Crossing Borders: Tang and Song Scholar-Officials in China's Southern Regions

''Crossing Borders: Tang and Song Scholar-Officials in China's Southern Regions'' Southern border lands were tenuously held by China's central government during the Tang and Song periods. Nonetheless, territory south of the mountains, the Lingnan area and Hainan Island, served as places of exile for several prominent officials of the Tang and Song. Their border crossing was not only movement to a specific geographic terrain, but a transfer from one political sphere to another. For several men, it was a psychological passage from the familiar to the strange, banishment from a civilized to a barbaric world. Although the flora and fauna of a new realm captured the imagination of some of these scholar-officials, and thus enlivened poetry of the exile, dominant images in the poetry are of miasmic regions tending toward decay and death. Comparisons of the poetry of Han Yu (768-828), Song Zhiwen (d.712), Ding Wei (966-1037) of the Tang with that of Su Shi (1037--1101)of the Song Dynasty reveal that tropes of the exiled official in an inhospitable land were prompted by a fear of death outside the borders of the China they knew and understood. Perceptions of the poet were thus clouded by the concerns of the political exile.