![]() ![]() "What is Shan Hai Jing, the Book of Mountains and Seas about? Is it a geographical book? A travelogue? A history book? A book of mythology? A book of folklore? These are but a few citations of the mysteries and riddles of Chinese culture, the tip of an iceberg. The great Tang poet Du Fu (712-770) in Shensi regretted he had not traveled to Fu-sang, whose fu-sang tree, imagined by Han times in China as something like mulberry, evidently was a cornstalk, confused in some Shan hai jing reports with organ-pipe cactus.": "Hwi returned an old man 499 and described Hohokam Arizona and Teotihuacan Mexico to the Southern Liang court 502. Shan Hai Jing, namely, the Mountain and Sea Records, recorded most of the myths and legends of ancient China, and this book, strangely, had recorded the stories and accounts of lands as far as Europe and the Americas." "There are two books that are worthy of special attention, Shan Hai Jing and Huai Nan Zi. I can't find an English translation in book or any other form, but this (expensive) Japanese translation's description page is very informative as to the book's contents: Shan Hai Jing is often translated as "Classic of Mountains and Seas". the Ltishi chunqiu, the Huai nan zi, the Liji, the Zhou li, the Guan zi.I jsut did a little web search, and it DOES sound very interesting (and likely right up GH's alley). Any mistakes found in this paper are my own responsibility. My special thanks to John Moffett for final corrections, as well as for his valuable comments. I owe a debt of gratitude also to Bridie Andrews, Marta Hanson, Morris Low, and Lowell Skar for important remarks and corrections of my English. I am truly grateful to François Martin for taking time to conduct a meticulous reading through of this paper with me. I would like to thank Augustin Berque, Charles Le Blanc, Karine Chemla, Anne Cheng, Marc Kalinowski, Michael Lackner, Christian Lamouroux, Bernard Lepetit, Rémi Mathieu, Georges Métailié, and Alexei Volkov for valuable comments on this paper. My participation in this Conference was kindly supported by the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Foundation. Certain items were discussed at the 10th Conference of the European Association of Chinese Studies (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, 29 August - 1 September 1994). It is an enlarged version of a paper presented at the 7th International Conference on the History of Science in East Asia (Kansai Science City, Kyoto District, Japan, 2-7 August 1993), which I attended thanks to the financial support of the Organizing Committee of the Conference. An exploration of it can serve to highlight certain typological characteristics and specifics of conceptions of space at the mature stage of Chinese cosmography, and to advance some suppositions concerning its origins and evolution.ĪBBREVIATIONS: SBCK - Sibu congkan - SBBY - Sibu beiyao - SSJZS - Shisanjing zhushu - ZZJC - Zhuzi jicheng This article was written under the auspices of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme Foundation. Normally the English name of the book is the Classic of Mountain and Seas. In addition, the extent of the geographical area encompassed and the multiplicity of detail provided, combined with a remarkably systematic arrangement of data, distinguishes it from other ancient Chinese representations of the world. Shan is mountain, Hai is seas, and jing is scripture or classic or sacred book. It occupies a special place among these sources as the only text entirely devoted to cosmography. The SHJ is one of several sources * of a compilatory nature produced by the summarization and systematization and, to a considerable extent, the reconstruction and reinterpretation of the cultural heritage accumulated by the formative stage of imperial China (the end of the 1st millenium B.C.- the beginning of the 1st millenium A.D.). The quinary terrestrial scheme of the SJ embraces a large region of territory around the basins of the Huanghe and Changjiang rivers (see Map 1). ![]() This article* is concerned with the view of the terrestrial world presented in the Shan haijing ("The Classic of Mountains and Seas", hereafter the SHJ). Conception of Terrestrial Organization in the Shan haijing ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |