Identity, Power, and Landscape in Southern Song Travel Records: A Case Study Based on Zhou Bida’s Record of Boating on Rivers and Roaming amid Mountains

Abstract

Record of Boating on Rivers and Roaming amid Mountains 泛舟游山录 is a work composed by Zhou Bida 周必大 (1126–1204) during his service as a temple sinecure 祠禄官. The interrelations among identity, power, and landscape depicted in this work are closely connected to Zhou’s official position. Drawing on his personal cultural capital, Zhou Bida integrated observation of the natural world with literary and historical investigations, using techniques of intertextuality and dialogue through a cultural viewfinder. With fluidity of prose and a creative interplay between reality and imagination, he constructed a dynamic, rational, and humanistic landscape within a specific cultural field. Landscape originates from identity—it is both a product of power and a manifestation of it. From a broader perspective, the diary-style travel records of the Southern Song period, as a literary cartography of the real world, provide key texts that shape China from a spatial dimension. It is essential to replot the cognitive mapping by exploring both the external connections and internal rhetoric of these texts.

Keywords

Zhou Bida / Record of Boating on Rivers and Roaming amid Mountains / identity / power / landscape / travel record

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Higher Education Press