two British military steamships, HMS Woodcock and Woodlark, also made the Yichang to Chongqing trip in 1900. The same year, the German-owned Suihsiang was wrecked just beyond Yichang, delaying the introduction of regular steam travel until 1909, when the Chinese Szechuan Steam Navigation Company introduced the Britishbuilt Shutung, also piloted by Plant. Plant, Handbook, 1; “Plant Memorial Inauguration—Monument to Pioneer of Navigation on Upper Yangtze Unveiled by British Consul,” North China Herald, December 6, 1924; “Memorial to Late Captain Plant—Pioneer of Yangtze Navigation Monument on the Hsin T’an and Bursary Fund,” North China Herald, October 4, 1924.

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33. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 54. Ari Kelman describes a similar process in A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 77. 34. Nanny Kim, “River Control, Merchant Philanthropy, and Environmental Change in Nineteenth-Century China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 52, no. 4 (2009): 660–694. According to Kim, the “improvement works on the Upper Yangzi go back to the Tang and Song,” though they “increased noticeably in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and greatly so in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries” (670). 35. Kim, “River Control,” 678, 661n2. 36. Kim, “River Control,” 664. For Mao’s role in this process, see Deirdre Chetham, Before the Deluge: The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 157. 37. Kim, “River Control,” 679–681. 38. For a survey of Western, Japanese, and Chinese mapping projects from the late Qing and early Republican era, see Li Peng 李鵬, “Wanqing minguo chuanjiang hangdaotu bianhuide lishi kaocha 晚清民國川江航道圖編繪的歷史考察,” in Xueshu yanjiu 學術研 究 2 (2015): 96–103. 39. The Maritime Customs was one of the most important sources of government revenue between its founding and the Communist Revolution in 1949. See van de Ven, Breaking with the Past. 40. Plant, Handbook, “Prefatory Note” from 1916 published in the 1920 edition. 41. Plant, Handbook, 2. 42. H. G. W. Woodhead, The Yangtsze and Its Problems (Shanghai: Mercury Press of Shanghai, 1931), 17. 43. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, chap. 5. 44. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 16. 45. Luo Jinshen 羅縉紳, Xingchuan biyao 行川必要 (Yichang: Shuishi xinfu zhongying, 1883). Little commends the Xingchuan biyao (Essential Guide) as “well-arranged” and gives a “pidgin English” version of the title as “Walkee Szechuen must want-jee” as well as a grander translation of “Vademecum [sic] of Admiral Ho”; Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 323. Edward Parker provides “an almost literal translation” of the route guide portion of the text and a glossary of “valuable local terms” with English translations; Edward Parker, Up the Yang-tse (Hongkong: China Mail Office, 1891), 21. 46. The textual history of Luo’s Essential Guide and Critical Chart is complex. Early editions seem to have circulated together with the Xiajiang jiushengchuan zhi 峽江救生船志 (Gazetteer of the Lifeboat System of the Yangzi Gorges), a two-volume text, also attributed to Luo, that details the workings of a lifeboat system as well as the names of Chinese and Western donors.

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47. Igor Iwo Chabrowski argues that detailed charts of the Upper Yangzi appeared only in the late Qing in response to increased economic activity on the river; Igor Iwo Chabrowski, Singing on the River: Sichuan Boatmen and Their Work Songs, 1880s–1930s (Boston: Brill, 2015), chap. 1, especially 63–72. 48. For more on early charts of the river, see Julia Orell, “Picturing the Yangzi River in Southern Song China (1127–1279)” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2011), 207–210, and Cordell Yee, “Cartography in China,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 2, book 2, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 160–166. 49. Liu Shengyuan 劉聲元, Xiajiang tanxian zhi 峽江灘險志 (Beijing: Heji yinshuaju, 1920). 50. There is confusion over whether this figure’s name is Guo Zhang or Jiang Guozhang 江國璋. I follow Lan Yong’s 藍勇 usage here, as he is one of the few scholars to have carried out extensive research on the topic; Lan Yong, Changjiang sanxia lishi dili 長江三峽歷史地理 (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 2003), 435–440. Multiple editions of the Critical Chart were published between 1901 and 1926. Most consist of two volumes, each of which centers on a lithographic chart sandwiched between two textual stage guides. The guides list the location of landmarks, give distances between them, and provide navigational information. Combined, the lithographic charts depict the river as it runs from Yichang to Chongqing and back. According to available sources, the chart was first published in 1901 by Shanghai’s Xiuhai shanfang shuju 袖海山房書局, though I have not been able to locate a dated version from before 1916. There are four versions in the collection of the Harvard Yenching Library. The finest, Chuanxing bidu xiajiang tukao 川行必讀峽江圖考, is undated but may be the 1901 edition. There are three dated editions (1916, 1919, and 1926) of a version titled Xingchuan biyao tukao 行川必要圖考 published by the Wensheng shuju 文盛書局. 51. Lan Yong 藍勇, “Qingdai changjiang shangyou jiusheng hongchuanzhi chutan 清代長江 上游救生紅船制初探,” Zhongguo shehui jingjishi yanjiu 中國社會經濟史研究 4 (1995): 37–43. For information on other philanthropic programs, see Kim, “River Control.” 52. Yang Baoshan 楊寶珊, comp., Chuanjiang tushuo jicheng 川江圖說集成 (Chongqing: Zhongxi shuju, 1923). 53. The Sichuan Yangzi Steam Navigation Company was founded in 1908 with funds provided by Qing officials, Sichuanese gentry, and merchants in order to maintain Chinese control over commercial steamships on the Upper Yangzi. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 185–186. 54. Yang, Chuanjiang tushuo, no page numbers. 55. Li, “Wanqing.” 56. Yee, “Cartography,” 128. 57. Yee, “Cartography,” 128.

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58. For an example of Qing topographical painting, woodblock carving, and engraving, see Kangxi Emperor, Yu Shen, and Matteo Ripa, Thirty-six Views: The Kangxi Emperor’s Mountain Estate in Poetry and Prints, trans. Richard E. Strassberg (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2016), and Lin Qing 麟慶 and Wang Chunquan 汪春泉, Hongxue yinyuan tuji 鴻雪因緣圖記 (Beijing: Guojia tushuguan chubanshe, 2011). 59. Laikwan Pang, The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 40. 60. Pang, The Distorting Mirror, 40–44. 61. For more on Woodhead, see Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900–1949 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012), chap. 2. 62. For more on the American-owned Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co., see Frederick B. Hoyt, “The Open Door Leads to Reluctant Intervention: The Case of the Yangtze Rapid Steamship Company,” Diplomatic History 1, no. 2 (1977): 155–169. 63. The Yangtsze and Its Problems reads as a caricature of orientalist ideas, but its focus on economic and infrastructural issues aligns it with some Chinese travel accounts of the period. According to Madeleine Yue Dong, Chinese accounts of inland and borderland travel from the 1920s and 1930s tended to focus on “the geography of these parts of the country . . . in terms of industrial capacity, conditions of transportation, and natural resources,” reproducing the strategic survey approach of foreign accounts in the context of national construction; Madeleine Yue Dong, “Shanghai’s China Traveler,” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua L. Goldstein (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 212. The Minsheng Industrial Company (Minsheng shiye gongsi 民生事業公司), which included a Yangzi shipping concern, published numerous articles between 1936 and 1946 on the Three Gorges region in its journal A New World (Xin shijie 新世界). Most of these focus on industrial and commercial development, though the journal also printed scenic photographs and poetry and promoted tourism in the Gorges and other areas of Sichuan. Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-Colonialism, 283, 350n116. Chinese travel accounts of the Three Gorges appear in multiple tourism and lifestyle journals from the 1930s and early 1940s. These typically center on the same famous sites (shengji 勝跡) that Tang and Song travelers sought out. An essay from 1932 is typical: written in a slightly modernized classical Chinese, it is nearly identical in poetic tone and format to premodern travel essays and gazetteer entries in which famous landmarks are described by citing poetry by figures such as Du Fu, Li Bai, and Fan Chengda and geographical texts such as Li Daoyuan’s Commentary to the Classic of Rivers; Zhao Youwen 趙幼文, “Sanxia yiyou 三峽憶游” (A Three Gorges Journey Remembered), Lüxing zazhi 旅行雜誌 6, no. 6 (1932): 9–18. Another essay, from 1939, also cites Li’s Commentary, though it does so shortly after providing a capsule history of Little’s and Plant’s roles in introducing steamships on the Upper

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Yangzi; Fu Huanguang 傅煥光, “Sanxia ji 三峽記” (Three Gorges Diary), Lüxing zazhi 旅行雜誌 13, no. 2 (1939): 3–6. For additional travel essays from this period, see Wang Xiaoting 王小亭, “Sanxia jiyou 三峽紀遊,” Dazhong huabao 大眾畫報 1 (1933): 16–17; Gao Bochen 高伯琛, “Sanxia daoguan 三峽道觀,” Lüxing zazhi 旅行雜誌 10, no. 1 (1936): 103–112; and Jiang Zhonghai 江仲海, “Sanxia yipie 三峽一瞥,” Xin Zhonghua 新中華 5, no. 6 (1937): 82–89. For more on tourism between the late Qing and early years of the People’s Republic, see Mo Yajun, “Itineraries for a Republic: Tourism and Travel Culture in Modern China, 1866–1954” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2011). 64. Woodhead, The Yangtsze, 4, 6–7. 65. Woodhead, The Yangtsze, 4. 66. Woodhead, The Yangtsze, 42. 67. Travelers encountered a great deal of writing carved into cliffs or mountainsides. Here is Isabella Bird’s description of a temple near Yunyang in the Gorges: “Nature and art have combined in a perfect picturesqueness. On the flat vertical surface of a noble cliff rising from the boulder-strewn shore of the Yangtze are four characters—and what can be more decorative than Chinese characters ‘writ large’?—which are translated ‘Ethereal bell, one thousand ages.’ ” Isabella Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 163. 68. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 80. See also Andrea Bachner, Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 95, and throughout. 69. Images of penetration have long been a central component of colonial discourse. See David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 19. 70. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 379. 71. For more on “free trade imperialism,” see Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 74, 216n4, 216n7. 72. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 379. 73. For a critique of natural history as imperial project, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 37. 74. The Qing Dynasty was, of course, a major imperial power with extensive experience in exploiting natural resources from colonized regions such as Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. What I am discussing here, however, is the embrace by the Qing and later Chinese governments of the modern scientific disciplines and technologies integral to resource imperialism as part of a discourse of national sovereignty. Perhaps the most relevant account of how the Qing and later Chinese governments reconceptualized resources and adopted the “underlying values” of Euro-American resource imperialism is Wu, Empires of Coal, 3. See also Grace Yen Shen, Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and

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Nationalism in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), and Sakura Christmas, “The Cartographic Steppe: Spaces of Development in Northeast Asia, 1895–1945” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2016). 75. Bird, The Yangtze Valley, 147. 76. Blakiston describes the same phenomenon in Five Months, 139. 77. John Thomson, Illustrations of China and Its People (London: S. Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1873), Introduction. Volume 3 of Thomson’s book includes a ten-page account of his journey through the Gorges as well as one of the earliest photographic travelogues of the region. 78. Bird often refers to coal in The Yangtze Valley and Beyond. Archibald Little, who made his livelihood selling mining equipment, provides a lengthy account of a visit to a mining operation outside of Chongqing and comments throughout his narrative on the prospects for mining in Sichuan; Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 273–282. Much of the popular interest in coal can be traced to the writings of the German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen, who studied China’s geology between 1868 and 1872. See Wu, Empires of Coal, chap. 2, and Shen, Unearthing the Nation, chap. 1. 79. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 320. 80. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 320. 81. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 326.

