Townscapes of Virtue: Urban Memory of Suzhou from Imperial China

Memories of urban China in the past largely resided in texts other than physical structures. A literary form known as tujing emerged in the Han dynasty through the use of pictorial maps and texts to depict a city. Also later known as local gazetteers, such literary forms prevailed from the Song dynasty, and in a more or less rigid genre, they revealed an official effort to produce collective urban memory. Suzhou is an example, par excellence, among many historic cities, for its urban memory sustained by various physical and literary means which reveals the good qualities of a city created with a cosmological concept and imbued with Confucian humanism. With sources from the literature (e.g., text and painting), maps and physical remains from imperial Suzhou, this chapter investigates the Chinese philosophies and strategies of building, managing, maintaining and perpetuating a city, with the purpose of understanding what it means to provide a good urban landscape.