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Abstract

Walls have long been understood as a distinguishing feature of premodern Chinese cities. Serving both practical and symbolic purposes, they set off urban space from the surrounding countryside. This article examines illustrations of cities (chengtu) in Qing-era gazetteers to determine to what extent and in what ways our assumptions about the importance of walls correspond to a common genre of visually representing urban space. Some chengtu reflect these assumptions very directly, presenting walled cities as islands floating in the blank space of exurban space. However, most chengtu contain some amount of extramural detail, and there is considerable variety in how these illustrations treat the relationship between intramural and extramural space. No single factor, such as geography, the presence of topographical features or religious structures, or the specific title attached to a given chengtu, can explain this variation. Instead, chengtu reflect tremendous fluidity in visual discourse around cities in the Qing period beyond what existing scholarship on gazetteers and representations of urban space would lead us to expect.古代中國的城牆一直被視為城邑的一個顯著特徵。它分隔城郭與郊野，既實用又具有象徵意義。本文通過考察清代方志中的城市圖錄，來印證人們對城牆重要性的認知與城市視覺史志之間的相符程度。有些城邑在城圖中被呈現為游離在汪洋中的孤洲，明顯契合主流意象。但大多數城圖則包含畫外音，對城郭內外空間關係的處理也不盡相同。而無論是地理位置、地形特徵，還是宗教結構，抑或賦予城圖的特定標簽，沒有任何一項能成爲解釋這種差異的單一因素。由此，城市圖錄在清代城貌的視覺話語中展現出的高度流動性，實非傳統方志和城邑表徵研究令人始料能及。