4. Chinese L ab or 1. “Women chuangongde shenghuo zhen beican 我們船工的生活真悲慘” (The life of us boatmen is tragic indeed), in Zhongguo geyao jicheng Chongqingshi juan 中國歌謠集 成重慶市卷, ed. Nie Yunyan 聶雲嵐 (Chongqing: Kexue jishu wenxian chubanshe, 1989), 24; Igor Iwo Chabrowski, Singing on the River: Sichuan Boatmen and Their Work Songs, 1880s–1930s (Boston: Brill, 2015), 183. 2. Archibald Little, Gleanings from Fifty Years in China (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1910), 42. 3. There are a range of Chinese word for trackers, including shuishou 水手, yeshou 曳手, chuanfu 船夫, and qianfu 縴夫. The last two are the most common. 4. Important exceptions include Du Fu’s “Ballad of the Most Skilled 最能行” (DSXZ 1286; Owen 15.19), which celebrates the skill of Yangzi boatmen, and Mi Fu’s 米芾 (1051–1107), “A Poem Written in a Boat on the Wu River 吳江舟中詩,” which describes trackers hauling a boat in windy weather. For a translation of the latter, see Peter Sturman, Mi Fu: Style and the Art of Calligraphy in Northern Song China (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 115–117. In addition to these relatively rare treatments of tracking, a number of folk songs and sayings attributed to Yangzi boatmen—including

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the song about crying gibbons cited in Li Daoyuan’s Shuijing zhu—were taken up as conventionalized examples of local culture by literati poets. Boatmen also appear with some regularity in folk-song-inspired “bamboo branch lyrics” (zhuzhi ci 竹枝詞), the most famous of which were composed by the temporary Kuizhou resident Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫 (772–824). Later examples, especially from the Qing, sometimes describe the harsh conditions under which trackers and other boatmen worked, as well as the songs (haozi 號子) that they sang while working; Chabrowski, Singing, 107–113. Perhaps the most famous pictorial representation of river trackers is in Zhang Zeduan’s 張擇 端 (fl. twelfth century) Qingming shanghe tu 清明上河圖 (Along the River on the Qingming Festival), in the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing. 5. Chabrowski, Singing, 63. 6. For examples of Chinese travel writing on the Three Gorges, see chapter 3, note 63. 7. Chinese woodblock artists may have been influenced in their depiction of trackers by Ilya Repin’s (1844–1930) famous painting Barge Haulers on the Volga River (1870–1873), which was reproduced in China at least as early as 1922; Xiaoshuo yuebao 小說月報 13, no. 4 (1922): 7. A 1932 painting of two trackers by the artist Wu Zuoren 吳作人 is especially evocative of Repin’s image; Wu’s work is reproduced in Guoli zhongyang daxue jiaoyu congkan 國立中央大學教育叢刊 3, no. 1 (1935): 1. For more on the reception of Repin’s image and for examples of trackers in Republican-era art and print culture, see Xiaobing Tang, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 177, 181. The tracker is now closely associated with the Gorges, thanks in part to his adoption in the post-Revolution era as a symbol of proletarian fortitude. Like the famous “rice sprout songs” (yangge 秧歌) of Northern China, boatmen’s haozi were repurposed as examples of revolutionary popular culture; Chabrowski, Singing, 23–25. 8. Donald Mennie, The Grandeur of the Gorges: Fifty Photographic Studies, with Descriptive Notes, of China’s Great Waterway, the Yangste Kiang, Including Twelve Hand-Coloured Prints (Shanghai: A. S. Watson, 1926), Preface. 9. H. G. W. Woodhead, The Yangtsze and Its Problems (Shanghai: Mercury Press of Shanghai, 1931), 30. Between 1898 and 1911, only twenty-five steamships reached Chongqing, but numbers began to increase steadily beginning in 1912. By 1922, 693 steamships dropped anchor in Chongqing. While the logistics of moving the Republican capital to Chongqing and provisioning it during the Japanese invasion led to a brief increase in junk traffic, their displacement by steamships was already well underway by the early 1920s. Zhou Yong 周勇, Chongqing tongshi 重慶通史 (Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe, 2002), 400, cited in Chabrowski, Singing, 76. 10. Woodhead likens Chinese people to animals a number of times in The Yangtsze and Its Problems; see, for example, 84, 101.

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11. Woodhead, The Yangtsze and Its Problems, 30. 12. Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 4. 13. Lyman P. Van Slyke, Yangtze: Nature, History, and the River (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1988), 125. 14. Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 65. 15. For a variety of historical and economic reasons, traditional shipping methods persisted on the Yangzi (albeit on a small scale) well into the post-Revolution period (Chabrowski, Singing, 2, 20). 16. Chabrowski, Singing, 92. 17. Edward Parker, Up the Yang-tse (Hongkong: China Mail Office, 1891), 19. 18. Van Slyke, Yangtze, 125. 19. “Chinese Lack of Imagination” is a subject heading for a chapter on the gorges in Lawrence John Lumley Dundas’s A Wandering Student in the Far East (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1908). For more on the history of the supposed failings of the Chinese imagination, see Nicholas R. Clifford, “A Truthful Impression of the Country”: British and American Travel Writing in China 1880–1949 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 56–57, chap. 2–3. 20. Dundas, A Wandering Student, 71. 21. Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 141; see also Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). Hayot focuses on American “yellow peril” rhetoric, but similar beliefs are easy to find in British writings. 22. Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 141. 23. Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 168. For accounts of the coolie trade that linked Hong Kong with Latin America, see Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 21–41, chap. 4, and Evelyn Hu-Dehart, “Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba and Peru in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labor or Neoslavery?,” Journal of Overseas Chinese Studies 2 (1992): 149–182. 24. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 46. 25. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 2–3. 26. There is an extensive scholarly literature on the application of racial and physiological thought in colonial and national contexts. For examples, see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 292–318; Yuehtsen Juliette Chung, Struggle for National Survival: Eugenics in Sino-Japanese Contexts, 1896–1945 (New York: Routledge,

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2002); Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, 2d ed. (London: Hurst, 2015); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1996); and Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). For more on social Darwinism in China, see Andrew Jones, Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011); James Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1983); and James Pusey, Lu Xun and Evolution (Albany: State University of New York, 1998). 27. Archibald Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges: or, Trade and Travel in Western China (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1888), 78. 28. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body Between China and the West (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008) offers a compelling account of the representational tactics of missionary medicine, including an analysis of the collaboration between the missionary doctor Peter Parker and the Canton export painter Lam Qua. Hayot dedicates a chapter to the same topic in The Hypothetical Mandarin. 29. Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 145. 30. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 57. 31. Arthur H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics (Norwalk: EastBridge, 2002), 90. 32. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 92. 33. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 94. 34. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 97. Most of Smith’s “characteristics” were centuries-old racial stereotypes. For more, see Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, especially chap. 1. 35. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 162–163. 36. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 168. Smith cites two descriptions of Yangzi River trackers from travel accounts by Sir Alexander Hosie and Little. Isabella Bird provides an even more glowing report of the good-natured tracker: “These trackers may be the roughest class in China—for the work’s ‘inhuman’ and brutalizing—but, nevertheless, they are good-natured in their way, free on the whole from crimes of violence, full of antics, and frolic, clever at taking off foreigners, loving a joke, and with a keen sense of humor”; Isabella Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 215. 37. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 170. 38. For more on haozi, see Igor Iwo Chabrowski’s Singing on the River, from which I have drawn my examples. Haozi emerged during the Republican period as important examples of laboring-class folk culture. In the early years of the People’s Republic of China, they were taken up as expressions of popular culture that could be recoded with class-conscious revolutionary content. During the Reform Period, they were

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recategorized as a form of “intangible cultural heritage” (feiwuzhi wenhua yichan 非物質 文化遺產); Chabrowski, Singing, 19, 25–26. 39. Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 158. Bird claims that the noise of the river combined with the shouts of trackers pulling her boat over the Xintan affected her hearing for days; The Yangtze Valley, 142; Chabrowski, Singing, 106–107. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, N.Y.: Destiny Books, 1994). 40. For more on haozi 號子 as “mnemonic tools created for remembering and navigating in space,” see Chabrowski, Singing, 137. 41. “Laoban dalai laoban ma 老闆打來老闆罵” (The boss beats us, the boss curses us) in Zhongguo geyao jicheng, 20; Chabrowski, Singing, 176. 42. “Yinian siji tanshang pa 一年四季灘上爬” (All year, every season we climb the rapids), Zhongguo geyao jicheng, 19; Chabrowski, Singing, 182. 43. “Women chuangongde shenghuo zhen beican 我們船工的生活真悲慘” (The life of us boatmen is tragic indeed), Zhongguo geyao jicheng, 24; Chabrowski, Singing, 183. 44. Chabrowski, Singing, 180–184. 45. David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Stephen Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); Chabrowski, Singing, 264. 46. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 4. 47. Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 63. 48. Bird, The Yangtze Valley, 138. 49. Bird, The Yangtze Valley, 142–143. 50. Smith’s casual observation obscures the by then already lengthy and controversial history of “dissection-based anatomy” in China. As Ari Larissa Heinrich has argued, over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, Western medical missionaries “began to construct . . . still another ‘lack’ in Chinese tradition: the lack of willingness or ‘ability’ to perform autopsy because of what they saw as the cultural superstition that prevented it”; Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images, 118. Whatever lack there might have been was soon filled, not only by the absorption of Western anatomical knowledge but also by the development of an “aesthetics of anatomical realism” that made the figure of dissection central to modern Chinese literary production; Heinrich, The Afterlife of Images, 116. Thanks to Lydia Liu, it is a well-known irony that these realist techniques modeled on metaphors of dissection were deployed by Lu Xun against the very deficient Chinese characteristics cataloged by Smith. 51. Bird, The Yangtze Valley, 144–145. 52. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 170.

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53. For more on Bird’s politics, see Clifford, “A Truthful Impression,” and Susan Schoenbauer Thurin, Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), chap. 5. 54. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 175. 55. On her journey, Bird slept in a small cabin, a curtain the “only partition” separating her from the “half naked” trackers. Though she comments on their rough behavior, she decides in the end that they are not so bad, partly because they do not penetrate her space, even though it would have been as easy as pulling back her “cambric curtain”; Bird, The Yangtze Valley, 132. 56. Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 90. 57. Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 6. 58. Woodhead, The Yangtsze, 96. 59. I am indebted to Paola Iovene for encouraging me to reconsider the moral ambiguities of Bird’s sympathy in relation to our own sympathetic, artistic, and intellectual labors. 60. Woodhead, The Yangtsze, 147. 61. Woodhead, The Yangtsze, 148. 62. John Hersey, A Single Pebble (New York: Knopf, 1956), 107. 63. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 15. 64. For the history of geology as a modern scientific discipline in China, see Grace Shen, Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 65. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 6. 66. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 18. 67. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 15–16. 68. Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 298, 318. 69. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 42–43. 70. This unnamed expert is cited by Eliza Scidmore in China: The Long-lived Empire (New York: Century, 1900), 456. See also Clifford, “A Truthful Impression,” 7. 71. As Julie Greene notes, the degrading effects of prolonged residence in colonial lands was a major concern around the turn of the twentieth century; Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 27. 72. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (New York: Harcourt, 1924). 73. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 74. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 38. 75. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, chap. 4.

