Andrew Chittick

Though he does not immediately proffer an explanation for this, the overall argument of the book is that, in the intervening four centuries, the unquestioned dominance of "imperial metageography" - familiar to all Sinologists as the conception of a single empire, divided into provinces and counties, and rimmed by less submissive foreign borderlands - gave way to other metageographies which often challenged and subverted the imperial view. Felt also links the three new subgenres to three historical "transformations" in the early medieval era: the fragmentation of the imperial order (resulting in more local works); the development of the Yangzi basin (leading to works on natural spaces); and the impact of Buddhism and knowledge of the wider world beyond the Sinitic ecumene (works on foreign lands). [...]I would be interested in how these two chapters might have played out if Felt had abandoned chronology and instead considered as two distinct metageographies the relatively de-politicized "ecumenical regionalism" of much local writing, and the more politicized "competitive empires" model (a term Felt doesn't apply generally but does use as a section subheading on p. 122) of both the Three Kingdoms and late Northern and Southern periods. [...]the Shuijiiig zhu's hydrocultural scheme does not "entirely decenter the state" (as Felt claims on p. 208), but instead leaves state agents playing an outsized role in shaping the world.