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This study examines the Heming ji (Collection of singing in harmony), which comprises the sometimes surprisingly intimate poetic exchanges between the woman intellectual Wang Zhaoyuan (1763-1851) and her husband Hao Yixing (1757-1829), both renowned in their lifetimes as classical "evidential research" (kaozheng) scholars. The paper seeks to demonstrate the transformation of the cult of qing (romantic love) in the High Qing period. It argues that, as the centrality of courtesans in literati culture died out with the Ming-Qing dynastic transition, gentry women came to represent the positive cultural values of qing through the increasingly fashionable idea and practice of companionate marriage. In this process, the cult of qing that characterized the subversive late Ming literati culture, of which courtesan culture was an important part, was not obliterated by the High Qing classical revival as is often assumed; rather, it was domesticated, ritualized, transformed into conjugal love, and arguably, integrated into the High Qing "familistic moralism." The paper also explores how the concept of qing, in the narrow sense of love between man and woman, was expanded into this couple's shared passion and ambition to serve the state and empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few Tibetan figures have left an impression on the Himalayan landscape, both literary and geographic, as indelibly as Mi la ras pa (ca. 1028–1111), whose career as meditator and poet was punctuated by travel across the borderlands of southern Tibet. This essay will begin to address the defining role of place in Tibetan biographical literature by examining the intersections of text and terrain in the recording of an individual's life. In particular, this study examines sites of transformation in Mi la ras pa's biographical narratives, arguing for what might be called a geographic biography by examining the dialogical relationship between a life story recorded on paper and a life imprinted on the ground. It first considers the broad paradigms for landscaping the environment witnessed in Tibetan literature. It then examines ways in which the yogin's early biographical tradition treated the category of sacred place, creating increasingly detailed maps of the yogin's life, and how those maps were understood and reinterpreted. The paper concludes by addressing two specific modes of transformation in the life story — contested place and re-imagined place — exploring new geographies of consecration, dominion, and praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]