#n.b. for 'chess' read more exactly 'weiqi' or 'go'; played not on checked squares but on a true grid

[chadlesbianjasontodd]

In the year 827, it was from the Zhongnan Mountains that Bai Juyi wrote the following lines, tracing out a sight line from one of its peaks to the very gate of the imperial palace in Chang'an: Upon Ascending Guanyin Terrace, Looking towards the City The myriad houses resemble the chessboard, The dozen avenues like planted furrows. From far off, pinprick torchlights going to court can be discerned, A stringed constellation west of the Five Gates. Households, wide avenues, the Daming Palace opening its gates to the courtiers at dawn: in just two couplets the poet enumerates the population and infrastructure count of the city. At the root of this is the grid, a spatial mechanism that thrives on its regularity and which can extrapolate small units into infinity. Bai Juyi's vision of Chang'an -- rule governed, panoramic in its totality, and keyed into worldly affairs -- is reminiscent of Du Fu's lines sixty years earlier from his Autumn Meditations series: "It's been said that Chang'an resembles chess / a hundred years of worldly affairs more than grief can bear." In Bai Juyi's case, when read in the context of poems composed in the capital-gazing tradition, his poem from the Zhongnan Mountains imparts less about Chang'an itself than it does about the mindscape of the gazer. ... In this poem, empirical observation plays second fiddle to an idealized view of the capital. This view, as Bai Juyi articulates elsewhere, equates the geometric regularity of the capital with its proper governance: "The capital is of four sides square / Such is the root of the kingly influences." The idealized vista Bai Juyi describes has been assimilated into what he already knows to be the order and rhythm of the capital. As someone who was in the past frequently among the "torchlights going to court," the fifty-six-year-old poet also maps his own identity onto the functioning mechanism of the state bureaucracy. (56)

linda rui feng, city of marvel and transformation: chang'an and narratives of experience in tang dynasty china (university of hawaii press, 2015)