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 FIXING
LANDSCAPE

A Techno-Poetic History of China’s

Three Gorges

COREY BYRNES
 FIXING
LANDSCAPE

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

 Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University

The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University were
inaugurated in 1962 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research
on modern and contemporary East Asia.
 FIXING
LANDSCAPE

A Techno-Poetic History of China’s

Three Gorges

COREY BYRNES

columbia university press New York

 columbia universit y press
publishers since 1893
new york chichester , west sussex
cup.columbia.edu

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by
the Wm. Theodore de Bary Fund in the publication of this book.

Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Byrnes, Corey J., 1980– author.
Title: Fixing landscape : a techno-poetic history of China’s
Three Gorges / Corey Byrnes.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2018] | Series: Studies
of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018017833| ISBN 9780231188067 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780231547123 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Yangtze River Gorges (China)—History.
Classification: LCC DS793.Y3 B96 2018 | DDC 951.2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017833

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America

Cover image:
Yang Jiechang, Crying Landscape (Yangzi River Dam), 2003.
Image courtesy of the artist
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii
Orientation xiii

pa ssage i. departure 1

part i. a l and s cape of tr aces

1. Tracing the Gorges 25
2. From Trace to Site 54
pa ssage ii. one thousand li 88

part ii. reinscribing the three g orges

3. Chinese Landscape 93
4. Chinese Labor 130
pa ssage iii. one thousand years 160

part iii. for the record

5. A Record of the Trace 165
6. Ink in the Wound 198

pa ssage iv. part of the movement 235

Notes 241
Bibliography 287
Index 309
 AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

i still remember the first time i tried to articulate the

half-formed ideas that inspired this project. At the end of my PhD qualify-
ing exams, I explained to my committee—Andrew Jones, Paula Varsano,
Pat Berger, and Robert Ashmore—that I wanted to write a dissertation that
spanned two millennia, in which I could think comparatively about Tang
poetry and contemporary film. It would have been easy for them to dismiss
this plan as ill conceived. Instead, they listened carefully, took my ideas seri-
ously, and encouraged me to pursue them. What I did not realize then was that
they were also signing on without hesitation to the mammoth task of guiding
me through this project. As my co-advisers, Paula Varsano and Andrew Jones
have given me more of their precious time and energy than I am comfortable
admitting. They remain my models for what it means to be a good colleague,
an exemplary scholar, and a kind human being under even the most trying of
circumstances. I am lucky that they remain my mentors, but far luckier that
I can call them my friends. I have Dore Levy to thank for encouraging me
 viii acknowledgments

to apply to Berkeley, but also for introducing me to the wonders of Chinese

poetry and feeding me so many delicious meals. Fixing Landscape would not
exist without her.
Many of the ideas that found their way into this book were developed in
exchanges at Berkeley and beyond. Katrina Dodson, Emily Drumsta, Toby
Warner, and Tristram Wolff joined me in my first (and only) dissertation-
writing group. In reading the earliest version of the final chapter, Alan Tans-
man made a number of transformative interventions. I am indebted to Jason
McGrath, whose very careful (and generous) reading of an early version of
chapter 5 helped advance the dissertation at a key stage in its development.
Thanks also to Michael Cherney and Yun-fei Ji—their art has sustained me
through the long process of finishing this project.
In one of the first (and hardest) seminars I took at Berkeley, Robert Ash-
more gave me a sense of what it really means to read Du Fu. I am still in awe
and still trying my best. In that seminar and others, I was privileged to learn
from my fellow students—Roy Chan, Laurence Coddere, Menghsin Horng,
Liu Xiao, Patrick Luhan, Lawrence Yang, Yueni Zhong, and many others.
The winter after my exams, I was lucky to find a temporary home of unusual
warmth with friends and family in Berlin—Lydia Brotherton, Marion Detjen
and family, Gunnar Klack, Robyn Schulkowsky, and Eike Wittrock.
Fixing Landscape really began to take shape during my time in the Depart-
ment of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Cali-
fornia, Santa Barbara. I am eternally grateful to my colleague Michael Berry
for his unstinting support through tough times. He is a great scholar and
a remarkably kind man. Thanks also to Gillian Osborne, Brian Petit, and
everyone else who helped make the Central Coast feel like home, if only for
a short time.
Northwestern University’s generous institutional support and unfailingly
collegial intellectual community made finishing this book not only possible
but also pleasurable. I am especially lucky to have had the mentorship of Laura
Brueck as well as the support and guidance of Peter Fenves, Susannah Gottlieb,
Laura Hein, Rajiv Kinra, Jules Law, Amy Stanley, and Paola Zamperini. Special
thanks to all my colleagues in the Department of Asian Languages and Cul-
tures and to Jean Deven for performing superhuman feats on an almost daily
basis. To Patrick Noonan, my Berkeley friend and Northwestern colleague,
I am lucky to share an office wall with you. In co-organizing a workshop on
the Environmental Humanities through the Alice Kaplan Institute for the
Humanities, I have had the pleasure of working with Tom Burke, Jill Mannor,
 acknowledgments ix

and Wendy Wall, who have created an intellectual world of rare warmth and
rigor in Kresge Hall. To my workshop co-organizer Keith Woodhouse and to
all the workshop stalwarts, you have done a great deal to make this a better
book. Thanks also to Mario Aranda, Nadim Audi, Lydia Barnett, César Braga-
Pinto, Sarah Dimick, Paul Fagan, Jun Hu, Michelle Huang, Rebecca Johnson,
Andrew Leong, Nick Valvo, and many other friends and colleagues for making
Chicago winters more than just bearable. A special thanks to Harris Feinsod,
Emily Licht, and David Simon, old friends who went above and beyond to
make a new city feel like home.
A well-timed year at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center
under the inimitable leadership of Homi K. Bhabha made the completion of
this book possible. My sincere thanks to him for his radical hospitality and
to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding my fellowship. To my fel-
lows in the “Slow Violence” seminar—Anna Abramson, Betsy Beasley, Mark
Geraghty, Callie Maidhof, Isaiah Lorado Wilner—your exceptional work is
an inspiration. To the staff of the Mahindra Humanities Center—Steve Biel,
Mary Halpenny-Killip, and Sarah Razor—I could not have asked for a kinder,
more welcoming group of colleagues. A special thank-you to Andrea Volpe,
the Mellon Seminar coordinator at the Center, for listening, understanding,
and knowing when it was time for a drink. This project also benefited from
the generous support of numerous other people at Harvard, especially Karen
Thornber, who not only invited me to join important conversations about the
Environmental Humanities, but also took the time to read my work with care;
Eugene Wang, whose feedback on the final chapter helped me suss out the
hidden ecology of my book; and David Der-wei Wang, who is as gracious as
he is brilliant.
During my time in Cambridge, I had the privilege of discussing my work
with many exceptional scholars, including Arunabh Ghosh, Brian Lander,
Stephanie LeMenager, Elizabeth Lord, Covell Meyskens, Anne Reinhardt,
Shu-mei Shih, Amy Zhang, and Ling Zhang, all of whom pushed me to
strengthen the interdisciplinary bones of my project, none more convincingly
than Ling, an old friend from the other Cambridge and a true ally. Special
thanks to my lunch partner Gillian Osborne, who kept me company in the
attic of Warren House, and to Brian and Quinn for bringing much needed
domestic joy into my life; to Kim Icreverzi, who read (and reread) chapter 5 at
a crucial moment; to Daniel Callahan, for introducing me to Provincetown;
to Jacob Moses, for taking me to swim in Walden Pond; and to David Francis,
Joseph Lee, and Kris Trujillo for their excellent company.
 x acknowledgments

