Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges

The [Thearch] Di said, “Come Yu, you also must have excellent words (to bring before me)”…Yu replied, “The inundating waters seemed to assail the heavens, and in their vast extent embraced the hills and overtopped the great mounds, so that the people were bewildered and overwhelmed. I mounted my four conveyances, and all along the hills hewed down the trees…I (also) opened passages for the streams (throughout the) nine (provinces), and conducted them to the four seas. I deepened (moreover) the channels and canals, and conducted them to the streams, sowing (grain), at the same time, along with Ji, and showing the multitudes how to procure the food of toil…(In this way) all the people got grain to eat, and the myriad regions began to come under good rule.” Gao-Yao said, “Yes, we ought to model ourselves after your excellent words.”

From antiquity, the Chinese people have undertaken grand historical campaigns to pacify, develop and exploit nature. The myths of Jingwei filling the sea and the foolish old man moving a mountain, as well as the story of Yu the Great’s quelling of the flood, represent the primeval Chinese people’s spirit of tenacious struggle in “transforming nature” and ensuring that “man will certainly triumph over nature”…Today, the project that we are constructing in the Three Gorges of the Yangzi River—the world’s largest and most comprehensively beneficial conservancy and hydroelectric project—will greatly stimulate the economic development of the people of our nation. It is an enterprise that will enrich the people of today and spread its benefits over our descendants for millennia to come.

While keeping its traditional meanings and aesthetic functions in mind, I treat ji/trace as a hybrid concept that opens out onto a range of forms and practices, not only what are known in media studies as inscriptional technologies—writing, printing, filmmaking, photography, sound recording—but also the various ways in which space is shaped by politics and ideology.5 The ji that constitute the landscape of the Three Gorges are produced by and productive of many types of inscription—ke 刻 (to carve), shu 書 (to write), hua 畫 (to paint), and ji 記/紀 (to mark, record, document), as well as shu 疏 (to dredge), zao 鑿 (to chisel), and fu 斧 (to ax). My conception of ji/trace as both objective and active overlaps with but also extends beyond Wu’s taxonomy. By blurring the boundaries that separate things from actions, I hope to show how ji/traces act to describe and circumscribe space. More than imprints or remainders on the surface of the earth, ji/traces can also be, or inspire, acts of spatial production that change the earth.

The Three Gorges are rich in all manner of ji/traces. Rarely are their complexities and ambiguities—the way they hold presence and absence, the concrete and the imaginary, part and whole in a state of dynamic equilibrium—more fully exploited than in the poetry of Du Fu 杜甫 (712–770), who lived briefly in the city of Kuizhou, near the western entryway to the Gorges, in the middle of the eighth century. A contemporary of Li Bai, Du Fu is perhaps the most famous poet in the Chinese tradition, and the works that he produced in Kuizhou and its environs forever changed poetic and popular perceptions of this region. In Du Fu’s poetry, the Three Gorges are fully integrated into an imaginary map of empire, not as a symbol of the state or proving ground for the spirit of its people—as Jiang Zemin would later describe it—but as a frontier marking the farthest reach of Han culture and a site where past order gives way to present entropy. Du Fu orients himself in this exotic place by invoking the traces of historical and mythical figures he admires, many of whom were similarly displaced during their lifetimes, and by treating the landscape of the Gorges as a surface for the projection of fleeting visions and memories of his distant homeland. In Du Fu’s poetry, the Three Gorges appear not as a proto-national landscape, but rather as a site for the spatialization of a poetics of personal failure and imperial fragmentation. This is a profoundly different use of the region and its mythic dimensions than Jiang Zemin and other Chinese leaders have made, with far less tamable political effects.

In the centuries following his death, Du Fu was transformed from a minor if respectable figure to the greatest poet in the tradition. With canonization came a newfound interest in the traces that he had left behind in the Three Gorges. These were far more than evocative “traces of the past.” During the Song Dynasty (960–1279), they became sites of pilgrimage that needed to be spatially fixed in order to maximize their sacred qualities. It is perhaps no coincidence that the elevation of Du Fu over the course of the Song coincides with one of the most important conceptual and physical transformations of the Three Gorges region: from a landscape of traces defined by flux into a landscape of landmarks fixed by a burgeoning geographical and touristic literature. As part of this transformation, the ji that appear in Du Fu’s poetry as figures of decay, threatening always to become illegible, are succeeded by “landmarks” or “famous sites” (shengji 勝跡), legible figures of cultural revival and flourishing.

As the landscape was being reconceptualized, it was also undergoing demographic and spatial changes brought about by the ongoing expansion of Han settlements into areas south of the Yangzi that had long been dominated by non-Han tribes.6 As the spatial reach of Song administrators and Han settlers extended south, the strangeness of the region, much of it grounded in local myth and religion, was gradually secularized and folded into the cultural orthodoxy of Song China. The exotic allure of the Gorges remained powerful, as it does today, but it was rendered morally meaningful as part of a shift in spatial thinking that produced a landscape defined more by its edifying sites than its suggestive traces. Although the expansion of Han culture and control was already well under way by Du Fu’s time,⁷ the Three Gorges that he experienced in the mid-eighth century was still an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous place, integral to the lore of the greater empire but nonetheless foreign, as Du Fu reminds his readers:

Du Fu was the scion of an illustrious family with roots in a suburb of the Tang capital at Chang’an, near modern-day Xi’an. His grandfather, Du Shenyan 杜審言 (d. ca. 705), was one of the most eminent poets of the early Tang. As a boy, Du Fu received an exemplary education in the classics and literary composition. Though he had the pedigree and training for a glorious political career, he twice failed the imperial examinations (in 736 and 745) that were a prerequisite for service in the state bureaucracy. It was only in 751, at the age of thirty-nine, that Du Fu, after submitting a number of long poems to the throne as evidence of his qualifications, succeeded in passing a special examination set by Emperor Xuanzong 玄宗 (r. 712–756). Even with the emperor’s support, however, his career never took off. When a massive rebellion broke out in 755, he was well connected but politically insignificant.

