Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue 南嶽) in Medieval China (review)

Chinese sacred geography was introduced to Western readers by Édouard Chavannes, whose study of the Eastern Sacred Peak remains unsurpassed a century later.¹ Together with Michel Soymié's "Le Lofeou chan: étude de géographie religieuse,"² Le T'ai chan paved the way for a subfield in Chinese studies today that examines how space was structured and sacralized by the imperial cult, local cults, Daoism, and the transposed Indian worldview of Chinese Buddhism, including further comprehensive histories of single sites. In Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak, James Robson takes up anew the challenge of laying out the full panorama of one of the great "sacred peaks" of China in all its topographic, socio-religious, and political complexity.

Collectively the sacred peaks constitute the highest level of several hierarchical sets of natural features that demarcate the religious landscape of China. The idea of attributing ranks of precedence to places reflects their role in the local administration of the unseen ritual realm. In addition to this vertical taxonomy, sites are classified in sometimes overlapping religious categories. Thus the Southern Peak is simultaneously a Daoist auspicious site and a Buddhist Pure Land. Places also form interrelated networks: Grotto-Heavens communicate with one another by means of connecting tunnels; the topographic layout of the terrestrial realm corresponds with stellar regions above.

Since early times—the worship of peaks 嶽 is attested in oracle bones of the Shang period (ca. 1600-1045 B.C.)—various configurations of sacred peaks have fixed the cosmological orientation of the Chinese empire, which was conceived as a vast ritual area. Initially numbering four peaks, the set expanded to five in the Warring States period (475-221). This latter configuration was enshrined through the penchant of men of the Former Han (202 B.C.-A.D. 23) for structuring the universe into correlated sets of five entities. In the book under review Robson begins by tracing the ritual concept and geographical disposition of the five directional peaks, which represent the four cardinal points and the center, from the earliest attested sources in the second century B.C. Then, on the basis of an exhaustive examination of the documentary sources, he explores the thorny question of the localization of the Southern Peak. Assessing the early evidence is complicated because Han authors and editors tended to fabricate venerable institutions by projecting contemporary practices into antiquity. Robson succeeds admirably in navigating the topographies of the mountain's physical and mythical landscapes, not to mention its "true" (that is, esoteric) form. Disconcertingly for modern students of sacred geography, for whom the physical, mythical, and mystic perspectives of a place are situated on disparate conceptual planes, many premodern geographical narratives, in China and elsewhere, barely differentiate between these planes.

The localization of the Southern Peak stabilizes only with the reunification of the Chinese empire under the Sui dynasty (581-618). Its peregrinations prior to that date reflect several factors such as shifting geographical foci in the celebration of the imperial rites, competing claims by local and sectarian cults, and the redefined boundaries of the period of division under the Northern and Southern dynasties (220-589). The title finally settles on the mountain, or more precisely the mountain range named Hengshan 衡山. Situated in the center of today's Hunan province, Hengshan belongs to the cultural orbit of the ancient kingdom of Chu 楚. Its central peak is named for the fire god Zhurong 祝融, a Chu deity and potent symbol of the south, suggesting an albeit unsubstantiated association with the Chu pantheon (pp. 115-22).

The Hengshan chain of mountains was viewed as forming a natural wall that guards the southern frontier of the Chinese empire. It was also envisaged as a projection on earth of the constellation of the Southern Palace 南宮. Occasionally, the Son of Heaven would visit the Sacred Peaks in an imperial progress that allowed him to...