It has long been observed that in China's lengthy history two periods are especially remarkable as episodes of wide-ranging cultural transformation consequent to a deep engagement with a foreign episteme: the early Middle Ages, with its influx of Buddhism, and the period of “Westernization,” from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Few scholars, however, have undertaken a comparative study of the processes of cultural contact during these two periods. Thus, a book that juxtaposes travel literature from these widely divergent, yet—the book argues—fundamentally similar eras arouses curiosity: what will it tell us about deeper structures of (literary) encounters with the foreign and the strange, and about patterns of adaptation and the integration of new knowledge?
This book attempts to answer the first of these questions, although not the second. Notwithstanding the author's claims about “breaking boundaries that fragment and compartmentalize knowledge in academe” (p. 7) or the inclusion of materials from religious traditions, the aims of the book remain squarely within the field of literary studies. Within this field, it makes marked contributions to the study of a number of early medieval and early modern genres.
The author has divided the volume into two parts, corresponding to the two periods. The first part devotes three chapters to early medieval writings on space, place, and their transcendence. Chapter 1 analyzes some of the most famous pieces of fourth-century landscape poetry, reading them against Buddhist and Daoist writings of the era to elucidate their discourse on vision and imagination. Chapter 2 juxtaposes an extended reading of Faxian's record of his pilgrimage to India with an analysis of several fu (“poetic expositions”) on southern Chinese military expeditions to the north. In this chapter, the author elaborates the main thesis of the book: that travel writers of this era developed two enduring frameworks of engagement with the strange and the unknown, setting conceptual schemata that shaped the narrative structure of later Chinese travel writing. The two frameworks she identifies are, first, a historical engagement with place (“the seeing of the past in the present,” p. 143) and, second, a “heaven versus hell” binary, that is, the tendency of travel writers to elevate their travel experiences by describing foreign places as either paradisiacal or hellish. These two frameworks, however, encompass such a wide range of experience and expression that one wonders whether they indeed offer specific schemata for conceptualizing place, or whether they are instead convenient shorthand characterizations of common poles of travel experience (temporal/social and transcendent/intensely personal). Already the close reading of Xie Lingyun's landscape poetry in chapter 3 fails to substantiate the thesis, as Xie's poetry avoids the paradisiacal and hellish modes so consistently that the author settles for characterizing its general mood as “purgatory.”
The thesis fares slightly better in the two chapters of the book's second part, devoted to nineteenth-century travel writing. Chapter 4 offers a rich reading of late nineteenth-century records of travels to Western countries. Not surprisingly, the historical “mode of seeing” of older, domestic travelogues did not lend itself well to countries that had not been described before. The author therefore introduces a new “utilitarian mode” (p. 159), paired with the new “rhetorical schema” of the “love of the strange” (p. 166). In contrast, the “heaven and hell” paradigm does prove effective as a mode of textual analysis, and it leads the author to the important proposition that the mostly paradisiacal descriptions of the Western metropolis found in nineteenth-century Chinese travelogues may be explained by the circumstance that the travelers were shown only “the glossy side of things, the glittering surface” (p. 210). Chapter 5, finally, departs from the question of schemata altogether to discuss the use of shi poetry in late nineteenth-century writings on encounters with the strange—a very important matter for understanding both the nature of shi poetry and the epistemic functions of literature in this encounter. Tian shows that shi poetry functions both to familiarize the strange and to give voice to the complications and contradictions of trying to understand the unfamiliar.
The richness and diversity of this book are increased by a number of short essays that provide insightful analyses of poetry as well as of novels, and by a full, annotated translation of Xie Lingyun's Zhuanzhengfu in the appendix. These bonuses enhance the many masterful translations and in-depth interpretations in the main text. It is in these erudite, sensitive readings of literary texts that the main value of this book lies, rather than in the attempt (contrived, in my eyes) to position the texts within a larger question about cultural continuity in Chinese engagements with the unknown. In addition, although it is important to demonstrate the special position of poetry in this thematic field, modes of narrating the strange and discourses on the experience of travel have been developed more consistently in prose. Finally, it would seem difficult to mount an argument for literary continuities between the sixth and nineteenth centuries without addressing the intervening period, especially the explorations of Xu Xiake during the late Ming.
Readers of this book will be rewarded with numerous insights into a wide range of Chinese literary works and genres. Scholars without a solid background in Chinese literature, be they comparative scholars of travel literature or historians of China interested in cultural continuities, may feel somewhat disoriented, or even come away with misconceptions. It is for this reason that I wish the author had opted for a less ambitious, more straightforward way of integrating her stunningly diverse literary scholarship into a single book. Contrary to the author's assertion, this is not an interdisciplinary study, but rather a supreme achievement in literary studies. Both the book and its potential readers might have been better served if it had been presented as such.
