Abstract: In the 18th and 19th centuries, in the debates of "the origin of Chinese civilization" and "Fusang is the Americas", the Classic of Mountains and Seas entered the academic vision of Westerners, and continued to promote France's geographical exploration of China's early landscape and territorial imagination. For more than a hundred years, the French studies of Horace, Rackbury, Bazin, Ronnie, Brenoff, Schgood, Glenyan, Remy · Matthew, Weidley and others have interpreted this early Chinese geographical writing from multiple perspectives such as geography, ethnography, political science, and philology, and have put forward novel research angles and ways of thinking as external achievements, proving that in the understanding of the historical context of Chinese civilization, geography, history, ethnicity, politics and other aspects are inseparable, and the achievements of modern and contemporary scholars in the mainland complement each other. These studies not only show that contemporary Chinese studies in France are inseparable from the existing traditions and frameworks of European Orientalism, but also help us to reflect on and deepen our current research in the understanding and criticism of relevant Western topics, and then explore how to expand the platform for international dialogue on ancient Chinese historical geography in a cross-cultural context.
Throughout the history of Sinology in France, the Classic of Mountains and Seas is as important to the ancient geography of the East as the Analects is to Chinese Confucianism, so it has become an important topic in Western Sinology. The acceptance of the Classic of Mountains and Seas in Western geography is related to how the West views the emergence of early Chinese geography and national civilization.
In the 18th century, the French orientalist J. de Guignes threw out the theories of "Chinese immigrants for Egypt" and "Chinese immigrants to the Americas", which had a huge impact. In the controversy that has lasted for a hundred years, many scholars have cited the Classic of Mountains and Seas as a basis for supporting or refuting it. Among them, C. Ho Lai Si de Harlez), A. Rackbury Terrien de Lacouperie and others questioned the authenticity of the book, but E. Breenoff (E. Brown) Burnouf) and L. Ronnie. de Rosny, willing to believe in its authenticity, sought to reveal its geographical and naturalistic value in the translation of the Classic of Mountains and Seas. Schlegel refuted Deggin with the theory of population migration, and a number of geographers have paid attention to the problem of ancient Chinese geographical surveying.
In short, in the debate about the geographical environment and the origin of civilization in early China, the Classic of Mountains and Seas entered the Western academic field and continued to promote the exploration of the France's early geographical landscape and territorial imagination in China for more than a century. Through the discussion of the geographical science of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, Western scholars have placed China in the perspective of global comparative knowledge, and this academic connection is of great significance to the study of geographical thought in both China and the West.
1. The measurement of "li" and the geographical scope of the "Classic of Mountains and Seas".
A key issue in determining the territorial scope of the Classic of Mountains and Seas is the length of the "li". Although some scholars on the mainland lamented that few people have seriously examined this issue, the author finds that France Oriental scholars have long realized that the "li" in China in the earlier period was much shorter than that of later generations, and this insight is decisive for understanding the geographical scope of the Classic of Mountains and Seas.
In 1760, after Degin proposed the idea that Fuso, 40,000 li from China, was the Americas, many scholars in France began to pay attention to the unit of measurement of Chinese geography. The first to realize this problem was the France geographer J. Donville. B. D'Anville, in his essay On the Measurement of Distance in Ancient and Modern Times (1769), discusses the ancient and modern measures of distance around the world, including the Chinese "li". Townville was taught by the Jesuit J. Duched. B. du Halde) commissioned and redrawn a map of China based on the Panorama of the Imperial Opinion and included in the Quanzhi of the Chinese Empire. Referring to the translations of the Orientalists and Jesuits of the time, he found that the length of the "li" was not always the same in different periods, and even varied greatly. Oriental scholar J. Claprott von Klaproth has pointed out that the "li" in the "General Examination of Literature" is less than half of the later miles, and is too small to be applied to any measure of distance pointed out by Chinese geographers at any time. A. Remusa Rémusat also points out in the Chronicles of the Buddha (1836): "The 'li' used to vaguely express these long distances may have been very short. ”
In the reprint of "The Oriental Peoples Known in Ancient China" (1886), the France Japan scholar Ronnie devoted a new chapter to the geographical unit "li" in China. The article points out that the meaning of "li" in the literature such as "Zhou Li", "Erya", "Historical Records" and "Shuowen" is different and the length is different; The concepts of "step", "ruler", "inch" and "mu" in the ancient books are vague and cannot be accurately calculated to determine the changes in the meaning of length in China. Roni also points out that "in some periods, the 'li' was much smaller than it is now" and that "many important ancient geographical and ethnographic studies belong to these periods". At that time, Roche was translating the "Book of Mountains", which should be specifically mentioned. Luo believes that the distance recorded in the Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms ·Wei Zhi" does not match the modern distance...... to Lelang County and Obifang County and 12,000 li", and "there is a slave country to the south...... More than 12,000 li from the county to the Queen's Kingdom", if calculated according to the length of modern miles, "the capital of the Queen of Himiko cannot be located anywhere in the Japan archipelago, not even in Kamchatka, not on the coast of the White Ridge, but somewhere in the Alaska region or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!" This is clearly a mistake." Roche asserts that the "li" here is much shorter than it is now.
France geographer L. Saint-Martin V. de Saint-Martin) found that the length of the Chinese "li" changed in the past dynasties as much as the Westerners changed in the measure of distance in different peoples and eras. He explained the problem of geometrics in China based on the Records of the Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty, pointing out that the meaning of "li" was confusing and varied under the superficially uniform name because it was used to denote distances that could not be immediately or directly assessed, and it was only later, with certain advances in mathematics and astronomical sciences, that this order of linear measurement was attempted. "It is a fact recognized by Chinese historians that the distance expressed by the word was shorter in ancient times than in modern times," said St. Martin. ”
Because of this, we see that all the France scholars who translated the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" did not use the ancient Greece unit of distance stade, the ancient Roman mille, or the France ancient lilieue to translate the "li", but used the Roman phonetic li to prevent ambiguity. On the method of presumption, St. Martin points out: "The significance of the measure of distance can only be explained in the light of the local conditions at the time. These opinions greatly narrow the geographical scope of the Classic of Mountains and Seas. At the beginning of the 20th century, the France sinologist M. Gülenyan Granet, in speculating on the geographical scope of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, argues that the territory presented in the book is rather narrow, confined to the southern part of Zhili, Luxi, the interior of Jiangsu, the northern part of Anhui and Hubei, the southern part of Shanxi, and the Shaanxi and Gansu regions, and some mountain ranges from south to Zhejiang. He wrote that "it barely includes the bordering parts of Henan and Shanxi, Shaanxi and Shandong, that is, the areas through which the Yellow River flows or impasses", and although the deserts in the northwest and Shu in the southwest and Kunlun in the west are mentioned, "the desert and the sea are not within the geographical vision of the ancient Chinese, and they remain mythical spaces". In fact, contemporary mainland scholars such as Wang Ning and Liu Zongdi have narrowed the scope to the vicinity of Shandong, believing that the Classic of Mountains and Seas is a geography book of the Lu Kingdom.
Although the problem of distance measurement in the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" has never been specifically studied by France scholars, because the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" is considered to be the earliest recorded document of "Fuso", it began to be collected and translated by oriental scholars, thus entering the academic vision of Westerners.
2. The belief and doubt of the geography recorded in the myth
The earliest mention of the geographical value of the Classic of Mountains and Seas should be A. Bazin, from the School of Oriental Languages in Paris. Professor Bazin, who first published an article in 1839 about the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the opinions of Chinese scholars on the book, said: "Such an absurd book cannot be ignored, and the geographical knowledge of the Chinese deserves our in-depth study." However, it was not until the mid-to-late 19th century that the Oriental scholars Brenoff and Roni translated the annotations to prove that the Book of Mountains is a true record of physical geography. In 1875, in order to allow Westerners to "have an accurate idea of the geographical part of the ancient Classic of Mountains and Seas", Brenoff first used the Classic of Mountains and Seas as an example to discuss the geographical significance of the Classic of Mountains and Seas. Based on the annotations of Guo Pu, Wu Renchen, and Hao Yixing, Bushi translated and annotated the contents between "Qianlai" and "Nanshan", and then sorted out the 77 mountains and the corresponding hydrological conditions of the "Xishan Jing" according to the mountain names, distances, directions, water names, and river names. Bush considered this work "of certain significance to the study of the historical geography of the Chinese Empire" and brought this article to the opening ceremony of the provincial capital of France Orientalists. The publisher of the article said in the afterword that the translation would make the academic community realize that "this is probably the oldest work on geography in the world." Sure enough, the article caught Ronnie's attention.
