Please note that the workshop takes place on June 29 and July 1, 2020 on Zoom (16:00-17:30). 

For over two millennia of Chinese imperial history, geography played an integral role not only in local  and  state  administration, but  also  in  literary  and  visual  representations. As officials and literati collected and organized geographical data and knowledge, such efforts at local levels demonstrated both proximity to and distance from the centers of imperial authority. Why and how did officials and literati represent localities? How did they structure spatial information? Where do we find the“imperial” in the “local” and the“local” in the “imperial”? This workshop proposes a diachronic and place-­based approach to examining the processes of producing and organizing geographical knowledge in imperial China. Our aim is to bring to  light  the structural  and epistemological  tensions between  the  standardization  and localization of geographical knowledge beyond the temporal bounds of each dynasty and expand the view to the wide array of source materials that describe“things” according to their spatial configurations, such  as local  gazetteers,  poetry,  empire-wide  geographical compilations,  geographical  treatises  from standard  histories, and any  form  of  visual representations. These sources draw the boundaries of localities in divergent ways, and this workshop  will probe  the  manner  in  which the boundaries  were drawn,  negotiated,  and redefined in geographical representations.