Xu Xiake

Xu Xiake the Chinese travel writer and geographer of the late Ming dynasty (1587-1641) who devoted more than thirty years to journeys across the length and breadth of China and left behind a vast diary of his observations. His account of his travels, known as the Travel Diaries of Xu Xiake, remains one of the greatest works of geographical literature in Chinese and a landmark in the study of karst landscapes and river systems.

Early Life and Background

Xu Xiake was born in 1587 as Xu Hongzu in Jiangyin, a town on the southern bank of the Yangtze in the province of Jiangsu, into a family of modest landed gentry. His father had withdrawn from official service and preferred the quiet life of a scholar, and from him the boy inherited both a taste for reading and a distaste for the examinations that led to government office. He was educated in the classics as a youth but showed little inclination to pursue a bureaucratic career.

According to family tradition his mother encouraged his wanderings rather than restraining them, even making him a travelling cap to show her approval. Freed from the obligation to sit for the examinations, he turned his energies toward the investigation of the natural world rather than toward the composition of formal essays. He read widely in the geographical and historical literature available to him, but he came to distrust much of it and to value direct observation above inherited authority.

He began his journeys while still a young man, at first making short excursions to famous mountains and shrines in the eastern provinces. These early trips trained his eye and his habits of note-taking, and by the 1610s he had settled into the pattern that would define his life. He travelled light, often in the company of a single servant or a Buddhist monk, and he recorded the route, the distances, the terrain and the weather in meticulous daily entries.

The Journeys and the Diaries

Over roughly three decades Xu Xiake made a series of great expeditions that carried him far beyond the well-travelled circuits of the scholar-gentry. He climbed many of the sacred mountains, including Taishan, Huashan and Hengshan, and he explored the rugged interior of the southern and western provinces. His longest and most celebrated journey, undertaken between 1636 and 1640, took him through Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangxi, Guizhou and finally into Yunnan on the southwestern frontier.

The written record of these journeys, the Xu Xiake Youji, is not a single finished book but a collection of diaries reconstructed and edited from his manuscripts after his death. The surviving text for the great southwestern journey alone runs to many tens of thousands of characters and gives an exceptionally detailed day-by-day account of travel through regions that few educated men of his time had ever seen. He described the roads, the rivers, the caves, the markets, the local customs and the plants and animals with equal attention.

His method was empirical and quantitative in spirit. He paced distances, estimated elevations by the fall of rivers, timed the stages of his route and cross-checked the reports of local people against what he could see for himself. When the received geographical writings contradicted the evidence of his own eyes, he said so plainly, and his willingness to correct the accepted authorities gave his diaries a scientific authority unusual for their age.

Achievements in Geography and Karst Studies

Xu Xiake is remembered above all for his study of limestone landscapes, and he has been called a pioneer of karst geomorphology. In Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan he encountered great expanses of weathered limestone riddled with caves, sinkholes, underground streams and pinnacled hills, and he examined them not as curiosities but as the products of processes he tried to explain. He described the solution of rock by water, the collapse of cavern roofs and the formation of the strange tower-like hills that characterise the region.

He explored numerous caves in person, mapping their chambers and passages, noting the direction of their streams and the deposits on their floors, and recording the stalactites and stalagmites that grew within them. His descriptions of these formations anticipate the modern understanding of cave development, and geographers of a later age have found his observations accurate enough to be used in reconstructing the history of particular sites.

He also made a decisive contribution to the understanding of China's rivers. He argued on the basis of his own travels that the upper course of the great river of the south, which others had confused with neighbouring streams, was the true source of the Yangtze system, and he corrected long-standing errors in the accepted accounts of several major waterways. This insistence on tracing rivers to their sources and following them through the landscape was a fundamental advance in the way the physical geography of the country was described.

Writings, Style and Personality

The travel diaries combine the characteristics of a scientific record with the sensibility of a literary essayist. Xu Xiake wrote in a compact and vivid classical prose, and his descriptions of mountain storms, of dawn over the gorges, of the poverty of remote villages and of the hazards of the road give the work a human immediacy that purely technical accounts lack. He was capable of dry humour about his own hardships and of real tenderness toward the companions and servants who shared them.

He travelled in an age of disorder, when banditry, famine and the breakdown of local order made long journeys through the interior genuinely dangerous. He fell ill repeatedly, was robbed more than once, and lost companions to sickness and accident, yet he continued to press westward until he could go no further. His diaries record these difficulties without self-pity and with a curiosity that never seems to flag.

Although he wrote a great deal, almost none of his work was published in his own lifetime, and much of it survived only through the efforts of relatives and friends who gathered his papers after his death. The first substantial editions appeared in the seventeenth century, and the text has been edited and expanded by later scholars as further manuscripts came to light. His relative and editor Xu Zhongzhao played a central part in preserving the diaries for posterity.

Influence and Legacy

For centuries after his death Xu Xiake was admired chiefly as an exemplar of the wandering scholar, and his diaries were read for their literary beauty and for the light they threw on the places he visited. Only in the twentieth century, as geography became a modern academic discipline, did the full scientific value of his work come to be recognised, and he was claimed as a founding figure of Chinese geographical research.

Geographers and historians of science have praised his empirical method, his careful measurement and his willingness to reason from evidence rather than from tradition, qualities that set him apart from most of his contemporaries. His descriptions of limestone terrain are still cited in studies of the karst regions of southwestern China, and the locations he recorded have been used by field researchers seeking to trace changes in the landscape over the intervening centuries.

His name has been given to places, institutions and a national day of tourism in China, and his diaries continue to be reprinted and studied as both literature and science. He stands as an enduring symbol of the inquiring traveller, a man who preferred the evidence of his own eyes to the settled opinion of the learned, and who made the patient observation of the natural world the labour of his life. He died in 1641, shortly after returning from his last great journey.

See also

• Travel literature
• Karst topography
• Yangtze River
• Chinese geography