This article is based on a lecture given at the China Academy of Art in March 2019. It was originally published in the December 2020 issue of "New Art" in Hangzhou，this version has been supplemented.

Ancient China used to be “a country abundant with forests.” Wen Huanran, a Chinese historical geographer, thus argues based on his research on the shifting distribution of forests in China from eight thousand years ago to the present. The vast historical shifts in China’s forest landscape were closely related to the equally vast changes in China’s human/biosphere, its natural environment and human activities.[1] Through examining oracle bone inscriptions of the Ruins of Yin, historical archives and documents throughout different dynasties as well as scholarly works on paleozoological fossils, Wen explores the ancient and present changes in China’s historical geography of animals, including peacocks, Chinese alligators, Asian elephants, rhinoceroses, pandas, wild horses, donkeys, camels, and gibbons. The history of the Asian elephants’ gradual and persistent southward migration from 40º 06’N to 24º 6’N was documented with the most thorough details not only because the change of the northern boundary of Asian elephants’ habitat is the most conspicuous one among all the endangered wild animals in China,[2] but also because of the close connection between the general tendency of climate zones moving southward and a similar pattern of Asian elephants’ migration, both with occasional reversions.[3] Wen mainly attributes to the change of temperate climate to a cold one the animals and plants migrations aforementioned, and wasteland reclamation activities to the popularization of ironware and cattle tillage, which expedited the destruction of natural vegetation in China after the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States Periods.

A gigantic water-loving beast inhabiting warm and moist forests, the Asian elephants need constant bathing to lower their body temperature and to avoid direct sun exposure. Based on a series of facts ranging from excavated elephant pits at the Ruins of Yin, to the records of the Kings of Shang Dynasty hunting elephants in the region between Qin Shui and the Yellow River, to the ritualistic function of elephants as an animal sacrifice,[4] among others, people today could very well imagine the landscape of the lower Yellow River region in ancient times, one that was once covered with thick, exuberant forests. Seen in this way, common depictions of elephants in ancient classics such as: “among the beauties of the South are the rhinoceroses and elephants on Mount Liang” (南方之美者，有梁山之犀象焉)[5] or “Emperor Shun was buried in the soil of Cang Wu, where the elephants tilled” (舜葬于苍梧下，象为之耕)[6] might not be entirely unfounded.

Inspired by the research of Wen Huanran, American scholar Mark Elvin further proposes in his book The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China that, “The pattern of their [the elephants’] withdrawal in time and in space was, so to speak, the reverse image of the expansion and intensification of Chinese settlement. Chinese farmers and elephants do not mix…The war against wild animals generally was a defining characteristic of the early Zhou-dynasty culture from which classical China later emerged.”[7] In contrast with Wen Huanran, Elvin places an explicitly greater emphasis on the environmental impacts of human agrarian activities and he proposes as a decisive temporal milestone the “great deforestation” during the Western Zhou Dynasty in the 10th century BC as a result of efforts to establish an agrarian civilization in China. In fact, in “Huang Yi,” one of “the epics of Zhou People” anthologized in “Da Ya” (“Major Court Hymns”) in Shijing (Book of Songs), we can find passages like this, “raised up and removed, The dead trunks, and the fallen trees. / He dressed and regulated, The bushy clumps, and the [tangled] rows. / He opened up and cleared, The tamarix trees, and the stave-trees. / He hewed and thinned, The mountain-mulberry trees…God surveyed the hills, Where the oaks and Yu were thinned, And paths made through the firs and cypresses.” (作之屏之，其菑其翳。修之平之，其灌其栵。启之辟之，其柽其椐。攘之剔之，其檿其柘。……帝省其山，柞棫斯拔，松柏斯兑)[8] Another epic of Zhou People titled “Mian,” an encomium of King Tai of Zhou, also records that “The oaks and the Yu were [gradually] thinned, And roads for travelling were opened. / The hordes of the Hun disappeared, Startled and panting.” (柞棫拔矣，行道兑矣。混夷駾矣，维其喙矣)[9] Also in “Zai Shan” of Zhou Song (Sacrificial Odes of Zhou), “They clear away the grass and the bushes; And the ground is laid open by their ploughs. / In thousands of pairs they remove the roots, Some in the low wet lands, some along the dykes.” (载芟载柞，其耕泽泽。千耦其耘，徂隰徂畛).[10] The Zhou Dynasty, founded upon an agrarian economy, not only overthrew the tyrannical reign of the Shang Dynasty, but also created, through a deforestation whereby “The oaks and the Yu were [gradually] thinned, And roads for travelling were opened” and “tigers, leopards, rhinoceroses, and elephants were ostracized,”[11] an agrarian world with neatly arranged field ditches and boundaries, a world of Huaxia civilization different from those peripheral nomadic worlds, where “foxes dwell and wolves howl,” and thorns left unpruned. This civilizing process led to the ultimate ending of the primitive hunter-gatherer civilization, whose very existence both relies on and is symbolized by forests. Several historians I dealt with in the previous chapter, including Lü Buwei (291-235 BC), Sima Qian (145 BC - ?), and earlier, the author of Guoyu (Discourses of the State), they all lived in the eras following the great deforestation, when people had already been estranged from that green world for ages. Forests, as a result, became something both puzzling and fearful in their writings.

