The City in a Garden: The Emergence of the Geo-Poetic Collection in Dong Sigao's 'One Hundred Poems on West Lake'

The city has become a central focus of scholarship on the cultural history of Song dynasty China. Regarded as a period of "urban revolution," during this time some of the largest cities in the world came to flourish within the boundaries of the empire. Literary genres, however, adapted only slowly to this rapid pace of cultural and spatial change. Gradually, writers expanded the scope of what kinds of urban space and dwellers could be represented within established genres and invented new hybrid forms to make the everyday life of cities visible in ways previously unimaginable. This article contends that the collection, One Hundred Poems on West Lake (Xihu baiyong 西湖百詠), by the "Rivers and Lakes" (jianghu 江湖) poet Dong Sigao 董嗣杲 (active 1260–1276), represents a significant breakthrough in the representation of urban space in classical Chinese poetry. Historically well-positioned to document the rise of Hangzhou 杭州 at the peak of its development in the thirteenth century, he significantly chose to do so by composing what is arguably the city's first poetic walking-guide. He devised a new geo-poetic form comprised of one hundred septasyllabic regulated verse poems with detailed geographic notes, which he arranged into a circular itinerary around West Lake. Within this walking circuit, Dong regarded the gardens of West Lake as extensions of the city through his attention to the influx of "sightseers" (youren 游人) and the unprecedented impact of the court and market on the built environment. The goal of this article is to trace how Dong Sigao made the city in the garden visible through the incremental development of this new form, the geo-poetic collection.

The nature and literary achievement of Dong's literary milestone can only be fully understood by examining how his hundred-poem collection developed from earlier medieval models of writing about gardens. For in the preface to his walking guide to West Lake, Dong contrasted his work with an earlier eleventh-century collection, Matching Yang Pan's One Hundred Poems on West Lake (He Yang Pan Xihu baiyong) 和楊蟠西湖百詠 composed by Yang Pan 楊蟠 (1027–?) and Guo Xiangzheng 郭祥正 (1035–1113) in 1089–1090. The poems in this earlier collection, in turn, clearly drew on the model of the Tang estate poem associated with medieval poet Wang Wei's 王維 (692–761) Wang River Collection (Wangchuan ji 輞川集). As perhaps the earliest example in the Chinese literary tradition of a poetic sequence used to describe a programmatic walking itinerary of a garden, the Wang River Collection exerted a profound influence on generations of poets who wrote on garden spaces throughout the Song dynasty. But whereas the aesthetics of the Tang estate poem called for the careful construction of self-contained worlds that were socially exclusive and symbolically separate from capital and city life, even if the estates they described were physically located in the nearby suburbs of the Tang capital Chang'an, these two eleventh- and thirteenth-century collections by successive stages unveiled the integration of the city of Hangzhou within the gardens and other sites of West Lake.¹

Dong Sigao begins to articulate new criterion for describing the sites of West Lake in the preface to his collection dated to 1272. Dong first acknowledges that his was not the first attempt to describe West Lake in the form of a hundred-poem collection before proceeding to take his predecessors to task for their failure to fully capture the multi-faceted beauty of West Lake and Hangzhou's concomitant rise. Comparing his own work to the Northern Song collection of Yang and Guo, he finds his predecessors deficient in two main areas, the close empirical observation of concrete details and the perspective of the local:

Long have I resided here, becoming an old acquaintance with the landscape. Every inch of ground that my feet have tread upon has become the topic for my poems set to Tang-dynasty regulated verse. Though over the past twenty years or more I've merely scraped together one hundred poems in all, they all lodge my intentions, drawing from what...