Having failed professionally, Du Fu dedicated himself to writing poetry. Steeped in the classics, formally inventive, and technically virtuosic, the more than fourteen hundred poems that make up his collected works are revered in China. Of these, the roughly four hundred that he composed in Kuizhou are generally considered among his finest. For well over a millennium, they have generated countless commentaries, exegeses, translations, and works of praise and imitation. Du Fu is famous for more than his poetry, however. After his death he became known as a man of unimpeachable integrity who, “despite his unsatisfied desire to serve the state, through all his vicissitudes…never for the space of a meal forgot his sovereign.”9 By the end of the Song Dynasty, Du Fu the failed official and invalid had become Du Fu the “historian poet” (shishi 詩史) and “poet sage” (shisheng 詩聖), titles that “evoke the two roles, historian and sage, which were most esteemed by Confucius.”¹⁰

In 766, however, when Du Fu arrived in Kuizhou with his small family in tow, he was an impoverished refugee, sick with malaria, diabetes, and other ailments.¹¹ He had already been displaced for nine years, having fled Chang’an in the spring of 757 after a brief period of incarceration by rebels. In 755, the forces of the traitorous general An Lushan 安祿山 (ca. 703–757) had torn through the northeastern capital at Luoyang. The next year, they captured the northwestern capital at Chang’an, forcing Emperor Xuanzong south to Sichuan.¹² Du Fu remained in the ravaged north for a number of years after hostilities began. By 759, finding himself politically isolated and unable to support his family, he followed some of his political allies to Sichuan. By 760, he was established in Chengdu, capital of modern-day Sichuan, where he experienced a period of relative stability. By 765, however, he was on the move again, traveling slowly down the Yangzi and longing always for an end to the conflict and a clear route home.¹³ Du Fu would remain a wanderer for the last decade of his life, an accidental exile in the southern reaches of a foundering empire, a “soul not yet summoned” (wei zhao hun 未招魂) home.¹⁴

In the spring of 766, Du Fu and his family sailed east down the Yangzi (then known simply as the Jiang 江) to Kuizhou for a stay that would last until the autumn of 768. Located just upriver from Kuimen, the entryway to the Gorges, Kuizhou was a transportation and commercial hub linking the Chengdu basin to the northwest with the fertile plains and expansive lakes of modern Hubei and Hunan to the east.¹⁵ Famous for its deadly rapids, changeable weather, and scenic beauty, the Three Gorges region was, and still is, closely associated with a number of cultural and literary heroes—Yu the Great, Liu Bei 劉備 (161–223), Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181–234), Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 343–ca. 277), and Song Yu 宋玉 (third century BCE), among others. Though central to Han culture, Kuizhou and the Gorges were on the frontier of the Tang state, nodes in a zone of contact between Han and non-Han peoples. The latter occupied much of the countryside around Kuizhou, especially southwest of the Yangzi, and the region had long served as a setting for tales of otherworldly encounters, rain maidens, and dragon spirits.

During his time as a refugee, Du Fu wrote prolifically about both his experience living on the frontier and the traces of the cultural heroes who had also spent time there, integrating both into a poetic map of empire and exile. At one end of this map stand Kuizhou and the Gorges, points from which Du Fu looks outward to take the measure of personal and imperial history. Casting his gaze across space and back in time, he considers the forces that constitute his many worlds—social, aesthetic, political, physical. Through his observations and imaginative journeys, he establishes Kuizhou not as symbol of, or synecdoche for, empire, but as the antipode of Chang’an, the gridded capital that had defined the imperial spatial imagination for a millennium. Joined by sheets of clouds and the night stars, these two places loom large in Du Fu’s most famous poetry of exile, especially the eight poems of the “Autumn Stirrings 秋興八首” series, in which visions of abandoned imperial gardens and blinding glimpses of the deceased sovereign dissolve into images of the Gorges, which are established in the opening couplets of the first poem as a harsh and volatile landscape:

The “Autumn Stirrings” series is long and complex, and an analysis of each of its eight poems is beyond the scope of this chapter.16 To illustrate how Du Fu poetically produces the Three Gorges as a landscape of ji/traces that are not simply material or historical, but also atmospheric, elemental, textual, and affective, I offer a focused reading of the second poem, which includes an allusion to the same crying gibbons that appear in Li Bai’s “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” and of select lines from poems six, seven, and eight.

Opening at dusk in Kuizhou, the second of the “Autumn Stirrings” poems is organized around a back-and-forth motion that draws Du Fu’s gaze and mind north to Chang’an, only to leave him where he started, ailing and homesick in Kuizhou. A study in oscillation, this poem helps establish the bipolar structure of the entire eight-poem series, in which the imagined connection between Chang’an and Kuizhou grows stronger and stronger, until by the sixth poem, the astral triangulations and waking dreams that transport Du Fu in the second poem are replaced by an almost material conduit leading him north to Chang’an:

Here, the “mouth” (kou 口) of Qutang becomes a portal that leads across ten thousand li of wind and fog to the banks of the Serpentine, a stream that flowed through a royal park in the southeast corner of Chang’an, allowing for a journey back to the capital and through its long history.20 According to Stephen Owen, it was during the Tang that mist was established as an important “poetic signifier” for hiddenness.²¹ Against a Tang imperial geography that was carefully “mapped, inventoried, administratively partitioned, [and] crisscrossed by post stations…misty scenes poetically resist imperial space, where everything is illuminated and perspicuous.”²² In Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry, mist, clouds, and fog do block the poet from the center of Tang imperial geography, but they also bridge the spatial and temporal rifts that define his exile, making possible his dazzling visions of that center.

The “Autumn Stirrings” series contains a number of aqueous and atmospheric images of linkage, though in poem two, the gulf between where Du Fu undeniably is and where he so desperately wishes to be remains wide. Gazing north, he sheds the southern tears that Li Daoyuan made famous in his description of the Three Gorges in the Commentary to the Classic of Rivers. When Li Bai writes of the “sound of gibbons crying without rest,” he evokes the place through its textual traces.²³ When Du Fu makes the same allusion, he insists on the authenticity of his experience—he “truly” (shi 實) sheds the tears described in the song.²⁴ For Du Fu, to look at and listen to the landscape carefully is to discern the traces of a literary discourse that subtends and validates the physical, and vice versa.