From 1885 onwards, Ronnie translated and annotated five volumes of the Classic of Mountains and Seas: Ancient Geography of China. Based on the growing geographical knowledge at that time, this paper integrates the records of mountains, rivers and islands in the Classic of Mountains and Seas into the actual geographical environment of China. At the same time, it fully demonstrated the interdisciplinary characteristics and the overall vision of East Asian studies, breaking through the traditional research methods of Sinology at that time. In addition to the annotations of the past dynasties, the translator also referred to at least 20 ancient Chinese documents, as well as many achievements of Western Sinology and Japan at that time, expanding the scope of geography from a naturalist perspective, presenting the characteristics of the "Mountain Classic" as a mountain and river naturalist, greatly enriching the understanding of the "Mountain and Sea Classic" by Sinology readers, and won the "Julian Award" in 1891. This translation had a great impact, attracting the attention of more Western scholars to the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and promoting the book to enter the world's academic literature. Since then, the catalogues of Chinese books have classified the Classic of Mountains and Seas as "geography". United Kingdom geologist C. Gould In his book Mythical Monsters, Gould says, "Roughly speaking, The Classic of Mountains and Seas is a fictional story; Reading with wisdom is a historical treasure", and ranked it at the top of the world's natural history books. We published in 1886 the book of the Orientalist A. Le Suève. Lesouëf) in the catalogue of the collection reads: "(The Classic of Mountains and Seas) is not only the earliest geographical work of the Chinese, but also probably the oldest geographical work in the world, see Ronnie's translation." France sinologist H. Caudi In his first supplement to the Bibliography of China, Cordier placed the Classic of Mountains and Seas translated by Brenoff and Roni at the top of the "geography category", and then listed Western studies of ancient and modern Chinese geography. This approach also helps to link with modern place names and places, piecing together the ancient Chinese's vision of territory.
Of course, the geographical value of the Classic of Mountains and Seas is not unquestioned. With the exploration of the origin of Chinese civilization and the extensive screening of Chinese ancient books in the European academic circles, in the late 19th century, cautious attitudes and doubts appeared towards some difficult to verify geographical records in the Classic of Mountains and Seas.
The France orientalist Rackbury pointed out in Early Chinese Civilization to the West (1894) that the Classic of Mountains and Seas is a book with incremental content. He acknowledges that the Wuzang Shan Jing is a geographical description of the country's hills and mountains under the rule of the Shang Dynasty, but argues that the "Four Overseas Classics" and the "Four Classics of the Sea" were compiled by Liu Xiang in the Han Dynasty and described the utopian geography of the Zhou Dynasty; Later, Liu Xin compiled another version of chapters 6 to 13, forming the more romantic "Four Classics of the Great Wilderness" and "The Classic of the Sea"; Finally, Guo Pu added the content of the Jin Dynasty's "Water Classic" to the thirteenth chapter, which formed the current "Classic of Mountains and Seas". In the same year, Charles De Harlez, a Belgian missionary and professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Leuven, pointed out that the Chinese in 2200 BC could not have such a wide geographical vision and knowledge, and the scope of Dayu's rule could not reach two places so far apart, while the territory of the later empire included all the countries described in the "Classic of Mountains and Seas". He speculated that the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" was a Han Dynasty alchemist, that is, a variety of spiritual media, which only recorded the content of worship without any real geographical information, in contrast to the serious and authentic "Yu Gong", and should have been "a method of glorifying heroes" in the early days of the empire. It can be seen that Horis and Rackbury pointed to the political level of the book of this myth, believing that it was a book that served the rulers of the Han Dynasty and was not a scientific record.
In fact, their opinion is a serious internal critique of the text, but it has inspired France scholars to refute or interpret this ancient Chinese geographical writing from ethnological, archaeological, and political perspectives for more than a hundred years. Until the present day, the major Western studies of the Classic of Mountains and Seas are still greatly influenced by the opinions of this period.
3. Population migration: ethnographic issues in the Classic of Mountains and Seas
Professor Schgooder of Leiden University firmly objected to the questioning of the authenticity of the geographical knowledge contained in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and said that the facts implicit in the Classic of Mountains and Seas could refute the "serious arguments for denigrating the antiquity of the Chinese nation in every possible way" that were popular at the time, and that the book showed that China had interacted with other peoples in Asia in a very distant time.
