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Xu Xiake (1587-1641): The Art of Travel Writing. By JULIAN WARD. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001. xviii, 231 pp. $60.00 (cloth).
Motivated by an intense interest in geography and history, in 1607, at the age of twenty, Xu Xiake (or Xu Hongzu-"Xiake" was his literary name, or hao) began a lifelong career of geographical surveys and explorations. In all, he made seventeen separate journeys. His final excursion, undertaken between 1636 and 1640, led him to distant Yunnan and Tibet. During his travels, Xu kept diaries, sometimes written in great detail, describing the places that he visited. These texts survive in various editions that usually carry the title Xu Xiake youji (Travel records of Xu Xiake). Based on the wide extent of his travels and the rich content of his youji, Xu has been praised by both contemporaries and posterity as China's greatest traveler and explorer. Even the respected Siku editors remark that Xu was "especially skilled at composing travel records, and no previous work in the genre surpasses his youji" (Heyin Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao ji Siku weishou shumu jinmie shumu, ed. Ji Yun et al. [rev. ed., Taibei: Commercial Press, 1988], 3:1539). At the same time, however, the late eighteenth-century editors go on to say: "[Xu] never expresses personal sentiments in his writings, but only [recorded] what he saw and heard with his own eyes and ears."
Julian Ward disagrees with this view. In his introduction to the book under review, the author contends that "Xu's diaries resound with a love of, and empathy for, the landscape" (p. xii). Focusing on Xu's travels...