Du Fu’s real (shi) tears are paired with the emptiness or futility (xu 虛) of his dreams of service (and of a Chang’an that has yet to materialize fully). Full and empty, actual and imagined, material and immaterial, shi and xu form a “bipolar concept” that structures contrastive poetic imagery while also serving as a traditional literary critical pairing used to distinguish language describing concrete (shi) scenes from language that “subordinate[s]” the scenic to an abstract (xu) mood or effect.²⁵ Shi and xu are a complementary rather than oppositional pair, each term establishing not only the condition of possibility for the other but also the possibility for the transformation of one into the other (just as the immaterial sounds of gibbons crying produces Du Fu’s material tears). Shi and xu also happen to be among the most important terms in the so-called “Li-Du” debate in Chinese literary criticism, the venerable practice of comparing Li Bai and Du Fu, usually to determine who deserves top place in the canon. In her study of the poetry of Li Bai, Paula Varsano describes how xu, which she translates as “unfounded” or “unfoundedness,” came to be associated (not always positively) with the imaginative poetry of Li Bai, and shi, which she translates as “substantive,” with the classically grounded poetry of Du Fu.²⁶

Du Fu’s tears seem, at first glance, to support this traditional dichotomy. In reality, they form the substantive counterpart to a series of immaterial and fleeting images. Unlike “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” which centers on a journey so fast that it is over almost as soon as it begins, Du Fu’s “Autumn Stirrings” suspend the poet-wanderer between the hard facts of his exile and the fevered memories of a past to which he can only return in reverie. If Du Fu’s past journeys in search of employment and away from the chaotic north were taken in vain, the journeys he takes in his Kuizhou poetry are little more than fantasy. They offer a temporary escape that only reinforces his immobility, reminding him that the one journey he so wishes to take—back home—remains impossible.27 Throughout his Kuizhou poetry, Du Fu finds himself in the space between—waking and sleeping, south and north, the real and the imagined, shi and xu. When he moves from one to the other, as in his alternation between the “painted ministry” and the “mountain hall,” his poetry reflects a painful awareness of the gap that separates the northern spaces and traditions that will always feel most substantive to him from the amorphous and disorienting southern landscape he now occupies.

In the final couplet of the second “Autumn Stirrings” poem, that gap takes the form of an elusive and immaterial trace—the light of the moon:

Temporarily lost in reverie, Du Fu has lost the time it took for the light of the moon to move from the vines atop the stones to the reed flowers before the islet, and he calls out for confirmation of this, for a trace of the passage of time. The materialization of this temporal gap in the space between the rocks and the flowering reeds provides him with only a temporary and partial means of orienting himself. The riverbank comes into view, but this is not really the object of his gaze. The stones, vines, and reeds are merely what give solid form to the light of the moon, which both marks the passage of time and also serves as a conventional poetic figure linking distant places and separated loved ones (who always look on the same moon no matter how far apart they are).

In the second couplet, real tears in line 3 lead into the vain journeys of line 4. By the third couplet, the alternation between xu and shi accelerates: in line 5, the imagined painted ministry is replaced by Du Fu’s sickbed; in line 6, the solid battlements conceal the immaterial sound of the flute. Xu leads into shi and back to xu, and so on and so forth. “Autumn Stirrings” is so deeply poignant in part because Du Fu cannot fully sustain his reverie and must thus suffer the constant alternation between the real and the imagined, presence and absence, past and present. As Paula Varsano writes of the highly allusive (and elusive) poetics of Li He 李賀 (791–817), it is “only by entering a dream-state, wherein presence and absence are so fluid as to be one…[that] the speaker [can] escape their unceasing and tortuous alteration.”28 For Du Fu, there is something even darker beyond such torture: a formless abyss that threatens to swallow the poet, removing all reference points and effacing the solid surfaces onto which he casts his visions and memories. In the last couplet of the penultimate “Autumn Stirrings” poem, the series and the poet seem to reach a point of exhaustion. The link between Kuizhou and Chang’an dissolves, and the realm now appears as an expanse of mountain passes, endless skies, and spreading waters:

The waters and skies that once linked Du Fu to other places and times cease to transport him in this moment. Endless mountains hold him fast, and the rivers and lakes of the south make him a permanent and solitary transient. The one path that he can see is no path at all, and the only movement that is open to him will leave no trace, not even a footprint. Facing oblivion, Du Fu has wandered through his past, conjuring images of glory that rise and fall like empires. By the final couplet of the eighth and last poem, he is a man defeated:

While the xing in the title of “Autumn Stirrings” (qiuxing 秋興) is generally taken as referring to the feelings inspired by autumn and not the technical term of the “Great Preface,” its appearance there cannot help but evoke the affective images of the Book of Odes.³¹ What ultimately distinguishes those xing from Du Fu’s natural images, however, is that the latter function referentially, as traces of a mostly obscured exilic landscape. In “Autumn Stirrings,” Du Fu’s emotions are stimulated by the physical traces that autumn has left on the landscape of the Three Gorges—jadelike dew and withered maples, wind and fog—and by a series of powerfully evocative immaterial traces—the cries of gibbons, the wail of a mournful flute, and the shifting light of the moon. This second set of traces makes Du Fu aware of things that he cannot see or that he failed to observe because his mind was elsewhere. Though their sources (gibbons, flute, moon) are absent or invisible, they map the poet’s surroundings while also stimulating his emotions. As traces on and of the Three Gorges, they are the substantive counterparts of an imagined Chang’an, yet they never cohere to form an integral landscape. Instead, they reveal the physical world through its fragments, flickering across a space that is mostly concealed by atmospheric effects or swallowed by spreading waters. The Three Gorges of “Autumn Stirrings” is a landscape of traces that will bear no permanent mark, a place where nothing seems to have changed but everything is revealed to be impermanent.

