The Literary Imagination of the White Pagoda and Dynastic Change in Early Ming Hangzhou

Abstract

This article examines the literary imaginations of the White Pagoda and demonstrates a shift in its representation from a metaphor for the Song court’s fate to a fantastic site for the subjugation of unworldly beings. In the late thirteenth century, the Yuan-appointed Tibetan Buddhist monk Yang Lianzhenjia exhumed the imperial mausoleums of the defeated Southern Song, built the White Pagoda on the site of the old Southern Song palace in Hangzhou, and interred the exhumed bones under it. Enthusiastic Song loyalists thus considered the White Pagoda to be a symbol of a humiliating past in which the Mongol Yuan dynasty occupied the south. Meanwhile, Qu You, an early-Ming writer from Hangzhou, began to imagine that the White Pagoda served to pacify the innocent, lonely dead who died during the Song-Yuan social disturbance. Investigating the discourse of the early Ming literati in regard to the pagoda site and the supernatural in early Ming Hangzhou leads to the conclusion that the literary imagination of the White Pagoda would have also contributed to the development of the White Snake Legend, where a white serpent spirit was subdued under Thunder Peak Pagoda in Hangzhou.