Schgude serialized a series of monographs in the Circular in French, "Geographical Problems: Foreigners in Chinese Historical Records", and examined the 20 countries in northeast China recorded in the "Sea Classic": for example, the Heizhi and Xuangu countries in the "Overseas Eastern Longitude" and "Great Wilderness Eastern Classic" are the Tungusic and the Gilyak ethnic groups in the Heilongjiang region, respectively; It is believed that the White Republic in the "Great Wilderness East Classic" is the distant ancestor of the ancient Ezo people in Japan, belonging to the Mongolian race, similar to the villagers of Russia; The White Republic in the "Overseas Western Classic" may be the remnants of Western Caucasian people in East Asia, and so on, in fact, the authenticity of the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" is demonstrated by the theory of population migration.
Drawing an analogy with Herodotus's Histories, Schiff argues that such books, although initially criticized, will prove to be true over time: "Because the ancients tended to confuse facts with myths, they gave facts a magical and inconceivable cloak that would be difficult for later generations of scholars to discern." He appealed to Western scholars to frankly dig into the truth of Chinese historical records under the surface of magic, and then discuss the geography and ethnicity of ancient China. In fact, in his book The Known Oriental Peoples in Ancient China (1881), Ronnie compared the Classic of Mountains and Seas to the Book of Genesis, which provided information on the Jewish peoples, pointing out that this is one of the early documents of the Chinese's understanding of the Oriental peoples, saying: "From the most distant recorded times, the Chinese have been concerned with the areas where their migratory people lived, and devoted themselves to the study of the geography of their country and surrounding areas. Their arguments link the Classic of Mountains and Seas to ethnogeography, and demonstrate the authenticity of this seemingly absurd geography from a new academic perspective.
Due to the limitations of the times, the inferences of Ronnie and Schgoode were unsubstantiated at the time, and were considered by many to be "nothing more than the imagination of some imaginative scholar". However, with the development of archaeology, Chinese and Western scholars began to pay attention to the cultural connection between China and the Americas. In the 30s of the 20th century, Belgium art historian and sinologist C. Huntz Based on a large number of artifacts and ethnographic data excavated in the Americas, Hentze's series of works compares the groups of monster images and motifs that are quite similar to those in myths and legends and unearthed sacrificial vessels in China and the Americas, and finds that the signs or motifs of these mystical ideas are related on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, suggesting a community of mythological logic. In the 60s of the 20th century, archaeologists represented by Zhang Guangzhi proposed the "Pacific Rim Civilization Circle", arguing that although Chinese civilization and Mesoamerican civilization originated differently, they were actually the products of the descendants of the same ancestor in different times and places. Following this academic trend, France Sinology opened up the modern study of the Classic of Mountains and Seas. Contemporary sinologist R. Remy · Matthew Mathieu argues that it is possible to explore the prehistoric origins of the myth of Eurasian oneness and the close relationship between the peoples of Asia and North America and ancient Siberia through drawings handed down from the Neolithic period and contemporary ethnological investigations.
In 1983, after eight years of hard work, Matthew published the first complete Western translation, Ancient Chinese Mythology and Ethnography: Commentary on the Classic of Mountains and Seas, which reinterpreted the Classic of Mountains and Seas and its commentaries from archaeological and anthropological sources, and explored the migration and cultural transmission of early Chinese people implied in the book from an ethnographic perspective. Matthew believes that the customs and shamans of Siberia had a great influence on the formation of Xia Shang mythology in China, and had a profound influence on North America.
He found that the myth of shooting the sun existed in the shamanic Far East, in the Altakans, and among the Koreans, while the Eskimos from North America to Alaska worshipped the creation crow, and even more developed on the west coast of North America; On the coast of East Siberia, on the opposite side of Hokkaido, people would make clothes out of fish skin or seal intestines, showing the characteristics of "black body" and "black stock"; According to anthropological reports, the Scythians had a habit of cutting off the arms of criminals and throwing them into the air for sacrifice, and throwing bones into the air was also a method of divination among Siberians, and the demonic image of one eye, one arm, and one bone is common in Central Asian and Siberian mythology, and Matthew deduces that the one-armed kingdom may have been part of Tibet influenced by this belief...... Matthew speculates that in the early Han Dynasty, the Central Plains peoples were in a long period of conquest or rebellion with the surrounding peoples, and a large number of myths were produced or revived in the cultural invasion and resistance. These myths have been degraded in the adaptation of culture and ideology, becoming legends and even folk tales, which have been included in works such as the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and have become "ethnographic treasure houses".
