Reading the Textured Landscape: Qian Qianyi's (1582-1664) Reflections on Yellow Mountain

Abstract

Conventional interpretative frameworks by which seventeenth-century youji (travel records) are understood in secondary scholarship have tended to produce impoverished readings of the genre, failing to take into account the degree to which landscape-representation is a creative process, informed by a variety of factors specific to particular social and cultural settings. This study presents a close examination of one such essay, the ‘You Huangshan ji’ [Record of My Travels at Yellow Mountain], composed by the noted poet, official and literary historian Qian Qianyi in 1642. It seeks to read the landscape of Qian's essay as a product of a complex representational tradition, rather than as an existing and empirically-verifiable space. Within the context of a discussion of élite self-representation during the late-Ming period (1550-1644), the essay is shown to be an important means by which Qian can evince his appropriate engagement both with the natural world, and with selected works of the literary canon. Far more than a product of firsthand observation, Qian Qianyi's record exists at the intersection between traditional cosmology, late-Ming aesthetic values and religious traditions, all of which is filtered through the memory and imagination of one of the greatest literary historians of his generation. It is argued here that in the case of this essay at least, recognition of landscape-representation as an active process of selection and transformation offers a far more sophisticated and nuanced reading both of the Mountain, and of the late-Ming world. This project includes the first complete English-language translation, and represents the first full-length critical study of Qian Qianyi’s essay to appear in any language.