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76. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 95. 77. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 180–181. 78. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 104. 79. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 103–104. 80. Little, Through the Yang-tse Gorges, 318. 81. The “Old” of Pebble’s name is presumably a “translation” of lao 老, which is commonly used as an honorific rather than to indicate age. Although “old” can have a similar flavor in English, it is used more consistently to refer to age. Hersey’s “translation” thus allows him to create a character who is simultaneously relatively young and old, an individual and a timeless type. 82. Little, Gleanings, 42, 178; Bird, The Yangtze Valley, 142. 83. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 22. 84. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 11. 85. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 4. 86. Sun Yat-sen 孫中山, Sanmin zhuyi 三民主義 (Taibei: Zhongyang wenwu gongyingshe, 1985), 272–275. 87. Sun Yat-sen, “Shang Li Hongzhang shu 上李鸿章书,” in Sun Zhongshan quanji 孫中 山全集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), vol. 1, 8. 88. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Interventions in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 7–8. 89. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 107.

Pa ssage iii. One Thousand Years 1. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009). 2. John Hersey, A Single Pebble (New York: Knopf, 1956), 82. 3. Hersey, A Single Pebble, 87. 4. Li Daoyuan 酈道元, Shuijing zhu jiaozheng 水經注校證, ed. Chen Qiaoyi 陳橋驛 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 790.

5. A Record of the Tr ace 1. Andrew Chan and Jia Zhangke, “Online Exclusive Interview with Jia Zhangke,” Film Comment (March–April 2009), http://www.filmcomment.com/article/jia-zhangkeinterview. 2. Rey Chow, “China as Documentary: Some Basic Questions,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2013): 23.

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3. The film’s Chinese title echoes Bertolt Brecht’s play The Good Person of Sichuan (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan). For a comparison of the two, see Haiping Yan, “Intermedial Moments: An Embodied Turn in Contemporary Chinese Cinema,” Journal of Chinese Cinema 7, no. 1 (2013), 52. 4. The first part of Dong centers on the creation of Liu Xiaodong’s 劉小東 Hotbed 1 熱床 (2005), a monumental oil painting that features the same local workers (and Han Sanming) Jia taps as amateur actors in Still Life. Liu’s Three Gorges paintings resemble Still Life in their combination of group portraiture and landscape, though Jia’s interest in painting predates these films. As a young man, Jia “studied painting a little” and attended art classes at Shanxi University; Jia Zhangke, Jia xiang 賈想 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2009), 48. Though some critics have noted the influence of traditional Chinese landscape painting on Still Life, the default artistic analogy for Jia’s work is usually “poetic.” Jia’s lyricism or “poetic conception” (shiyi 詩意) come up repeatedly in the panel discussion (which included Wang Hui, Li Tuo, and other eminent respondents) that followed a 2007 screening of Still Life; Li Tuo 李陀, Jia Zhangke 賈 樟柯, Wang Hui 汪暉, et al., “Sanxia haoren: guli, bianqian yu Jia Zhangke de xianshizhuyi 三峽好人: 故里, 變遷與賈章柯的現實主義,” Dushu 讀書 2 (2007): 3–31. For other poetic readings, see Jiwei Xiao, “The Quest for Memory: Documentary and Fiction in Jia Zhangke’s Films,” senses of cinema 59 (2011), and Jie Li, “Home and Nation Amid the Rubble: Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life,” Modern Literature and Culture 21, no. 2 (fall 2009): 86–125. For more on Liu Xiaodong, see Liu Xiaodong and Jeff Kelley, The Three Gorges Project: Paintings by Liu Xiaodong (San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2006), and Wu Hung, ed., Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Jason McGrath’s essay in this last volume, “The Cinema of Displacement: The Three Gorges in Feature Film and Video” (33–46), is the best overview of cinematic responses to the dam project. 5. Brooke Wilmsen, “Damming China’s Rivers to Expand Its Cities: The Urban Livelihoods of Rural People Displaced by the Three Gorges Dam,” Urban Geography 39, no. 3 (2018): 345–366. 6. Recently, there have been attempts to promote art produced by migrant workers and the rural and urban poor. For his Folk Memory Project (Minjian jiyi jihua 民間 記憶計畫), Wu Wenguang 吳文光 recruited filmmakers to produce documentaries based on oral histories of the Great Famine (1959–1961). For more, see Paul Pickowicz, ed., Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-First Century China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), chap. 6, appendix. Qin Xiaoyu’s 秦曉宇 Wode shipian: dangdai gongren shidian 我的詩篇: 當代工人詩典 (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2015) collects a large number of poems by rural and migrant workers. In 2015, Qin and Wu Feiyue 吳飛躍 also produced a documentary film, Iron Moon (Wode shipian 我的詩篇), which follows a number of these worker-poets, including the Foxconn factory worker

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Xu Lizhi 許立志, who committed suicide in 2014. For an abbreviated translation of Qin’s collection, see Eleanor Goodman, trans., Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry (Buffalo, N.Y.: White Pine Press, 2016). See also Maghiel van Crevel, “Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry and Iron Moon (the film)” [review], Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center, February 2017, https://u.osu.edu/ mclc/book-reviews/vancrevel4/, esp. notes 1 and 3. 7. I am drawing here on Daniel Morgan’s adaptation of Stanley Cavell’s concept of “acknowledging”; Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 238–266. Morgan uses Cavell to reassess André Bazin’s account of cinematic realism, arguing that realism for Bazin can include a variety of aesthetic styles so long as those styles “acknowledge” reality, giving it meaning and “turning it into facts,” which might relate to some specific “understanding of social reality”; Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (2006): 472. 8. A number of scholars have singled out portraiture as an important component of Still Life. For an example, see Esther Cheung, “Realisms within Conundrum: The Personal and Authentic Appeal in Jia Zhangke’s Accented Films,” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 18. Portraiture is also central to the structure of 24 City (Ershisi chengji 二十四城 記, 2008), the hybrid documentary-narrative film Jia made after Still Life. 9. For more on these “still life” objects, see Jie Li, “Home and Nation.” 10. A. Thirion, Jérémy Segay, and Jia Zhangke, “Festival de Hong-Kong par A. Thirion et Jérémy Segay + Entretien avec Jia Zhang-ke,” Cahiers du Cinéma 623 (May 2007); cited and translated in Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 59. 11. I have explored the question of Jia’s realism in Corey Byrnes, “Specters of Realism and the Painter’s Gaze in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 24, no. 2 (2012): 52–93, which is based on an early version of this chapter. For many scholars, Jia’s realism is beyond question. Esther Cheung, for example, writes that “the subject matter of social concern and Jia’s compassion for the ordinary people place him safely in the realist tradition of Chinese cinema”; Cheung, “Realisms within Conundrum,” 20. Similarly, Jiwei Xiao calls Jia “a die-hard realist”; Xiao, “The Quest for Memory.” For more on problems with approaching Jia’s work in this manner, see Sebastian Veg, “Introduction: Opening Public Spaces,” China Perspectives 1 (2010): 4–10. For general studies of Jia’s work, see Jason McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic,” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Zhen Zhang (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 81–114; Michael Berry, Jia Zhangke’s “Hometown Trilogy”: Xiaowu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Pheng Cheah, “World as Picture and Ruination: On Jia Zhangke’s Still Life

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as World Cinema,” in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, ed. Carlos Rojas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 190–208. 12. Robert Mitchell and Jacques Khalip, “Introduction: Release—(Non-)Origination—Concepts,” in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011), 4. 13. Ning Ken 寧肯, “Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre,” trans. Thomas Moran, Literary Hub, June 23, 2016, http://lithub.com/modern-china-is -so-crazy-it-needs-a-new-literary-genre/. 14. Chow, “China as Documentary,” 27. 15. Ji 記 and the homophonous character ji 紀 can both refer to records and the act of recording. They can be used interchangeably, though the latter is typically used in the words jilu 紀錄 (document, record) and jilupian 紀錄片 (documentary film). 16. I am drawing here on Chow’s idea of “medial information”; Chow, “China as Documentary,” 12. 17. Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 18. This is only one of a number of scenes in Still Life that revolve around hard currency. Upon his arrival in Fengjie, Han is forced to attend a “magic show” in which a magician “transforms” pieces of paper (“U.S. dollars”) into euros and then renminbi 人民幣. When the men who run the scam ask him to pay a “school fee,” he claims to have no money and defends himself against their attempt to rob him with a wellhidden switchblade. Later, Han’s new friend Mage uses a piece of paper to imitate an image playing on the TV behind him of the Hong Kong film star Chow Yun-fat using a hundred-dollar bill to light a cigarette. 19. Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 75. For a history of this technique, see André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) vol. 1, 32–35. 20. David Bordwell singles out a technological shift occurring in the 1960s and 1970s—“filmmakers’ growing reliance on long lenses”—as facilitating the even greater extension of depth that allows for “planimetric composition.” Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, “Observations on Film Art: Shot Consciousness,” David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema, January 16, 2007, http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2007/01/16 /shot-consciousness/. 21. For more on ruins, see Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012); Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), 80–81; and “Ruins, Fragmentation, and the Chinese Modern/Postmodern,” in Inside Out: New Chinese Art, ed. Gao Minglu (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Asia Society Galleries 1998), 59–66. For a review of Wu’s A Story of Ruins, see

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Xavier Ortells-Nicolau, “A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture,” China Quarterly 211 (September 2011): 879–881. Other notable studies of ruins include Li, “Home and Nation”; Xavier Ortells-Nicolau, “Urban Demolition and the Aesthetics of Recent Ruins in Experimental Photography from China” (PhD diss., Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2015); and Sze-lan Deborah Sang, ed., “Special Issue: Ruinscapes in Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture,” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, no. 2 (2017). See also Gastón Gordillo, Rubble: The Afterlife of Demolition (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014). 22. Buildings in Still Life also function as analogs for the human body, a linkage with a long history in Western architectural theory. For more on the “bodily analogy in architecture,” see Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 70, and throughout. For a phenomenological approach to the relationship between moving bodies and buildings, see Paul Crowther, Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame) (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), chap. 10, especially 177–185. 23. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 25. 24. This scene follows the sequence of modes that Bolter and Grusin have called “immediacy,” “hypermediacy,” and “remediation.” In their terms, immediacy demands a “transparent” medium through which a viewer looks onto a “presentation of the real”; hypermediacy refers to representations that draw attention to their own multimedia construction, at which a viewer is supposed to look; and remediation is the “representation of one medium in another”; Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 21, 41, 45. Whereas various critics emphasize the immediacy of Jia’s work, what we find throughout Still Life is a pervading logic of hypermediacy and remediation. 25. Jia has singled out The Boys from Fengkuei as an especially important early influence on his filmmaking; Jia Zhangke, “Life in Film: Jia Zhangke,” Frieze, April 15, 2007, https://frieze.com/article/life-film-jia-zhangke. For more on Hou Hsiao-hsien’s influence on Jia, see Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 159, and Chan and Jia, “Online Exclusive Interview.” 26. James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 169. 27. Jason McGrath, “Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films and the Realist Tradition in Chinese Cinema,” in Opera Q 26, no. 2–3 (2010): 351. 28. Stephanie Donald, Public Secrets, Public Spaces: Cinema and Civility in China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 62. 29. “The World Is Truly Changeable, like a Sea Become a Mulberry Field” is the final line of Mao’s 1949 poem commemorating the communist capture of Nanjing, “The People’s Liberation Army Occupies Nanjing 人民解放軍佔領南京.” For the Chinese

