The pictorial mapping and imperialization of epigraphic landscapes in eighteenth-century China.
详细信息
文摘
Compiled in 1771 to document Manchu emperors' southern processions, Magnificent Ceremonies of the Southern Inspection Tours can be considered an imperialistic campaign that aimed at placing Qing imperial patrimonies and monuments, such as temporary palaces and stele pavilions, on the tourist map and promoting them as cultic objects for the masses to worship. Probably inspired by this mapping project, the literati artist Huang Yi (1744--1802) created a series of topographic paintings to record ancient steles during his archaeological expeditions in northern China.;These mapping projects were, in fact, visual representations of two competing movements in the eighteenth century. One was Han-Chinese literati's collective effort to museumize long forgotten ancient steles and advocate them as alternative models to challenge the calligraphic orthodoxy, known as tiexue (model-book calligraphy). The other was the Qing court's mass construction of new steles to monumentalize the tiexue tradition and imperialize China's physical and cultural landscape.;Driven by such ambitions, the court produced an array of war memorials to celebrate successful military campaigns along borderlands and deliberately misplaced them in the empire-wide institution for civil education, or the system of government schools and Confucian temples. By installing these military monuments in civil institutions, the court transgressed the long-standing boundary between the civil and military realm and subverted the traditional Han-Chinese values that privileged civil merits over military ones. Concurrently, numerous steles were erected to commemorate imperial tours. Inscribed with lyrical poems by Manchu emperors, these steles spread from one popular scenic site to another and intruded into a leisure landscape that had long been monopolized by literati-travelers to immortalize their on-site travel literature.;The Qing monuments not only physically and symbolically reshaped the landscape, but also altered the original image of imperial steles as rare and mysterious monoliths. Their omnipresence and their availability to the public transformed them into a new form of mass communication and propaganda. Chinese literati's efforts to restore the legacy of ancient monuments might have been a countermeasure against such excessive use of steles by the court to regain their dominance over the physical and cultural space of China's historic sites.