Strategies for Knowing an Asian Mountain

This was the title of a very stimulating talk that I attended by Ruth Rogaski, an East Asia Historian at Vanderbilt. The talk was subtitled "Changshaiban, 1600-present" and forms part of Rogaski's larger project on relationships between nature and empire in Manchuria.

Rogaski opened her talk with a question, "How do we know a mountain?" She then offered a series of answers, each represented by a sign or image indexing a particular way that a distinct historical actor might set about "knowing" a mountain. The signs/images included numbers (the height of Changshaiban), Changshaiban's secret name, its cartographic location, aand photos representing the experience of reaching the summit (a photo of an ancient stairway at the summit), the experience and expertise involved in climbing (gear), iconographic conventions (Chinese paintings), calligraphy on rocks, technology (a 3-D GIS map that shows the mountain aerially with its 3-mile wide crater lake clearly visible), etc. Rogaski indicated that Changshaiban is unique amongst Chinese mountains in having no temples and very few tourists and alluded to its mythic stature as the birthplace of the Chinese imperial lineage.

Rogaski used the 3-D map as a jumping off point (why do people use this expression for mountain climbing when it seems to suggest diving into the sea?) for the body of her talk, noting that "this is not at all how the 17th century emperor Kanshu (sp?) thought about the birthplace of his imperial lineage. Claiming that nobody had accurate knowledge of the mountain, he sent a delegation to study it. Changshaiban afforded Kanshi a means of self-fashioning, of using a tactile observation of nature as a way to perform political power. In a stylized narrative essay, he wrote of the multiple strategies that the mountain used to avoid being seen, summoning cloaking clouds and mists at will. In his essay, he portrayed the mountain as too sacred to stay long to look at. Here Rogaski finds a similar tension to that discussed by Bill Cronin in "The Trouble with Wildness," namely that between sacredness the compulsion to explore. The person who gets to map a place that is off-limits often takes on the responsibility of keeping it hidden. ("Once a mountain is apprehended as 'the sublime face of a God,' only a prophet might gaze upon it for long.")

I really liked the way Rogaksi used images in her talk, juxtaposing very different perspectives of the mountain while also managing to gesture at the fact that the basic identity of the mountain lies in a persistent quality, albeit differently construed: it is elusive and off-limits. I am wondering whether her visual and discursive strategy of juxtaposing the many perspectives that come together around Changshaiban might be a good one for me to adopt for the as-yet unwritten conclusion or epilog to my book? (Another logical place to use this strategy is in Chapter 1, although I am leery of overhauling that yet again.)