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text as well as a translation, see Mao Zedong, The Poems of Mao Zedong, trans. Willis Barnstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 74–75. 30. Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 8. 31. Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian, eds. Art and China’s Revolution (New York: Asia Society, 2008), 32, 34. 32. Landslides caused by the increased pressure of the reservoir have had a serious impact on water quality and the health of riverbank ecosystems and have also led to the relocation of large numbers of people. See Michael Wines, “Landslide Risk at Reservoir Cited in China,” New York Times, April 18, 2012, and Liu Qin, “Landslide Destroys Dam in the Three Gorges Region,” China Dialogue, September 22, 2014, www.chinadialogue .net/article/show/single/en/7333-Landslide-destroys-dam-in-Three-Gorges-region. 33. For more on the role of naked and nearly naked bodies in Still Life and Jia’s documentary film, Dong, see Corey Byrnes, “Men at Work: Independent Documentary and Male Bodies,” forthcoming. 34. The magical moments of Still Life, and this scene in particular, have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. The monument as rocket even appears on the cover of Dudley Andrew’s What Cinema Is! For interpretations of Jia’s surrealism, see Andrew, What Cinema Is!, 59–61; McGrath, “The Cinema of Displacement,” 42–43; and Tweedie, The Age of New Waves, 298–299. Jie Li cites Jia’s own explanation of the surreal quality of Fengjie, which he links not only to the upheaval caused by the dam project but also to the older myths of Mt. Wu as a scene of fabulous transformation; Li, “Home and Nation,” 105. 35. McGrath, “The Cinema of Displacement,” 46n7. Jia might be commenting on the failed promises made to those displaced by the dam or on the money that the government was pouring into China’s manned space program around the time the film was being made. China’s primary spacecraft is known as the Shenzhou 神州 (Divine Land), another poetic name for China. 36. Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene K. Kamenka (New York: Penguin, 1983), 207. 37. Wu Hung argues that soon after Political Pop appeared on the scene, it “exhausted the source of its pictorial vocabulary,” thereby helping “to conclude post–Cultural Revolution Art and to usher in an important change in the Chinese art world beginning around the mid-nineties”; Wu, Transience, 23. While it is true that “many artists [have] finally bid farewell to the Cultural Revolution,” one wonders if the ghosts of such historical trauma can be so easily banished. The work of Jia and other artists suggests otherwise. 38. Though we do not hear the lyrics to Han Sanming’s ringtone, “May the Good Live Forever in Peace” focuses on the passage of the time, the distance of loved ones, and the sensation of continued closeness.

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39. Edward L. Davis, ed., Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005), 138. 40. It is Mage’s bravado that gets him killed. When Han calls his friend later in the film, he hears Yip’s voice emanating from the pile of rubble under which Mage’s body has been buried. For readings of this scene, see Yan, “Intermedial Moments,” 54–56, and Cheah, “World as Picture,” 198–203. Yan also identifies a third song that is tied to Shen Hong’s character; Yan, “Intermedial Moments,” 55. 41. Sebastian Veg, “Building a Public Consciousness: A Conversation with Jia Zhangke,” in China Perspectives 1 (2010): 59; McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke,” 97, 112n25. 42. In Still Life, popular songs are not only traces of their historical moments but also expressions of the different “structures of feeling” that define the main characters. Yan, “Intermedial Moments,” 54–55. 43. Li, “Home and Nation,” 102, 101. Li reads each line in Li Bai’s poem as having “subtle cinematic correspondences in Still Life”; Li, “Home and Nation,” 101. In addition to the structural parallels that she finds between the poem and the film, she also positions Li Bai’s unmediated poetic experience against the “ideological landscape” presented by the televisual propaganda; Li, “Home and Nation,” 102. 44. Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 21.

6. I nk in the Wound 1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 255. 2. Wu Hung and Yun-fei Ji, “A Conversation Between Yun-fei Ji and Wu Hung,” in Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art, ed. Wu Hung (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2008), 103. 3. For representative examples of trauma-studies scholarship, see Cathy Caruth, Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Michael S. Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

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4. Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1. 5. Scholars in trauma studies have described (or promoted) various types of empathy, including Dominick LaCapra’s concept of “empathetic unsettlement,” Kaja Silverman’s “heteropathic identification,” and Jill Bennett’s “empathic vision.” LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma; Kaja Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996); Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005). 6. Tan Lin, “Yun-fei Ji and the Unchanging Structures of History,” in Yun-fei Ji: The Empty City, ed. Shannon Fitzgerald (St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, 2004), 25. 7. Trauma has become a familiar topic in Chinese studies. See Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), especially chap. 1; Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004); and David Der-wei Wang, The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 8. This phrase is used both by Richard McNally, Remembering Trauma (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 9, and by Leys, Trauma, 2. 9. Caruth, Trauma, 5; Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History, 82; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 7; LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, xi. Beginning in 1980, the psychiatric field has also sought to produce an acceptable clinical definition of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). McNally, Remembering Trauma, 8–13; Caruth, Trauma, 3–4. 10. For more on Freud’s concept (and Caruth’s adaptation) of Nachträglichkeit, see Leys, Trauma, 20–21, 270–271. 11. Leys, Trauma, 20. 12. Caruth, Trauma, 8. 13. As Gregory Volk notes, wind has its own set of cultural connotations in China. It is “a metaphor for the Emperor and all his whims and decisions, as well as being a metaphor for revolutionary force. When one ‘listens to the wind,’ one attempts to divine where policy might be headed and what its effects might be”; Gregory Volk, “The Empty City,” in Yun-fei Ji: The Empty City, ed. Shannon Fitzgerald (St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, 2004), 57. 14. Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History, chap. 1–3; Leys, Trauma, chap. 2–3. 15. The retrospective pull of trauma has long been offered up as a metaphor for historiography: to try to make sense of history is to be drawn ineluctably into narratives of both personal and collective trauma. Because it “appears to demand inclusion in any narrative of the development of the present yet makes any narrative seem painfully

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inadequate,” trauma inevitably returns to demand its right to a new narrative that will inevitably fail, thus requiring another attempt, and so on, ad infinitum. Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History, 82. 16. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 4. 17. Eng and Kazanjian, Loss, 4. 18. Benjamin, “Theses,” 255. 19. Eng and Kazanjian explain this artistic tendency toward indeterminacy by arguing that the ego itself is the product of “the residues of its accumulated losses,” that it emerges from melancholy and the preservation of “abandoned object-cathexes”; Eng and Kazanjian, Loss, 4). Individual melancholic objects never exist in isolation because the ego is actually composed of the undifferentiated and accumulated traces of such objects. Hence, “the ability of the melancholic object to express multiple losses at once speaks to its flexibility as a signifier, endowing it with not only a multifaceted but also a certain palimpsest-like quality”; Eng and Kazanjian, Loss, 53. 20. Benjamin, “Theses,” 257. 21. Tan Lin’s analysis of Ji’s style is among the most sophisticated available, though he tends to emphasize its parodic rather than constructive qualities; Tan Lin, “Yun-fei Ji,” 26–29. 22. The most famous expression of this allegorical mode is an essay attributed to the Northern Song painter Guo Xi 郭熙 (ca. 1020–1090) and his son Guo Si 郭思 (active ca. 1070–after 1123), translated by Susan Bush and Hsiao-yen Shih in Early Chinese Texts on Painting, 2d ed. (Aberdeen, UK: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 150–154. For more on this mode, see Martin Powers, “When Is a Landscape Like a Body?” in Landscape, Culture, and Power in Chinese Society, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1998), 1–22. 23. Melissa Chiu and Yun-fei Ji, “Ghosts, Three Gorges, and Ink: An Interview with Yun-fei Ji,” in Yun-fei Ji: The Empty City, ed. Shannon Fitzgerald (St. Louis: Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, 2004), 81. 24. Chiu and Yun-fei Ji, “Ghosts,” 80. The catalog to Ji’s exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing contains selections from Ji’s “field notes,” as well as photographs that he took as preparatory research; Paula Tsai, ed., Yun-fei Ji: Water Work (Beijing: UCCA Books, 2012), 91–92. 25. Ji’s debt to Republican-era artists, including Xu Beihong 徐悲鴻 (1859–1953) and Jiang Zhaohe 蔣兆和 (1904–1986), has received relatively little notice. As Stephen J. Goldberg notes, Ji’s Three Gorges Dam Migration scroll is especially reminiscent of Jiang’s long (78.5 x 1063 inches) handscroll Refugees 流民圖 (1943), which depicts the victims of the Japanese invasion; Stephen J. Goldberg, “The Fate of Place and Memory in the Art of Yun-fei Ji,” in Yun-fei Ji: The Intimate Universe, ed. Tracy Adler (New York: Prestel, 2016), 79.

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26. Valérie Malenfer Ortiz, Dreaming the Southern Song Landscape: The Power of Illusion in Chinese Painting (Boston: Brill, 1999). 27. Below the 143 Meter Watermark is almost exactly double the height of one of the most famous Song landscapes, Fan Kuan’s 范寬 (active ca. 1023–1031) Travelers Amid Streams and Mountains (Xishan xinglü 谿山行旅), in the collection of the National Palace Museum, Taibei. 28. Francine Prose, “Water Colored: Demons and Detritus in Yun-fei Ji’s Restive Landscape,” in Ji Yun-fei: Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts, ed. Jessica Lin Cox, Christopher Lawson, and Leo Xu (New York: James Cohen Gallery, 2010), 10. 29. John Hay, “Values and History in Chinese Painting, II: The Hierarchic Evolution of Structure,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 7–8 (spring–autumn 1984), 112. 30. Wu, Displacement, 22. 31. Wu and Ji, “A Conversation,” 103. 32. Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll is the English title provided by the Museum of Modern Art Library, which commissioned this image. A literal translation of the Chinese title, Sanxia kuqu yimin tu 三峽庫區移民圖, is Three Gorges Reservoir Zone Migrants Scroll. 33. Mao Zedong, “Strategic Problems in the Anti-Japanese Guerrilla War,” Collected Works, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1967). 34. For more on water and the uncanny, see Jiayan Mi, “Framing Ambient Unheimlich: Ecoggedon, Ecological Unconscious, and Water Pathology in New Chinese Cinema,” in Chinese Ecocinema, ed. Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 21. 35. Both Wu Hung and Ronald Egan trace the origins of liumin tu 流民圖 to the story of Zheng Xia 鄭俠 (1041–1119), an official who served during the implementation of Wang Anshi’s 王安石 (1021–1086) controversial New Policies. In 1074, Zheng submitted a memorial that detailed negative effects of the policies and a painting that depicted the devastated peasantry. He was eventually arrested and exiled for his attack on Wang, but his act of pictorial remonstrance is seen as launching the genre of liumin tu 流民圖. Wu, Displacements, 20; Ronald Egan, Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 47–48. 36. Rey Chow, “China as Documentary: Some Basic Questions,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2013): 26. 37. Benjamin, “Theses,” 255. 38. McNally, Remembering Trauma, 9; Caruth, Trauma, 5. 39. Wu and Ji, “A Conversation,” 103–104. 40. Many scholars have written specifically about the chai(-na) phenomenon (and demolition in general). See especially Yomi Braester, “Tracing the City’s Scars: Demolition and the Limits of the Documentary Impulse in the New Urban Cinema,” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, ed.

