Fixing Landscape by Corey Byrnes

Author:Corey Byrnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT008010, Literary Criticism/Asian/Chinese, ART015000, Art/History/General
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2018-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

PART III

For the Record

5

A RECORD OF THE TRACE

When I went to look at Fengjie, the location where we shot the film, every county we saw had basically been reduced to rubble. Seeing this place, with its 2,000 years of history and dense neighborhoods left in ruins, my first impression was that human beings could not have done this. The changes had occurred so fast and on such a large scale, it was as if nuclear war or an extraterrestrial had done it.

—Jia Zhangke1

LEAVING BAIDICHENG

At the beginning of this book and at each of its points of “passage,” I have reflected on the enduring popularity of Li Bai’s “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng.” For over a millennium, this short poem has shaped the popular imagination of the Three Gorges. With each recitation and in each translation, Baidicheng, shrouded always in the clouds of morning, serves as a point of departure. Li Bai’s poem and many other famous accounts of the Three Gorges have lent Baidicheng an air of timelessness for those who wish, if only temporarily, to look past all that has changed since the Tang. One of the best-known landmarks in the Three Gorges, Baidicheng has been central to the seeming stability of the region as cultural concept. As Fan Chengda and Lu You discovered in the Song Dynasty, and Red Pine/Bill Porter rediscovered only a few years ago, however, Baidicheng’s stability is as much an effect of historical re-creation as it is a fact of historical preservation. The temples and other ancient buildings that make this topographical feature a famous cultural site are not always what they seem to be.

With the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, even the geographical status of Baidicheng has changed. Thanks to the inundation of the low-lying land that anchored it to the banks of the Yangzi, the former fortress is no longer a promontory, but an island, connected to the banks of the Yangzi by a high, Chinese-style bridge punctuated by tile-covered pavilions. Before the completion of the dam, the banks of this soon-to-be island were reinforced with a wide band of concrete added to prevent erosion caused by the increased pressure of water in the reservoir. Still connected to the surrounding land, Baidicheng was primed for a new spatial reality. This is how it appears in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (figure 5.1), to the left of Kuimen, its concretized banks extending up from the waterline. Beset by forces that threaten its continued existence, Baidicheng has been armored to preserve the look and feel of the Three Gorges as a certain kind of Chinese landscape. For the region to remain a coherent cultural concept despite the enormous changes it has undergone, landmarks like Baidicheng had to be carefully fixed in place, even as others were dismantled, moved, or inundated. The goddess of Mt. Wu from Mao’s poem “Swimming” might marvel at this epochal reinscription of the Three Gorges, but thanks to such acts of preservation she will not find her world completely altered.

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