According to mytho-historical sources, one of which appears as an epigraph to this chapter, Yu the Great, mythical founder of the first dynasty in Chinese history, is said to have created the Three Gorges by boring through the granite, limestone, schist, and shale of this mountainous area so that the excess waters of an epic flood could drain into the sea. Yu’s contributions extend far beyond flood control, however. According to early accounts, his taming of the waters bolstered the centralization of state power, led to the creation of an empire-wide travel network, and established a system of tribute and taxation.32 Yu’s dredging and clearing were seen as civilizing acts that definitively inscribed the boundary between watery chaos and the (spatial and moral) order of a society grounded in agriculture and ruled by a bureaucracy. It was in the course of traveling through the realm to teach the people “how to procure the food of toil” and reminding them to pay their taxes in kind, that Yu left behind another set of traces, those formed by his feet. During the imperial period, “Yu’s traces” (Yuji 禹跡) served as a poetic term not only for his footprints and the marks that his ax and spade left on the surface of the earth, but also for the entirety of the geographical entity associated with Han cultural and political influence. Indeed, early maps of the realm were often simply called “charts of Yu’s Traces” (yuji tu 禹跡圖) (figure 1.1).

Over the last two decades, Yu the Great, like other Chinese mythological figures, has enjoyed a revival, with statues, shrines, and other memorials appearing all over China.33 One of the most remarkable of these is the Yu the Great Mythology Park (Dayu shenhuayuan 大禹神話園), opened in 2006 in the city of Wuhan, just beneath the Wuhan First Yangzi Bridge, along the northern bank of the Yangzi. Approximately four hundred meters long and sixty meters wide, the park consists of three groups of statues and an exhibition hall dedicated to ancient Chinese flood mythology. The first group of stone statues is arranged along a short avenue and details the story of Yu’s father, Gun 鯀, who failed to quell the flood and was executed as a result.³⁴ They lead to a central plaza dominated by a wall of carved marble close to three hundred feet long and eighteen feet tall, with a twenty-foot-tall bronze statue of Yu in the center. The relief carvings on the wall depict episodes in the mythology of Yu. To the east of the plaza is another avenue of stone relief carvings showing Yu’s quelling of the floods. Two large statues depicting episodes from Yu’s life mark the junction of both the first and third groups with the central plaza. Robin McNeal describes the park “as a visual narrative in three dimensions” leading visitors through Yu’s life story and on toward the Qingchuan Pavilion 晴川閣, a shrine that has been dedicated to the worship of Yu the Great since the sixteenth century.³⁵

The Yu the Great Mythology Park is an example of how mythical figures like Yu have been monumentalized and materialized in statues, parks, and other memorials as part of a postreform revival of interest in Chinese mythology. According to McNeal, contemporary interest in Yu the Great represents a continuation of early-twentieth-century attempts to forge a “coherent Chinese mythology” that could compete with the systematized accounts of Greek mythology that Chinese intellectuals first encountered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.36 As an “instance of mythmaking writ large,” the park updates and gives monumental physical form to these intellectuals’ search for a solid ethnocultural foundation for China’s modernization efforts.³⁷ While the park may address long-standing Chinese insecurities vis-à-vis the West, it also demonstrates how China’s new global power and prestige operate domestically, through the reinscription of the banks of the Yangzi as a national landscape grounded in ancient mythology. Yu’s role in this act of spatial production is not as a culture hero, but as an action hero, vanquishing monsters, quelling floods, and bringing order to the realm (figure 1.2). In addition to embodying the spirit of the people, as Jiang Zemin claims, this new Yu is also an allegory of raw national power (figure 1.3).

An English-language text inscribed in stone at the park’s entrance, for example, compares Yu’s feats with those of the people of Wuhan, who “defeated” the floods of 1954 and 1998, and explains that the park was built to “glorify the unbending will and superb wisdom of Yu.” The prevention of floods, which have killed millions over just the last century and a half, has been one of the main justifications for building the Three Gorges Dam. To open this park in 2006, along the recently flooded banks of the Yangzi, as the dam neared its long-anticipated completion is to send a clear and confident message about the institution of a spatial order that is simultaneously new and as old as Chinese culture itself. For the average visitor, presumably unschooled in the mythography of early intellectuals, the massive sculptures representing Yu and his exploits will not conjure up old debates about the status of Chinese mythology. They will mark the contemporary revival of Yu’s spirit and the current leadership’s replication of his superhuman feat of quelling the floods. By making the banks of the river a site for monumental art, with its claim to permanence, the creators of the park scorned the natural variability that has defined the Yangzi for millennia. This is possible because as the Three Gorges Dam neared completion, it was on the verge of finally fixing the river—controlling its flow, clearing the many obstacles it posed to trade and travel, and ending its pattern of destruction.

In this sense, the Yu the Great Mythology Park stands in stark contrast to other memorials and monuments that have been built along the Yangzi over the course of the twentieth century, not to mention the hydrographic markers and landmarks that have aided navigation for millennia. One example from the first category is the fifty-foot-tall obelisk of Changsha granite that was erected in the Three Gorges village of Xintan in 1924 to commemorate Cornell Plant, one of the first men to pilot a steamship through the rapids of the Gorges as far as Chongqing. Building on the work of the mid- to late-nineteenth-century travelers and adventurers that I discuss in Part II, Plant systematically charted the rapids of the Yangzi Gorges and instructed steamship pilots on how to navigate them safely. As one admirer said after his death, “the best monument to Captain Plant is the work he has left behind, which will ever remain the foundation of what is hereafter done for the improvement of the navigation of the Upper River.”³⁸ By inscribing the river textually and visually to improve navigation, Plant’s work laid the foundation for the Three Gorges Dam project, which clears the obstacles imposed by nature and fixes the flow of the river behind a massive wall of concrete and steel.

Plant’s contribution to the remapping of the Yangzi helped make the dam possible, but the monument erected in his honor, by virtue of its original positioning, expresses an earlier understanding of the river as an obstacle that could be overcome through navigational technologies but not physically transformed. Whereas the Yu the Great Park in Wuhan stages a narrative of control performed within a space consolidated by the dam project, the Plant Memorial, which was first constructed above one of the most treacherous rapids in the gorges to serve as a beacon to steamships and native craft, stood in dialogue with the landscape as it existed in 1924. Built as a monument to a man, it was also a monument to the Yangzi. Ironically, the locals of Xintan were forced to move the obelisk in 2002–2003 to avoid its being inundated by the rising waters of the reservoir (figure 1.4). They took this opportunity to restore the Chinese and English inscriptions that had been defaced during the Cultural Revolution. By reinscribing the monument, they erased one set of historical traces in order to recover another; by moving it, they bowed to the new spatial order enshrined in the park in Wuhan.