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Zhen Zhang (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 161–180; Sheldon H. Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007); Sheldon H. Lu, “Tear Down the City: Reconstructing Urban Space in Contemporary Chinese Popular Cinema and Avant-Garde Art,” in The Urban Generation, 137–160; and Wu Hung, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012). 41. Chai works its magic so effectively because, on its own, the character lacks tense. Chinese is an uninflected language, and without additional temporal markers, there is no way to tell whether chai should be read in the past tense, as “demolished” or “has been demolished”; in the future tense, as “will be demolished” or “to be demolished”; or in the imperative, as “demolish!” For an alternative approach to chai, see Mi, “Framing Ambient Unheimlich,” 24–25. 42. See Chiu and Ji, “Ghosts, Three Gorges, and Ink,” 89. 43. A Monk’s Retreat (2002), The Move in Badong (2002), The Wait (2009), The Guest People (2009), and Autumn Colors (2003). 44. Last Days Before the Flood (2006) and Four People Leaving Badong (2009). 45. Isabella Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 145. 46. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 21. The Body in Pain has been subjected to numerous critiques. Geoffrey Harpham, for example, has argued that Scarry’s tendency to hyperbole leads her to draw dubious conclusions. He understands Scarry as arguing that “regardless of the intentions of makers and consumers, material artifacts—including presumably, all the instruments at the torturer’s disposal and all the machines of war—have but one ‘absolute intention,’ to relieve sentient being of its pain”; Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Elaine Scarry and the Dream of Pain,” Salmagundi, no. 130–131 (spring– summer 2001): 228. For an even stronger critique, see Peter Singer, “Unspeakable Acts,” New York Review of Books 33 (February 27, 1986): 27–30. While I acknowledge the idiosyncratic nature of Scarry’s argumentation, the almost speculative quality of her materialism offers valuable insights for analyzing how objects function in Yun-fei Ji’s artistic practice. 47. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 244. 48. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 262. 49. These men evoke not only early European anatomical renderings of the human form, but also their repetition in Luo Ping’s Ghost Amusements, a painting that includes figures copied directly from a 1630 Chinese copy (based on a 1605 German copy) of the De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), with illustrations by Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564). Jonathan D. Spence, “Specters of a Chinese Master,” New York Review of Books 56 (December 3, 2009): 14. For more on Luo Ping, see Kim Karlsson, Alfreda Murck, and Michele Matteini, eds., Eccentric Visions: The Worlds of Luo Ping (Zürich: Museum Reitberg Zürich, 2009).

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Pa ssage iv. Part of the M ovement 1. Paul Carter, Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 7. 2. The best source on the history of developmental discourse in modern China is Andrew Jones, Developmental Fairytales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). 3. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 535. 4. Cherney’s Ten Thousand li of the Yangzi River can be seen online at http://www.qiumai.net/cjwlt/cjwlte.html. 5. From text of a public talk provided by the artist. 6. Carter, Dark Writing, 7.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italic refer to figures. Thus 107f3.6 refers to figure 3.6 on page 107. 233ff6.20–621 refers to figure 6.20 and figure 6.21 on page 233. aesthetic systems: Albertian window of perspectival painting, 175; and how we see and act in the world, 168.

Autumn Colors (Ji), 224–25, 225f6.14, 226f6.15 “Autumn Stirrings” (Du Fu), 30–35,

See also Chinese aesthetic thought;

249nn18–19; alternation between xu

inscriptional landscape tradition;

(empty, unfounded, imagined) and

ji (trace); landscape representation;

shi (real, substantive), 33–34; xing

racial landscape of the Three Gorges;

(stirring) in, 34–35, 250n31

Three Gorges as a literary landscape; ways of seeing “At Qutang Contemplating the Past”

Baidicheng: geographical location and status of, 2, 5, 8f1.2, 13f1.4, 46;

(Du Fu), 45–46, 50, 252n53

labeled on The Shu River handscroll,

“At Qutang Yearning for the Past”

57, 58–59f2.1. See also “Setting Out at

(Du Fu), 48–49, 51

Dawn from Baidicheng”

310

“Ballad of the Most Skilled” (Du Fu), 250n24, 269n4 Below the 143 Meter Watermark (Ji) 214, 215f6.8, 216, 224, 226, 284n27

index

Chabrowski, Igor Iwo, 141, 266n47, 272–73n38 chai 拆 (to demolish): as the dark side of the Chinese dream, 223–24; in Jia

Benjamin, Walter, 209, 211, 222

Zhangke’s Still Life, 223f6.13; as a term,

Bennett, Jill, 282n5

285n41

Bird, Isabella: on Chinese characters “writ large,” 268n67; on coal, 269n78;

Cherney, Michael (Qiumai 秋麥), 238–39fIV.1, 238–40

on the fear of the “ocular power” of

Chiang Kai-shek, xiv, 94

the “Foreign Devil,” 126; sympathetic

Chinese aesthetic thought: and chonggao

view of trackers, 143–47, 156, 168, 169,

(poetic sublime), 85, 181; and the

201–2, 230, 274n59

experience of nonelite people, 168;

Blakiston, Thomas Wright, 143, 148

and Jia Zhangke’s reimagining of

Blakiston, Thomas Wright, charts of the

what it means to see the Three

Yangzi river by, 103, 104f3.4, 105–6,

Gorges as a “Chinese landscape,”

127; Chinese charts compared with,

4, 168–71, 196–97; and liumin tu

119–20; index chart foldout map

(tradition of paintings of refugees),

produced by Arrowsmith, 105–7,

212, 221, 284n35. See also guji (ancient

106f3.5, 107f3.6, 124; as prospective

traces); handscrolls; inscriptional

tools grounded in the imperial view

landscape tradition; ji (trace); ke

of nature, 108, 121–22, 124–25. See

(carve, inscribe); mists; shanshui;

also Five Months on the Yang-tsze

shi (real, substantive); shengji

Blakiston, Thomas Wright, scientific survey of the Upper Yangzi by, 101–2; and the fantastical China of massproduced willowware porcelain, 102–

(landmarks, famous sites); shiyi (poetic intention); xing (stirring); xu (empty, unfounded, imagined) Chinese Characteristics (Smith): Chinese

3, 102f3.3, 121–22; and the realizing

difference asserted in, 140–41; on

of the “physical features” of Chinese

dissection, 140, 145, 273n50; on

geography, 103, 110–11, 140 Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin, 279n24

trackers, 141, 142–43 Chou, Eva Shan, 55 Chow, Rey, 16, 222

Bordwell, David, 173–74, 278n20

Chow Yun-fat, 190, 278n18

The Bund (Shanghai tan), theme song to,

Chunqiu zuozhuan zhengyi, 47

190–93, 195–96, 281n40

colonial discourse: and anti-conquest narratives, 153–54; and the discourse

Carter, Paul, 19, 55

of adventure and grandeur associated

Caruth, Cathy, 208

with Three Gorges, 99, 101; and

Casey, Edward, 245n28

notions of Chinese racial difference,

Cavell, Stanley, 277n7

142–43. See also Bird, Isabella;

index

311

Blakiston, Thomas Wright; imperial

256n20; text accompanying his

view of nature

painting on The Shu River handscroll, 65

Confucianism: and Du Fu’s recognition

dissection and vivisection: in orientalist

as “historian poet” (shishi) and “poet

and colonialist discourse, 140–41,

sage” (shisheng), 29; Neo-Confucian

145, 156, 273n50; and Yun-fei Ji’s

belief in the correspondence between

metaphorical connection between

physical and human realms, 14;

the body and its material trappings,

Neo-Confucian distinction between

229–32

humans and spirits, 75; and Yun-fei

Dong, Madeleine Yue, 267n63

Ji’s paintings, 198, 214; Yu the Great

Du Fu: as a refugee in Kuizhou, 29–30;

as a Confucian exemplar, 44, 251n33

location of his homes in Chengdu

Conrad, Joseph, 153

and Kuizhou on The Shu River

consumer goods: and Jia Zhangke’s

handscroll, 55–57, 60f2.2, 61–62,

Still Life, 167; and Yun-fei Ji’s artistic

64–65; recognition as “historian

practice, 217, 226, 233–34, 285n46

poet” (shishi) and “poet sage”

Cosgrove, Denis, 17

(shisheng), 27–29; reconstruction of

Critical Chart (Guo Zhang), 115–19,

his home at Dongtun, 21, 65–73, 165,

116f3.10, 120–21 Cultural Revolution: defacing of the Plant

235–36, 256–57n22 Du Fu’s poetry: and the inscriptional

Memorial during, 40; Mao’s launching

landscape tradition, 10–12, 51, 129;

of, xiv–xv; and “Political Pop,” 188–89;

and the processes of decay and

and the television drama Yearning

displacement, 21, 27, 31, 46–47, 51–52,

(Kewang), 190, 191; Yun-fei Ji as a

236, 254n73; Qiu Zhao’ao on, 49,

witness to, 198–201, 203, 209; Yun-Fei

243n14, 252n53. See also “At Qutang

Ji’s conflation of it with the Three

Contemplating the Past”; “At Qutang

Gorges Dam, 200–201, 206–7, 211–12

Yearning for the Past”; “Autumn Stirrings”; “Ballad of the Most Skilled”;

Deng Xiaoping: depicted with other

“Singing My Feelings on Traces of the

Chinese leaders involved in the

Past”; “The Two Palisades of Qutang”;

history of the dam, 2, 196, 196f5.25;

“Writing My Feelings While Travelling

economic reforms launched by, 167; and Liu Shaoqi depicted in Yun-Fei Ji’s The East Wind, 203, 205f6.4

at Night”; “Yu’s Shrine” Du Fu Kuizhoushi xiandi yanjiu (A Study of the Current Locations of Sites in Du Fu’s

Derrida, Jacques, 6, 246–47n41

Kuizhou Poetry) (Jian Jinsong): on

difangzhi 地方誌 (gazetteers), 55, 57, 62,

the locations of Yang Terrace and

65, 83, 114–15, 131, 256n22 Ding Guanpeng: illustration of the final

the Palaces of Chu, 254n70; Tan Wenxing’s critique of, 62

couplet of Du Fu’s second “Autumn

Du Guangting, 75–76, 79–80, 260n60

Stirrings” poem, 63–65, 64f2.3, 180,

Dundas, Lawrence John Lumley, 138–39

312

The East Wind (Ji): conflation of the Cultural Revolution with the Three

index

Folk Memory Project (Minjian jiyi jihua) (Wu Wenguang), 276n6

Gorges Dam, 206–7, 211–12; figure

Foong, Ping, 15

resembling Liu Shaoqi, 203, 205f6.4,

Forster, E. M., 153

206; Red Guards (both human

Four People Leaving Badong (Ji), 202, 203f6.1,

and dog-faced) in, 203–4, 204f6.2, 205f6.3, 206, 209, 211; ruined car, 209, 210f6.6; upside-down donkey, 203, 206f6.5

212, 220 Foxconn factory workers, 146–47, 276–77n6 Freudian model of trauma, 201, 207–8

Eberhard, Wolfram, 253n59 Egan, Ronald, 284n35 Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian, 209, 211, 283n19 Essential Guide and Critical Chart (Luo Jinshen), 114f3.9, 115, 120–21

“Gaotang Rhapsody” (Song Yu), and the goddess of Mt. Wu: and attempts to reform the goddess, 56, 74–76; and the Neo-Confucian distinction between humans and spirits, 75; traces of the divine made famous by,

famous sites. See guji (ancient traces); shengji (landmarks, famous sites) Fan Chengda: poem in response to a

54, 56; Yu Fen’s critique of, 261n65 gazetteers. See difangzhi Ghosh, Amitav, 20

poem inspired by a painting of Mt.

