Navigating the Smellscape of Medieval China

Smell mattered in medieval China. Through the sense of smell, people navigated the natural and social world, structured human-divine relationships. Medieval Chinese texts are replete with references to smells of people, things, and places. Mediated through the minds of their recorders, olfactory accounts vividly reveal hitherto overlooked patterns of the beliefs and ideas that people in medieval China had on the human person, their surrounding world, as well as the unseen realms of the dead and divine. This study traces historical smells of medieval China and examines how the people navigating that smellscape made sense of their olfactory perceptions. It analyses the moral significance of olfaction in medieval China and its expression in ethno-cultural discourse as well as in the relationship with the unseen worlds of ghosts, spirits, and the divine. Through its analysis, this dissertation makes two interrelated claims: first, for medieval Chinese people, smell was not only a physical sensation, it also embodied a combination of social, moral, and cosmological significance. It was the conduit to the worlds of the gods and the spirits; it was a marker of social status and cultural alignments; it symptomised virtue or moral decadence; and it could also signify a divine manifestation. Second, smells were not only perceived, but also constructed. Conscious of the social, moral, and cosmological connotation odours implied, medieval Chinese literati employed smells – both in their own right and in the form of rhetoric – to create and assert social and cultural distinctions. Smells separated us from the Other, the poor from the wealthy, the virtuous from the corrupted, the civilised from the barbarians, and the sacred from the profane. This study situates medieval Chinese olfactory history in the context of an increasingly open world characterised by dynamic cross-cultural contacts, remaking of demographic and religious landscapes, as well as growing knowledge about hygiene and medicine. Building on the established scholarship in multiple disciplines, this first study on smells and smelling in medieval China seeks to contribute to the understanding of medieval views and practices regarding the body, identity, religion, culture, and society.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Fang, Xi

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Galambos, Imre

• Cultural history
• Medieval China
• Sensory history
• Smell
• Social history
• Tang Dynasty
• Silk Road

Licence

• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.93182

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/345760