Book Review--Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue 南嶽) in Medieval China

During the past two decades, an ever-increasing body of scholarship has examined the cultural import of Chinese sacred sites. Power of Place sheds new light on this issue by surveying the dynamic and diverse spatial characteristics of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue 南嶽) during the medieval era. Robson, an associate professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, adopts a sophisticated methodology that features the blending of geographical and historical modes of analysis. Moreover, his scholarship encompasses a broad base of sources, including a twelfth-century work entitled Nanyue zongsheng ji 南嶽總勝集 (Record of the Collected Highlights of Nanyue), the Nanyue zhi 南嶽志 (Gazetteer of Nanyue; 1883) by Li Yuandu 李元度, the Northern Song Daoist hagiography Nanyue jiu zhenren zhuan 南嶽九真人傳 (Biographies of the Nine Perfected of Nanyue), and data from a lost work entitled Nanyue shiba gaoseng zhuan 南嶽十八高僧傳 (Biographies of the Eighteen Eminent Monks of Nanyue). The result is a case study that not only does justice to the complexity of one of China’s most vibrant sacred sites, but also clarifies far-reaching issues of Chinese religious history.