2: Meditating on the Past and Capturing the Present: Ma Guangzu’s Creation of a Capital Gazetteer Through His Curation of Jiankang’s Literary Layers

This paper reveals how Ma Guangzu (1201-1266), three-time magistrate of Jiankang and editor-in-chief of the Jingding Jiankang Gazetteer (1261), selected and arranged the temporal layers of Jiankang’s poetic history in the “literary works” (wenji 文籍) section to promote his reconstruction of the city and reassert Jiankang’s potential as capital for the Southern Song after a period of decline and political neglect. To do so, he carefully curated works by poets which depict Jiankang as a city of landmarks in the “meditations on the past” subgenre or capture the immediacy of how prominent litterateurs experienced its local landscapes.

In the first category, Ma included two Hundred Poems on Jinling collections respectively by his grandfather, Ma Zhichun and by the commoner Rivers and Lakes poet, Zeng Ji. Here Ma stressed geo-political considerations, including poems on monuments and artifacts from the Six Dynasties and Southern Tang when Jiankang was the imperial capital and suppressing poems on local tutelary cults. In the second category, Ma highlighted well-crafted regulated poems by the former Northern Song prime minister Wang Anshi who retired to Jiankang and by the celebrated Southern Song poet Yang Wanli who served there. Ma prioritized their fame and common aesthetic accomplishment in capturing the immediacy of sensory experience. Through this combination of geo-political and socio-aesthetic criterion, Ma curated a canon of Jiankang-centric poetry that promoted the city’s past as an imperial capital through its monuments and its attractiveness to nationally known poet-officials whose works received the imprimatur of recent literary criticism.