Although cultural artifacts of sufficient importance were generally shifted beyond the reach of the reservoir, others were simply too large to relocate. Among these were a number of boulders and outcroppings that local residents and navigators used to gauge changes in the water level.39 For millennia, all along the Yangzi, but especially in and around the treacherous gorges, residents and travelers often carved markers to indicate normal and abnormal water levels and aid in navigation. Perhaps the most elaborately carved of these hydrographic stations is the only one to remain accessible in situ. Located near the city of Fuling, west of the Gorges, White Crane Ridge (Baiheliang 白鶴梁) is a sixteen-hundred-meter-long sandstone ridge on which fourteen carvings of fish and 165 inscriptions, some dating back to the mid-Tang Dynasty, are discernible. The eyes of the fish once indicated normal water levels, and the inscriptions recorded especially low levels and their dates, though they were sometimes far more detailed.⁴⁰

White Crane Ridge, which now rests near the bottom of the Three Gorges Dam reservoir, has remained visible through the construction of China’s first underwater museum. This structure, promoted by UNESCO as preserving important “underwater cultural heritage,” encircles the ridge (which remains exposed to the water) and is punctuated with windows that allow visitors to look through the murky water of the Yangzi at the famous carvings. White Crane Ridge provides evidence of some of the navigational challenges that the dam was built to overcome, but it is also a record of a long local tradition of direct observation of, and engagement with, the variability of the river. As one of the few objects beneath the reservoir to remain visible, the ridge has become a relic for and of different ages. An ancient text that until recently could still fulfill its original function, it is now a trace of the past enshrined as a monument for a future when the pre-dam shape of the gorges and the river will have become only a distant memory.

By tracing the network of local, regional, and national sites that imbue the park with meaning, we see more clearly how Yu the Great has been enlisted in the recent reorganization of the Yangzi. To visit his park is to experience not only a new conception of Chinese mythology as national allegory, but also to place oneself at the nexus of multiple historical moments and in the shadow of multiple historical figures and structures. The shaping of Chinese history and identity in the present is still inextricably linked to the inscription of national space. That Yu is credited with creating that space and embodying the spirit of the Chinese people makes him a particularly powerful avatar of the state, though he has not always played that role. What is obscured in the creation of new sites in the cult of Yu are older and more ambiguous traces—Yuji. The Yu who appears amidst the fading traces of Du Fu’s poetry is, as we shall see, not the muscled hero of the present day.

“Yu’s Shrine” resembles other temple poems by Du Fu, many of which contrast the cultural fullness (shi) of the dead and the ritual promise of continued presence with the vacancy (xu/kong 空) of the temple.48 In the first and third couplets, Yu’s shrine is presented as a lonely building, hidden away within “empty” mountains and surrounded by immaterial phenomena: autumn wind and slanting sunlight, clouds and mist exhaling over green cliffs, the sound of water rushing over sand. The courtyards and rooms of the temple that appear between these images of emptiness are empty too, overgrown by weeds and occupied only by painted images. Few worshippers come to trample the grass that fills the temple’s courtyards, but their citrus trees are traces of a ritual program dedicated to the worship of Yu’s feats. Tangerine and pomelo were the local specialties presented as tribute to Yu following his quelling of the flood and subsequent survey of the realm. Inside the temple’s aging halls, the images of dragons and snakes refer to the pestilential creatures that invaded the central states along with the waters of the flood. In some versions of his myth, Yu is heralded as much for driving away these creatures as he is for ending the floods.

Within the religious context of the shrine, a space dedicated to maintaining a connection with the dead, the citrus trees and paintings are designed to materialize and illustrate Yu’s mythology. Whether they fulfill that function is another question. The temple’s desuetude suggests that this attempt to institutionalize Yu’s traces in the mountains of Zhongzhou may not have succeeded as planned. In his study of the Sichuan frontier in the Song Dynasty, Richard von Glahn cites this poem as early evidence of the secularization of the cults of the ancient kingdom of Ba, which included the Three Gorges.⁴⁹ Though it conforms to a poetic pattern in Du Fu’s work for describing isolated temples, the lack of interest that Du Fu notes might also have something to do with Yu’s transformation from a local deity to a Confucian exemplar. Against the impermanent spatial and pictorial inscriptions that celebrate this particular Yu, the immaterial phenomena that fill the first and third couplets of the poem appear newly stable—they not only predate the temple buildings, but they will also outlive their passing.

In the final couplet, Du Fu moves from natural images to a statement of personal knowledge:

“Yu’s Shrine” is an atmospheric poem that turns enigmatic in its last couplet.⁵¹ The tenor of Du Fu’s claim to previous knowledge remains opaque, but the interaction of shi and xu images in the first three couplets and the personal tone of the final couplet suggest that he is not only comparing his knowledge of Yu against the physical realities of Yu’s shrine or the landscape he mastered, but also his own fate against that of the Yu enshrined in the temple. If even the traces of Yu the Great are subject to the vagaries of time, then what claim to permanence can the poet hope to stake? The doubts that “Yu’s Shrine” raises about the status of Yu’s traces and deeds continue to echo through “At Qutang Contemplating the Past 瞿唐懷古,” a poem Du Fu wrote in Kuizhou, not long after his visit to Zhongzhou:⁵²

If “At Qutang Contemplating the Past” looks back to “Yu’s Shrine,” it also offers an alternative answer to the question that Du Fu poses at the beginning of “The Two Palisades of Qutang 瞿唐兩崖” (see Passage I): “The Three Gorges—from where do they come down to us?”⁵³ Instead of a reference to competing textual traditions, however, here Du Fu compares Yu the Great’s primordial dredging with the generative forces of nature, “the Potter’s Wheel” (taojun 陶鈞), which he deems “greater yet.”⁵⁴ Du Fu calls Yu’s “feats” (gong 功) “glorious” (mei 美), but it is the focused and sustained power of flowing water that actually separates these “fierce enemies,” the mountains that form the great chasm of Qutang and its gate, Kuimen.⁵⁵

