1: Being There: Constructing Imperial Legitimacy in the Southern Capital

The flight of Chinese aristocratic families from northern China and subsequent establishment of a regime in exile at Jiankang in 317, inaugurated a new era for the city known today as Nanjing. The transformation of Jiankang, from regional outpost to imperial center, was a gradual, complex affair. The palaces, parks, and walls constructed over the course of the fifth century might be fairly regarded as the clearest manifestation of this change. However, recent scholarship has been increasingly attentive to the role played in this process by the "textual constructions" of the southern courts. This paper examines the rhetorical repertoire of Southern Dynasties courtiers in order to better understand how Jiankang was made into a center. I discuss the observance of lunar festivals in the court of the short-lived Southern Qi (479-502), as well as commemorative compositions on such occasions by the three literary greats of this dynasty: Wang Rong, Xie Tiao, and Shen Yue. While the efforts of the Nationalist regime to transform Nanjing from a former imperial capital to the seat of a modern nation-state have been described in terms of the "rewriting" and "overwriting" of ritual spaces and practices (Nedostup 2009), Jiankang's status as an imperial capital was "underwritten" by a rhetoric of substitution, invocation, and appropriation of symbols of imperial authority from the (northern) past. Through a survey of commemorative works by these figures, I show how their spatio-temporal rhetoric produced a sense of being at an imperial capital, at the center of the world.