Deforestation is the mark of all agrarian civilizations. Vico writes, “The Greeks began to count their years from the burning of the Nemean forest by Hercules to clear it for sowing grain.”[12] The ploughing of arable lands during the medieval period in Europe was also accompanied by the cutting and clearing of forests. Yet despite the ploughing, there remained in Europe large areas of royal hunting scenes and private parks of feudal aristocracies under the governance of forests conservation law. Even tenured manors could be built within forests as “woodhouse eves.”[13] As Clarence J. Glacken testifies through abundant sources, activities of cutting down forests for arable lands during the middle ages had always been restricted and counterbalanced by legal rules and regulations of forest conservation considering the value of forests to pasturing, hunting, beekeeping and prevention of land loss, “attempts to limit these rights [rights of cutting down forests] seem almost as old as the rights themselves. One senses an uneasy truce throughout the middle ages between these two tendencies…Viewing the middle ages as a whole, it seems that the tendency was toward more precise definition and delimitation of these rights with time.”[14] Moreover, compared to the deforestation in ancient China, the clearing of forests in Europe happened at a much later time, when worship of forests still exerted its influence over art and literature.

A variety of factors contributed to the absence of forests in Chinese Shanshui landscape, among which the primary one should be the fact that China was a land of agrarian civilization that had experienced a thorough deforestation a long time ago, and, compared to the European civilization, enjoyed a longer history of living without forests so much so that forest deities were absent in nature worship, forests were scarce in plains[15] and arable lands found their way among the mountain ranges, that for literati who immersed themselves in nature and wrote poems of nature after the Eastern Jin (317-429 AD), it was Shanshui alone that would count as the beauty of nature.

Shanshui (literally meaning mountains and waters) is a neologism in Chinese corresponding to the rising convention of literati’s leisurely excursions in mountains and rivers in the Eastern Jin around the 4th century AD. The appositive word formation of Shanshui, comprised of two singular characters, suggests an embodiment of “one dimension and two poles,” a semantic expansion of “Shan” (mountains) and “Shui” (waters) through metonymy while maintaining its fundamental dichotomy of Shan and Shui.[16] Admittedly, Xie Lingyun (385-433 AD), hailed as the pioneer for Shanshui poetry throughout history, might have occasionally run across those thick primeval forests. The biographical record in the Book of Song (Songshu) described him as “once cutting down woods and clearing up paths in Mount Ning Nan up to the seaside.”[17] As a result, we’d find in Xie Lingyun’s poems images like “barren forests,” “thick forests,” “forest belts,” “sparse woods,” “arbor,” “the deep of the forests,” “forest gullies,” etc. However, writings on forests in no way achieved the preeminent literary status enjoyed by Shanshui poetry and Xie Lingyun didn’t even personally go into the forests for close observation. There were indeed forests in the places where Xie travelled and dwelled, as seen in his poems like “A Travelogue of Famous Mountains” (“You Mingshan Zhi”) and “A Poem of Mountain Dwelling” (Shanju Fu). Yet there was a conspicuous lack of special devotion to the forests in the poet.

It was precisely because of this lack of devotion to the beasts-haunted savage world with thick, dark forests that forests would later degenerate into an aesthetically alienating and even infernal image in the poetic works of later generations. In “The Poem of Qiushan” by Liu Zongyuan, mountainous forests are described as,

 

It would become humid when clouds and fogs surround the mountains, bringing a pungent, briny odor in the vaporized air. The Qi of Yang, stagnant and sedimented herein, would consolidate with the freezing cold Qi of Yin… it seemed as if those thick forests downhill were the thorns that shackled me, and the howls of the tigers and leopards were those of the wild beasts guarding my prison cell. Why on earth would I watch the tiny patch of sky like a frog in the bottom of the well? Because there weren’t anywhere to flee to even outside these treacherous mountains! Suffering from obscure charges of crimes and injustice, even a saint would become a moaning sick man. No rhinoceros, yet I was imprisoned within a wooden cage; no swine, yet I was enclosed within a pigsty! A full decade had passed and no one even asked about me. Only those wild grasses grew around me…Who made me a prisoner of these endless mountains?[18]

