Medieval Taoist cliff inscriptions and their modern reception
Descriptive vocabularies for inscribed landscapes, (calli)graphic variation and rubbings
Abstract
The Altergraphy project, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR, 2023–2028), documents medieval cliff inscriptions in Shandong province, China. Zheng Daozhao (455–516 CE), a local official and ordained Taoist, selected four peaks close to the towns where he was stationed, with remarkable rock formations, which were engraved in the rough, unpolished rock, with characters of varying size and depth. The texts name the stone surface they are carved on, they depict ritual activities, and stage divine creatures. This form of spatial appropriation is adopted in other religious contexts in the region since the 6th century,as documented by the Buddhist Stone Sutras project, and becomes a privileged form of expression for the literati elite in the following centuries.
Based on a small corpus of four sites and less than a hundred inscriptions, we aim at replacing the medieval inscribed landscapes in the history of epigraphy, including the reception of the inscriptions as rubbings and the agency of later visitors. To classical forms of documentation such as rubbings, transcriptions and translations, the corpus integrates a diachronic photographic archive, scans of the mountains, landmarks and rock surface, maps and videographic renderings of the itineraries, textual descriptions in gazetteers and antiquarian treatises, and interviews of contemporary stakeholders. Beyond the construction of a relational database integrating these dimensions, the project's output include a collaborative effrot to produce trilingual descriptive vocabularies and metadata schemes for (calligraphic) variants, cliff inscriptions and rubbings for Chinese epigraphy.