The Travel Diaries of Xu Xiake

Timeline

1. 1613–1635Mount Tiantai, Zhejiang · ZhejiangThe present text opens with entries on a trip to Mount Tiantai and Mount Yandang in the third month of the forty-first year of Wanli; for the next twenty-odd years Xu Xiake, based in Jiangyang, repeatedly surveyed famous mountains of the southeast, North China and Fujian. The daily entries record routes, caves, temples and phenology, already showing an approach of 'trust what the eye sees,' but were not yet assembled into a complete book.
2. 1636–1640Around Jizu Mountain, Yunnan · YunnanIn the ninth year of Chongzhen Xu Xiake set out from Jiangyin, passing through Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Hunan into Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan; ten years later, gravely ill near Jizu Mountain, he was escorted eastward. This journey's diary is the most complete, detailing peak forests, solution caves, underground streams and the Pan and Jinsha river systems, and proposing several judgments of river sources, elevating the diaries from landscape sketches to verifiable geoscience observations.
3. 1641–1642Jiangyin County, Southern Zhili · JiangyinXiake fell ill and died soon after returning home, entrusting his scattered diaries on his deathbed to his tutor Ji Mengliang to 'sort and compile.' After an initial collation by Wang Zhongren, who then went to Fujian, the manuscript passed to Xiake's eldest son Xu Qi, and Ji filled the gaps, organizing it by region, completing the manuscript Xu Xiake's Western Travels in the twelfth month of the fifteenth year of Chongzhen. This was the first time the diaries were made into a book. After the jia-shen year (1644) Jiangyin was ravaged by war and most of the original manuscript was destroyed; the text survived in manuscript copies.
4. 1650–1776Jiangyin County, Southern Zhili · JiangyinXiake's concubine-born son Li Ji (Jieli) sought out manuscripts by Cao Junfu and others, adding pieces such as the 'Diary of a Journey to Mount Taihua,' a version praised as 'the ancestor of all versions.' In the forty-first year of Qianlong the clansman Xu Zhen collated the Yang Mingshi, Chen Hong and other recensions and produced the first woodblock printing, turning the diaries from manuscript into printed edition. Ye Tingjia, Ding Wenjiang, Chu Shaotang and others subsequently collated, annotated and illustrated it, making it a standard classic of Chinese geographical history and travel literature.