Writing the Yuan Palace_Part II
Certainly Zhu Xie also included some photographs in his book, but it was the maps that were equally important, if not more so, than the textual verifications of the palace buildings, since he regarded the lack of maps thereof to be a common problem in early sources of palatial architecture. He based his maps on two primary textual sources: one major and one minor. The major source was Xiao Xun’s text, because as Zhu reasoned, “it was a record of field investigations,” [25] providing an experiential framework for his work; the minor source was Chuo Geng Lu, a late Yuan dynasty compilation of essays on various aspects of the Yuan society, with a section on its palatial buildings, which would provide, according to Zhu, “a contemporaneous framework of reference.” [26] Therefore Zhu’s method of working through Xiao’s text was very similar to that adopted by the authors of Clarifications of the Old Stories; in his own words, his maps “were based on primary materials, compromising various sources to create detailed [visual] verifications [of the Yuan palaces].” [27]
Zhu Xie also acknowledged the occasional inaccuracy of Xiao’s account. Here he copied, word for word, the text from the earlier Clarifications on Xiao’s mistakes, although without acknowledgement. He went further; when he copied also the reasons for Xiao’s inaccuracy, he did not entertain the speculative nature of the earlier editors. For Zhu Xie, it was simply a matter of fact that “When Xiao was dismantling the Yuan palaces, what he saw was only from a quick glance at thousands of doors and gates inside the compound. It is only natural that he would have been mistaken at times.” [28]
Other than the textual sources on which Zhu Xie based the creation of his maps, he also relied on earlier visual materials. One of these was a map from 1908 called Detailed Map of Beijing. He superimposed his map of the Yuan palaces on that map depicting Beijing of a much later time (Fig. 1). Another base for his visual work was one of Zhu Qiqian’s maps, although not without corrections to it. Although Zhu Xie criticized Zhu Qiqian for constructing his maps from descriptions of Chuo Geng Lu, whose account of the palaces “provided only individual dimensions, and not spatial distances,” and thus coming up with maps that were largely results of “estimation,” [29] Zhu Xie’s maps themselves were plagued and compromised in the same way. One of the most palpable examples is his map of the palaces western of the lakes, namely, the Xingsheng, Longfu Palaces and the Western Imperial Resort. He encountered the same problem here: “[These] three places have only individual dimensions, without spatial distances [between buildings]. And since there are 172 bays of the wu around the Yanchun Pavilion as there are around the Longfu Palace, I am taking it tentatively as that these two palaces are of equal size, and the rest of the palaces are estimated and mapped accordingly.” [30] (Fig. 2)