In fact, at the beginning of the 20th century, the dominant school of modern geography in France, formed by the Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, no longer emphasizes the nationalist narrative and frames the study of geography as a comprehensive field at the intersection of history, anthropology and sociology. This trend of thought has inspired countless scholars to devote themselves to exploring the cultural interactions and migrations across oceans, borders, and societies throughout history, resulting in many monographs. From Schgoode to Matthew, they can all be seen as discourses that conform to this academic trend. As a result, the study of the Classic of Mountains and Seas in France entered a new stage in the 20th century, becoming historical evidence for exploring the theory of national cultural interaction and communication.
4. The Political Function of Ancient Chinese Geography Writing
Since the birth of mythology in the West, it has been inseparable from political and religious issues, and the study of ancient geography is also inseparable from political perspectives. When interpreting the Classic of Mountains and Seas, France sinologists pay particular attention to the political background of the work. As we saw above, many scholars at that time noticed the problem of the short distance between the ancient miles, so much so that Gülen Yan narrowed the scope of the Classic of Mountains and Seas to the north of Zhejiang. However, after the unification of the Qin and Han dynasties, the place names in the book appeared on the entire territory of the empire. Therefore, contemporary France sinology pays special attention to the political background of this geographical writing when interpreting the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and traces some of these hard-to-verify geographical records to political purposes.
(1) Geographical Writing and Imperial Politics
At the beginning of the 20th century, although Gülen Yan did not conduct an internal examination of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, he also made a judgment from the perspective of political function. He pointed out that the "Book of Mountains" actually provided the king with an important place for Dayu to control the water or sacrifice and the necessary tribute for each region; The Kunlun region in the "Xishan Jing" is rich in minerals, which not only promotes the trade in the region, but also is used by the ethnic groups led by Dayu who have mastered metallurgical technology, and gradually gains political power; Most of the Chinese mythological themes provided in the Classic of Mountains and Seas show the order of time and space (four seasons, four directions) and conceptual norms (yin and yang, monarchs and ministers) established by the ancient rulers after their accession to the throne, and the supernatural figures in it are actually dancers in this ritual of re-establishing order. In short, the Classic of Mountains and Seas is not only a geographical chronicle, but also a geographical work that serves the political economy and tells the emperor how to use natural resources. Matthew attaches great importance to this: "Our understanding of geographical space, whether in China or elsewhere, must be premised on the concept of nationality and national status. ”
According to Matthew's inference, as one of the official documents for writing geographical knowledge in China, the Book of Mountains was used by geographers to compose a set of works with the meaning of "supra-vassal states", showing the vision of China's spatial order at that time, and reflecting people's cognition at that time from another perspective and way in addition to the pre-Qin classics. With the emergence of geopolitical ambitions and the unification of the Han empire, the part of the "Sea Classic" in the sense of cartography later appeared. As a result, Matthew attaches great importance to the relationship between the geographical naming of the Classic of Mountains and Seas and political intentions, and he interprets the different chapters, i.e., the same naming of different places, as a practice that serves the territorial legitimacy of the empire.
When translating the Classic of Mountains and Seas, Matthew found that the Classic of Mountains and the Classic of the Sea often have the same place names, and sometimes the same place name refers to two places far apart, such as "Zhubi" is both a place name in Xinjiang and a place name in Zhejiang; Cangwu, located in Ningyuan, Hunan, was placed in Guangxi in the "Southern Classic of the Sea", and Qingqiu appeared in the "Nanshan Classic", "Overseas Eastern Longitude" and "Great Wilderness Eastern Longitude...... According to Matthew, this situation may be due to population migration, or depending on the geographical origin of the person who named it and its location relative to the known territory; He speculated that it may have been during the Warring States period when trade between China and Central Asia increased, and the scattered geographical knowledge of merchants constituted the initial prototype of geographical science in documents such as the Classic of Mountains and Seas. However, businessmen may be interested in the resources of the land and try to associate them with the name of the place of origin (e.g., Snake Valley, Bear Mountain, Wulu Mountain, etc.); Politicians, on the other hand, were more keen to name conquered places, and based on the geographical vision of merchants, they semantically and imaginatively linked these places to places that were prominent in Chinese history. For example, the pronunciation of the "Mountain of Fuyu" in the "Great Wilderness North Classic" is very close to the pronunciation of names such as "Kuiyu Mountain" in the "Hainei East Longitude", "Wuyu" in the "Overseas North Classic", and "Buyeo" in the "Hainei West Classic", regardless of location, these place names have "the ability to evoke the reader's imagination as symbols", and it is likely that "the occupation of the new territory of Northeast China was realized by incorporating elements that were legitimate in Chinese history into the landscape". After the unification of the country, when the literati officials were commissioned to organize the Classic of Mountains and Seas, they managed to unify some of the place names in the two parts in order to meet the needs of the overall vision of the empire.