 

The forests became a prison, a place that had to be bearable for life. However, these mountain forests, ridden with howling beasts and piercing thorns, were not born out of the poet’s bodily experience but from the pure semiotic landscape constructed out of textual materials in “Summons for a Recluse” (招隐士), “Summons of the Soul” (招魂), “The Great Summons” (大招), etc. of Chu Ci (Verses of Chu).[19]

Beyond the vision of forests and the fundamental framework of natural landscape of Shanshui dichotomy, the essence of Chinese natural scenery consists in a kind of distant view, or grand view. As Guo Xi says, “Shanshui, grand things they are. It requires a distance for human spectators to view the contours, tendencies, spirits and energies of the mountains and waters.”[20] Of course, the so-called Shanshui favored by literati is in fact a kind of pastoral landscape, that is, mountains covered by rich vegetation and waters running down from such mountains with fertile soil and rich vegetation. The representation of mountains in Chinese poems and paintings focuses more on fogs and clouds, so much as that “the greatness of painters lies solely in his depiction of the rise and fall of fogs and clouds,”[21] which are generated within the forests. Yet it doesn’t mean that poets and painters would have to step into the deep of the forests and obtain their views therein. On the contrary, they would usually view the mountains and waters far outside the deep forests. Hence the championship of “distance” in Chinese Shanshui poetry and paintings.

What Tang Junyi calls “distance” is “the extension of the shape and nature of Shanshui,” which can be traced back to the metaphysical theories of Wei and Jin Dynasties.[22] The metaphysical poet and philosopher Ji Kang writes, “hunting birds with stones by the waterside and fishing in the long rivers; watching the swan geese flying away and playing the five-string instrument. I felt at ease with my head up and down, with my mind roving in the supreme mystery of the cosmos.”[23] This constitutes the quintessential distant view, eulogizing the riverside lands and meandering waters. This “distance” assumes an untrammeled vision. Let me quote a description of the landscape of Amazonia by a scholar who examines natural landscape through the lens of cultural anthropology as a counterexample,

 

It is hard to see Amazonia as landscape, in the sense this term has for people from temperate climes. The land does not recede away from a point of observation to the distant horizon, for everywhere vegetation occludes the view. In the forest, sight penetrates only a short distance into the mass of trees. Along the big rivers, you can see further, but even here there is no distant blue horizon. The sky starts abruptly from behind the screen of forest. Sight is hemmed in, and you would succumb to claustrophobia had not a plane journey or many days of travel let you know the scale of this land of big rivers and unending forests. To travel in most of Amazonia is to pass through an endless succession of small enclosed places, and to imagination itself is left the task of constructing out of these an immense extension of space. Only when an Amazonian landscape has been radically transformed by roads and deforestation is it revealed as visually extended space. A bright red road extends to the horizon, while buildings, fences, and isolated trees recede away into the distance. It looks more like a northern temperate landscape, with the wilderness forest no longer dominating the visual field, but simply a hazy transition between land and sky in the far distance.[24]

 

Doesn’t this paragraph perfectly illustrate why a view untrammeled by forest coverage is indispensable for the “distance” in landscape? “Distance” is a venerated principle in Chinese painting. Guo Xi first proposed “the Three Distances in Mountains,” among which the “vertical distance” when “looking upward from the foot of the mountain to its top,” and the “horizontal distance” when “looking toward a distant mountain,” wouldn’t be possible in a thick, exuberant forest. Even a shifting viewpoint would require an extended space free from forest coverage, while the “deep distance” when “looking from the front of the mountain to its behind” also calls for a tunnel space for the eyes to traverse through the heavy rocks and sparse woods.[25] As Fei Hanyuan, a painter of Qing Dynasty puts it, “The deep distance results from the recesses behind the mountains where peaks and ridges burst forth with numerous overlapped masses…making its boundaries infinite to the human eye with its thousands of layers.”[26] This is an unrealizable perspective within the forests. So are the various kinds of distance proposed by Han Zhuo of Song Dynasty such as “spacious distance,” “mysterious distance” and “obscure distance”, the “spacious distance” results from a view from a near riverbank toward distant waters and capacious mountains; the “mysterious distance” from a view blurred by smokes and fogs, making even the scenery across the river invisible; the “obscure distance” from a supremely ethereal landscape[27] wherein the human eyesight itself is obscured among the floating clouds and fogs. Again, these three kinds of distance proposed by Han Zhuo would only occur within a visual field stretching toward the horizon without forest coverage.

Distance is also a cherished principle in Chinese poetry. On the landscape fit for poetic representation, Wang Changling says, “in twilight, when vapors and fogs are yet to rise, the Qi of Yang is at temporary rest, and everything remains clear and tranquil, this is the moment when the eyesight can reach far;”[28] On “the landscape of the poets,” Dai Shulun writes, “it should be one that resembles the warm sun of Lan Tian County, which makes fine jades vaporize into smokes and fogs. It can be viewed from afar but not to be placed under one’s eyebrows;” [29]and Wang Shizhen says, “I once heard Jing Hao discussing Shanshui, whereby he realized three kinds of ignorance in poets, that is, no eyes in people in the distance, no waves in distant waters, no textures in distant mountains.”[30] In all these claims, “distance” is praised and championed. In poetic landscapes, “less than a Chinese foot are the continuous mountain tops from the sky, and upside down is the arid pine hanging on the steep precipice” embodies the “vertical distance,” “meandering mountain ridges across the distant fields, ragged rocks extending into the distant horizon” the “horizontal distance,” “endless fogs and vapors permeate the mountain, into its surfaces and recesses alike” the “deep distance,” “the mountains end with the plains, and the rivers flow into the far distance” the “spacious distance,” “the rivers flow beyond heaven and earth, with the mountains looming here and there” the “mysterious distance,” “invisibly obscure is the estuary of Yangtze River, with trees on the distant riverbank soaked in fogs and smokes” the “obscure distance.” All these distances point to a space free from forest coverage.

Lastly, the Chinese natural landscape is not supposed to be appreciated as part of the original savage wilderness. Despite the differences between Shanshui and pastoral landscape, that is, the former, more than the latter, emphasizes the idea of randomness, the freedom from schematized design, from set rules and boundaries, both, in their essence, lie beyond the world of literati within the agrarian civilization. Therefore, “pastoral poet” Tao Yuanming writes in “Visiting Xie Chuan”, “Facing the rivers flowing into the far distance, and looking toward Mount Zeng Cheng from afar,”[31] and “Shanshui poet” Xie Lingyun also writes in detail in his “A Poem of Mountain Dwelling” the manors to the north and south of the eastern bank of Shan Shui along with “matters concerning herbs, trees, rivers, mountains, grains and crops in the mountainous region.”[32] His poem titled “Building Gardens, Dams and Hedges in Mount Nan” has to be categorized as a pastoral piece. It writes,

 

I cleared all the dirt and messes within the garden so that the cool breeze could blow through it. I selected the location upon which the cottage was built by divination. With the mountain in the north on its back, I could see the waves of Nan Jiang through the open door. I built a dam upon the brook as a substitute for water well, and planted hibiscus woods into the land as hedges. Rows of trees at the door front, with endless ridges outside the window. At times I’d descend along the meandering path and rove among the fields at the bottom of the mountain, at others I’d ascend to the mountain top for a grand, panoramic view. With a stoic heart of few desires, I didn’t expect huge labor and work in building this garden. I only wanted to build a few paths, through which my dear friends could come and visit me…[33]

 

In the heyday of the Tang Dynasty, the two worlds (the world of Shanshui and that of the pastoral landscape) within the agrarian civilization yet beyond the circles of literati were finally integrated as one in the poets thanks to their common roots within the agrarian civilization. To borrow the metaphor of cultural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, these two worlds don’t belong to the category of the uncooked “raw,” but the already “cooked.”[34] Due to the great deforestation and its influence on cultural psychology, it is fairly difficult for later generations to truly return to the world of “the Scions of Xia Emperor,” to the genuine, savage wilderness through the “medium” of forests. On the other hand, the stock image of forests in European paintings and literature manifests its continual devotion and aspiration toward the wilderness. As Keith Thomas noted, the Latin etymology of “savage” is “silva,” out of which mankind stepped and well into the civilized era.[35] Abundant records of cultural anthropology indicate that in the rite of passage of the tribes in their initial phase of civilization, a youth would always be sent into the forest alone during the night and expected to return, symbolizing the process of death and rebirth, of transforming from barbarity to civilization. Here, the rite of passage reenacts the genesis of cosmos and civilizations, or rather, “The genesis of the world serves as the model for the ‘formation’ of a man.”[36] And the forests is the symbol of the savage nature.

