Punctuating the fluid vision : Li Zixiao’s Yandang scroll (1316)

Li Zixiao’s Yandang scroll (1316), now in the collection of the Shanghai Museum, is the earliest extant handscroll depicting the Yandang Mountains in Wenzhou, Zhejiang. This thesis examines how the handscroll produces a time-based viewing experience through the material construction of five textual sections and seven ink paintings. Drawing on local gazetteers, historical and literary records, fieldwork, and visual materials, this thesis situates the scroll both within the broader context of Yuan-dynasty (1271-1368) landscape representation, and within pictorial and textual practices of recording and remembering Yandang as place. Through visual and comparative analysis of architectural depictions, sites associated with Xie Lingyun (385-433) and Nakula, and locally specific toponyms inscribed across the scroll’s seven pictorial sections, the thesis argues that the scroll produces Yandang as a historically mediated and experientially apprehended place. This construction operates through a relay between poetry and painting, animated by xing (affective incitement), which activates historical memory and Chan Buddhist practice as entangled modes of perceptual engagement. The scroll’s significance therefore lies in the productive gap between verbal reference and pictorial articulation, through which the handscroll’s temporally unfolding movement between looking, reading, recursive comparison, and verification becomes central to the production of Yandang as place. Rather than presenting landscape as a stable visual whole, the scroll converges lived itinerary and localized knowledge into a historically persuasive yet visibly constructed vision of the Yandang landscape.