The Patterned Guidelines of Shazhou ( Shazhou tujing ) and geographical practices in Tang China

Abstract

This article is a case study of how geographical knowledge was practiced in China before the age of print. The Shazhou tujing, or Patterned Guidelines of Shazhou, represents the earliest material evidence of “patterned guidelines” (tujing), a geographical genre which is believed to have paved the way to “local gazetteers” (difang zhi), the most important genre for our knowledge of the history and geography of late imperial China. By focusing on a manuscript copy that reproduces Chapter 3 of the Shazhou tujing, this article probes how geographical knowledge was produced at the local level, and how such a manuscript could serve as an instrument for knowing and using a locality in an imperial context.