Goldberg, Stephen J., 283n25

Wu, 76–79; poetic landscapes in

Greene, Julie, 274n71

Du Fu’s poetry compared with their

guji 古跡 (ancient traces): and Du Fu’s

physical spaces by, 73–74; preface to

“Singing My Feelings on Traces

Song Yu’s “Gaotang Rhapsody,” 74,

of the Past,” 49, 54–55; and Li

76; search for Du Fu’s Lofty Retreat,

Xiang’s reconstruction of Du Fu’s

65–66, 72, 73, 165; Wu Gorge painting

Dongtun lofty retreat, 69–71; and

commissioned by, 80, 83, 238–39,

Qianlong’s inscription on The Shu

262n75. See also youji (travel diary,

River handscroll, 56–57, 61, 65; and

essay); Wuchuan lu (Record of a Wu

shengji (landmarks, famous sites), 26,

Boat)

61, 237

Fan Kuan, 213, 284n27

Guo Zhang, 115–19, 116f3.10, 120–21

Five Months on the Yang-tsze (Blakiston), 269n76; frontispiece to, 99, 100f3.2,

handscrolls: the experience of viewing

101, 263n11; and the inscriptional

a traditional handscroll evoked by

landscape tradition, 99, 101, 129;

Jia Zhangke, 170, 189–90, 197; Jiang

“route books” produced by the

Zhaohe’s Refugees, 283n25; panoramic

military intelligence organs of

temporality of, 217. See also Three

the British imperial bureaucracy

Gorges Dam Migration Scroll; The Shu

compared with, 103, 263n18

River handscroll

index

haozi 號子 (work songs), 131, 141–42,

313

“Yu’s traces” (Yuji), 18, 36, 37f1.1,

269–70n4, 272–73n38, 273n39. See also

43, 79. See also ji (trace); landscape

trackers

representation; The Shu River

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt, 285n46

handscroll; “Swimming”; Three

Hayot, Eric, 138, 146

Gorges as a literary landscape

Heidegger, Martin, 127, 128, 158 Heinrich, Ari Larissa, 272n28, 273n50

ji 跡 (footprint, trace): as a hybrid

Heise, Ursula, 20

concept, 26–27; and ancient

Hersey, John. See A Single Pebble

carvings of fish and inscriptions at

Hevia, James, 103, 263n18

White Crane Ridge (Baiheliang),

Huang Tingjian, 69–70, 73–74

40–42, 224; and Derridean thought, 246–47n41; and Du Fu’s Kuizhou

imperial view of nature: and images of

poetry, 27, 30, 34–35, 49–50, 52–53,

penetration, 6, 124–25, 145–46, 148,

62–63, 236, 240; and the figure of

230, 268n69; as man’s extension

the Chinese tracker in the Yangtsze

of his power over nature, 125; and

Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement,

Mao’s war on nature, 42–43, 172; and

123f3.14, 133, 135, 135f4.3, 158–59; and

natural resource development in the

Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, 168–71, 171;

Yangzi region, 16–17, 95, 98, 124–27,

and landscape as the product of

136, 149–50, 245n31, 246n32, 267n63,

overlapping and intersecting traces

268–69n74; and the socialist realist

and acts of trace making, 19, 65, 84,

gaze, 180–81; and the sovereign gaze,

131–32, 168, 235–40; and Qianlong’s

124, 148. See also colonial discourse

envisioning of Du Fu’s river pavilion,

inscriptional landscape tradition: and

63–65; “traces of Yu” (Yuji), 18. See

Du Fu’s poetry, 10–12, 49–53, 129; and

also guji (ancient traces); shengji

the elongated Chinese character yan

(landmarks, famous sites)

言 on the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship

ji 記 (to mark, record, document; record,

Co. advertisement, 122, 123f3.14, 124;

document), 26, 79–80, 278n15. See

and ji (trace), 18, 26, 246–47n41; and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, 183,

also jilu (to mark, record, document) Ji, Yun-fei: absence of the region’s

184f5.13; and ke (carve, inscribe), 26,

famous natural and manmade

79–80; and Li Daoyuan’s Shujing zhu

monuments from his work, 200;

(Commentary to the Classic of Rivers),

artistic influences on, 213, 283n25;

129, 212, 267n63; and the “real world

consumer goods and domestic

consequences” of literary tropes,

objects in his paintings, 217,

87; and reservoir-related markers

218ff6.10–6.11, 226, 233–34, 285n46;

preserved by the White Crane Ridge

metaphorical connection between

Underwater Museum, 40–42, 225;

the body and its material trappings,

and tracks of birds (niaoji), 18; and

234; as witness to the Cultural

314

Ji, Yun-fei (continued)

index

framing, 176–77, 176f5.5, 177f5.6,

Revolution, 198–202, 203, 209;

179ff5.8–5.9; multiplicity of apertures,

qimo (energy arteries) employed

174–76, 175f5.4; and realist discourse,

by, 216, 226, 227; reimagining and

170, 277n11; tracking and panning

reinscribing of the landscape of the

to make sensible the space-time

Three Gorges as a site of trauma,

between presence and erasure, 170,

201–2, 206–8, 222–23, 230; as a

172f5.5, 189–92, 191f5.18, 197

secondary witness to contemporary

Jian Jinsong, 62, 250n70

events that he depicts, 201–2, 207,

Jiang Zemin: construction of the Three

208–9; spatiotemporal compression

Gorges Dam project approved by,

and erasure in his paintings, 222–23,

xv; speech marking the diversion of

225–26; synthesis of traditional

the Yangzi, 42–43; Three Gorges as

Chinese landscape painting styles,

a proving ground for the spirit of the

techniques, and media by, 211–14,

Chinese people, 27

217, 284n27; the Three Gorges Dam as

jilu 紀錄 (to mark, record, document),

an invisible source of chaos, 200, 206,

and Yun-fei Ji’s reinscription of the

224–26. See also Autumn Colors; Below

landscape of the Three Gorges as a

the 143 Meter Watermark; The East Wind;

site of trauma, 201–2, 221–22

Four People Leaving Badong; Last Days Before the Flood; Monk’s Retreat; Three

ke 刻 (carve, inscribe), 26, 79–80

Gorges Dam Migration Scroll

Kroll, Paul, 15, 51

Ji, Yun-fei, “Empty City” 2004 exhibition, and the Cultural Revolution, 207. See also The East Wind Ji, Yun-fei, “Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts” 2010 exhibition, 229

Kuifu, 83, 238–39fIV.1, 239 Kuimen: Baidicheng in relation to, 46; depiction on a ten-yuan banknote, 13f1.4, 171–73, 172f5.3, 239; Kuizhou in relation to, 27, 29; in Michael

Ji, Yun-fei, “Old One Hundred Names”

Cherney’s Ten Thousand Li of the

2003 exhibition, 198; Four People

Yangzi River, 238–39fIV.1, 238–40;

Leaving Badong, 202, 203f6.1, 212, 220;

monumentality of, 10–12; Yanyu

Last Days Before the Flood, 225, 226, 228,

Rock, 251n39

228f6.17; Monk’s Retreat, 209, 210f6.7, 229–30, 230–31f6.18, 231, 233ff6.20–6.21 Jia Zhangke: and Dong, 167, 276n4. See also Still Life Jia Zhangke, visual system of, 169–76;

labor power: Chinese labor as a cheaper machine for the work, 137–39, 146–47; Chinese labor as a threat to Western dominance, 138, 142, 156–57,

deep focus, 169, 172–74, 172ff5.2–5.3,

271n21; Chinese pilots on the Yangzi,

180; and the experience of viewing

113–14; coolies, 132, 137, 142–43;

a handscroll, 170, 189–90, 197;

factories as symbols of the modern

index

315

socialist state, 193, 194ff5.21–5.22;

the Qianlong emperor’s imaginary

naturalization of, 140–41, 158–59;

itinerary inspired by The Shu River,

and the racial landscape of the Three

57, 59–65, 71, 84, 238; and Qing and

Gorges, 104, 137–43, 155–56. See also

early Republican charts, 114–15, 119;

trackers

reconstruction of Du Fu’s home at

LaCapra, Dominick, 282n5 landscape representation: and Chinese cartography before the twentieth

Dongtun, 53, 54–55, 62–63, 65–73, 165, 235–36, 256–57n22 landscape/shanshui. See inscriptional

century, 120; and the context of

landscape tradition; landscape

European and American culture,

representation; racial landscape;

17; and landscape/shanshui, 14–15,

shanshui; techno-poetic landscape;

17–18, 120–21; as a means of

Three Gorges as a literary landscape

reflecting on the status of tradition in contemporary China, 5–9, 247n42;

Last Days Before the Flood (Ji), 225, 226, 228, 228f6.17

as a powerful “material force” for

Ledderose, Lothar, 15

historical change, 19–22, 236–40,

Lefebvre, Henri, 15

247n42; reimagining of the Three

Lewis, Mark Edward, 48

Gorges as a “Chinese landscape”

Li Bai, and poetry: on the goddess of Mt.

in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, 2, 168–71,

Wu in his “Moved by Poetic Images,

196–97; and tradition as a process of

Poem One,” 76, 260n63; and the

incremental reinvention, 5–6, 85–87,

inscriptional landscape tradition,

129, 131–32; and youji (travel diary,

129; and tradition as a process of

essay), 55, 62, 67, 257nn24–25; Yun-fei

incremental reinvention, 5–6, 132.

