Structures of the Earth: Metageographies of Early Medieval China by D. Jonathan Felt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Structures of the Earth: Metageographies of Early Medieval China by D. Jonathan Felt Hieu Phung Structures of the Earth: Metageographies of Early Medieval China. D. Jonathan Felt. Harvard University Asia Center, 2021. Pp. xii+391, 2 photos, 11 illustrations, 17 maps, footnotes. $68.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-6742-5116-8. One of the most problematic geographical units in world history is "China." In contrast to the historiographies of classical societies like Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome, or Angkor, the narrative of Chinese civilization continues to spark debate on the insidious influence of teleological thinking in the field. Moreover, emphasis on the theme of Chinese unification has overshadowed counternarratives of fragmentation. D. Jonathan Felt's Structures of the Earth is a delicate project that unveils the "ruptures, inconsistencies, and disjunctions" (11) in the historical geography of a place often oversimplified as "China." Structures of the Earth tells the spatial history of four centuries, from around 200 to 600 CE, a period during which a unified Chinese empire did not exist. Felt's central argument is that the framework of imperial unification is only one among many spatial paradigms that the various peoples living in historical China perceived. To illustrate, Felt analyzes four spatial schemes, or metageographies, that emerged in the eastern part of the Eurasian landmass between the third and seventh centuries. They include ecumenical regionalism, the Northern and Southern dynasties, the hydrocultural landscape, and the Indo-Sinitic bipolar worldview. Chapters 2 to 5 each analyze one of these spatial schemes. In addition to the introduction and conclusion, the first chapter discusses in detail how geography emerged as a new literary genre in early medieval China. As suggested in its title, this monograph speaks of spatial history and historical geography. Inspired by the work of Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen, Felt's use of "metageographies" aims to identify the kind of spatial structures that were (and have been) unconsciously accepted as natural entities. For instance, Felt shows in chapter 3 that the metageography [End Page 94] of the Northern and Southern dynasties—as two halves of one "China"—was a teleological product that the literati of the later periods created to characterize the sociopolitical conditions of the fifth and sixth centuries. By contrast, the rulers and literati of both the Northern and Southern dynasties did not perceive themselves as part of a fragmented empire awaiting reunification. They instead presented themselves as universal empires. Felt also utilizes Henri Lefebvre's dialectic relationship between spatial practices, representations of space, and representational spaces (70). He argues that the decline of the Han imperial metageography, which emphasized top-down political control and the cultural ecumene, resulted from a series of interconnected transformations in spatial practices after the third century CE. The Han imperial order was replaced by several different fragmented sociopolitical entities. Thanks to major waves of immigration out of the original Sinitic core at the Yellow River valley, the period also saw the rise of the Yangzi basin as another core of civilization. Thus, early medieval literati sought to reconcile the relationship between imperial and local geographical models by means of the metageography of "ecumenical regionalism" (chapter 2). Likewise, the movement of travelers and ideas between the Indic/Buddhist and the Sinitic worlds compelled the literati to create a new metageography that synthesized geographical information from both cultures (chapter 5). The most important contribution of this study is its masterful analysis of the Shuijing zhu (SJZ, Guide to waterways with commentary). Despite the rich information preserved in this early medieval source, Felt's work is the first substantial analysis of the text within English-speaking scholarship. The statistics Felt extracts from this source are impressive. The SJZ contains information of "1,252 rivers and the physical and cultural geography surrounding them" in the land that goes beyond China proper "to include India, Inner Eurasia, and Southeast Asia" (12). Arguing persuasively that "the single defining feature of geographical writing was its spatially organized textual structure" (22), Felt brilliantly uses drainage basins as a spatial unit to visualize the distribution of information in the SJZ (e.g., maps 1.1, 1.2, 1.3). Moreover, the information from the SJZ serves as the...