The Research On Travel Notes In Late Ming Dynasty

Because of the steady foundation of economy as well as the openness and freedom of that age, many scholars in late Ming Dynasty walked out their houses and fell into the landscape’s embrace. The time, from the Longqing period to more than seventy years of Qing Dynasty, became the booming period for travel notes in the Chinese history of literature. From the whole view, the travel notes at that time had very rich content; scholars paid a lot of attention to nature and human landscape and the thematic travel, which was based on landscape style, also appeared and it wipe the time limitation off. The type of writing got more and more complete, especially the travel notes written in essay and diary got good achievements and reached their own summit. Meanwhile, the scholars at that time had very strong creative consciousness and a certain amount of theory, and put forward their own idea about the relationship between landscape and human. As for the specific works of scholars, that time had a lot of masters with their marvelous works. For example, the works of Yuan Hongdao, Wang Siren, Xu Hongzu, Zhang Dai and so on were in different styles but they all had their own "true interests". We also can get the travel concept from scholars’travel notes in late Ming Dynasty. Their views about the landscape were very complex:they pursued the comfort of life; they appreciated the beauty of landscape; they thought landscape was beneficial to our health; they thought travelling can make people gain knowledge; travelling played a very important role in writing article or others. In a word, it got developed and became richer. There was coexistence on the concept of travelling, such as between travelling for fun and travelling for pain, travelling at the suitable time and travelling anti-season; travelling elegantly and travelling vulgarly. It also showed the feature that "human" activities affected the landscape. The connection between these concepts, which had distinct imprint of times, and marvelous works of travel notes showed the development of travel notes in late Ming Dynasty.