Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools by James M. Hargett;

Author:James M. Hargett;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780295744483
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2018-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

4.1. Painting of the White Marchmount (Baiyue tu 白岳圖; 1343). 84.4 × 41.4 cm. Attributed to Leng Qian (fl. fourteenth century). The Collection of National Palace Museum, Taipei.

ADDENDUM

Up until the Ming dynasty, travel literature relied completely on authorial verbal skill to create word pictures of visually based phenomena like mountains, water, rocks, and trees. That some Ming painters, especially those, like Wang Lü, who were interested in depicting the realities and dangers of mountain climbing and providing more verbal and visual details about the physical challenges of the journey, especially the dangers of ascending an extremely perilous height like Mount Hua, would use paintings to illustrate such details in their youji is certainly not surprising.55 And while topographical paintings that were related to sightseeing destinations continued to be produced in the Qing dynasty, most of which concerned famous mountains and carried inscriptions in verse (rather than prose), albums like that of Wang Lü, which included a prose youji describing a real journey to the place depicted in the painting, are in fact rare in the history of Chinese painting. One reason for this, as noted by Cahill, is that “the Chinese tradition of painting contains no single ‘realistic’ or ‘true-to-life’ mode of representation,” but only some occasional examples.56 The most critical point of all, however, is this: even though scholars like Kathlyn Maurean Liscomb have been able to find isolated examples in which a pictorial representation of a real landscape includes a prose youji, these works had no discernible impact on the development of travel writing. Virtually all Chinese youji authors in the Ming and the remainder of the traditional period followed the generic conventions established by their predecessors, and rather than break tradition and begin to append paintings, illustrations, maps, and so on to their prose accounts, they instead continued to utilize and to rely on their verbal skills to describe and “paint word pictures” of their travel experiences.

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