Title: City Map, Space, Imagination: The Construction of the Image of Peking in French Archives

Abstract: The map of Peking records and expresses changes of Peking’s urban form from a macroscopic point of view, and is an important representation of the city’s spatial evolution. From the travelogues and letters of French Jesuits in the 17th and 18th centuries to the Peking-based French novels of the 20th century, , the writers wrote and drew a map of the city of Peking according to the diversity of texts, them constructed a literary space for the image of Peking. From individual memories of aesthetic scrutiny to collective memories of shared descriptions, the image of Peking follows the history of the evolution of China’s image. Between the writer and the city of Peking, the illustrated book and the text become the constant interaction to express a textualised and intentional Peking space. The co-representation of the textual narrative, the spatial representation of the symbolic system, and the constructive nature of the writing framework of Peking’s image constitute the imaginary system of Peking’s image.

Keywords: map of Peking, French archives, representation of space, construction of the image, imaginary system

Authors: Jing Zhou, French Language Institute, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, Dalian, Liaoning, China; Yuanbo Chen, Lecturer, French Language Institute, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, Dalian, Liaoning, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2024.04.010