Many readers will already be familiar with The Landscape of Words, which was awarded the Levenson Prize in the pre-1900 category for 2010, and has now been extensively reviewed. Robert E. Harrist's elegant study of moya or “polished cliff carving” is organized around four case studies. The first, “Public Works and Public Writing at the Stone Gate,” emphasizes the importance of intertextuality and physical proximity in a series of public inscriptions related to the Stone Gate Tunnel in northern Sichuan. The second, “Roaming with Immortals on Cloud Peak Mountain,” argues that the project associated with Zheng Daozhao of placing more than a dozen moya around three mountains in northern Shandong province transformed the landscape into a Daoist realm. In chapter 3, “The Virtual Stele on Mount Tie and the Merits of Scale,” Harrist takes up a group of Buddhist inscriptions in Shandong Province identified with the monk Seng'an Daoyi. Here, the author deftly evokes the disorientation imposed on the reader of the text by the monumental calligraphy. And the subject of chapter 4, “Imperial Writing and the Ascent of Mount Tai,” is the inscription commemorating the performance of the feng and shan rites on Mount Tai by the Tang emperor Xuanzong. As in each of the previous case studies, historical precedent, contemporary context, processes of production and reception, as well as questions of intention and motivation are meticulously delineated.
In The Landscape of Words, Harrist not only attends to the primary object of his inquiry, the texts, he also deepens our understanding of their form by bringing to bear a wealth of recent archaeological findings and scholarship on mortuary, public, and religious visual culture from the second to the eighth century. The author also walked the terrain to read the often difficult to access writings. He grappled with issues of illegibility and the effect of encountering really big rock-engraved inscriptions. His attention to detail (including translations of all of the texts discussed) and command of the broad conceptual issues results in a skillful work of modern art historical scholarship.
Yet, one might also understand The Landscape of Words as the extension of an interest among Qing dynasty antiquarian scholars to move beyond reproductions (ink rubbings and transcriptions) in the study of inscriptions to engage with the original texts in situ. The result is a turn toward an archaeological approach to the traditional study of history and epigraphy. Qing scholars—many quoted in Harrist's text—journeyed to renowned sites, as did Harrist, to personally engage with famous inscriptions and their physical context, and to record their findings and responses. Scholarship and pilgrimage formed the basis for the imaginative creation of a lineage of Chinese writing. The Landscape of Words rings with the emotions evoked by the overwhelming vistas and scale of the mountain sites and the author's sympathetic response to the tradition of making and appreciating moya.
The role of Qing antiquarianism for our understanding of Chinese history and epigraphy has been recently and profitably discussed (see Rethinking Recarving: Ideals, Practices, and Problems of the ‘Wu Family Shrines’ and Han China, ed. Cary Y. Liu [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008]). The issue is not the “correctness” of the opinions of Qing scholars, but an acknowledgment of the specific historical circumstances and motivations out of which their enormously influential views were formed. A future task for those who would build on Harrist's achievements might be to attend to the way scholars and schools of Qing antiquarian studies placed their indelible stamp on how we study and interpret inscriptions and images.
Moya were public statements. Harrist understands the fundamentally rhetorical nature of the texts—the personal and political motivations of the sponsors—and the problem of mistaking rhetoric for fact. Actual beliefs or intentions are not always provided by a text. In fact, as Martin Powers brilliantly demonstrated nearly twenty years ago (Art and Political Expression in early China [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991]), grasping the rhetorical context of any text or image is the key to explicating the goals of makers and the reception of their productions. While some, perhaps many, would demur (see Amy McNair, review of The Landscape of Words, Art Bulletin 91, no. 2 [June 2009]: 231), the task of further elucidating the rhetoric of moya, so well initiated by Harrist, remains a challenge for future scholarship.
Finally, one should note the elephant in the room: relatively few people could read and comprehend inscriptions such as moya in this time period. Functional literacy—the ability to read and write characters necessary for a trade, for example—was no doubt significant in premodern China. But scholarship on Chinese writing often assumes widespread literacy or, worse, the literati conceit that those who were well educated were the only people who really counted. While understandable, there is no requirement for historians to continue to pay deference to such a viewpoint. Harrist attends to the issue indirectly through attention to the nontextual, visual, and somatic dimensions of the reception of moya. But the task of putting literacy in its proper historical perspective has only begun.
