Our team hosted several meetings around the making of sacred landscapes, the poetic form of the inscriptions in Mount Tianzhu, the definition of graphic variation in medieval China and an ontology for Chinese rubbings, the latter being the object of two separate posts.

On April 4, Vincent Goossaert joined us in discussing several questions we had prepared around the birth, life (and sometimes, as it may be the case for the sites investigated here, the failure) of sacred mountains in ancient China. The wide-ranging discussion touched upon spatial markers or physical characteristics of sacred mounts, the presence of a specific god and associated rituals, the permanence or seasonality of religious communities on the sites, the identity and perception of visitors to the sites, as well as narratives and trajectories/paths that can structure their experience – including the impact of modern ‘heritigization’ processes. This overview allowed us to plan further how to organize our enquiry into the history of the sites, and to structure our corpus in a way that would contextualize the medieval episode of spatial appropriation into a wider range of attitudes to the (sacred) mountain. Beyond the analysis of historical discourses on the investigated mountains, we reassessed the importance of documenting the transformation of the sites and their infrastructure as well as interviewing the living communities that still inhabit them.

On April 25, under the guidance of Zhang Rui and with the participation of Tchou-Tchou Tophoven and Camille Khireddine, we made some progress in the translation of the song 頌 poems by Zheng Daozhao (final part of the Zheng Wengong stele) and his son Zheng Shuzu (at the foot of the same stele and at the foot of the mountain). We tried to get a sense of the poetic quality of their production, and to stay as close as possible to the sobre yet evocative four-character structure, oscillating in content between wordly concerns and transcendent images. The passage 觸石吐雲 from Zheng Shuzu’s inscription at the foot of Mount Tianzhu 天柱山銘 inspired the title of our upcoming exhibition…

This month, we have launched invitations for our upcoming conference – “Sinographic Forays into the Epiverse”, planned for October 15 and 16, 2024, and started to prepare the exhibition about the mountains inscribed by Zheng Daozhao – “Sculpter les nuages, la montage enlacée” – planned from October 7 to 31, 2024.

Besides the AAS conference mentioned in our last post, a workshop, a seminar and a public talk were given by Lia Wei this month – one at a workshop by the French National Research Agency on March 6 and one at the Musée du Quai Branly on March 22, and the last one at the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou on April 17–, respectively on research methods, comparative perspectives in the history of writing and the history of Chinese calligraphy.

Finally, two research trips were financed by Altergraphy this month: one by Kento Ashikari in Tokyo to interview Japanese calligraphy amateurs having visited the inscribed landscapes in Shandong since the 1980s, one by Lia Wei in Shandong province to gather authorizations for fieldwork by the whole team on September 1 to 10 as well as survey four steles and epitaphs from the Northern Qi period.

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