This panel examines how poetry functions as a medium through which Daoist sacred space is produced, authorized, and reimagined across time. Spanning the Tang, late Ming, and contemporary digital eras, the three papers argue that poetry does not merely describe sacred landscapes—it actively helps make them. The first paper reads Li Bai’s poems on Mount Song as a corpus that links poetic form to the institutional and social life of a sacred mountain. The second explores Ming biographies of Ye Xiaoluan, showing how poetry and imagined mountain spaces legitimize her posthumous identity as a Daoist immortal. The third traces the quotation of Tang poetry in social media posts about Daoist caves, demonstrating how classical verse continues to sacralize space in modern contexts. Together, the papers foreground poetry as spatial practice—bridging text and terrain, memory and authority—and reveal how Daoist sacred space is continually shaped through language, circulation, and lived engagement
This paper reads Li Bai’s poems on Mount Song as a small corpus linking poetic form to the social and institutional life of a sacred mountain. Rather than treating his “Daoism” as personal temperament projected onto scenery, I show how the poems presuppose Songshan as a worked religious terrain: a Central Marchmount shaped by past legends of transcendents, sites of retreat and rare herbs, imperial sacrifice, and abbeys. Four clusters anchor the analysis: poems on Yuan Danqiu that make friendship and visiting a way of locating aspiration; the sweet flag gatherer poem that condenses the Han Wudi legend into a fleeting encounter with a transcendent; a farewell poem that ties imagined residence to herb gathering; and an address to a female Daoist master that builds presence through absence. Together, they show Songshan made visible through acts of visiting, seeking, and naming: where friendship, hagiographic memory, and institutions converge
This paper explores the Ming woman poet Ye Xiaoluan’s (1616–1632) posthumous identity as a Daoist female immortal in three Ming biographies. Apart from certain historical facts about Xiaoluan’s human life, these biographies highlight her family members’ spiritual encounters with Xiaoluan during her various “returns” as a female immortal. The sections on Xiaoluan’s afterlife suggest the possibility of studying these biographies as hagiographies, which will shed light on how a late imperial cultural figure was remembered and immortalized. The paper analyzes how the notions of poetry and space play a significant role in the writers’ construction of Xiaoluan’s Daoist identity. To convince the readers of her Daoist identity, how did the three authors imagine and depict the sacred spaces? How did poetry participate in legitimizing these writers’ claim of Xiaoluan’s new identity as a Daoist immortal?
This paper develops a method for reading classical Chinese poetry when it appears as quotation on social media and becomes attached to contemporary places. It begins with a 2016 Weibo “#早自习” (“morning self-study”) post that simply quotes Wang Bo’s Tang poem Xun daoguan (“Seeking a Daoist Temple”). Rather than treating this as a purely literary gesture, the paper argues that quoted poems reflect and participate in devotional practices present across contemporary China. Expanding outward to posts about Daoist caves and temples, it shows how social media posts often emerge during travel experiences, religious visits, or heightened emotional states such as nostalgia, fatigue, longing, or serenity. In these contexts, quoted poetry functions as an emotional intensifier, a legitimizing voice, and a form of cultural capital. The paper demonstrates how feeling gathers around caves—imagined as liminal, sheltered zones of sacred depth—illuminating contemporary expressions of popular Daoism