Creating local landscape: tidal bores and seawalls at haining (1720s-1830s)

Abstract

My dissertation explores landscape as a social and cultural instrument in the high Qing (1760s-1820s), a multi-ethnic empire with the largest territory and the most diverse ethnic groups in the history of China. In particular, I ask how a multiethnic empire rules and how the small county of Haining in east central China fit into the ruling house’s vision of its empire as a “great union.” Instead of answering these questions by examining the center of state politics (administration and state policies), I look at local politics. In this case I examine how seawalls, tidal phenomena, and scenes of daily life represented as Haining landscapes were collected and organized in local histories and imperially commissioned works. This dissertation thus seeks both to elucidate the historical relations between the imperial center and the locale and to address issues of wider concern to scholars of empire formation in the early modern world. Haining in the late imperial period was a small city located where the Qiantang River flows into China East Sea in Zhejiang province. Before the second half of the eighteenth century, Haining most commonly appeared in reports of local coastal floods caused by tidal bores and requests for famine relief. Following the construction of protective seawalls and the Qianlong emperor’s inspection tours to Haining in 1762, the image of tidal bores shifted. Once depicted as wild and uncontrolled natural disasters they now appeared as tamed and even aesthetically pleasing phenomena. Haining itself thereafter was celebrated in poems as a place holding a unique position as the destination for sightseeing related to the tidal bores and a booming cultural center noted for poets, bibliophiles, and scholars.

The central thematic concern of my dissertation is the local response of Haining’s literati to the Qianlong emperor’s representations of Haning’s local landscapes. I analyze this response in terms of discursive representations functioning as political technology in service of power. While Qianlong used local landscapes to imagine Haining as a jigsaw puzzle piece in his multiethnic empire, local literati appropriated that imagination and manipulated the meaning of local landscapes in an effort to reinforce their own status. Despite their differences in terms of political agendas and interests, however, both the imperial and local representations of local landscapes facilitated to map out previously little known Haining as a highly cultivated place with beautiful sceneries on the imperial cultural map. My dissertation works on three types of textual representations of local landscape, natural sights (tidal bores), man-made structures (seawalls), and human performance (scenes of local daily life). Most were landscape poems anthologized and re-anthologized into Haining local histories since the sixteenth century. The rate of their incorporation into the histories rapidly increased in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, especially after textually constructed landscapes of Haining had been included in imperially sponsored works after the Qianlong emperor’s inspection tours to Haining. These poems constitute a unique kind of historical source material, one that invites an interdisciplinary approach. First, this body of material allows for a detailed study of the development of the largely unexamined local histories in the form of poems. Second, the landscape poems incorporated in imperially sponsored works can serve as a vehicle for examining one aspect of the Qing rule. As an example, the Qianlong emperor’s poems on his tours to seawalls and tidal bores function more as edicts to local

officials than simply praises to local scenery beauty. Third, an exploration of the milieu from which they sprang poses questions about the relationship between the imperial center and its locale. Finally, this abundance of documentation also sheds light on the related matters of how recording and documenting of landscape poetry can forge a national identify for a multi-ethnic empire.