Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
knowledge by reading a lot of topics, ancient materials and manuscripts. It must be
mentioned that China of that time was a kingdom which had enjoyed a cultural
unity for several 100 years through the prosperous dynasties of Qin and Han, and
the Chinese culture had developed rapidly. There were many writings concerning
national and regional geography, history, folklores and tradition, and some of
them were of good quality. According to a study and calculation of the writings of
Li Tao-Yuan, we fi nd that the topics and writings he used for reference in his work
amount to 437. It is a pity that most of these topics have been lost. In addition to
these references, he also collected a lot of writings from stone tablets and folklores
and folk literature for his own reference. During the time of Li Tao-Yuan, there were
some geographical literature and writings circulating among the elite circles. To Li,
these were far from being satisfactory, some being too simple, some being too dry
and insipid, and others being too confusing with no defi nite system for reference
and research. It must be noted that most of these materials of geographical descrip-
tions were little more than the compilation and gathering of raw materials and rough
sketches on all sorts of natural phenomena. And there was no standard system of
classifi cation for these geographical records.
Li Tao-Yuan decided to set up a standard and unifi ed system of recording the
geographical materials of China. He used
The Book of Rivers
, a topic written by
some scholar before him, as an outline for his studies. The original
Book of Rivers
was completed in the third century A.D. It had the descriptions and records of
137 rivers in China, with reference to their sources, estuaries, tributaries, etc. It had
a defi nite system of recording of its own. The only defect of the topic is that there
was little or practically no reference to the geographical condition of the land
irrigated by each river. Li Tao-Yuan used this topic as an outline for his research; he
fi lled up many vacancies and supplemented a lot of materials. The number of rivers he
studied and recorded increased to 1,252. More important is the fact that he compiled
detailed descriptions of each river including the geographical condition of it, the
natural phenomena of the district concerned and their changes, with reference to the
historical development and infl uences. Many of the descriptions were facts collected
and recorded by Li himself. The completed works of Li Tao-Yuan amounted to
300,000 words which is about 20 times more than that of the original
Book of Rivers
.
As to the system of compiling his topic, Li decided that all the rivers originally
recorded in the old topic (
The Book of Rivers
) should be printed in bold type while
all the materials supplemented by Li himself should be printed in small type, as
references and footnotes. The name of the new topic still preserved the name of
the old, i.e.
The Book of Rivers
, but the only change was by adding the word
“Commentary” and thus the full name of the topic became
A Commentary on the
Book of Rivers
.
In his life time, Li Tao-Yuan had written many topics and essays, but only this
topic got left. This topic was preserved to us because of its beauty in writing style,
especially its excellence in describing natural scenery. For example, in his records
of the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, the readers would be deeply attracted by
his interesting description of lively actions and meditating quietude, its changing
colours and poetic sounds of the magnifi cent pictures of Mother Nature. It is this
