In Li Bai’s 李白 “Seeing Off Wei Wan, the Recluse of Wangwu Mountain, Back to Wangwu Mountain, with a Preface” 送王屋山人魏万还王屋并序, which consists of 64 lines, the entire journey of Wei Wan’s 魏万 travels in the Wu and Yue regions (along the lower reaches of the Yangtze River) is meticulously recounted. Many of the scenes described in this poem also appear in Li Bai’s other works on Jiangnan, making this poem a complete collection of Li Bai’s literary accounts of Jiangnan. By examining the chronology of Li Bai’s poems about his travels in Yue, it can be observed that Wei Wan’s journey closely resembles Li Bai’s initial trip to Wu and Yue. Wei Wan’s travel enthusiasm stirred Li Bai’s youthful memories. Li Bai’s account of the journey not only praises Wei Wan’s celebrated scholarly demeanor but also serves as a reminiscence of Li Bai’s own multiple travels in Eastern Zhejiang, reflecting the geographical consciousness of people in that era regarding Jiangnan. Unlike the Early Tang poets’ fondness for traveling in Shu (present-day Sichuan) and distinct from the Mid-to-Late Tang poets’ experiences of traveling for official purposes or seeking refuge to the south of the Yangtze River, the trend of traveling in Jiangnan during the High Tang period was primarily driven by a need for spiritual experiences. This was related both to the central status of Tiantai Mountain in Daoism and to the initial geographical consciousness and aesthetic view formed among scholars of the time through the book Selections of Refined Literature 文选. Interpreting Li Bai’s poems allows for a detailed examination of the cultural connotations within his geographical consciousness.

During his two-year-and-three-month stay in Kuizhou from his arrival at Yun’an in the ninth lunar month of the first year of the Yongtai Era to his departure from Kuizhou in the first lunar month of the third year of the Dali era, Du Fu 杜甫 composed a wide array of poems describing Kuizhou’s fengtu 风土 (natural features and social customs), famous sites, and landscape. This type of poetry stands out as particularly remarkable among the subjects Du Fu explored throughout his life, representing a significant shift in his later works. These poems not only hold historical value in documenting local geography but also carry profound cultural significance. The values embodied in these poems relate both to the cultural memory shaped by Confucian concepts of social governance, which aim to transform social customs and instruct and rectify mores by promoting sagely values through education, and to Du Fu’s early political ideal that “Elevate the sovereign to the level of Yao and Shun; / Restore social mores to purity and simplicity.”

The rise of the “Ten Scenes” 十景 poems and lyrics in the late Song Dynasty marked the solidification of the landscape writing modes in West Lake poetry. Earlier, the exemplary writings of Bai Juyi 白居易, Su Shi 苏轼, and Yang Wanli 杨万里 on West Lake landscapes had already formed three distinct modes: Bai Juyi’s poetry is characterized primarily by the Panoramic Mode, Su Shi’s by the Poetic-Subject Mode, while Yang Wanli further developed the Landscape-Focus Mode, establishing a Lake-Surface-Mode. These modes provided models and methodological pathways for the later “Ten Scenes” poems and lyrics. The developmental history of West Lake poetry during the Tang and Song dynasties reveals the complex interactions among power, customs, landscape, and literature.

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.

The concept of “landscape” has the attribute of self-sufficiency, and a series of sub-disciplines have formed around it. Landscape literature research is an inevitable interdisciplinary direction in the landscape discipline realm, with values independent from literary landscape research. Based on landscape writing, landscape literature takes landscapes as its starting point and focuses on examining the rich coupling relationship between scenery and observation, as well as the expressive experiences in it. In practice, ancient Chinese landscape literature takes traditional literary forms such as poetry and prose as its core. Ancient Chinese landscapes can be divided into four categories: natural landscapes (celestial phenomena, landforms, hydrological conditions, physical forms, etc.), social landscapes (cities, villages, markets, folk customs, etc.), historical landscapes (sites, temples, etc.), and human landscapes (architecture, gardens, skills, etc.). The creation of landscape literature in ancient China featured the integrated development of human, social, natural, and historical landscapes, which had become a magnificent sight by the Tang and Song dynasties. Landscape literature documents are often classified into the secondary level under the general catalogue of literary forms, and various encyclopedic works and classified collections also provide frame reference and text sources for landscape literature research. By comparing the poems of Su Shi 苏轼 in Southbound Journey Anthology 南行集 written by the “Three Sus,” namely Su Shi himself, his father Su Xun 苏洵, and his younger brother Su Zhe 苏辙, with his poems in Zhuangyuan Wang’s Classified Collection of Su Shi’s Poems with Annotations from Different Scholars 王状元集百家注分类东坡先生诗, this article reveals the important value of Su Shi from the perspective of landscape poetry