Imagined City: The Shaping and Network Structure of Nanjing Poetic Landscape

As an important object of literary writing, cities are endowed with an “imaginative reality”. The urban physical space, imagination and readers’ cognition have shaped a cultural landscape with strong vitality. Nanjing, which is listed as a world literary capital by UNESCO Creative City Network, fully reflects its outstanding position in the literary circles. With digital technology, this research explores the image dimension, landscape image hierarchy and network structure of the landscape image of the ancient Nanjing urban landscape. It has found that the poetry of the Song Dynasty have great impacts on the shaping of the landscape of Nanjing. The writing theme dimension of “Jinling” embodied the characteristics of the urban historical development, while “Qinhuai” showed the regional natural and cultural characteristics. Among the regional landscapes, “Zhongshan Mountain”, “Phoenix Terrace”, “Rain Flower Terrace”, “Xuanwu Lake”, “Mochou Lake”, “Egret Island”, “New Pavilion”, “Jiming Temple” and “Zhuque Bridge” were important network nodes, which were the writing objects of Nanjing poetry and endowed with diversified feelings.