Introduction: New Sources of Geographic Knowledge

These two articles, both by early career scholars, explore how people experienced space and place in middle-period China. In examining epitaphs written during the Liao dynasty (907–1125) about the emperor's moving court, Lance Pursey, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Birmingham, U.K. who is working with Naomi Standen as his supervisor, draws on the concept of counter-mapping to suggest an alternative view of space, one that does not divide the world into prefectures and their subdivisions. In contrast, Lee Tsonghan, an associate professor at National Taiwan Normal University, focuses on a single individual who wrote about one of those subdivisions—the township (zhen 鎮)—where he lived during the final decades of the Southern Song. Featuring close readings of primary sources, both articles propose far-reaching conclusions.

The first article tackles a particularly difficult subject. All readers of this journal know just how limited the source base for the Liao dynasty (907–1125) is. One could, of course, check Tang, Five Dynasties, and Song sources, especially since so much of Liao territory came under Chinese rule at one point or another, and the "Dili zhi" 地理志 (best not translated as "Geography Monograph," as Pursey explains) of the dynastic history of the Liao (Liao shi 遼史) is certainly an obvious place to start. But it, too, sheds minimal light on indigenous views of geographic knowledge because it was compiled centuries after the fall of the Liao and mostly on the basis of Song sources. No one source reveals how the people living under Liao-dynasty rule, a mixed population of descended from Kitan, Chinese, Bohai, and Uighur ancestors (and other groups as well), might have thought about the spaces they inhabited.¹

Lance Pursey realized that Liao-dynasty epitaphs written in Chinese offer some important leads. In the course of studying all published Liao-dynasty epitaphs (216 in total) for his dissertation, he found that thirty-three referred to the "moving court," which corresponded to various Chinese terms for the Liao emperor and his entourage as they went from place to place. Because the epitaphs were written during, not after, the Liao dynasty, they provide crucial information about contemporary understandings of geography.

As he closely analyzes the phrasing about the moving court, Pursey does not attribute any of the epitaphs to either ethnically Chinese or Kitan authors. Here he is following the lead of recent scholars who have come to appreciate how much cultural mixing took place under the Liao. Pamela Crossley's essay in Perspectives on the Liao explored the family of Han Derang 韓德讓 (940–1011, also known as Yelü Longyun 耶律隆運). His ethnically Han family spoke Kitan and adopted many Kitan ways as they rose to become the most powerful Han'er 漢兒 (meaning "Chinese serving the Kitan") family in the Liao empire.² Realizing that the multiple peoples living under Liao rule spoke a variety of languages and followed multiple customs, historians in recent years have come to use the word "Liao" to refer to their shared practices—as distinct from "Kitan," which specifically denotes the practices of the tribe, including the founders of the Liao dynasty, who identified as Kitan.

Pursey's wide-ranging reading in the secondary literature about geography allows him to introduce the intriguing idea of "countermapping," and he draws on Nancy Lee Peluso's scholarship to suggest how the indigenous Liao view of geography broke with Song-dynasty Chinese hierarchies of prefecture and county. Lance Pursey debated whether to provide Chinese-style information about Shen Kuo's location (of course, modern scholars use these data to construct GIS maps, too) or to stick solely to Liao nomenclature in order to remain more faithful to the countermapping ideal. Ultimately, he included both the Chinese-style information and the indigenous view as expressed in the epitaphs because both are of interest to modern scholars.

Of course, much about the epitaphs remains mysterious. When someone in the moving court died, how did the living arrange for burial of the deceased? Did everyone have a Chinese-style burial with an epitaph? Who chose the wording of the epitaph? Did the craftsmen work with model...