ann
(Ann)
#1
applicability and narrower focus, this discourse is not entirely synonymous
with Hanspace. The accommodation of accommodationist views was made
possible by literally wider perspectives arising from Inner Asian conquest.
Hanspace could then rearticulate the Han-barbarian discourse, and its
historical variants such as anti-Manchuism, beyond a self-other dichotomy
of mere race or ethnicity.
accommodationist hanspace
Hanspace has been visible in Chinese elite cartographic texts since the
emergence of antiquity’s classical canon, containing the only accounts of
thefirst three dynasties, the Shang, Xia, and Zhou, known in imperial
times. One of the most significant portions of these texts, the“Tribute of
Yu”(Yugong), is generally held to be the earliest classical expression of
Chinese geography. In it, Yu, the founder of the Xia dynasty, established
the formal boundaries of China proper, known as the Nine Provinces
(Jiuzhou), after controlling thefloodwaters that had inundated the whole
region. The “Tribute” account of his postdiluvian renovation of the
physical, political, and cultural core of the Han people became a primary
Hanspace text.
In later ages, Confucian scholars sought to determine the Nine Prov-
inces’precise location in works sufficiently voluminous to culminate in
Hu Wei’s self-deprecatingly titledYugong chuizhi(A Peep-hole View of
the“Tribute of Yu”). Contemporaries considered this work, complied
between 1694 and 1697 with maps added in 1705 , as the definitive
commentary on its subject, mainly the clarification of toponyms. Hu’s
work has been read as a demonstration of empirical and demystifying
“practical learning”largely devoted to evaluating and clarifying the text
and its numerous historical glosses.^12 A major rationale for this approach,
however, is to affirm empirically and rationalistically a (meta)physical
concept of Han imperial space, primarily by linking the Nine Provinces to
their contemporary Qing counterparts.^13
To this end, Hu augmented his extended gloss on each line of the text
with forty-seven maps, including a“Map of the Five Domains”(Wufu
tu), an ethnic schematic of the Nine Provinces, conventionally represented
asfive concentric squares. Each square comprised an area offive hundred
lito form the central Domain of the Sovereign (Dian fu), then that of the
Nobles (Hou fu), then the Domain of Pacification (Sui fu), then the
Domain of Restraint (Yao fu), and,finally, the outermost Wild Domain
(Huang fu).^14 Hu’s assemblage is part of a cartographic tradition
26 Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain
