Landscape As Text:the Meaning Making Of Phoenix Hill And Ancient Trees In Hangzhou

Mountain nurtures everything, and together with trees, they are closely related with human being. In different historical periods, mountain and tree have accumulated various meanings. However, with a large consumption of energy as a result of fast economic development, mountain is regarded as a resource, an origin of wood, stone and herbal medicine. Tree is also exploited as source of timber. Once as the embodiment of sacrificial performance, mountains become tourist resorts for resting, entertaining and consuming. Other small hills scattering among villages and towns are on the verge of oblivion. The cultural and historical meanings embedded in mountain and trees were spilt from the locality and the local communities. Chinese cultural studies on them are mostly dependent on interpretations of the classics. Besides, the traditional Chinese local gazetteer is also an ample source for mountain and tree’s diverse meanings. Seeing landscape as text, this paper will select Phoenix Hill and ancient tree as two examples. It aims to explore the meanings of the hill and trees and the changing interpretations of them through the passage of time. By reading traditional Chinese local gazetteers, this paper attempts to explore an indigenous Chinese way of looking at mountains and trees. Taken from a discourse perspective, combined with western theories such as place, landscape, cultural memory and cultural heritage, this paper will adopt a critical discourse analysis and an interpretive-historical inquiry to analyze the text so as to obtain a diversity of mountain and tree meanings. It is found that as the centrality of capital and divine power, the Phoenix Hill reached its highest prosperity in Southern Song and gradually fell into a state of neglect from Yuan, Ming, Qing to the Republic. In the craze for World Heritage movement, especially greatly encouraged by the successful application of West Lake, the Phoenix Hill together with palace relic once again received attention, development and exploitation. Finally, under the restoration and protection of the palace relic project, this paper suggests a holistic understanding of the hill’s historical change and the flow of its meanings. Through the interpretations of trees, we can acquire a humanistic view of how the ancient perceive nature.