Jiuzhou

Ancient China was divided into Nine Lands. Yu set down the high mountains and great rivers to tell them apart — a land was not a district, but mountains, rivers, and the way a people lived. The old names are gone from the map; the mountains and rivers remain. Jiuzhou rewrites them as gazetteer: one city, one volume, written slowly.

The first volume is Hangzhou — beside West Lake, the old capital of the Southern Song. Under it sits Lin’an — beneath Mount Tianmu, the old homeland of Wuyue.