Page from The Classic of Mountains and Seas in the National Library of China
The Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Shanhai jing, composed between the third century BCE and second century CE, ought to be a brilliant source for ancient landscape ideas. Three thousand places are named and briefly described. But unfortunately they are very hard to identify and their is little on their appearance – instead we get information on the presence of valuable deposits like jade and gold, plants (often medicinal), animals, mythical creatures and gods. Anne Birrell, who translated the Penguin edition, is so adamant that the whole book should be seen as mythology that she refrains from supplying any notes speculating on real locations and gives everywhere an English name – so for example Book One, Chapter One starts with Mount Magpie, Mount Raiseshake, West Sea, River Sveltedeer and so on.
Why can’t these mountains and rivers be pinned down? Apart from the fact that ancient cartography is inevitably unreliable, Chinese toponyms are always changing. The book may preserve some historic names from pre-Zhou times – geographical units were overhauled by the early Zhou emperors and all changed again when the dynasty fell. But it’s more than this – the moment you start reading the descriptions you realise they are unlikely to be about real places. Just one example:
Two hundred leagues further north is a mountain called Mount Northpeak. Oranges, wild date, and hardwood trees are plentiful here.
There is an animal here which looks like an ox but it has four horns, human eyes, and the ears of a sow. Its name is the all-dote. It makes a noise like a honking goose. It eats humans. The River Alldote rises here and flows west to empty into the River Hubbub. The dwarf sturgeon is plentiful in the River Alldote. It has a fish’s body and a dog’s head. It makes a noise like a baby. If you eat it, it will cure madness.
‘In sum,’ Birrell concludes, ‘although there are some recognizable landmarks in the early part of the Classic [I wish she had footnoted them!], due to the vagaries of regional culture, the process of historical change, the lore of ritual practice and the mythological mode, the world the reader is invited to circumnambulate, for all its seemingly precise details and place-names, is largely an imaginary and mythical landscape.’