Laura Brueck, Christopher Bush, Peter Carroll, Peter Fenves, and Paola
Iovene generously workshopped my manuscript at a late stage in its develop-
ment; their perceptive feedback encouraged me to refine key aspects of my
argument, and I have no doubt that Fixing Landscape is better thanks to their
timely contribution. I am especially grateful to Paola Iovene, who kindly
agreed to read my manuscript without ever having met me. Her continued
guidance and kindness have been invaluable throughout the revision pro-
cess. Thanks also to Ari Heinrich for his warm encouragement and to Ruth
Mostern for her amazing generosity in reading (and greatly improving) the
first two chapters of this book.
My sincere thanks to Christine Dunbar of Columbia University Press for
accepting this book and ushering it smoothly through the review and pro-
duction processes, and to Christian Winting for his guidance on design
and image-related issues. Thanks also to Kathryn Jorge, my production
editor at Columbia University Press, and to Peggy Tropp, who expertly
edited the manuscript, and to Ben Kolstad, who oversaw the day-to-day
aspects of production. A special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers,
who pleasantly surprised me by returning the manuscript only five weeks
after I submitted it. Ross Yelsey, publications coordinator for Columbia
University’s Weatherhead Institute, contacted me during my first year at
Northwestern, when the book seemed impossibly far off. In the years since,
he has been my guide through the mysterious world of academic publish-
ing. I am grateful for his help and for the willingness of the Institute and its
editorial committee to include my book in the Studies of the Weatherhead
East Asian Institute book series.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my closest friends and family. Kath-
ryn Crim, Katrina Dodson, Emily Drumsta, Andrea Gadbury, Rhiannon Gray-
bill, Erin Klenow, Miriam Markowitz, Valeria Mogilevich, Ryan Murphy, Jerry
Passannante, Lealah Pollock, David Simon, and Travis Wilds have made my
life and this book better than it would otherwise be, and I am beyond grate-
ful to them. To the Wolff-Ireland-Wilkie family, thanks for many restorative
meals and walks in Vermont, Princeton, Providence, and London over the
years. I look forward to more of the same in the decades to come. In the fall
of 2000, my Uncle Mike and Aunt Marie welcomed me into their home in Bei-
jing. Over the course of a long year, they fed, entertained, and supported me
in innumerable ways. Their generosity has made this book possible. Thanks
also to my departed grandparents and to my brother Kyle for giving me a sense
of place that has shaped my approach to landscape in ways great and small.
To my parents, who have supported me from the beginning, who let me leave
 acknowledgments xi

college and move to China, who have often wondered at my ability to convince
institutions to pay me to travel, think, and write, I owe you more than I can
really express.
*
Finally, this book is for Tristram. We met in May of 2003, as I was walking
across the main green, my freshly bound undergraduate thesis in hand, and
we have been inseparable ever since. He is the best person I know and this
book lives becomes of him.
 O R I E N TAT I O N

a full technical and historical account of the three

Gorges Dam project is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, my goal is to
offer an alternative to conventional narratives about the dam—whether trium-
phalist or critical—and to seek its horizons of possibility in the millennia-long
history of the Three Gorges region as a famous cultural and material land-
scape. Against the teleological thrust of standard chronologies, I present a
series of overlapping and juxtaposed perspectives that reconsider the connec-
tions between a landscape constituted through poetry and painting and one
reorganized by steel and concrete. For readers unfamiliar with either modern
China or the standard history of the dam project, however, I have prepared a
basic introduction to the key figures, texts, and events that I am recontextual-
izing and to which I refer frequently in what follows.1

1894 Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), “father of the nation,” addresses

a petition to the high-ranking Qing official Li Hongzhang
(1823–1901), offering his scientific expertise in support of
 xiv orientation

