Fixing Landscape

"This book is a cultural history of the Three Gorges, spanning 2,500 years and media as disparate as eighth-century poetry; travel essays and landscape painting from the twelfth through eighteenth centuries; nineteenth-century British travelogues, maps, and visual culture; and contemporary film, photography, and ink painting. Byrnes argues that the Three Gorges Dam exists not only because the geology and hydrology of the region make it possible, but also because of the symbolic weight the region had acquired over millennia of cultural representation. Fully understanding how the Three Gorges…