Island of Guanyin: Mount Putuo and Its Gazetteers by Bingenheimer Marcus

Author:Bingenheimer, Marcus [Bingenheimer, Marcus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-04-14T18:15:00+00:00

Exhibit 2: Tu Long’s “Twelve Famous Views of Mount Putuo” (c. 1589)

In 1925 Lu Xun was both sad and amused to hear that the Leifeng Pagoda, one of the “Ten Famous Sights of the West Lake,” had collapsed: sad, because the destruction served “no purpose” and was merely brought about by people looting bricks; amused, because the fall of the pagoda upset what he called the “ten sights disease.” Lu felt that the custom of grouping famous sights in sets of ten or eight was a nuisance that had reached “epidemic proportions in the Qing dynasty.” “Look through any county gazetteer, and you will find that the district has ten sights.”23

Grouping famous views of a region into sets was a result of the growing appreciation of local culture since the Song dynasty. Sets of famous spots gave travelers a route not unlike the routes of shrines one was supposed to visit on a pilgrimage. The sets thus gave structure to a journey and its memory. In modern tourism a sizable segment of the market seems to cater to tourists who do not want to be simply tourists. Going to places “unspoiled” by tourism is highly valued. The mindset with which tourist-pilgrims undertook scenic travel in late imperial China was almost never concerned with the “new.” Explorers like Zheng He 鄭和 (1371–1433) and Xu Xiake 徐霞客 (1587–1641) were rare figures, and most people were content to see what they had read or heard about a site before. It was good enough that the site was new to them. By grouping places into sets of famous sights, local culture created a grid both for visitors suggesting what to visit as well as for poets suggesting what to write about.

In the texts of the Song and Yuan dynasties, Mount Putuo was perceived mainly as a religious site as well as an important landing place for envoys and embassies. In the Ming and Qing another aspect became prominent: the island began to be appreciated more and more as a scenic site. In his gazetteer of 1590, Tu Long 屠隆 (1543–1605) included no less than five poem-cycles on “Twelve Sights of Mount Putuo,” written by Wang Shouren 王守仁 (1472–1529) (Ch. 5, p. 7), Long Defu 龍德孚 (1531–1602) (Ch. 5, p. 20), Wang Shike 王世科 (d.u., fl.1544–1577) (Ch. 5, p. 35), Guan Daxun 管大勳 (jinshi 1565) (Ch. 5, p. 40), and himself (Ch. 6, p. 13). The presence of Wang Shouren or Wang Yangming, the eminent philosopher, is surprising; if the famous Wang Yangming had made a visit to Mount Putuo, his poems should appear prominently in all gazetteers. However, the Huo-Tu Gazetteer already made clear that the attribution to Wang Yangming is spurious,24 and the set was not included in any of the later editions, nor is it part of Wang Yangming’s collected works.25 Although Long Defu, Wang Shike, Guan Daxun, and Tu Long knew each other well and their sets originated very likely on a shared occasion, only the sets of Tu Long and Long Defu were eventually carried forward in the gazetteers.

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