The ancient Maritime Silk Road, bound to the sea, connected vast expanses of geographical space and handed down a grand historical legacy. As its pioneer, China has left many traces of its culture in regions along the route. Quanzhou, Guangzhou, Beihai, Ningbo cities and Hainan Island as well as the South China Sea, as pivotal hubs of the route along with the Maritime Silk Road, witnessed numerous stories. As these stories have entered into the purview of contemporary Chinese writers, they have brought out variety and color in literary works. In the process of revisiting and looking back along the traces of the route, contemporary Chinese writers have created related works with ever greater enthusiasm. A number of essays (sanwen, a short form genre that aims to express personal emotions through informal structure, flexible style and a wide range of techniques and subjects) about the history of the Maritime Silk Road have been written by authors such as A Lai, Ye Mei and Guan Renshan. Together with essays about Hainan Island and the South China Sea by writers such as Zhang Chengzhi, Liu Xinglong and Yu Qiuyu, they constitute a new literary landscape.

Different from one-dimensional natural landscapes, the literary landscape is generated after external subjects including natural landscapes, history and memory have been filtered through writers’ emotions. Producing more than an aesthetic creation, writers synthesize their life experience, hobbies and artistic imagination.

A number of writers, represented best by A Lai, write about shipping history, related personalities and their stories. They do not simply recall the past but focus on collecting and expressing emotions deep in the national memory, historical legacies and scenes. For example, A Lai’s work “Expanse of Sea and Wind—from Fuzhou to Quanzhou” tells about the interactions between different ethnic groups and their significance, presenting the historical lens of China-foreign cultural communication. Such description is different from that in archaeology, and though it may seem mundane at first glance, it is able to make people to think and reflect throughout their reading.

From the 1980s and 1990s on, cultural essays began to thrive. Those focusing on the Maritime Silk Road dig through history while keeping close to reality, pushing cultural essays to new heights. At the same time, those essays correspond to China’s current strategic vision to build the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, reflecting Chinese writers’ proactive participation in the real world. It also in some sense shows the further awakening of Chinese writers’ consciousness about the sea, and it breaks the long-standing focus on the description of land limiting literary academia.

In terms of such essays since the 21st century, the styles are diverse. For example, the description of Quanzhou Bay in Ye Mei’s works is gentle and affectionate. But Chen Yingsong’s “Wrecked Ship and Sunshine Tree” depicts Quanzhou Bay as grand, coming from his own experience of once being a mariner. Guan Renshan’s “The Sea, the Bay and the Ship” makes the reader feel a sort of desolation that alludes to the pain of the modern Chinese maritime civilization’s long suspension under external coercion. In Zhang Chengzhi’s “Chessboard on the Sea,” Hainan Island almost becomes a synonym for his personal ideal. This is the result of the enthusiasm with which he embraces this unfamiliar land being someone from northwest China. When a person arrives at the open, vast Hainan Island from the relatively enclosed inland region, one can imagine that sort of joyful surprise. In Yu Qiuyu’s “Story of the End of the Sky,” Hainan Island, however, becomes a symbol of ups and downs and the ebb and flow of the past—this shows how Yu perceives history from critical perspectives. In “Three Chapters on South China Sea” by Liu Xinglong, the South China Sea becomes the divine family of life, which does not fit with any hypercritical sentiments, which demonstrates the aesthetic perception of a realistic writer. Though the styles of writing are diverse, it is easy to find that the sea not only inspires writers, but also imbues all these works with an impressive shade of the serene scent of the sea, letting readers take a breath of the vast atmosphere of marine culture.
 

Through essay writing, history becomes a vessel for writers’ thoughts. The Maritime Silk Road hence not only reveals impressive history but also points toward the present and future. With China’s growing international influence, more readers of these essays about the Maritime Silk Road will not be confined within the national border, and more will be foreign. Their reading and acceptance of these essays, being conducive to the overseas spread of Chinese literature, will also expand the international influence of the Maritime Silk Road.

 

Wang Quan is from the School of Humanities at Hunan City University.

(edited by BAI LE)