Mapping the Strange
One distinctive characteristic of zhiguai is that they tend to mention a specific location to situate the story told or the person involved in it. The given location can be as specific as the exact building in a city or as vague as the name of a province or region. Either way, most of the locations can be geolocated with exact coordinates corresponding to their historical sites.
Why go through the trouble of creating a map for hundreds of stories? After all, simply reading the texts itself leaves the reader with impressions of the geography of the strange, too. Nevertheless, no matter how familiar the reader is with the locations referenced, visualization of the same remains a powerful tool, because it simplifies the process of placing all the stories in geographical relation to each other. Furthermore, creating customized maps allows for sorting the stories displayed by a variety of criteria, such as the collection or even juan (chapter) it is mentioned in or a associated story category. Maps even allow for easy and comfortable comparison of several story collections in terms of the geographical spread of the stories collected.
The map in the top left serves as a first entry point to the geography of the first juan in Zibuyu, a collection of strange records compiled by Yuan Mei and first published in 1788, showing some of the major cities in and around which many of the stories recorded take place.
Each item in the gallery to the right focuses on one of the first five juan of Zibuyu. The last item shows a map of all five juan combined.
One look at the gallery immediately reveals that many of the stories take place in southeastern China, an area often referred to as Jiangnan 江南 (engl. lit. 'south of the (Yangtze) river'). Considering the compiler Yuan Mei's background, this is not very surprising. Yuan Mei was a native of Hangzhou 杭州, which is located just south of the Yangtze River. Therefore, it is not hard to imagine, that many of the stories he heard and collected happened in Hangzhou as well as the larger area around it, including cities like Nanjing 南京, Suzhou 蘇州, and Yangzhou 揚州.
But how about areas beyond Jiangnan? How widespread is the reach of the stories? As we can tell from the maps, the first few juan of Zibuyu contain stories as far reaching as the capital 京師 (Beijing) in the North or Sichuan 四川 and Yunan 雲南 in Southwestern China. From the clusters in the map combining juan 1-5 it is easily visible that most of the stories happen in Jiangnan, however, there are also smaller clusters in the capital and in (and around) Chengdu 成都.
The maps in this gallery do not only provide answers, they also raise questions. Many of these questions can be answered by continuing the research started in this project. By comparing maps of entire story collections it will become visible whether the geographic outreach of one collection speaks to the norm or represents an outlier. Widespread comparison of story categories will confirm, whether certain types of events only happend (or were recorded) in particular topographies or geographic regions or whether they were ubiquitous.