Documenting Spiritual Geography

Abstract

This article examines the visual and textual geographical knowledge presented in a unique scroll of painting and poetry depicting the Yandang Mountains (Wild Goose Pond Mountains) northeast of Wenzhou on the Zhejiang coast. The Yuan-dynasty Attendant Censor Li Zixiao documented this local geography after his trip there in a 1316 scroll consisting of five inscriptions and seven detailed pictures of the northeastern spur of the range. This study examines how his travel notes and poems work together with the pictured routes, geography, architecture, and activities to recreate multi-sensory experiences of the mountains. It then suggests four ways the scroll may have been circulated and read by fourteenth-century people in social networks at the local and national levels: as a personal travel record; as a local landscape through which viewers might imagine traveling; as a document of visual knowledge for religious practice; and as an official report for the imperial court.