James M. Hargett hD - Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools: The History of Travel Literature in Imperial China

JADE MOUNTAINS & CINNABAR POOLS

JADE
MOUNTAINS &
CINNABAR
POOLS

THE HISTORY OF TRAVEL LITERATURE
IN IMPERIAL CHINA

JAMES M. HARGETT

A Samuel and Althea Stroum Book

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

Seattle

Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools was supported by generous grants from the Samuel and Althea Stroum Endowed Book Fund and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

Copyright 2018 by the University of Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States of America

Design by Katrina Noble

Composed in Minion Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

COVER ARTWORK: (front) After Tang Yin (Chinese, 14701524), Landscape for Zhao Yipeng. Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk, 71.1 139.7 cm. Purchase, Bequest of Dorothy Graham Bennett. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 67.6.1. (back) Xuanzang on His Journey to the West (Xuanzang xixing tu ), Wikimedia Commons.

FRONTISPIECE: One of the few surviving calligraphy samples written by Xu Xiake (15871641), which reproduces a text attributed to Tao Yuanming (or Tao Qian; 365427) concerning the exemplary friendship bond between two famous figures of antiquity: Bao Shuya (d. 644 BCE) and Guan Zhong (ca. 720645 BCE). The first line reads: To come to know someone has never been easy, but to really know someone is truly difficult (, ). Calligraphy sample courtesy of the Xu Xiake Research Society, Jiangyin, Jiangsu, Peoples Republic of China.

DEDICATION PHOTOGRAPH: Rick (left) and author, Louisville, Kentucky, 2009.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

www.washington.edu/uwpress

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Hargett, James M. (James Morris), author.

Title: Jade mountains and cinnabar pools : the history of travel literature in imperial China / James M. Hargett.

Description: Seattle, WA : University of Washington Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018011972 (print) | LCCN 2018043870 (ebook) | ISBN 9780295744483 (ebook) | ISBN 9780295744469 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780295744476 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Travel writingChinaHistory. | Travelers writings, ChineseHistory and criticism

Classification: LCC PL2278.5.T72 (ebook) | LCC PL2278.5.T72 H37 2018 (print) | ddC 895.109/32dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011972

In memory of

Richard (Rick) Sterman Hutchison

29 June 19476 March 2011

The best man I ever knew;

The best friend I ever had.

, .

Travelingit leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.

TRADITIONALLY ATTRIBUTED TO MUHAMMAD IBN BATTUTA (130468 OR 69)

This is the first book-length history written in English or any other European language of traditional Chinese travel literature. The chronological breadth is vast, extending from the Six Dynasties period (220589) to the late Ming dynasty (13681644). Although this book is intended primarily for colleagues and students in the field of Chinese literature, I have tried to keep technical sinological matters to a minimum so that specialists working in European and American travel literature and even the general reader might benefit from the results of this investigation.

There are few published critical histories of traditional Chinese literature that cover extended periods of time. The reason for this lacuna revealed itself during the preparation of this book: writing literary history poses daunting challenges. The biggest question of all, of course, is, How should one write a literary history? What are the priorities? What should be included and what excluded? How does one structure and organize a literary history? And how exactly do we define what is literary and distinguish the good literature from all the rest?

As many scholars before me have observed, there are diverse ways of organizing and talking about that enormous and heterogeneous body of written material we call literature. Usually, one of two approaches is adopted and almost always with some modification and tweaking involved: either the material is arranged according to form or type (the novel and its development in England), which is called genre study; or else different genres of literature are discussed in a chronological framework that is usually organized by period(s) (Victorian Period Literature, 18371990), which is usually referred to as literary history. This investigation combines both approaches in that it seeks to trace the development of a type of prose literaturetravel writingin China from about the fourth to the early seventeenth centuries. I certainly could have organized my study of ancient Chinese travel literature in other ways. For instance, I could have followed the so-called literary-biography approach and concentrated on key and influential authors, or I could have adopted the historical-cultural approach, which seeks to interpret the literary work in its historical and cultural contextto get inside the text and the author and the time in which he or she lived. My approach is to consider travel literature as a distinct literary form and then to look at it through different periods of development. The details of this process are outlined and explained in the introduction.

The most essential, characteristic elements of prose travel literature in China emerged during the Six Dynasties. Many of these key features, along with some new ones that came afterward, will be identified in chapter 1 and then traced in the works of subsequent writers in the chapters that follow. What is uniquely fascinating about Chinese travel literature, however, is that many authors, while writing within the general, traditional form and structure of the genre established in the Six Dynasties, changed and adapted it to suit their own personal tastes and needs. Presenting examples of how important and influential authors through the dynasties modified the content of their travel writing provides a systematic framework in which to discuss the material and outline the genres evolution and development over time. Moreover, highlighting how different authors changed and adapted their travel works at once eliminates the kind of generalization, homogeneity, and vagueness that sometimes weighs heavily on literary history and, on the contrary, highlights the distinctive qualities that define individual masterpieces of the genre. I am aware, of course, that there is a huge body of shilyric poetry dating from the traditional period in Chinathat deals with travel. I shall severely limit my discussion of such works in this study, however, because the lyrical-expressive modes common in travel poetry are quite different from those found in prose. For this reason, it is my view that verse about journeys in ancient China deserves treatment in a separate study.