Introduction: New Sources of Geographic Knowledge

Abstract

These two articles, both by early career scholars, explore how people experienced space and place in middle-period China. In examining epitaphs written during the Liao dynasty (907–1125) about the emperor’s moving court, Lance Pursey, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Birmingham, U.K. who is working with Naomi Standen as his supervisor, draws on the concept of counter-mapping to suggest an alternative view of space, one that does not divide the world into prefectures and their subdivisions. In contrast, Lee Tsonghan, an associate professor at National Taiwan Normal University, focuses on a single individual who wrote about one of those subdivisions—the township (zhen 鎮)—where he lived during the final decades of the Southern Song. Featuring close readings of primary sources, both articles propose far-reaching conclusions. The first article tackles a particularly difficult subject. All readers of this journal know just how limited the source base for the Liao dynasty (907–1125) is. One could, of course, check Tang, Five Dynasties, and Song sources, especially since so much of Liao territory came under Chinese rule at one point or another, and the “Dili zhi” 地理志 (best not translated as “Geography Monograph,” as Pursey explains) of the dynastic history of the Liao (Liao shi 遼史) is certainly an obvious place to start. But it, too, sheds minimal light on indigenous views of geographic knowledge because it was compiled centuries after the fall of the Liao and mostly on the basis of Song sources. No one source reveals how the people living under Liao-dynasty rule, a mixed population of descended from Kitan, Chinese, Bohai, and Uighur ancestors (and other groups as well), might have thought about the spaces they inhabited.1 Lance Pursey realized that Liao-dynasty epitaphs written in Chinese offer