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leading art critic. “If Breughel’s paintings and Jonson’s poems convey as Kenneth Clark suggests ‘an all embracing sympathy with humanity’ the landscape paintings and poems created only a few years later were pervaded with a quiet detachment.” Clark actually says nothing about Jonson. It is difficult to establish a correspondence between the poet and the painter. Breugel’s “peasants and villagers” may be “utterly integrated” with their environment but no plebeian figures appear in the scene Jonson describes. His poems exclude the world of work as deliberately as later landscape gardens which, for this very reason, Relph deplores. Jonson describes how the bounty of the Sidney estate yields naturally to its owner and his friends, a way of seeing that scarcely constitutes “an all embracing sympathy with humanity”. One of the best discussions of the ideology of Jonson’s poetry is contained in Raymond Williams’ book The Country and the City. It is remarkable that Relph can write a lengthy and approving summary of Williams’ book without realizing how it challenges assertions he has made elsewhere in his own.

Relph also abstracts ideas from their historical context. In a book that addresses the connection between power and environmental design we are told little about the relation of ideas of landscape gardening to eighteenth-century politics and economics, or the relation of modern residential planning and institutional design to post-war property development and corporate business. Relph’s eagerness to cast writers and designers as agents of “humanism” leads him to make some curious judgments. We are told that “Alexander Pope and the landscape gardeners of Georgian England would have under- stood . . . the idea of landscape in modern landscape architecture. . . as an object comprising many subtle and complex ecological systems”. What Pope and Humphry Repton did understand were the aesthetic and moral issues of their own time and their ideas of landscape engaged these issues. To ignore this is to distort their work.

The past is used here to warrant a critique of the present and prescriptions for the future. This is perhaps why Relph fails so often to understand it.

University of Nottingham STEPHEN DANIELS

Hou RENZHI, Lishi Dilixue de Lilun yu Shijian [The theory and practice of historical geoa- raphy] (Shanghai: Renmin Chubanshe, 1979. Pp. 463. 2.20 yuan)

Historical geography has not received much emphasis in China since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Hou Renzhi’s book, therefore, is an important source for those wishing to know how historical geography has fared there. Despite its title, it is not an integral discussion of the theory and practical application of historical geography, but a collection of essays previously published between 1951 and 1978. Consequently there is no progression to the essays; each can be read as a self contained study. However, the topics are all within the domain of historical geography and each of them discloses aspects of Hou’s thought and method on the subject.

Of the 22 essays, only two were written before the Great Leap Forward in 1958, while eight were written between the Great Leap and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, and 12 appeared after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1972. The author groups the essays around three themes: inquiry into the theory and methodology of historical geography (four essays), investigation of the historical geography of deserts (six essays), and research on the historical geography of cities (nine essays). There are also three miscellaneous essays concerning sea routes between China and East Africa before the sixteenth century, the life of Alexander von Humboldt, and the life of another geographer, Xu Xiake (15861641). Besides clearly demonstrating that Hou Renzhi’s main interests are in cities and deserts, all the essays with the exception of the four theoretical ones and the essay portraying von Humboldt as a dialectical materialist, are concerned with China. In Professor HOU’S view the goal of historical geography is to “restore” past environments in words, and to elucidate the evolutionary process whereby present reality is reached. He not only stresses the importance of field work in the accom-

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plishment of this goal, he attempts to place historical geography into a theoretical frame- work based on Engel’s writings on the dialecticism of nature and Marx’s idea of dialec- tical materialism. Man’s role in the environment must be the major focus of historical geography. Periods before the existence of man are not considered as historical geography, but as “ancient geography”. Hou also creates a subdiscipline called “successive geography” (yunge dili) which describes boundary changes and place names. According to Hou, “successive geography” is essential for geographical and historical research but cannot be considered historical geography: it is just a first step in the development of historical geography.

In the series of essays concerned with the historical geography of China’s deserts, Hou again stresses the importance of field work. Here too he pays homage to communist ideology, particularly Mao Zedong thought. Hou himself carried out desert field work in the early 1960s and looked at desertification in two xiun (counties) just east of the Yellow River in Ningxia, the Wulanbuhe Desert on the Inner Mongolia-Ningxia border, and the Mu Us (Chinese-Maowusu) Desert on the Inner Mongolia-Shaanxi border. From his field experiences and documentary research, Hou concludes that human misuse of the land has probably been the major factor causing the spread of desert in these areas since the Han dynasty (202 BC. to AD. 220).

Although Hou writes about several Chinese cities-Handan (Hebei province), Zebo (Shandong), and Chengde (Hebei), most of his effort is devoted to Beijing. Hou stresses the importance of the city Ji (Beijing prior to the Tang dynasty, AD 618-907) as a point of contact between the sedentary Han-Chinese and nomads to the north. He also tries to explain why Beijing later rose to preeminence over the Tang capital of Changan. Changan, located in present Shaanxi province on the Wei River, lost economic importance with the development of the lower and middle Yangze River basin to the south and east during and after the Tang, while the Beijing site became more important as a front line defence post against northeastern nomads. Nomadic conquerors such as the Jtirched Jin dynasty (1115-1234) and the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) constructed capitals within the present-day Beijing area. Using clues from scattered references, Hou tries to explain the decision of the Mongols to abandon the site of the older Jin capital, Zhongdu, and to construct their capital, Dadu, immediately to its northeast. As retreat palaces of the Jin still stood to the northeast of Zhongdu and better water sources were available, the Mongols could build a more beautiful capital and could improve the transit of grain from south China by means of a projected canal. To Professor Hou, Dadu is the first Chinese national capital to implement the ideal city form found in the Kao Gong Ji, a part of the Zhou Li or Book of Rites written during the Eastern Zhou era (770-221 BC). The ideal design was a walled enclosure, nine li (approximately 5.18 km) square, with three gates on each side, and containing 18 major roads equally spaced, nine north-south and nine east-west: there were specific locations for temples and markets. Besides these essays on overall city layout there are also several detailed essays about different sites in Beijing.

This book shows the strengths and weaknesses of historical geography as a subject. HOU’S studies are solid precise works, but so detailed as to leave this reader wondering what is the larger meaning of the theory and practice of historical geography. None the less, the book is essential for those interested in the historical geography of China, es- pecially those interested in the hydrology of ancient Chinese cities or the process of deserti- fication of China’s drylands.

University of Hong Kong RICHARD LOUIS EDMONDS

LISLE A. ROSE, Assault on Eternity. Richard E. Byrd and the Exploration of Antarctica (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 1980. Pp. x+292. $26.90)

The title of this book is somewhat misleading for the main focus is not Richard Byrd but