The Diasporic Experiences And Landscape Writings Of Jiangnan Literati In The Early Qing Period

The second half of the seventeenth century was an epoch of turmoil and transition;with the fall of the northern capital,intellectuals of the Central Plain started the journey of wandering.Following the founding of the Southern Ming,Jiangnan intellectuals left their homelands;they either hid in the transitional regions beyond the domination of the Qing government or went all the way to the southern and eastern margins,following the exiled courts.Compared to previous dynasties,such experiences and related writings are uncommon.The chaotic experiences and movements among different regions significantly influenced the literary atmosphere.The poetic themes of the southwestern inland,southeastern islands,and travel writings of nationwide expeditions and voyages were representative of intellectuals' turbulent experiences during these transitional times.As the Qing became dominant,literati were relocated to the northern margin due to the government's severe rule over the Jiangnan area.Compared to the southern exile,the northern journey set up a complementary type.For the early exiles,the northeast frontier is a deserted place unmarked on maps.After residing there for a long time,however,the banished poets rediscovered the aura of the penal colony.Unlike Liu Zongyuan of the Tang Dynasty,who viewed the landscape of exile as an �imprisoned mountain� and a �foolish brook�,exiles of the early Qing often got along with the alien scenery peacefully;they not only tried to endow the unpromising land with an aesthetic implication but also affected its mode of existence with the southern culture.This paper studies the collective experiences of exiles and related geographical/landscape writings in the early Qing period,and it is presented in two parts according to the displaced routes,�exile to the south� and �banishment to the north�.The first chapter of the first part addresses the representation of territory,including writings about both the southern empires as political entities and the intellectual fugitives as emotional subjects.The second chapter discusses Ming loyalists' life choices;they either stuck to the resistance and died as martyrs or wandered in seclusion and hid as hermits.Different choices led to different emotions such as �confusion� or �confession�.Three profiles of local writings are examined in chapter three: southeast areas(Zhejiang and Fujian provinces),west lands(Guilin city),and southern islands(including Taiwan).In addition to a discussion of intellectual exiles' local experiences,the symbolic and metaphoric connotations of place and space are examined.By changing the ways of imagination for different geographical relationships,the Ming loyalists attempted to establish positive meanings for the exiled courts and their adherents.Behind the changes of representation about national rejuvenation,exiles' writings echoed the homeless reality and highlighted the quest for living significance.The first section of the second part analyzes the northern exiles' early experiences and local sensations.The area outside the Shanhai Pass was a terra incognita,a place beyond people's sensory experiences and knowledge.The banished literati not only imagined but also encountered and experienced the penal colony through the embodied movements.The second section discusses three layers between people and lands in diasporic writings: first,the sensorial elements,such as weather,temperature,and color;second,the attachment and remembrance of the South;and third,quests for rational knowledge,such as the practices of archaeology and gazetteer writing in the marginal sites.Through the above steps,the barren land gradually developed into a space of dwelling and affection.The third section investigates some more active cultural practices.The exiles created new cultural and aesthetic implications for the northern frontier through living and writing.They either named and embodied the previously indefinable landscape or explored the primitive mountains and rivers,or even gained a chance to reconstruct the discourse of Empire's boundary.Northern exiles continually excavated new experiences of landscape and inscribed cultural and national meanings on the unmapped land.Based on the above discussions,this paper outlines multiple reactions among people,land and poetry.It explores different types of local writings and their tangled relationships with �body/emotion� and �landscape/geography� and expects to clarify a poetics of diaspora and landscape.