the waning dynasty. Sun writes of the almost magical power of

electricity and introduces Li to the technology of the hydroelec-
tric dam, then in its infancy, as a source of energy “that can be
extracted without limit and used without depletion.” Sun does
not succeed in presenting his petition to Li, though it is pub-
lished later that year in the reformist missionary publication Globe
Magazine (Wanguo gongbao ).2
1911–1925 Sun Yat-sen consolidates the ideas that form his “Three Principles
of the People” (Sanmin zhuyi ), an ambitious program of
cultural, political, and infrastructural modernization. A detailed
plan for the improvement of the Yangzi, including the damming
of the Three Gorges, appears in this and a number of other pub-
lished sources, including the English-language volume The Inter-
national Development of China, first published in 1920.
1930s The Republican government of Chiang Kai-shek (1887–
1975) sponsors exploratory surveys of the Three Gorges, though
the dam remains financially and technologically unfeasible. The
Japanese also carry out surveys of the area during their occupation
of eastern China.
1944–1947 John Savage (1879–1967), chief engineer of the United States
Bureau of Reclamation, is invited to China to produce a series
of proposals for the damming of the Yangzi. Savage, who led the
design of the Hoover, Shasta, and Grand Coulee dams, deems
the Yangzi project a “CLASSIC.” In 1945, the Chinese and United
States governments sign a provisional contract for a loan of $3
billion for construction of the dam, though this contract is ter-
minated in 1947, during the civil war that led to the Communist
takeover of China.
1950s Following significant flooding in 1954, Chinese officials and sci-
entists collaborate with Soviet experts to produce yet another plan
for damming the Yangzi at the Three Gorges. In 1956, Mao Zedong
(1893–1976) swims across the Yangzi at Wuhan and pens
one of his most famous poems, “Swimming,” which offers a
vision of the spatial reorganization of the region. He continues
to support the dam through the 1950s, though the catastrophic
failures of the Great Leap Forward make construction impossible.
1966–1976 Mao launches the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which
lasts until his death in 1976. Leaders continue to discuss the Three
Gorges Dam during this chaotic period, but lack the resources to
 orientation xv

launch the project. In 1970, construction begins on the first low

dam on the Yangzi River, the Gezhouba Dam , located
near the city of Yichang, just east of the Three Gorges.
1992–2012 In 1992, after decades of debate and planning by multiple gov-
ernments, teams of scientists, and foreign advisers, the National
People’s Congress, under the leadership of Jiang Zemin
and Premier Li Peng , approves construction of the Three
Gorges Dam project. Ground is broken in 1994 and continues
until the mid-2000s. The dam becomes fully operational in 2012.
FIXING
LANDSCAPE
 PA S S AG E I

D E PA RT U R E

Set ting O u t at Dawn

From the prow of a ship, Chinese tourists gaze out at the riotous greenery
and jadeite water of a river gorge as traditional music plays and a tour guide
recites a poem over a loudspeaker:

At dawn depart Baidi midst many-colored

clouds
Across 1,000 li to Jiangling in a single day return
From both banks the sound of gibbons crying
without rest
The light skiff has already crossed myriad-fold
mountains
 2 pa ssage i

When the tour guide finishes her recitation, she praises the Three Gorges
Dam project for “once again drawing the attention of the world” to this rug-
ged stretch of river and mountains, as if to make up for a long lapse in inter-
est. Meanwhile, a television on board the ship shows images of the Chinese
leaders who first imagined and then finally built the dam—Sun Yat-sen, Mao
Zedong, Deng Xiaoping—as well as footage of its early construction, which
began in 1994. As the guide mentions the projected water level of the com-
pleted reservoir, a ship full of foreign tourists passes in the opposite direction.
These nested journeys through the landscape of the Three Gorges take place
in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (Sanxia haoren ), a 2005 film set in the
city of Fengjie as its low-lying neighborhoods were being demolished to make
way for the Three Gorges Dam reservoir. If the images that Jia brings together
in this sequence speak to the modern history of the Three Gorges as a site of
national construction, then the four-line poem that echoes through it testifies
to a much longer history of imagining and representing the region. Antholo-
gized for over a millennium and still memorized by countless schoolchildren,
“Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng ,” by the Tang Dynasty
(618–907) poet Li Bai (701–762), is among the most famous depictions of
the Three Gorges region.1 It charts a course from the fortified settlement that
lies just west of the Gorges, through the towering mountains that separate the
Sichuan Basin from the lakes and plains of eastern China, and on to the city
of Jiangling in modern-day Hubei Province. Until recently, the Gorges, which
extend for roughly 120 miles between Baidicheng in the west and the city of
Yichang in the east, squeezed the Yangzi into a narrow, angry torrent, a string
of treacherous rapids, boulders, reefs, shifting sandbars, and swirling currents.
Before construction of the dam, the level of the river in the Gorges could rise
seventy or eighty feet during major floods before spilling out over the country-
side to the east, where it has killed countless millions over the centuries.2
In “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng,” the mountains that form the
Gorges and the surrounding terrain appear only at the very end of the last line,
not as part of the scenery, but as territory “already crossed.” We sense their
presence in the third line, but only from the cries of gibbons echoing across
the river. That the Gorges remain a palpable presence despite their absence
reminds us that we are dealing with a cultural landscape so iconic—so fixed
in the imagination—that it can easily signify from the edges of the poem. Li
Bai does not need to describe this landscape because his Tang readers know
to follow the gibbons’ cries back in time to Li Daoyuan’s (d. 527)
Commentary to the Classic of Rivers (Shuijing zhu ), the source of many of the
 departure 3

images and much of the language that was used to describe the Three Gorges
region in subsequent centuries:

The two banks are chains of mountains with nary an opening. Layered
cliffs and massed peaks hide the sky and cover the sun. If it is not mid-
day or midnight the sun and moon are invisible. In summer, when the
waters rise up the mountains, routes upstream and downstream become
impassible. If there is a royal proclamation that must be spread quickly it
sometimes happens that it departs Baidi at dawn and arrives at Jiangling
at dusk, a distance of 1,200 li. Even if one were to ride a swift horse or
mount the wind they could go no faster.
When winter turns to spring, there are frothing torrents, green pools,
and crystalline eddies that toss and turn reflections. On the highest peaks
strange cedars grow in profusion, hanging springs and waterfalls gush-
ing from their midst. Pure, luminous, towering, lush—there is so very
much to delight.
Whenever the weather clears or the day dawns with frost, within for-
ests chill and by streams swift, one hears the long cries of gibbons high
above. Unbroken and eerie, the sound echoes through the empty valleys,
its mournfulness fading only after a long time. For this reason the fisher-
men [of the area] sing: “Of Badong’s Three Gorges, Wu Gorge is longest;
when the gibbon thrice cries, tears drench your gown.”3

Li Bai’s allusions work because his readers already know the landscape as lit-
erary myth, but also because, his poem suggests, the physical landscape has
not changed in the centuries since Li Daoyuan immortalized it.4 The same
summer currents thunder through the gorges; the same gibbons cry mourn-
fully into the chill of clear mornings.
For most of its history, the Three Gorges region has existed in the cultural
imagination as a remarkably stable collection of images, ideas, and myths.
Only recently, with the rise of tourism on the Yangzi, have large numbers of
people from around China and the world been able to travel to the region. In
the late 1990s and early 2000s, tourists flocked to the gorges and their cities to
see them before the completion of the dam and its reservoir, which required
the demolition of thirteen major cities and the relocation of upwards of 1.5
million people. Before the rise of mass tourism and the infrastructure and
media that support it however, the Three Gorges were first and foremost a
literary landscape—more imagined than visited.
 4 pa ssage i

For “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng” to be recited in 2005, in the

middle of the Gorges, with the dam nearing completion and its reservoir
expanding, as though nothing had changed in nearly thirteen hundred years,
demonstrates the enduring appeal of that landscape and the texts that shaped
it. In reality, the tour guide’s use of the poem suggests a relationship between
poetry and landscape very different from the one that made Li Bai’s original
work possible. Its recitation in the place it describes establishes a connection
between poem and landscape based less in the recognition of literary allusions
than in the ability of tourists to retrace the poet’s journey in real time, even
though that journey is mostly absent from his poem. Its appearance in Still Life,
a film that captures the demolition of the modern city that now contains Baidi-
cheng, forces us to confront the discrepancy between the air of timelessness
that poems like “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng” still lend the landscape
and the radical changes the region has undergone in the last two decades. As
much as the tourists might imagine themselves reenacting the poet’s journey,
the historical footage that plays on the boat and the images of displacement that
fill the film tell a different story. The moment the tour guide shifts from poem
to dam and reservoir, she reminds us that the shoreline separating mountain
from river in Li Bai’s poem will soon be submerged, just as the swift currents
that he described will be slowed. Against touristic images of pristine nature, of
the landscape of Li Bai protected and promoted as a world-class tourist desti-
nation, Still Life presents a landscape of spatial and social ruination.
*
Fixing Landscape maps the many points of connection between the seemingly
timeless landscapes of the past and the spatial production of modern and
contemporary China. We have become habituated to seeing the former as the
sacrificial victim of the latter, but this book moves beyond simple narratives
of loss to show how the recent reshaping of China as a modern nation-state is
grounded not only in the political and economic transformations of the last
few centuries, but also in the traditions that preceded them and against which
they have so often signified. The story I tell here is not of a hitherto obscured
cultural continuity, however, but of the shifting representational and spatial
forms that have actively produced the Three Gorges as a famous landscape
over the course of more than two millennia.
Though the Three Gorges Dam has already been built, its reservoir filled,
and many residents of the region displaced, this remains an urgent story. As
the scene of touristic wonder from Still Life shows, from certain angles the
landscape of the Gorges looks unchanged. The level of the Yangzi has risen by
close to six hundred feet, but the mountains that form the Gorges are more
 departure 5

than three thousand feet high and the river still narrows dramatically when it
enters the Qutang Gorge (Qutang xia ) east of Fengjie. Even Baidicheng
is still standing. No longer a promontory, it is now an island, its banks rein-
forced with concrete to protect them from the enormous water pressure of
the reservoir. The Gorges have been flooded but not erased; they remain awe-
inspiring. With the passage of time, this sense of awe will make it harder to
remember what has been lost—not only the sights, sounds, and ecosystems
of an undammed river and the fields, farms, homes, and relics of the people
who occupied its banks, but also knowledge of the river as something endur-
ing and changeable, a figure for and a site of history’s flux.
Fixing Landscape recovers the fluidity of the Three Gorges as a cultural con-
cept and physical reality that has been shaped over time, inscribed and rein-
scribed to support shifting values. My approach is inspired in part by what
Ann Laura Stoler calls “concept-work,” a critical method that rejects stability
“as an a priori attribute of concepts.”5 By considering the Three Gorges as a
concept that is “provisional, active, and subject to change,” we remain sensi-
tive to its multiplicity and the frequency with which it has been reinscribed
to bear new meanings that are, more often than not, grounded in myths of
cultural stability.6 The stability of the Three Gorges as a cultural, geographi-
cal, and national landscape is an effect, a product of physical and represen-
tational processes that have homogenized and simplified the region. These
processes have not only facilitated the region’s cooptation by the state, but
also obscured how the poetic and pictorial landscapes of the past relate to
both the Three Gorges Dam project and the contemporary works of art it has
inspired. This book refuses to take the Three Gorges as a given—whether his-
torical, cultural, or even geographical—so that we might better understand
how landscape emerges from the interaction of the representational and the
physical. To readers interested in technical histories of hydropower and state
building in China, my approach may seem unorthodox, but I encourage them
to read on and take a closer look at the cultural and aesthetic grounds of our
material entanglements. Poems do not build dams, but this book shows that
the Three Gorges Dam would not exist as we know it without them.
To do this, Fixing Landscape takes seriously the power that supports the
Three Gorges Dam’s massive reorganization of space and the power of the
landscape traditions that the region has inspired. By tradition, I have in mind
neither the academically debunked but still popular vision of an unbroken
lineage of cultural production based on a shared set of techniques, forms,
or themes nor an “invented traditions” critique of that idea.7 Instead, I treat
tradition the way a poet such as Li Bai treats his own poetry—as an iterative
 6 pa ssage i

form that draws on the past but redefines it with each iteration. Holding on to
tradition might seem to run counter to the concept of iterability (and hence
to go against the Derridean grain), but it allows us to discuss the workings
of borrowed language and shared images beyond the old oppositional dis-
course of tradition versus modernity.8 By focusing on tradition as a process
of incremental reinvention that gains cultural potency by maintaining some
resemblance to an imagined past, I hope to further bridge some of the many
divides that separate the study of premodern, modern, and contemporary cul-
ture in the place that we now call China. The forms of representation I discuss
here are part of a tradition not only because they draw on a shared cultural
vocabulary, but also because they reinstantiate landscape in response to shift-
ing historical conditions and forms of power.
To better understand how the Three Gorges has served as an important site
for the creation and contestation of Chinese traditions, I have produced a book
that ranges over more than two millennia and weaves premodern accounts
of famous sites and figures together with modern and contemporary repre-
sentations of the same places and people. Part I, which moves between the
Tang, Song (960–1279), and Qing (1640–1911) dynasties and the present day,
shows not only how the Three Gorges landscape was once defined by the fad-
ing and often ambiguous traces of historical and mythological figures but also
how anxieties about the loss of those traces inspired attempts to “fix” them
in and as landscape. Part II centers on the introduction of radically new ways
of seeing, representing, and moving along the Yangzi in the mid-nineteenth
to mid-twentieth centuries. It was during this period that the Three Gorges
were inscribed as a “Chinese landscape,” first through the cartographic imagi-
nation of Western travel writers, explorers, and amateur scientists and then
through a nationalist discourse of modernization. Part III centers on contem-
porary filmmakers and visual artists who documented the transformation of
the Three Gorges region in the lead-up to completion of the dam. These art-
ists responded to the nationalist embrace of a development scheme that began
as an imperialist project of mapping and penetrating the Chinese interior by
reaching back to the premodern traditions that I describe in Part I.
The three parts of this book explore the complex and often elusive rela-
tionship between the art and science of landscape and the acts of landscap-
ing that have indelibly shaped the Three Gorges region. Though they unfold
chronologically, they do not tell a linear story. Each chapter is a microcosm of
the project as a whole, a constellation of premodern, modern, and contempo-
rary sources, and a melding of material and symbolic ways of engaging with
landscape. Read in dialogue with one another, these diverse sources help us
 departure 7

navigate the problems we face in confronting a landscape as richly overde-

termined as the Three Gorges region is; they show us, for instance, how an
eighth-century poem can change our understanding of a twenty-first-century
film about a socialist experiment in spatial production developed in part by
the American Bureau of Reclamation.
To further work against the pull of linear narratives, I have included a
sequence of “passages” after parts I, II, and III that lead us back through Li
Bai’s “Setting Out at Dawn from Baidicheng.” Like a recurring stratum in the
sedimentary record of the landscape’s representational composition, this
poem’s repetition as a quintessential expression of Chinese culture continues
to lend the Three Gorges landscape an air of timelessness and stability. Its
repetition in Fixing Landscape, however, is meant not only to destabilize con-
ventional understandings of the entity that we call the Three Gorges, but also
to inspire new ways of thinking about tradition as both concept and iterative
practice. This is in some ways a methodological experiment, but I believe it
is the method the topic demands. There are few places where the past and
the present, the aesthetic and the material, have come together so intimately
and violently as in the Three Gorges; this requires new ways of thinking and
writing. My hope is that this approach will offer readers in both Chinese stud-
ies and neighboring fields new methods for rethinking spatial configurations
across the globe with similarly storied cultural meanings. By bringing together
genres and media normally segregated from one another, shifting between
micro- and macro-temporal frames and intercutting historical moments, I
have situated the dam project as an environmentally destructive and socially
disruptive structure of “real-world” action and thought inextricably linked
to the images and metaphors that constitute the Three Gorges as landscape.
That the aesthetic may be an unacknowledged accomplice to material and
political worlds is easy to claim, but harder to show; this book is, among other
things, an illustration of this claim and a sourcebook for scholars working
through similar problems in other real and representational worlds.

Whence the Three G orges (Dam)?

A source of power for a flailing empire, a boon to the economy of the nation,
a way of fixing the faults of nature—for a century, the Three Gorges Dam
has been both a mirror and a cure for the anxieties of the men who imagined
it. At 1.4 miles long, more than six hundred feet high, and with a reservoir
that stretches four hundred miles, it exists in the realm of the mathematical
 8 pa ssage i

figure i.1 The Three Gorges Dam in operation. See also color plate 1.
Source: iStock/Getty Images

sublime, a testament not only to China’s wealth and power, but also, as some
would have it, to the spirit of its people (figures i.1–i.3). For those opposed
to the project, it has appeared otherwise: as an environmental and social
catastrophe, uprooting people, destroying cities and villages, and ravaging
the ecosystems of the world’s third-longest river.9 The embodiment of the
Chinese spirit stands against the erasure of local culture; the generation of
hydropower against the sovereign power of the state; the aesthetics of the

Nanjing
Wushan (Mt . Wu)

Lesser Three Gorges Shanghai

Three Gorges Dam
Fengjie
Chengdu Wanxian Wuhan
Zigui Yichang
Jiangling
Chongqing
Fengdu The Three
Gorges

Changsha

Baidicheng

Three Gorges Dam Reservoir

figure i.2 Area affected by the Three Gorges Dam and its reservoir
 departure 9

engineered against the beauty of a natural landscape. For most, the dam is a
Manichean figure, black or white; reality, as always, is a grayer affair.
This book does not weigh the benefits of the Three Gorges Dam against
its costs. It treats the project first and foremost as a social, environmental,
and cultural problem of massive proportions. The dam and its reservoir have
indelibly inscribed the power of the state onto the surface of the earth. Its
environmental and social consequences are still coming into view and will
follow the Chinese people for centuries, if not millennia, to come. They con-
stitute what Rob Nixon calls an “attritional catastrophe . . . marked above all
by displacements—temporal, geographical, rhetorical, and technological
displacements that simplify violence and underestimate, in advance and in
retrospect, the human and environmental costs.”10 If, as Nixon argues, “such
displacements smooth the way for amnesia, as places are rendered irretriev-
able to those who once inhabited them,” this book is an aide-memoire, but
one that reconfigures how we see the present and reimagines how we might
see the future by tracing the displacements of the Three Gorges Dam into the
distant past and back again, into a strange new world just now forming, where
memories of the past become haunting visions of the future.11
While I am concerned with what the dam has done, and will address artistic
responses to it in the final part of Fixing Landscape, one of my primary concerns
is how it came to be, in both the short and (very) long term. How did this par-
ticular dam become the Three Gorges Dam? What does it mean to modify the
word “dam” with the geographical designation “Three Gorges,” and how does
the resulting name link an engineered structure to the rich cultural history of
this region? I contend that rather than violently severing the links between
aesthetic landscapes and physical lands, the dam reinforces them, even as it
ends certain ways of seeing and moving through the Gorges. This is in no way
an attempt to wash the dam in the healing waters of tradition—they are not
necessarily salutary—but rather an effort to show not only how a geological
formation along the Yangzi River became the Three Gorges, but also how the
Three Gorges themselves became both a national “Chinese landscape” and a
locus of “Chinese traditions.” These are neither unidirectional nor completed
processes. Attending to the multiplicity of the Three Gorges as landscape and
concept raises fundamental questions about how to define the traditional in
contemporary China, a pressing task when both the political establishment
and independent artists are appropriating Chinese traditions to promote rad-
ically different interests.
If the Three Gorges are especially attractive as a site of political inscrip-
tion and artistic expression, it is due in part to the mysterious qualities long
 10 pa ssage i

figure i.3 Side-by-side satellite images from 1993 (left) and 2016 (right) show the
extent of the Three Gorges Dam reservoir after completion of the dam.
Source: U.S. Geological Survey

associated with the region. Depictions of the Gorges in literature, painting,

and film abound with supernatural figures, clouds and rains that coalesce
into beautiful goddesses, howling gibbons, and wildly changeable currents.
In early geographical texts, writers even argued about where the Gorges
began and ended and which sections of the river should be counted among
the three.12 When the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu (702–772), who is central
to the story I tell in chapters 1 and 2, confronts the towering mountains that
form Kuimen , the western gate of the Gorges, he invokes these debates
by posing and immediately answering a rhetorical question:

The Three Gorges—from where do they come down to us?

Paired palisades secure this gate13

According to a widely repeated gloss, Du Fu is toying with his readers by

invoking old textual debates to ask, “Where, according to tradition, are the
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