 

Translated by Zhang Bo

 

 

[1] 文焕然，《中国森林资源分布的历史概况》，文榕生（选编整理）《中国历史时期植物与动物变迁研究》（重庆：重庆出版社，2006），第3-14页。
[2] 《历史时期中国野象的初步研究》，同上书，第199页。
[3] 《再探历史时期中国野象的变迁》，同上书，第212页。
[4] 见王宇信、杨宝成，《殷墟象坑和殷人服象的再探讨》，《甲骨文探史录》（北京：三联书店1982），页
[5] 《淮南子.墬形训》，《诸子集成》，第3册，高诱注《淮南子注》，第58页。
[6] 《论衡.书虚》，《诸子集成》，第七册，第36页。
[7] Mark Elvin, Retreat of Elephants, pp. 9-11. 
[8] 《大雅.皇矣》，孔颖达《毛诗正义》卷十六，《十三经注疏》（北京：中华书局，1983），上册，第519-520页。
[9] 《大雅.绵》，同上书，第511页。
[10] 《毛诗正义》卷十九，同上书，第601页。
[11] 《孟子.滕文公下》，引自《孟子注疏》，《十三经注疏》下册，第2714页。
[12] 维柯，《新科学》，第159页。
[13] 英国的例子见W.G.Hoskins 的名著The Making of the English Landscape, 中译本见梅雪芹、刘梦霏译，《英格兰景观的形成》（北京：商务印书馆，2018），第86-94页。
[14] 见其Traces on Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Time to the End of the Eighteenth Century (University of California Press, 1967), p.329 . 中译本见梅小侃译《罗得岛海岸的痕迹：古代到十八世纪末西方思想中的自然与文化》（北京：商务印书馆，2017），第323页。The examples Glacken used include article 36 of Capitulare de Villis of Charlemagne, the 1289 Ordinance by Albert the Great and Henry VII, the regulations concerning the forest (Forst) and the royal forest (Reichswald) on both sides of the Pegnitz River issued by King Ludwig of Bavaria in 1331, the regulations issued by the Bishop of Bamberg in 1328 to take the forests of the bishopric under his faithful protection, etc.
[15] 艾温以《左传》宣公十二年中“赵旃弃车而走林”和成公二年中“骖絓于木而止”等三条记载为据，说明公元前六世纪时驷马两轮的车乘，是不可能驰骋于生长森林的平野上的。见Retreat of the Elephant, pp. 44-45.
[16] 见萧驰，《从实地山水到话语山水——谢灵运山水美感之考掘》，《中国文哲研究集刊》第37期（2010年9月），页1-50。此文的修正版见萧驰，《诗与它的山河——中古山水美感的生长》（北京：三联书店，2018），第47-130页。
[17] 沈约，《宋书》（北京：中华书局，1983），第6册，第1775页。
[18] 同上书，卷二，第63-64页。
[19] 见Kalevi Kull, “Semiotics of Landscape,” in Routledge Companion of Landscape Studies, eds. Peter Howard, Ian Thomson & Emma Waterton (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 98-102.
[20] 郭熙，《林泉高致》，《历代论画名著汇编》，第65页。
[21] 莫是龙，《画说》，《历代论画名著汇编》，第213页。
[22] 唐君毅，《中国艺术精神》（沈阳：春风文艺出版社，1987），第299-302页。
[23] 嵇康，《兄秀才公穆入军赠诗十九首》十五，戴明扬，《嵇康集校注》（北京：人民文学出版社，1962），第15-16页。
[24] Peter Gow, “Land, People, and Paper in Western Amazonia,” in The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, eds Eric Hirsch and Michael O’Hanlon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p.43.
[25] 郭熙，《林泉高致》，同上书，第71页。
[26] 费汉源，《山水画式》，俞剣华（编），《中国画论类编》（香港：中华书局，1973），第838页。
[27] 韩拙，《山水纯全集》，《历代论画名著汇编》，第135页。
[28] 王昌龄，《诗格》，张伯伟（彚考），《全唐五代诗格彚考》（南京：江苏古籍出版社，2002），第169页。
[29] 引自司空图，《与极浦书》，郭绍虞、王文生（主编），《中国历代文论选》（上海：上海古籍出版社，1979），第2册，第201页。
[30] 王士祯，《带经堂诗话》（北京：人民文学出版社，1982）第1册，卷三，第86页。
[31] 《陶渊明集校注》，第84页。
[32] 《山居赋》，《谢灵运集校注》，第319页。
[33] 《谢灵运集校注》，第114页。
[34] 列维．斯特劳斯（或译作李维史陀）这一观念，详见其《神话学：生食和熟食》，周昌忠（译）（北京：中国人民大学出版社，2007），第87-90页。
[35] 《人类与自然世界：1500-1800年间英国观念的变化》，宋丽丽（译） （南京：译林出版社，2009），第197-200页。
[36] Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (New York: Harper Torchbooks,1960), pp.193-197.