Li Daoyuan's Commentary on the Water Classic

Li Daoyuan (c. 470–527), courtesy name Shanchang, from Zhuo county in Fanyang (present-day Zhuozhou, Hebei), was an outstanding geographer and writer of the Northern Wei. Born into an official family, he loved travel from youth, and later, serving in the court and in the provinces, he used his postings to survey the land, traveling across the Yellow River and Huai River basins. Wherever he went he studied the local rivers and waterways, terrain and landforms, and ancient sites, and asked local people about history and customs. In the Three Kingdoms someone wrote a Water Classic, briefly recording 137 rivers across the country, but it was too sketchy and contained many errors. Drawing on a great many earlier geographical works and his own fieldwork, Li Daoyuan took the Water Classic as his framework and annotated it, producing the Commentary on the Water Classic. In 40 chapters of over 300,000 characters, it records the sources, courses, tributaries and outlets or confluences of 1,252 rivers and describes the hydrology, terrain, climate, soil, products, towns, historic sites and customs along them, citing over 400 earlier works. It is a comprehensive geographical work of ancient China, more than twenty times as rich as the Water Classic. It is also a collection of fine landscape prose, vividly written, with scenes like poems or paintings; the passage on the Three Gorges of the Yangtze, “Through seven hundred li of the Three Gorges, mountains line both banks with hardly a break,” is especially well loved and strongly influenced later travel writing.