In fact, E. Sha Wan Chavannes already pointed out in the Translation of the Chronicles that Caesar named the local gods after the Roman gods when they invaded Gaul; The name "North Korea" did not appear when China sent the Jizi to govern Korea. It can be seen that Matthew continued the opinion of this school of sinologists, and tried to dissect how the knowledge involved in it was formed under imperial politics through such a book of empires.
But Matthew was also influenced by the author of the English translation of The Classic of Mountains and Seas. M. Birrell's criticism: "Too much space is devoted to the precise location of mythical place names when in fact they do not exist. Such opinions are not uncommon. As early as the beginning of the 19th century, Bazin positioned the content of the Mountain Classic as the cosmology of the Chinese, and pointed out that this concept is "based on the unique Chinese system and based on Chinese religious legends"; The Catalogue of Birch and the Collection, also known as the Classic of Mountains and Seas, describes "real and imaginary geography". In recent years, V. Weidley, a researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies (CRCAO) of the France Academy of Sciences. Dorofeeva-Lichtmann uses new perspectives and documents, including silk slips, to support this view, arguing that the Classic of Mountains and Seas describes the imaginary space of the ancient Chinese.
(2) Imagination space and the power of the divine domain
Weidley is the most active France scholar in the study of the Classic of Mountains and Seas in contemporary times, and pays more attention to the structure and function of the text itself. She absorbs and develops the views of scholars Li Ling and Kyung-ho Suh, arguing that some chapters of the Classic of Mountains and Seas have a certain degree of structural autonomy and have the characteristics of both "diagram" and "interpretation", and can be regarded as independent texts and spatial structures. Wei proposes the hypothesis that the original layout of the text itself combines the structure and topographical description of the map or space (orientation), which can be called a textual universe map, and there may not be a map or drawing in the modern sense as Bi Yuan said, and the book is a kind of "schema" for laying out the world. She speculates that before these religious views of the world were written, they may have occurred during the period of princely hegemony, and that small-scale worldviews representing different central points needed to be brought into a specific, unified framework of the world. Since the principles of the establishment of the view of the world are largely dependent on the local traditions of the rulers, there are some cases where descriptions or symbolic representations are contrary to the real geographical location. Therefore, she speculates that the records in the Classic of Mountains and Seas are not surveys and mapping in the sense of modern cartography, and that such low-precision maps are expressions of a specific spatial concept rather than geographical facts at a time when ancient Chinese cosmology was mature. Therefore, she believes that instead of focusing on the precise geographical location of a place name, it is better to explore how the geographical world in the Classic of Mountains and Seas is constituted as a whole, and advocates excavating the concept of spatial order in the Classic of Mountains and Seas and its relationship with imperial rule.
Wei believes that the "Overseas Classic" and the "Great Wilderness Classic", "The Sea Classic" and "The Mountain Classic" are two overlapping sets of descriptions, but the perspective is different, and she defines this spatial representation as a parallel complementary map. Compared with other ancient texts, such as the "Kyushu" and "Wufu" of "Yu Gong" and the vassal state system of the Zhou Dynasty in "Guofeng", the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" presents a dualistic and complementary spatial conceptual organization of "center" and "periphery", which can be represented by concentric squares, crosses and nine-square grids. In any case, this schema is not a map in the modern sense, but a tool to convey the concept of space, in the service of "spatial layout", and thus has a religious-political function related to shamanic rituals, the practice of the empire's "creation of the world", and the origin of divination.
By analyzing the spatial arrangement of the routes in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, Wei found that the system of routes in the Classic of Mountains and Seas is much more complex and detailed than in the Yugong, and that each region is subordinated to a specific group of gods, constituting a divine domain, a region influenced by the power of the gods: "This means that any action in dealing with space requires a special knowledge of the landscape, that is, the correct distinction between the local gods and the communication with them through the right sacrifices. Therefore, she believes that the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" proposes an alternative interpretation of the legend of Dayu, which is actually a divinistic version of the historical narrative carried out by the rulers of the empire.
