英文摘要 |
The essay is inspired by reading geographical books that were completed in the Han and Tang Dynasties. The books of Lingnan Yiwu (foreign things south of the Nanling mountains) were popular in the Han Jin era but gradually disappeared after the Liu Song Dynasty. By the time of the mid and late Tang Dynasty, the genre made its comeback. I argue that this vicissitude resulted from the mass migration of people crossing Nanling to its south after the An Lushan Rebellion. The essay starts from a discussion of the cultural significance of "foreign/native" and further inquires into how yiwu (foreign things) entered knowledge to become part of it. Different from the Six Dynasties, the authors appear multiple times in their texts to demonstrate their visual perspectives on yiwu, with the effects of not only presenting their gestures in the face of yiwu but also extending the frontier of the bowu (natural history) writing. Moreover, the writing of yiwu highlights issues of language. The writers adopt attachments, associations, and allusions to the literature of previous eras to absorb yiwu into the memory network so as to construct a genealogy of knowledge for "the South." |