In the first two couplets, Du Fu layers images in a dramatic sequence of geological processes framed by a mythical geography: streams converge from myriad sources, rending the earth and creating a channel that allows the Yangzi to arrive from the Moon Cave, mythical resting place of the moon and a poetic image for distant lands. “Pared to perfection” (xiaocheng 削成) in line 5, Kuimen and Qutang are then joined by two built structures: the first is Baidicheng, the fortified settlement constructed in the first century CE by Gongsun Shu 公孫述 (d. 36), a rebel leader who immodestly titled himself (and his base) Baidi 白帝, or White Emperor, after the mythological Lord of the West (a deity associated with autumn). Located just east of Kuizhou, directly opposite Kuimen and the Qutang Gorge, Baidicheng was the site of one Du Fu’s homes during his Kuizhou years and appears in many of his poems. The other structure is the Yang (sunny/sun) Terrace (Yangtai 陽臺). Discreetly hidden in a bend of the river downstream from Kuimen, this is the site of the romantic encounter between an ancient king of Chu and the goddess of Mt. Wu immortalized in Song Yu’s famous “Gaotang Rhapsody 高堂賦,” which I discuss in chapter 2.

Just as the manmade fortifications of Baidi are placed opposite the natural gate of Kuimen, the Yang Terrace rests partially hidden in one of the great river’s bends. Against the ordering impulse embodied by these structures, Du Fu pits the physical products of gradual but irresistible natural forces. The title of the poem conveys something of this tension. The phrase that I have translated as “contemplating the past”—huaigu 懷古—refers not simply to a thought process and its object, but also to the emotions that traces of the past give rise to in one’s body (the literal meaning of huai 懷 is “bosom/breast” or “to carry in the bosom”), as well as to the category of poems inspired by those traces.⁵⁶ In “At Qutang Contemplating the Past,” the manmade structures in the third couplet are precisely the kinds of traces that inspire poets to meditate on the past, but they are not Du Fu’s primary focus. What occupies him is the topography that supports those traces—Qutang Gorge and Kuimen—both of which are traditionally described as among the most impressive of Yu the Great’s traces.

As if in response to that tradition, Du Fu ends the poem with both a concession and an exclamation: Though Yu’s feats have been called glorious, it is the power of “nature,” expressed through the image of the endlessly generative “Potter’s Wheel,” that truly impresses. Du Fu is not simply reviewing these two options and coming out on the side of nature, he is using a textual allusion to oppose the forces of nature to the human desire to will order on a world that is always decaying and being made anew. In so doing, he implies that the narrative of transmission—though “glorious”—pales in comparison to the might of nature and its dominion over humans. He makes this point by echoing (but changing the subject of) a passage from the Zuozhuan 左傳, one of the earliest histories in the Chinese tradition:

According to the Duke of Zhao, it is not simply the draining of the empire that should be attributed to Yu, but also the establishment and maintenance of its system of rule and order, which is carried out by those who wear “caps and robes.”⁵⁸ For the exiled Du Fu, confronted with the present impressive riverscape, the correlation between Yu’s heroic hydraulic engineering and the smooth functioning of the “business of the princes” must have seemed a bitter irony. Not only had Du Fu repeatedly failed in his desire to don “cap and robe” and serve the Tang royal house, he had also been forced from his ancestral lands to this dreary hinterland by a catastrophic breakdown of political, spatial, and cultural order. No longer a trace of the mythical act on which the imperial order was based, the Gorges become an emblem both of Du Fu’s personal failures and of the fragmentation of that imperial order.

As a deity who became the founder of a dynasty, Yu was both a god and a man. His feet marked out the entirety of the realm, but he was not unscathed by his tremendous labors. According some accounts, Yu’s efforts left his hands horribly calloused and his body partially paralyzed, forcing him to walk with a strange hopping movement. If the “traces of Yu” testify to his superhuman strength, the shambling “gait of Yu” (Yubu 禹步) is a reminder of his infirmities.59 Celebratory but also sometimes ambivalent references to “Yu’s feats” appear in many of Du Fu’s Kuizhou poems, but this lame Yu does not. Had Du Fu embraced the more human Yu, he might have found a partner in his nearly constant physical suffering. Instead, he destabilized the mythology of Yu’s in more subtle ways, by comparing them to the generative and destructive forces of nature, forces against which the human will to inscribe order on the world would always fail. If, as Mark Edward Lewis has argued, early Chinese texts conceived of civilization as emerging from a state of primordial chaos, the cosmogonic narratives of the progressive ordering of the world that they offered coexisted with a cultural memory of that original chaos, which “survived as a permanent background condition to human existence.”⁶⁰ In Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry, the threat of chaos is ever-present; it can be diminished for a time by imposing order on the world—real order for Yu and imaginary order for Du Fu—but it can never be entirely eliminated.

Du Fu was a man rich in words but poor in the kinds of deeds recorded in China’s great histories. Lacking proof beyond his poems of his unfailing loyalty to the empire, he became an “autobiographer of ‘being’ rather than ‘deeds.’”⁶¹ This being encompassed not only the thwarted civil servant and invalid poet, but also alternative avatars, from the “lone fisherman” of his “Autumn Stirrings” and the “single gull of the sand” (yi sha ou 一沙鷗) in his famous “Writing My Feelings While Travelling at Night 旅夜書懷”⁶² to the many earlier poets and historical figures associated with the southern lands of Du Fu’s exile. These avatars were integral to his attempt to refigure space and time in response to his displacement to the frontier of a culture in crisis. The acts of mapping that they made possible helped Du Fu make sense of his immediate visual and aural experience of the Three Gorges by filtering it through the lenses of personal experience, memory, and textual learning.

Du Fu’s mapping is defined at every stage by competing and contradictory forces: the aching pull of homesickness and the resignation that comes with the realization that he and his family may never leave the south. His thoughts often turn to the places and people of his past, but he can transcend neither his own corporeality nor his exile in the Gorges. Forced to live by the gaping maw of Kuimen, he speaks not of Yu the Great’s mastery, as he did in “Yu’s Shrine,” but of the greatness of nature’s power. In “At Qutang Yearning for the Past,” the accounts that promote the “glory” of Yu’s feats give way to a landscape that is the product of natural, not supernatural, forces. As Du Fu becomes more comfortable with the lore and history of the Gorges, he continues to remap the landscape, envisioning it as a ground for the immaterial but enduring traces of language and cultural memory.