Ji’s reimagining and reinscribing of

See also “Setting Out at Dawn from

the landscape of the Three Gorges

Baidicheng”

as a site of trauma, 201–2, 206–8,

Li Cheng, 213, 214

230. See also inscriptional landscape

Li Daoyuan. See Shujing zhu (Commentary

tradition; shanshui; techno-poetic

to the Classic of Rivers)

landscape; Three Gorges as a literary

Li He, 34; “How High Mt. Wu,” 77

landscape

Li, Jie, 196, 281n43

landscape representation, and the production of space, 16, 84, 105, 196;

Lin, Tan, 283n21 Little, Archibald, 108–9, 119, 151–52, 155,

Cornell Plant’s charting of the Yangzi

269n78. See also Through the Yang-tse

Gorges, 40, 109, 111, 112f3.8, 113–15;

Gorges

and the displacement of indigenous

Liu, Lydia H., 140, 273n50

spatial knowledge, 113; Du Fu’s

Liu Shaoqi, 203, 205f6.4, 206

poetic map of empire and exile in

Liu, Xiaodong, 276n4

“Autumn Stirrings,” 30–35; and

Liu Zongyuan, 257n25

316

liumin tu 流民圖 (tradition of paintings of refugees), 212, 221, 284n35 Lu You: poetic landscapes in Du Fu’s

index

84; and Fan Chengda’s preface to Song Yu’s “Gaotang Rhapsody,” 74, 76; the goddess’s origins in local

poetry compared with their physical

cults, 259–60n56; “How High Mt.

spaces by, 72, 73–74; search for the

Wu” poems, 76, 78, 84, 261n65; Li Bai

status of Du Fu’s three Kuizhou Lofty

on, 76, 260n63; and Mao Zedong’s

Retreats, 67–68, 165

“Swimming,” 84–85, 166, 171; and the

Luo Jinshen, 114f3.9, 115, 120–21

Neo-Confucian distinction between humans and spirits, 75; in painting,

Mao Zedong: Cultural Revolution

80–84; Shu Shi’s description in “Mt

launched by, xiv–v; and the dam as

Wu,” 254n71; Yaoji identified as a

a technological “solution” (shuofa),

Daoist goddess by Du Guangting, 75;

220–21; depiction on propaganda

Yaoji’s role in helping Yu the Great,

posters, 180–83, 182ff5.10–5.11, 193;

78–79. See also “Gaotang Rhapsody”

and the “grand plan” (hongtu) of socialist construction, 42–43, 93–94,

Nixon, Rob, 9

167; and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, 171– 73, 172f5.2, 186; quote proclaiming

Ortiz, Valérie Malenfer, 213

“the people are like water and the

Owen, Stephen, 15, 32, 35, 254n69

army is like fish,” 219–20; slogans associated with his “war on nature,”

Plant Memorial, 40, 41f1.4, 235–36

43, 173. See also “Swimming”

Plant, S. Cornell: appropriation and

McNeal, Robin, 36–38, 251n35

adaptation of his charts, 115, 119;

Mennie, Donald, 133, 134ff4.1–4.2

charting of the Yangzi Gorges, 40,

mists: as a “poetic signifier” for

109–10, 111, 112f3.8, 113

hiddenness, 32; and the changeable

Porter, Bill (Red Pine), 73, 165

nature of the Gorges, 12–13, 239–40;

Powers, Martin, 15

clouds and rains, 10, 42, 50, 54, 76,

Pratt, Mary Louise, 99, 153–54

83, 84, 85; “scudding clouds” as manifestations of the goddess of Mt. Wu, 83 Mitchell, W. J. T., 15 Monk’s Retreat (Ji), 209, 210f6.7, 229–30, 230–31f6.18, 231, 233ff6.20–6.21

Qianlong, imaginary itinerary of, inspired by The Shu River handscroll, 57, 59–65, 71, 84, 238 qimo 氣脈 (energy arteries): and traditional painting criticism, 214;

Morgan, Daniel, 277n7

and Yun-fei Ji’s perceptible sense

Morrison, Robert, 121

of receding space and depth, 216,

Morton, Timothy, 20 Mt. Wu, and its goddess: “clouds and rain of Mt. Wu” (Wushan yunyu), 80,

226, 227 Qing dynasty: charts of the Upper Yangzi, 114, 266n47; establishment of

index

Chongqing as a treaty port, 109–10;

317

“Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng”

increase in the size of ships and

(Li Bai): and “Du Fu’s Autumn

volume of cargo transported on the

Stirrings, Poem Two,” 31–33; and

Yangzi, 249n15; Maritime Customs,

the fixing of the Three Gorges as a

111, 265n39; Qianlong’s imaginary

Chinese landscape in the cultural

itinerary inspired by The Shu River, 57,

imaginary, 1–4, 7, 165, 197; and Jia

59–65, 71, 84, 238; search for natural

Zhangke’s Still Life, 167; and Old

resources as part of economic and

Pebble’s work song in A Single Pebble,

infrastructural development, 16–17,

160–62; recitation in the middle of

98, 245n31, 246n32, 268–69n74;

the Gorges, 1–4, 7

Tianjin Treaty and the establishment

shanshui 山水: and art historical and

of Chinkiang as a treaty port, 98, 101,

literary scholarship, 14–15; as

109, 264n27. See also Critical Chart;

a spatial organizing principle

Essential Guide and Critical Chart

in premodern poetry, 14;

Qutang Gorge: Du Fu’s “At Qutang

conventionalized forms associated

Contemplating the Past,” 45–46, 50,

with it, 128; Northern Song

252n53; Du Fu’s “At Qutang Yearning

monumental mode of, 211–14, 216,

for the Past,” 48–49, 51; Du Fu’s

283n22; and subjective experience,

“The Two Palisades of Qutang,”

15, 120–21. See also Critical Chart;

10–11, 45–47; geographical location

Essential Guide and Critical Chart;

and status of, 4, 8f1.2, 11–12, 46; on

The Shu River handscroll; Updated

The Shu River handscroll, 57, 58–59f2.1

Compendium shengji 勝跡 (landmarks, famous sites):

Rabinbach, Anson, 142

contrasted with guji (ancient traces),

racial landscape of the Three Gorges:

61, 237; depiction on a ten-yuan

and Chineseness expressed in Mao’s

banknote, 13f1.4, 171–73, 172f5.3, 239;

“Swimming,” 87; and dissection

and the traces of the past in Du Fu’s

and vivisection in orientalist and

poetry, 28, 62–63, 65; and xiandi

colonialist discourse, 140–41, 145, 156, 273n50; and modes of labor,

research, 63 shi 實 (real, substantive), 32–33, 43–45;

104, 137–43, 155–56; and notions of

as referring to something “truly”

Chinese racial difference, 98–99,

or “actually” witnessed, 32, 250n24.

139–43, 148, 270n10; and touristic

See also xu (empty, unfounded,

fantasies, 123, 131–32, 136

imagined)

Repin, Ilya, 270n7

shiyi 詩意 (poetic intention): and Ding Guanpeng’s illustration of the final

Savage, John, xiv, 94, 96f3.1, 148

couplet of Du Fu’s second “Autumn

Scarry, Elaine, 230–33, 285n46

Stirrings” poem, 63–64, 64f2.3; and

Schafer, Edward H., 259–60, 260n63

Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, 276n4

318

The Shu River handscroll (Shuchuan tu):

index

40, 109, 109, 111, 112f3.8, 113–15; junk

Ding Guanpeng’s image at the end

traffic on, 113, 116, 133, 134f4.1, 135–36,

of the colophons on, 63–65, 64f2.3,

135f4.1, 148, 149, 151, 270n9; and the

180, 256n20; labeling of sites on,

Tianjin Treaty and the establishment

57, 58–59f2.1, 60f2.2; Qianlong’s

of Chinkiang as a treaty port, 98,

imaginary itinerary inspired by, 57,

101, 109–10, 264n27; Yangtsze Rapid

59–65, 71, 84, 238; and Qing and early

Steamship Co. advertisement, 122,

Republican charts compared with,

123f3.14, 124, 128, 133, 135, 135f4.3, 136,

114–15, 120; Wu Gorge depicted on, 8l, 81f2.4 Shujing zhu (Commentary to the Classic

159 Still Life (Sanxia haoren) (Jia Zhangke): Baidicheng in, 2, 4, 166, 166f5.1; and

of Rivers) (Li Daoyuan): and the

Bertolt Brecht’s play The Good Person

inscriptional landscape tradition,

of Sichuan, 276n3; empathy with the

129, 212, 267n63; song about

living bodies of the Three Gorges

crying gibbons in, 2–3, 32, 242n4,

migrants, 167–69; environmental

269–70n4

impact of the dam project

Silverman, Kaja, 282n5

documented by, 183, 184f5.12, 280n32;

“Singing My Feelings on Traces of the

factories as images of socialist

Past” (Du Fu), 28, 49–53, 54, 62, 74,

failure in, 193, 194f5.22, 195f5.23; Han

248n8, 253n64

Sanming’s placement before Kuimen

A Single Pebble (Hersey), 158, 275n81; as an

in, 166–69, 166f5.1, 172ff5.2–5.3; and the

allegory of national difference, 148;

image of the body at work, 183–84;

and the appropriation of native ways

as a monument to the migrants of

of seeing, 150–51, 154; image of the

the Three Gorges, 169–70, 184–88,

tracker in, 148–49, 154–56, 160; Old

187f5.17, 280n34; orblike UFO in, 170,

Pebble’s work song in, 160–61

186, 191–93, 192f5.19; popular songs in,

Smith, Arthur H., and Chinese

190–92, 193, 196, 281n40, 281n42; as

Characteristics: Chinese difference

a record of the traces no longer there,

asserted in, 140–41; on dissection,

168–71; reimagining of what it means

140, 145, 273n50; on trackers, 141,

to see the Three Gorges as a “Chinese

142–43

landscape,” 4, 168–71, 196–97; scenes

Soja, Edward, 15

of demolition, 179–80, 179ff5.8–5.9,

Song Yu, 29; location of his house,

223, 223f6.13; scenes revolving around

50–53, 254nn68–69; and the Songs of

hard currency, 166f5.1, 167, 171–73,

Chu, 50, 52, 261n68. See also “Gaotang

172ff5.2–5.3, 183, 188, 197, 278n18; and

Rhapsody”

shiyi (poetic conception), 276n4

Spurr, David, 145–46

Stoler, Ann Laura, 5, 246–47n41

steamships on the Yangzi: and Cornell

Sun Yat-sen: Chinese labor viewed as an

Plant’s charting of the Yangzi Gorges,

obstacle to national development,

index

319

127, 156–58; and the dam as a

Thornber, Karen, 20

technological “solution” (shuofa), xiii–

Three Gorges, as a literary landscape,

xiv, 220–21; “Three Principles of the

3–4, 29, 236; and the creation and

People” (Sanmin zhuyi), xiv

contestation of Chinese traditions,

“Swimming” (Youyong) (Mao): ci (lyric)

5–7, 10–12; and the discourse of

poetic idiom of, 85; expression of

endangerment, 20, 130–32; and ji

Chineseness defined in, 84–87, 129;

(trace), 19, 26–27, 46–47, 236–37;

goddess of Mt. Wu from, 84–85, 166,

reinscription as Chinese landscapes,

171; vision of spatial reorganization

108–10, 117–21. See also inscriptional

in, xiv, 42, 85–87, 93, 181

landscape tradition; “Setting Out at

sympathy discourse: and Bird’s view of

Dawn from Baidicheng”

trackers, 143–47, 156, 168, 169, 201–2,

Three Gorges, before the construction

230, 272n28, 273n39, 274n55, 274n59;

of the dam, 2; as an obstacle, 99;

and liumin tu (tradition of paintings

as a sublime “land of pre-history,”

of refugees), 212, 221, 284n35; and the shared humanity of trackers

149–50, 150f4.4 Three Gorges Dam: construction

also described as “less than human

initiated on, xv; extent of, 7–9, 8f1.2,

animal,” 143; and the suffering of the

10–11f1.3; landslides resulting from,

present in relation to the people and

183, 184f5.12, 280n32; linking of “dam”

spaces of the past, 146–47; and the

with the geographical designation

symbolic Chinese body, 146. See also

“Three Gorges,” 9; massive internal

trauma

migration resulting from, 167–71, 202, 213–14, 216–23, 226, 228–29, 234;

Tan Wenxing, 62

as a monument to the imperialist-

techno-poetic landscape, 247n48; and

modernist exploitation of nature,

the cultural landscape of the Three

16–17, 42, 129, 149, 157, 236–38;

Gorges, 19–22, 25–26, 236–37; and

opposition to, 8, 242n9; tourism in

the figure of the Chinese tracker in

the reservoir of, 1–4

the Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co.

