Session: Reshaping Sea and Hinterland: New Perspectives of Imperial China from the Southern Expanse
3: Private History in Exile: Yang Shen’s Writings on Yunnan
Friday, March 13, 2026
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM PDT
Location: Pan Pacific Hotel, Oceanview Suite 4
Presenting Author(s)
KH
Kangni Huang (she/her/hers)
University of Southern California, United States
Geographical writings in premodern China often combine serious historiography, fantastical hearsay, and personal lament, offering great opportunities to explore the intersection of information economy and literary genres. We may wonder about the patterns and structures by which an amorphous space is turned into concrete, digestible information, or the motivation behind the decision to include or omit certain aspects of a given locale. Such explorations are particularly relevant for the study of Ming (1368-1646), a time when Chinese authors and readers were exposed to an ever-expanding world, both in terms of physical space and written knowledge. As a case study, this paper focuses on the scholar-official Yang Shen (1488-1559) and his writings about southwest China during his 35-year residence in Yunnan. After being demoted to the southwestern borderland because of his protest in the Great Ritual Controversy (dali yi), Yang Shen wrote extensively about Yunnan and its surrounding areas in various genres. Specifically, I will be comparing the long poem “Recording My Journey to Guard Yunnan, Ordered by His Majesty” (“Enqian shu Dian jixing”) with his travelogue of the same trip, “Record of My Journey to Yunnan” (Dian cheng ji), as well as reading selected entries from his “Historical Records of Yunnan” (Dian zai ji). I argue that Yang Shen constructed the borderland region via a complex network of literary, historical, and experiential references, defying any simplistic view of this process as a learned literatus inscribing a “barbaric” space.