The Three Gorges allow for such disparate figurations because they represent a spatial concept that encompasses a spectrum of culturally coded mark-making—at one end, they stand as an enduring monument to Yu’s mastery, which poets before and after Du Fu describe as still legible on the walls of the Gorges;63 at the other, they are the unstable ground of fading traces of human dwelling that endure through accidental survival or through the more reliable medium of words. It is through the textual trace in particular that Du Fu poetically repopulates the Three Gorges with its former residents—sympathetic locals and fellow exiles—figures at the periphery of empire who have come to occupy central positions in the culture Du Fu so loves. Embodied in Du Fu’s poetry, their words and stories are far more substantive than the physical traces that are attributed to them. Without the fixity of home, unable to repair the fractured empire, Du Fu orients himself through their traces.

The centering power of the textual trace is at the heart of the five poems of “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past 詠懷古跡五首,” which immediately follow the “Autumn Stirrings” series in Qiu Zhao’ao’s 仇兆鰲 widely read edition of Du Fu’s works. In “Autumn Stirrings,” Du Fu attempts to anchor himself in the glorious imperial history of Chang’an, but he can do so only through the mediation of a volatile and inhospitable natural world. In “Singing My Feelings,” Du Fu orients himself not by moving between Kuizhou and Chang’an, but by establishing his affinity with exemplary figures of suffering and exile from the past. Its title notwithstanding, this series does not revolve around physical historical traces (guji 古跡). Instead, it explores a collection of figures with connections to the area in and around the gorges. Though important to the lore of the region as developed by Du Fu, the figures in the first, third, fourth, and fifth poems are not part of the larger story that Fixing Landscape tells.⁶⁴ To close this chapter, I focus on the series’ second poem, in which Du Fu juxtaposes the affective and cultural power of the textual ji/trace with a countervailing conception of the ji as a concrete landmark. As we shall see in chapter 2, the idea of ji as something to be located in space, personally visited, and physically reinscribed in order to preserve it became common over the course of the Song Dynasty, dramatically reshaping the textual, pictorial, and physical contours of the Three Gorges as Du Fu knew it.

The second poem of “Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past” centers on the Chu poet Song Yu, about whom little is known. According to tradition, he served as a court official during the reign of King Xiang of Chu 楚襄王 (r. 298–263 BCE), but was cashiered for speaking too forthrightly.65 Most consistently associated with modern Hunan, but sometimes extending as far west as Kuizhou, Chu was a peripheral but powerful state for well over six hundred years leading up to the unification of China by the state of Qin in 221 BCE. Song Yu is credited with authoring a number of influential works in the southern or “Chu” style included in the Songs of Chu (Chuci 楚辭), an anthology famous for preserving secularized traces of shamanistic songs used in regional cults, including those centered on river deities, many of whom came to be anthropomorphized as gods and goddesses.⁶⁶ Song Yu is often paired in the literary imagination with his more famous contemporary Qu Yuan, the archetypal exile, suicide, and author of one of the most important poetic laments in the tradition, “Encountering Sorrow 離騷.” Despite Qu Yuan’s fame, Du Fu’s Kuizhou poetry draws more deeply on works associated with Song Yu, perhaps because the region was littered with traces associated with his poetry, including his former residence, the royal palaces of Chu, and the Yang Terrace atop Mt. Wu, which appears in a bend of the Yangzi in “At Qutang Contemplating the Past.”

The location of Song Yu’s house varied depending on one’s sources: some said that it could be found downriver, past the Gorges in Jiangling, while others claimed that it was further west in Zigui, in the heart of the Gorges.68 Du Fu is less confident, suggesting that references to his house are nothing more than “baseless literary stylings” (kong wenzao 空文藻). The precise connection between literary style and Song Yu’s house is obscure, though it is possible, as I have suggested in my translation, that Du Fu is referring to “baseless” texts produced by locals or traveling writers who wished to embellish their accounts of the landscape by exploiting Song’s aura.⁶⁹ Du Fu contrasts these suspect accounts of Song Yu’s house with the ruins of the Yang Terrace, a structure most commentators locate in the mountains of the Wu Gorge, downriver from Kuizhou.⁷⁰ For Du Fu, the ruination of the Yang Terrace gives it a materiality that both Song Yu’s “former residence” and the completely effaced “palaces of Chu” in line 7 lack. Famously described in Song Yu’s “Gaotang Rhapsody” as the location of a sensual dream assignation between a Chu king and the goddess of Mt. Wu, the terrace’s materiality is confirmed by its desolation (huang 荒).

In other Kuizhou poems, including “At Qutang Yearning for the Past,” Du Fu describes the terrace as an integral, if secluded, part of the local landscape, though there is nothing in these works to suggest that he actually visited this site. Had he climbed to the ruins, what would he have found there?⁷¹ The terrace to which Du Fu and so many other poets refer was probably not the physical trace of the “original” immortalized in Song Yu’s rhapsody. More likely, it was the ruin of a structure intended for some other use but repurposed as a literary-historical trace, one of many Yang Terraces found throughout the ancient state of Chu (and as far east as modern Anhui Province) that were used to commemorate and give tangible form to the supernatural events described in Song Yu’s poem.⁷² These Yang Terraces, like the former residences of Song Yu, are examples of a common desire to seek, and if necessary fabricate, physical coordinates for poetic sites. This search for physical traces exemplifies how literary discourse (especially the belief that poetry documents actual experiences, places, and times) concretely shapes and transforms the landscape. The “lexical landscapes and textual mountains” that Paul Kroll has described in another context had a way of materializing long after the poems had been written and their poets buried. By calling into question the historical reliability of structures purported to be Song Yu’s former home, Du Fu reflects on one consequence of this search for physical landmarks. Competing claims to authenticity lead to the atomization of ji like Song Yu’s house. No longer limited to one site, they appear throughout the landscape.

