Dear All, AAS 2020 Conference Registration is now open! https://www.asianstudies.org/conference/attend/register20/ We are happy to announce that the SSYCDS sponsored panel: “Making Space in Song-Yuan China” was accepted by AAS. Congratulations to organizer Mi Xiuyuan and the rest of the panel members for their excellent proposal. The panel is scheduled to take place on Thursday, March 19, 2020, from 7:30-9:15 pm--please mark your calendars. Here is the essential information: Title: Making Space in Song-Yuan China Time and Date: Thursday, March 19, 2019, 7:30 pm – 9:15 pm Location: TBD Participants (in alphabetical order): Jim Hargett (Professor, SUNY Albany, Chair), Ming Tak Ted Hui (PhD Candidate, Harvard, Presenter), Xiuyuan Mi (PhD Candidate, UPenn, Organizer and Presenter) Jeffery Moser (Assist. Prof., Brown, Presenter), Steven West (Foundation Professor, ASU, Discussant), and Cong Ellen Zhang (Assoc. Prof., Presenter) Panel and paper abstracts appear below, and are posted to our website https://www.songyuan.org/. We will announce information about the annual members meeting when we have a confirmed place and time. We look forward to seeing everyone in Boston! Best Wishes, Tracy Making Space in Song-Yuan China Panel Abstract Furthering recent inquiries on the geographical, infrastructural, and literary construction of space, this panel brings together a variety of perspectives to explore how different cultural projects conditioned and transformed physical space in Song-Yuan China. Instead of demarcating places as independent, static entities, this panel explores space and place in light of human creativity and dynamic cultural experience. Accordingly, we revisit the continuous reconfiguration of meaning through perceptual and conceptual schemes by which literati of the eleventh through fourteenth centuries related themselves to the worlds they inhabited. In particular, Zhang investigates how literary furnishing of some landmark buildings in the prefectural office compound reoriented and recreated administrative space in eleventh century Xiangzhou; Moser studies how urbanization fostered a new painting style that sought to create an embodied viewership through an examination of the famous Along the River on the Qingming Festival; Mi explores how aesthetic preferences in poetry quotations in twelfth and thirteenth century gazetteers demonstrate the discursive tensions between different locales and the state; Hui examines how fourteenth century travel literature by envoys dispatched to Annam altered the conceptualization of the Mongol-Yuan territory, and in turn naturalized the empire’s expansionist ambition. Collectively, the papers aim to deepen scholarly understanding of the role cultural space played in the generation of experience, the ways in which aesthetic space extended and contested physical place, and the processes whereby a perspectival vision of a place formed communal history through the creation of a spatial order. Paper Abstracts Building and Representing the Government Office Compound in Northern Song China: Han Qi in Xiangzhou Cong Ellen Zhang, University of Virginia In the last twenty years of his life, the Northern Song (960-1127) scholar-official Han Qi (1008-1075) served three times in his native place of Xiangzhou (Anyang, Henan). Among his most prominent activities during these sojourns were the construction and representation of the prefectural government complex. Han’s preoccupation with this project can be seen from his voluminous work, which include ji accounts, poems, and letters. Drawing on Han’s writing and that of his contemporaries, this paper begins with an introduction of Han’s various undertakings and their designated, official functions. The second part of the study examines the way the office space and government buildings were represented in the larger context of literati culture and emerging naming practices. The last part of the paper focuses on the highly visible usage of the complex as a place of leisure and entertainment. Overall, this case study aims to achieve three goals: (1) to establish Han Qi as a leading cultural figure of the 11th century, as opposed to his “traditional” image as a statesman and military strategist; (2) to highlight the centrality of the prefectural and county office compounds in the lives of Song literati; and (3) to demonstrate a flourishing culture of building, naming, and representing both official/public and unofficial/private spaces in the Northern Song. Visual Kinetics in the Qingming Handscroll Jeffrey Moser, Brown University As one of the key mounting formats of traditional East Asian painting, the handscroll is primarily understood as an intimate medium that engages a single dominant viewer in the interactive experience of unrolling the painting one section at a time. Compositional elements such as the repetition of human subjects, landscape framing, and textual insertions give many handscroll paintings an episodic narrative structure that regularizes the viewer’s engagement into a linear progression of stable scenes. The famous twelfth century handscroll Along the River on the Qingming Festival undermines this convention by mobilizing vision along multiple vectors simultaneously. The coexistence of detail and panorama throughout the scroll forces the viewer to constantly adjust the scope of their vision by raising or lowering their head. Micro-narratives within the painting simultaneously guide the eye forward and back, encouraging the hands to continue unrolling the scroll in a clockwise direction at the same time that they demand counterclockwise rerolling to resolve scenarios that proceed from right to left. In contrast to the iconographic focus of earlier scholarship on the painting, this paper argues that it is the volitional friction between these competing focal vectors that distinguishes the work as a historically significant approach to the urbanizing spaces of Song dynasty China. Poetic Geography: Building Literary Space in Song Local Gazetteers Xiuyuan Mi, University of Pennsylvania Many local gazetteers from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) quote poetry in abundance. While scholars have noticed the increasing number of poems in gazetteers after the mid-twelfth century, no one has examined the roles poetry played in this non-literary genre. My paper looks into the various ways of quoting poetry in extant sources, and explores how author, style, organizing principle, and changing context could create a literary space that endow the physical one with new meanings. Unlike earlier geographies that only quote poems as evidence, Song local gazetteers include poems to code distinct dimensions of cultural politics: canonical works were curated to create pseudo-literary gatherings in the past, poems in obsolete styles were excavated to fashion new identities, and common poetic objects were used to connect with famous figures unrelated to the area. Mapping the gazetteers against contemporary political events, I show that quoting-patterns can not only reveal different cultural dispositions each region had in relation to the state, but also trace a locale’s changing attitude toward controversial policies of the day. Both aspects may expand and complicate Robert Hymes’ “local turn” hypothesis that has been subject to intense debate in the field in the last three decades. Hostility and Hospitality: The Literary Imaginations of Annam in the Mongol-Yuan Dynasty Ming Tak Ted Hui, Harvard University In 1335, Fu Ruojin (1303-1342) went to Annam for a diplomatic mission. Along his way, he documented the customs and landscape of his destination through a series of poems. At the same time, Lê Tắc (ca. 1260s-1340s), an official who once served the Tran Dynasty and eventually submitted to the Yuan Dynasty, attempted to shed light on the Sino-Viet relationship by compiling Annan zhilue (A Brief History of Annam). Examining the two accounts in juxtaposition as well as the biographical information of Fu and Lê, one could locate certain discrepancies between the narratives, including how they conceptualize the territories and the connections between the two regimes. Against the backdrop of political confrontations, this paper argues that Fu’s poetic discourse strategically highlights the friendship between the two countries while naturalizing the exotic world. The rhetorical choice represents a veiled intention to project Annam as a tributary subject finally submitted to the empire. Contrasting Fu’s work with Lê Tắc’s, this paper concludes by explaining how representations of Annam varies with different political stances, while revealing how personal choices and political circumstances alter the representation of cultural others during the Mongol-Yuan dynasty. -------------------------------------------- Tracy Miller, Ph.D. Associate Professor, History of Art and Asian Studies Vanderbilt University President, Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasty Studies https://my.vanderbilt.edu/tracymiller/