‘Eight Views’ versus ‘Eight Scenes’: The History of the Bajing Tradition in China

Abstract

Bajing, translated from Chinese as ‘Eight Views’, is a well-established genre of landscape painting inspired by the Xiao Xiang Eight Views painted by Song Di in the eleventh century. It was however a much wider concept, with one strand specifically relating to ‘real’ landscapes. This paper distinguishes for the first time the Bajing tradition of painting from that of real landscape, by introducing a distinctive terminology; that is, Eight Scenes, in order to distinguish the latter from the former. These were a series of landscapes selected and celebrated by a national, provincial or local government and promoted as places for outdoor leisure activities. The importance of this genre is shown as being worthy of study in its own right. The roots of an ancient tradition are explored with a view to seeing how various artistic expressions related to each other, by analysing one hundred sets of Bajing for what they depicted and revealed about people's perception of nature and ancient leisure patterns. This culminates in a brief statement about their recent revival in a different guise under very different socio-economic circumstances, as national parks.