Strange Things, Omens and Geography: Reception of the Shan Hai Jing in Han China

The Shan hai jing, or the Itineraries of Mountains and Seas, is a rich repertoire of a wide range of subject matter, and thus unsurprisingly has been classified in many ways. One of the many thorny problems still under debate is its nature. Many modern students have sought to unravel its “real,” “original” nature and even challenged the traditional classifications of the work such as the one in the “Yiwen zhi” of the Han shu, the earliest surviving bibliographical catalogue. The present article suggests shifting the attention from the “production” end of the transmission history of the Shan hai jing to its “reception” end, and accepting various voices on the book as different creative approaches of making sense of it. Close examinations of these voices reveal not only how intellectuals reconstructed its meanings, but also how they related the work and the pertinent subjects to their contemporary circumstances. By studying four instances of Han elites and scholars receiving or consuming the Shan hai jing, the present article aims to demonstrate how the landscape of the reception of the Shan hai jing was related to the Han intellectual debates over the book and other related subjects, and how the different receptions led up to its classification in the “Yiwen zhi” in the first century C.E.