Senses of the City

The city of Hangzhou was a symbol of the declining Song Empire (960–1279). Paramount and feeble, awe-inspiring and threatened, it was the most admired city and a disgrace to its dynastic founders. Rather than debate the merit of these polemical judgments, the contributors to this volume treat them as expressions of their historical moment that reveal ideological and aesthetic preferences. Leading scholars of the field have produced essays that analyze writing, painting, dance, and music, as means by which individual literati placed themselves in time and space.