Previous scholarship, both Western and Chinese, has typically defined Chinese landscape poetry by its purported object of lyric attention: a poetry about "nature," "natural environs," or shan-shui (literally, "mountains and waters"). In his dissertation in East Asian Languages and Cultures, Harrison Huang argues, however, that medieval readers approached the lyric landscape in terms of you-lan, "excursion and the panoptic gaze." With this categorization, Mr. Huang's project, "The Classical Landscape: Modes of Excursion and Viewing in Medieval China" contextualizes Chinese landscape poetry in actual medieval excursion practices, including royal processions, inspection tours, banquet outings and hunting campaigns, as well as highlyritualized acts of viewing, such as panoptic surveys of administered domains, visualizations of the prognosticated future, and court evaluations of human resources. Mr. Huang also calls attention to landscaped nature, the engineered parks and playgrounds that were so central to Chinese representations of progress—as both spatial procession and normative transformation—through landscape. This situates the lyric landscape in medieval discourses about state authority, economic power, ritual performance, personality appraisal, and the uses of land, leisure and pleasure.