By further comparing with "Yu Gong", "Mozi", "Wu Yue Chunqiu" and Shangbo Jian's "Rong Chengshi", Wei believes that there are actually two types of versions of Dayu's deeds of controlling the water: one is the "divine" version, and the other is the "administrative" version - the divine version represented by the "Classic of Mountains and Seas", showing that Dayu relied on the support of local gods to gain the power to rule the territory, which was intended to establish spatial order religiously; The "Yu Gong" is represented by the administrative version of the reorganization of the territory of the country adopted in the imperial history books, showing that Dayu's actions have nothing to do with local gods or religious sacrifices; In addition, the newly discovered Shangbo Jian confirms that both versions were circulated in the early Qin and Han empires, and that the more religious version may have been dominant at the time, but after the unification of the empire, the official history books chose the administrative version when describing Yu's deeds, and the divine version lost its official status. However, the sacrifice of mountains and rivers became the core content of the royal "hunting tour" of later generations, and became a particularly important ruling ritual with the establishment of the Qin Empire.
She pointed out that, on the one hand, it should be studied from the perspectives of "whole" and "internal" in order to reconstruct and understand the regional spatial representation of the Classic of Mountains and Seas in an appropriate and coherent way. On the other hand, it should be based on the patterns and principles of ancient Chinese cosmology and other expressions of space in ancient China, that is, "proceed from its proper tradition, and avoid value judgments and distinctions peculiar to modernism or other cultural traditions, unless the latter is typologically similar to the representation of ancient Chinese regional space." Although she believes that the opinion that the Classic of Mountains and Seas has no ancient drawings is open to debate, this academic consciousness and understanding of the principles that frame the research principles of the Classic of Mountains and Seas is a useful and important reminder for both contemporary overseas sinologists and domestic scholars.
V. Conclusion
Throughout the history of Sinology, France's study of the Classic of Mountains and Seas continues the perspective of early Orientalism, relying on modern disciplines, when the modern and contemporary geography of the mainland is not yet mature, the introduction of surveying, ethnography, archaeology, religious politics and other studies on the geographical writing of ancient Chinese people, unveiling the history of different civilizations that have been concealed. These external achievements break the inherent methods and views of Chinese scholars in the study of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and demonstrate that in the understanding of the historical context of Chinese civilization, geography, history, ethnicity, and politics are inseparable.
Relying on Western studies, France Sinology is on a par with various emerging disciplines in the West, which has jointly inspired Chinese and Western scholars to re-examine ancient books such as "The Classic of Mountains and Seas", "Yugong" and "The Biography of Mu Tianzi", breaking through the limitations of traditional mainland scholarship, and putting forward novel research angles and ways of thinking, making it possible for scholars to re-examine human society and civilization with a holistic theory that transcends political boundaries.
However, on the other hand, because Western Sinology has never departed from the perspective of early Oriental scholars, it is difficult to explore the academic value of the Classic of Mountains and Seas based on solid philological skills. Since the early Orientalists laid a basic understanding of the foundation of China's geography contained in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, will the views of contemporary scholars be influenced by the intellectual background, and there is a preconceived problem? For example, Rackbury and Matthew's assumptions about the order and era of the books correspond to the passage of time and the imperial vision of the Qin and Han dynasties, which may lead to the assumption that the geographical scope is too wide. Or, as Wei Deli did the opposite, arguing that there is no such thing as a description of reality, assuming that the textual description is not a true geography, and so on. Like the study of other ancient Chinese texts, the advantage of France Sinology lies in the intervention of Western theories and paradigms, and due to the different academic environments and traditions, it can only be said that the achievements of the current and Chinese academic circles are different. Based on this, the author believes that it is necessary to reflect on the understanding and criticism of Western Sinology, and re-examine the biases and assumptions implicit in their respective historical research and conceptual frameworks, in order to objectively understand the true value of early Chinese geography.
Although mainland scholars such as Lu Kanru, Ling Chunsheng, Feng Chengjun, Xu Xusheng and others have studied the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" with new studies, and their methods may be influenced by France scholars, no contemporary scholars have specially introduced relevant research on France Sinology to facilitate academic dialogue. In view of this, the author hopes that this paper can serve as a bridge to establish a platform for dialogue and cooperation between Chinese and Western scholars in the process of mutual exchange and learning, and then explore how to conduct in-depth interaction on topics related to early Chinese civilization such as ancient history and geography under the pattern of world sinology.
Source: Folklore Research, No. 2, 2024