Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools: The History of Travel Literature in Imperial China by James M. Hargett (review)

This book offers a broad survey of "Chinese travel literature" from the Six Dynasties through the late Ming period. The author primarily takes a literary approach to the subject, striving to delineate youji as a genre and tracing its path of development. Based on Northrop Frye's theory of literary genre, Hargett opts for a "dynamic or open-ended conception of genre" formulated by Dirk de Geest and Hendrik van Corp. The author argues that the genre does have "some general identifiable traits regarding form and content" (p. 12). Through tracking the "affinities" of disparate writings, he argues that "all youji literature contains a coherent and indispensable narrative of the physical experience of a journey through space toward an identifiable place, written in prose" (p. 13). Hargett's definition singles out three defining features of "Chinese travel literature": (1) a first-person account, (2) a real journey across space, and (3) a prose literary style. Following these three threads, Hargett traces the origins of the various generic features of "Chinese travel literature," youji, to the Six Dynasties and argues that its features attained "articulation" in the Tang dynasty, reaching maturity in the Song dynasty. Finally, the production of youji entered the golden age in the middle and later years of the Ming dynasty. He criticizes modern Chinese scholarship on travel literature for adopting a static approach to genre. Scholars regard travel literature invariably as writings about "appreciating landscape." But for Hargett, development of travel literature in imperial China was dynamic, undergoing changes in both its form and contents.

The book has five chapters and a postface. In chapter 1, Hargett begins to identify a number of "key elements" that define the genre of travel writings, youji. His discussion covers a few different genres: rhapsodies, letters, preface, accounts (ji), including those by Buddhists like Faxian, and the Commentary on the Waterways Treatise by Li Daoyuan. The key elements Hargett has identified in letters and rhapsodies of the Han period include "real journeys and real places in a literary and lyrical way" (p. 24), "travel narration and landscape appreciation, and expression of personal sentiments" (p. 26), as well as "scenic description-author comment" structure (pp. 28-30). Appearing in different literary genres and variegated modes of language, these features of youji, however, had not coalesced in the works of later prototypes. This variety of writing excepting a preface by Huiyuan, though containing "various traits," was not qualified to be considered the prototype youji.

Chapter 2 examines two significant developments in travel literature in the Tang dynasty, which, the author argues, were critical for youji to become an independent genre in the mid-Tang. First, it was in the Choice Blossoms from the Garden of Literature that ji became an independent literary genre. And second, during the late eighth and early ninth centuries, "the ji form evolved into a new type of descriptive prose about place" (p. 58). The genre of ji writings by Liu Zongyuan such as the "Eight Accounts" emphasizes "the physical movement of the author and by extension, the reader through a landscape" (p. 82). One significant innovation of Liu and Yuan Jie, another Tang author, was that they composed "sight-seeing-landscape ji in which emotion is drawn from scene" (p. 85). In chapter 3 Hargett argues that the youji genre reached its maturity in the Northern Song in varieties, forms, and contents. In examining the accounts by Zhang Min, Zhao Buzhi, and Su Shi, he argues that these Song writers no longer expressed their personal emotions or inner conflicts through their writings on landscape, which marks "a major turning point in the history of the genre and functions as a key factor in the maturation process that began in the eleventh century" (p. 101). An entirely new form of...