The earliest existing edition of Shan Hai Jing was revised and edited by father and son Liu Xiang and Liu during the Western Han Dynasty. It is generally believed that Shan Hai Jing originated from geographical files as documented by Zhou Dynasty officials. However, it’s more likely that this authorship was an homage paid to the grand masters in the old days. Rumor credits authorship of the Shan Hai Jing to Xia-Yu and Buo-Yi. Fusing fantasy of worlds apart with true-to-life descriptions of the near-at-home, the Shan Hai Jing is a marvelous mixture of dream and reality. The Hai Jing is further split into different sections, with four chapters detailing ‘Regions Beyond the Seas,’ four on ‘Regions within the Seas,’ four covering ‘The Great Wilderness,’ and a short chapter on ‘Regions within Seas.’ With limited transportation and little communication between regions, in ancient times the average person still harbored fantastic visions of exotic countries and distant lands. With a total of over thirty thousand words in eighteen chapters, Shan Hai Jing is divided into five Mountain chapters (Shan Jing) and thirteen Sea chapters (Hai Jing). A wondrous book of ancient myths and legends, it serves as a record of geography, regional products and produce, ethnography, and folk customs. The Shan Hai Jing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas) is the earliest cultural and geographical record in China. From the old version, I found that people may not understand this map since the information was not clear anymore and the documentation style was far more different than how we read maps today.The Shan Hai Jing - Domain of Deities, Spirits, Monsters, and Beasts The first thing I did after I get the results from the analysis and had a holistic view of the mountain part was to look back in the authentic version of the reconstruction map of this part (the original version was lost). So I went back to the book and read this sub-layer information again, and surprisingly all patterns of the death rituals also followed a formula, which means there were only some specific activities that people would do in the death anniversary. However, when I dug it deeper, I found that some of the mountains in the geological location module didn’t include any descriptions of this part - this is interesting because it made me hesitated for a while that if I should really break it down into the analysis process and then put it on the map. I liked that this sub-hierarchy information of death rituals was complex and its information volume presented no less than the main subject as the geological locations did. Then I assorted them into excel and began my analysis work.For the Mountains part, I mainly focused on assorting all of the seven key features, particularly, several sub-hierarchy data under the death rituals module drove me into a deeper level to explore the methods of adding proper visual languages to the narration on this map. In this procedure, I meandered around all of the Mountains and Seas parts in the book and tried to capture the key highlights from the text. The book Classic of Mountains and Seas already has a clear hierarchy in its content, Some thoughts of classification and connections popped up to my mind after I read through three versions of this book in modern mandarin, classical Chinese and the photocopy of the ancient version from Ming Dynasty.Ĭontents of the Visualization Work Analysis I tried to examine the potential capability of visual languages to express ancient Chinese literal narration and to reserve Chinese culture through image-based information. From this work, I tried to examine the potential capability of visual languages to express ancient Chinese literal narration and to reserve Chinese culture through image-based information. Information Design of the book Classic of Mountains and Seas (also known as Shan Hai Jing) is my graduation project in 2018. Within in this work, visualization became a medium for forward-looking perception since graphical languages had performed as a new form of storytelling for people. Accordingly, the low efficiency and reading ability have become many readers’ concerns. However, people are no longer able to quickly understand our traditional Chinese literature works under the century-lasting influence of the Written Vernacular Movement. Classical Chinese was commonly used in ancient Chinese literature art.
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