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Abstract: A familiar trope in the Chinese literary tradition is that of climbing to a height, gazing out, and experiencing an outpouring of sadness, longing, and nostalgia. The earliest traces of this trope can be found in the Songs of Chu, a poetry anthology dating from around the 3rd century BCE, and it would remain a recurring theme in poetic writings thereafter. This theme of sadness evoked by gazing from a height has been explained psychologically, as a variation on the theme of unfulfilled yearning (sehnsucht) found in German Romanticism, or else as a symptom of the particularities of the traditional Chinese textual imagination. But it also bears examination as an aspect of the complex unfolding of other histories, including those of spatial organisation, cognition, and power. In my talk I will discuss how these histories were interwoven, drawing some conclusions about what the emotions bound up with seeing – and with failing to see – might reveal about the contentious domain of visual and epistemic authority in traditional China. Teams linkLink opens in a new window