Three Gorges Dam Migration Scroll (Ji),

advertisement, 123f3.14, 133, 135,

216–17f6.9; consumer goods and

135f4.3, 158–59; Hersey’s appropriation

domestic objects featured in, 217,

of Li Bai’s “Setting Out at Dawn from

218ff6.10–6.11; and displacement and

Baidicheng,” 161–62; and landscape

alienation, 219–20, 219f6.12; and

as a form of framing and enframing,

Jiang Zhaohe’s Refugees handscroll,

128; and Mao Zedong’s “Swimming,”

283n25; and the liumin tu (tradition

84–87

of paintings of refugees), 221; and

Ten Thousand Li of the Yangzi River (Cherney), 238–39fIV.1, 238–40 Thomson, John, 126

the panoramic temporality of the handscroll format, 217; title of, 284n32

320

index

Through the Yang-tse Gorges (Little): on

trauma: Freudian model of, 201, 207–8;

Chinese superstition, 151–52, 155;

retrospective pull of, 282–83n15; and

on mining in Sichuan, 269n78; and

scholarly views of empathy, 282n5;

the textual and graphic reinscription

suffering of Chinese laborers, 146–47,

of the Upper Yangzi, 108–9, 108f3.7; on the tracker, 130, 139, 143; and the Updated Compendium, 119 tourism: Blakiston’s map as an image of

276–77n6 travel writing: 55, 66, 72, 132, 154, 257n24. See also Bird, Isabella; Little, Archibald; Mennie, Donald;

the natural world as object of touristic

steamships on the Yangzi; Through the

consumption, 124–25; Chinese travel

Yang-tse Gorges; tourism; The Yangtsze

accounts in the Republican era,

and Its Problems; youji (travel diary,

267n63; Three Gorges Dam reservoir

essay)

as a destination of, 1–4, 196; and travelers on the middle and Upper

“The Two Palisades of Qutang” (Du Fu), 10–11, 45–47

Yangzi in 1931, 122; travel poster for Butterfield & Swire, 122, 123f3.13. See

Updated Compendium of Illustrated Guides to

also steamships on the Yangzi; travel

the Yangzi in Sichuan (compilation by

writing; youji (travel diary, essay)

Yang Baoshan), 119; Guo Zhonshun’s

trace. See ji (trace)

preface to, 119; and the reinscription

trackers: assimilation of native ways of

of the Yangzi and its gorges as a

seeing of, 141–42, 150–53; Chinese

Chinese landscapes, 117–20, 117f3.11,

words for, 269n3; and the discourse

118f3.12, 121

of endangerment, 20, 130–33; haozi (work songs) of, 131, 141–42, 269–

Varsano, Paula, 15, 32, 34

70n4, 272–73n38, 273n39; and images

Volk, Gregory, 282n13

of penetration in colonial discourse,

von Glahn, Richard, 44

145–46, 268n69; Isabella Bird on, 143– 47, 156, 168, 169, 201–2, 230, 272n36,

Wang, Ban, 85, 181

273n39; as a limit case for what it

ways of seeing: assimilation of native

means to be human, 139–40, 146, 149,

ways of seeing of, 141–42, 150–53;

154–58; and literati representations

and the experience of viewing a

of the Three Gorges, 131, 158–59,

traditional handscroll evoked by Jia

269–70n4; as a post-Revolution-era

Zhangke, 170, 189–90, 197; and the

symbol of proletarian fortitude,

experience of viewing a traditional

270n7; and racially divided modes of

handscroll evoked by Yun-fei Ji, 219;

labor, 104, 136–43; self-imaging of,

and Jia Zhangke’s mode of viewing,

141–42; work of, 135–37, 143–44, 156,

169–76, 277n11; and landscape as

160. See also A Single Pebble

a way to frame the world it seeks

index

321

to possess, 124–25, 128, 150–51;

Wu, Shellen Xiao, 98, 245n31

techno-poetics, 19–21; and Yun-

Wu Wenguang, 276n6

Fei Ji’s acknowledgment of the physical and psychic experiences

xiandi 現地 (current site) research:

of displacement, 214, 219–20, 226.

on Du Fu, 72, 256n14, 256n16; and

See also aesthetic systems; Chinese

the spatial logic of “famous sites”

aesthetic thought; imperial view of

(shengji), 63. See also Du Fu Kuizhoushi

landscape; inscriptional landscape

xiandi yanjiu

tradition; Jia Zhangke’s visual system; landscape representation;

xing 興 (stirring): and Du Fu’s “Autumn Stirrings” (qiuxing), 34–35, 250n31;

landscape representation and the

as one of the Six Principles (liuyi)

production of space; techno-poetic

in the “Great Preface” (daxu) of the

landscape

Book of Odes, 34–35; and Yu Xie’s

White Crane Ridge (Baiheliang): ancient carvings of fish and inscriptions at, 40–42, 224–25; underwater museum at, 42, 131, 235–36

“resurrecting” of Du Fu’s Dongtun lofty retreat, 70–71 xu 虛 (empty, unfounded, imagined), 18, 32–33

White, Richard, 98, 247n48

xu 墟 (mound, ruin), 70, 258n33

Winichakul, Thongchai, 113

Xuanzong emperor, 28, 29, 248–49n12

Woodhead, H. G. W. See The Yangtsze and Its Problems Worster, Donald, 125 “Writing My Feelings While Travelling at Night” (Du Fu), 48, 51 Wuchuan lu (Record of a Wu Boat) (Fan Chengda), 66, 78–80, 83 Wu Gorge, 3, 30; on Clouds and Waves in

Yaeger, Patricia, 20 The Yangtsze and Its Problems (Woodhead), 267n63; Chinese people likened to animals in, 135–36, 270n10; Yangtsze Rapid Steamship Co. advertisement from, 122, 123f3.14, 124, 133, 135, 135f4.3

the [Yangzi] Gorge of Wushan hanging-

Yee, Cordell, 120

scroll painting, 80, 82f2.5; and Du

Yip, Frances, 190–93, 195–96, 281n40

Fu’s Lofty Retreats at Dongtun,

youji 遊記 (travel diary, essay), 55, 65–67,

56; on The Shu River handscroll,

257nn24–25; See also Wuchuan lu

8l, 81f2.4; Song Yu’s Yang Terrace

(Record of a Wu Boat)

located in, 51; and the tradition of “Mt. Wu paintings” (Wushan tu)

Yu Xie, and Li Xiang’s reconstruction of Du Fu’s Lofty Retreat, 68–73

paintings, 80, 83, 238–39. See also Mt.

Yu Xin, 52, 253n64, 254n74

Wu, and its goddess

Yuefu shiji (compiled by Guo Maoqian),

Wu Hung, 26, 61, 70, 221, 280n37, 284n35

76, 261n64 “Yu’s Shrine” (Du Fu), 43–48

322

Yu the Great: as a Confucian exemplar,

index

Yu the Great Mythology Park (Dayu

44, 251n33; Du Fu on his power,

shenhuayuan), 36–42, 84, 131, 183,

47–49; flood control by, 36, 251n34;

188, 236; Plant Memorial contrasted

“gait of Yu” (Yubu), 48, 253n59;

with, 40

landmarks associated with his feats on The Shu River handscroll, 60, 65; Three Gorges mytho-historically created by, 18, 21, 36, 78; traced in Du Fu’s “Yu’s Shrine,” 43–48

Zhuangzi, image of the “Potter’s Wheel” (taojun) in, 45, 46, 252n54 Zhu Mu, 65

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

Selected Titles (Complete list at: http://www.columbia.edu/weai.columbia.edu/publications/studies-weai/) Electrified Voices: How the Telephone, Phonograph, and Radio Shaped Modern Japan, 1868–1945, by Kerim Yasar. Columbia University Press, 2018. The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, by Emily Baum. University of Chicago Press, 2018. Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan, by Robert Tuck. Columbia University Press, 2018. Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet, by Max Oidtmann. Columbia University Press, 2018. The Battle for Fortune: State-Led Development, Personhood, and Power among Tibetans in China, by Charlene Makley. Cornell University Press, 2018. Aesthetic Life: Beauty and Art in Modern Japan, by Miya Mizuta Lippit. Harvard University Asia Center, 2018. China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965, by Philip Thai. Columbia University Press, 2018. Where the Party Rules: The Rank and File of China’s Authoritarian State, by Daniel Koss. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives, by Chad Diehl. Cornell University Press, 2018. China’s Philological Turn: Scholars, Textualism, and the Dao in the Eighteenth Century, by Ori Sela. Columbia University Press, 2018. Making Time: Astronomical Time Measurement in Tokugawa Japan, by Yulia Frumer. University of Chicago Press, 2018. Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China, by Diana Fu. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Post-Fascist Japan: Political Culture in Kamakura after the Second World War, by Laura Hein. Bloomsbury, 2018. China’s Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927–1949, by Brian Tsui. Cambridge University Press, 2018. Promiscuous Media: Film and Visual Culture in Imperial Japan, 1926–1945, by Hikari Hori. Cornell University Press, 2018. The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies, by Alexander Zahlten. Duke University Press, 2017.

The Chinese Typewriter: A History, by Thomas S. Mullaney. The MIT Press, 2017. Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine, by Hilary A. Smith. Stanford University Press, 2017. Borrowing Together: Microfinance and Cultivating Social Ties, by Becky Yang Hsu. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Food of Sinful Demons: Meat, Vegetarianism, and the Limits of Buddhism in Tibet, by Geoffrey Barstow. Columbia University Press, 2017. Youth for Nation: Culture and Protest in Cold War South Korea, by Charles R. Kim. University of Hawaii Press, 2017. Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965, by Nicolai Volland. Columbia University Press, 2017. Yokohama and the Silk Trade: How Eastern Japan Became the Primary Economic Region of Japan, 1843–1893, by Yasuhiro Makimura. Lexington Books, 2017. The Social Life of Inkstones: Artisans and Scholars in Early Qing China, by Dorothy Ko. University of Washington Press, 2017. Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine: Evolutionary Theory and Religion in Modern Japan, by G. Clinton Godart. University of Hawaii Press, 2017. Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence, by Sheena Chestnut Greitens. Cambridge University Press, 2016. The Cultural Revolution on Trial: Mao and the Gang of Four, by Alexander C. Cook. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Inheritance of Loss: China, Japan, and the Political Economy of Redemption After Empire, by Yukiko Koga. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers, by Yoshikuni Igarashi. Columbia University Press, 2016. Samurai to Soldier: Remaking Military Service in Nineteenth-Century Japan, by D. Colin Jaundrill. Cornell University Press, 2016. The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China, by Guobin Yang. Columbia University Press, 2016. Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Government Accountability in Japan and South Korea, by Celeste L. Arrington. Cornell University Press, 2016. Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia, by Kathlene Baldanza. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Ethnic Conflict and Protest in Tibet and Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s West, coedited by Ben Hillman and Gray Tuttle. Columbia University Press, 2016. One Hundred Million Philosophers: Science of Thought and the Culture of Democracy in Postwar Japan, by Adam Bronson. University of Hawaii Press, 2016. Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia: The Zheng Family and the Shaping of the Modern World, c. 1620–1720, by Xing Hang. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics, by Li Chen. Columbia University Press, 2016. Imperial Genus: The Formation and Limits of the Human in Modern Korea and Japan, by Travis Workman. University of California Press, 2015. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar, by Akiko Takenaka. University of Hawaii Press, 2015. The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China, by Christopher Rea. University of California Press, 2015. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan, by Federico Marcon. University of Chicago Press, 2015. The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952, by Reto Hofmann. Cornell University Press, 2015. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920, by Shellen Xiao Wu. Stanford University Press, 2015.