Session 189: Constructing Hierarchies of Place: Three Studies of Late Imperial Chinese Travel Writing

Organizer: Steven B. Miles, Washington University, St. Louis

Chair: Susan Mann, University of California, Davis

Discussants: Susan Mann, University of California, Davis; Laura Hostetler, University of Illinois, Chicago

Keywords: China, Ming-Qing, travel writing, local identity.

By exploring several travel accounts in different genres, the papers in this panel seek to link the insights gained from recent studies of travel writing with perspectives offered by recent scholarship on local identity and imperial ideology. While highlighting the particular historical dynamics of each case, the papers are all concerned with what might be conceived of as the cultural politics of place.

Chang reads poetry composed by the Qianlong emperor on his late eighteenth-century southern tours as ideological responses to the cultural landscape of Jiangnan. Du examines two nineteenth-century travel diaries produced by Huizhou natives who were born and raised in Suzhou and visited their native place for the first time. They described Huizhou as a backward place compared to "their" Suzhou. Miles interprets an account written by a Cantonese literati traveler through Guangxi in the seventeenth century as a moment in the construction of that province as a Cantonese frontier.

The papers presented here approach travel and the attendant production and reception of travel accounts as performative acts serving a variety of purposes: reshaping the authority of Manchu emperors over Han literary elites, reimagining a portion of the empire’s southwestern frontier as a Cantonese frontier, and repackaging a Huizhou merchant family as a cultured Suzhou lineage. Likewise, each case reveals an historical negotiation of identities and hierarchies of place of origin and destination through travel and textual production.

The Politics and Poetics of Imperial Sightseeing: The Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Tours, 1751–1784

Michael G. Chang, George Mason University

The Qianlong emperor’s own poetry provides perhaps the closest thing we have to a personal narrative of his well-known southern tours (c. 1751–1784). Organized in roughly chronological order, these poems allow the historian to examine the emperor’s ideological responses to the cultural landscapes through which he moved.

In this paper I detail how Qianlong’s southern tour poetry was largely aimed at mitigating a basic ideological tension. The renowned affluence and scenic beauty of the Lower Yangzi region might lend any southern tour the air of a pleasure junket. Besides citing the need to attend to important administrative matters, provincial officials also proffered "viewing the mountains and streams, the valleys and woods" as a justification for an imperial visit to the south. Such suggestions were problematic because they alluded to Jiangnan’s exalted status as a bastion of literati refinement and sightseeing culture. Any hint of pleasure-seeking as an underlying motive for imperial touring might undermine Qianlong’s public image as a diligent ethno-dynast who disdained the decadent habits of Han elites. However, complete disregard of Jiangnan’s scenic attractions also risked offending the cultural sensibilities and dignity of those who hailed from the region.

As this paper illustrates, Qianlong ultimately finessed the issue by writing poetry. In his prodigious verse Qianlong explicitly disavowed that his southern tours were geared towards leisurely sightseeing by depicting a series of tableaus in which his own higher intentions of realizing classically-sanctioned principles of proper governance—filiality, diligence, and benevolence—might be conspicuously revealed.

A Translocal Lineage and the Romance of Homeland Attachment: The Pans of Suzhou in Qing China

Yongtao Du, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Available scholarship on kinship practices in late imperial China tends to assume that such practices were naturally localized, hence the implication that kinship identity and local identity were coincidental and mutually reinforcing. An examination of the Suzhou Pan lineage’s sustained connection with its homeland, Huizhou, provides us with a more complicated picture. For the Pans of Suzhou, Huizhou was their native place, where their ancestral graves were located and where a substantial number of their kinsmen still lived. Meanwhile, Suzhou, where their forefathers immigrated generations before, was the local place where their social life was embedded.

Though the Pans managed to maintain a resilient kinship link across these two distant places, their local identity and kinship identity were geographically separate, and occasionally might even be in tension. This is illustrated in the travel diaries of various Suzhou Pans who traveled back to their homeland, Huizhou. Though many Pan men were sent back to sweep ancestral graves and enhance kinship links, their frequent comparisons of Huizhou customs with those of "our Suzhou," their keen interest in exploring the native place with which they had become familiar through family tales yet which they had never seen in person, and the ambivalence felt between these "Suzhou men" and their kinsmen living in Huizhou indicate that neither the local nor the kinship identities of the Suzhou Pans were left intact in the lineage’s translocal practices.

Kuang Lu’s Chiya and the Cantonese Literary Construction of Guangxi

Steven B. Miles, Washington University, St. Louis

This paper primarily focuses on the production and reception of a single travel account, Chiya, a collection of observations that the Cantonese poet Kuang Lu (1604–1650) made during his 1634 travels through Guangxi. Recent scholarship has drawn our attention to the connection between travel writing and both the political incorporation and the cultural appropriation of frontier regions in Ming-Qing times. Rather than exploring the penetration of the Chinese state into Guangxi, however, this study is an initial effort to explore the specifically Cantonese incorporation of southeastern Guangxi. As a pioneering Cantonese travel account of Guangxi to which subsequent Cantonese accounts almost always referred, Kuang’s text was an important step in this process.

In contrast to nineteenth-century accounts, Kuang exoticized the land and peoples of Guangxi. I argue that this was largely due to Kuang’s presentation of himself as an idiosyncratic social rebel—he even claimed to have served as a secretary to an indigenous warrior princess—who wished to emphasize the eccentricity of his ventures in Guangxi. Yet Kuang’s travels must be read in the context of a growing presence of Cantonese migrants, traders, and administrative personnel in Guangxi. An eminent Cantonese traveler would have had access to a network of support in what was fast becoming a Cantonese frontier. Moreover, Kuang’s descriptions of local terrain and native military tactics bolstered Cantonese interests in Guangxi. Nineteenth-century Cantonese readers of Kuang Lu offered harsh critiques of his fanciful tales of exotic Guangxi while praising his "accurate" ethnographic and geographic descriptions.