In contrast to such dubious physical traces, Du Fu begins the poem with a series of textual traces that form a more solid connection between Song Yu and himself than any building possibly could. The first line opens with a quotation from one of the “Nine Disputations 九辯” of the Songs of Chu, which are traditionally attributed to Song Yu. The phrase I have translated as “autumn’s decay”—yaoluo 搖落—describes the withering and decay of vegetal life (“fluttering falling” is a more literal translation) and evokes a rich tradition of autumnal poetry and meditations on mortality.73 In the second line of the opening couplet, Du Fu describes Song Yu by borrowing a list of qualities—dashing romantic, learned, elegant—from a poem by the famous poet and exile Yu Xin 庾信 (513–581), the subject of the first poem in this series, and, according to tradition, a former resident of Song Yu’s house in Jiangling.⁷⁴ Perhaps the strongest link between Song Yu and Yu Xin, however, comes from the latter’s magnum opus, “Mourning the Southland Rhapsody 哀江南賦,”⁷⁵ which takes its title from a line in another Songs of Chu poem attributed to Song Yu, “Summoning the Soul 招魂”:

If the physical landmarks that Du Fu mentions in this poem are either out of view or no longer present, traces of Song Yu’s famed words and upright character have found new homes, first in Yu Xin’s poetry and then in both the person and the poetry of Du Fu. These words and traits, formulated poetically, transmitted textually, and embodied by Du Fu, have endured; Song Yu’s home and the palaces of Chu have not. Those who seek out these structures in order to establish a physical link to the past fail to understand, as Du Fu does, the nature of the ji/trace. It is both more elusive and more common than the historical site—reflected moonlight, an echo of an earlier text, a way of seeing the landscape, or a personal or literary quality studied and absorbed through poetry. The pointing fingers of the poem’s final line are the traces they seek, evidence of Song Yu’s enduring literary legacy. The homes of both the ancient poet and the king he immortalized may be gone, but they live on in those fingers.

三峽樓臺淹日月	In towers and terraces of the Three Gorges lingering for days and months
五溪衣服共雲山	With the tribes who wear the clothing of the Five Streams sharing cloud and mountain⁸

玉露凋傷楓樹林	Jade dew wilts and wounds the forests of maple trees
巫山巫峽氣蕭森	On Wu Mountain, in Wu Gorge—the air is bitter harsh
江間波浪兼天湧	In the middle of the Jiang, waves join the sky, surging
塞上風雲接地陰	Atop the pass, wind and clouds touch the earth, darkling

秋興，其二	Autumn Stirrings, Poem Two¹⁷
夔府孤城落日斜	When on the solitary city of Kuizhou the setting sun slants
每依北斗望京華	I always follow the Big Dipper to look toward the capital
聽猿實下三聲淚	Hearing gibbons truly I shed tears at their “three cries”
奉使虛隨八月槎	Sent out to serve vainly have I pursued the “eighth month” raft¹⁸
畫省香爐違伏枕	The painted ministry’s fragrant censers so far from my sickbed¹⁹
山樓粉堞隱悲笳	The mountain hall’s whitewashed battlements hide a doleful flute
請看石上藤蘿月	Look! the vine and creeper moon that was atop the rocks
已映洲前蘆荻花	Shines already on the reed flowers before the islet

瞿唐峽口曲江頭	From the mouth of Qutang Gorge to the head of the Serpentine
萬里風煙接素秋	Ten thousand li of wind and fog link hoary autumns

請看石上藤蘿月	Look! the vine and creeper moon that was atop the rocks
已映洲前蘆荻花	Shines already on the reed flowers before the islet

關塞極天唯鳥道	Unshakable passes to sky’s end—only a bird’s path
江湖滿地一漁翁	Rivers and lakes fill the land—a solitary fisherman

綵筆昔遊干氣象	My colored brush has wandered through the past, forging atmospheres and images
白頭吟望苦低垂	My gray head, chanting and gazing, now hangs low and bitter

起宏圖	I raise a grand plan—
一橋飛架南北	A single bridge, flying, will span south and north
天塹變通途	Transforming a natural moat into a thoroughfare
更立西江石壁	And across the western Jiang we shall erect a wall of stone
截斷巫山雲雨	That will rend Mt. Wu’s clouds and rain
高峽出平湖	Till lofty gorges rise from a placid lake⁴¹

禹廟	Yu’s Shrine⁴³
禹廟空山裏	Yu’s Shrine stands within empty mountains
秋風落日斜	Where autumn wind and setting sun slant
荒庭垂橘柚	In overgrown courtyards hang tangerine and pomelo
古屋畫龍蛇	In ancient halls are painted dragons and serpents⁴⁴
雲氣噓青壁	Clouds and mist respire over verdant cliffs⁴⁵
江聲走白沙	River sounds race across white sands
早知乘四載	Long have I known that by riding the four vehicles,⁴⁶
疏鑿控三巴	Dredging and carving, he mastered the three Ba⁴⁷

西南萬壑注	In the southwest myriad streams converge
勁敵兩崖開	Where fierce enemies are divided by paired palisades
地與山根裂	When the earth from its mountain roots was rent
江從月窟來	The Jiang from the Moon Cave came
削成當白帝	Pared to perfection it stands opposite Baidi
空曲隱陽臺	In an empty bend it hides the Yang Terrace
疏鑿功雖美	Though his feats of dredging and carving were glorious
陶鈞力大哉	The power of the Potter’s Wheel was greater yet

詠懷古跡，其二	Singing My Feelings on Traces of the Past, Second Poem⁶⁷
搖落深知宋玉悲	Amidst autumn’s decay, deeply I understand Song Yu’s sorrow
風流儒雅亦吾師	A dashing romantic, learned, elegant—he too is my teacher
悵望千秋一灑淚	In despair, gazing across a thousand autumns—a single scattering of tears
蕭條異代不同時	Forlorn, isolated in different ages—no contemporaries we
江山故宅空文藻	Tales of his former home midst river and mountain are baseless literary stylings
雲雨荒台豈夢思	But clouds and rain by the ruined terrace—how could they be the yearnings of a dream?
最是楚宮俱泯滅	Most of all, the palaces of Chu have been totally effaced
舟人指點到今疑	Boatmen point them out, but these days they are full of doubt

目極千里兮, 傷春心	The eye extends for one thousand li—ah—how it pains this spring heart
魂兮歸來, 哀江南!	Soul—ah—return, come! How I mourn for the Southland!⁷⁶