Yuquan   Mountain,   known   in  antiquity  as   Mount Fuchuan—literally, “Overturned Boat Mountain”—took its name from contours resembling a boat turned upside down. During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, a temple was constructed by imperial decree on its eastern slope, set against the mountain and facing the water. It was initially named Fuchuan Mountain Temple. From the Sui  dynasty onwards, the name “Yuquan” gradually gained currency, while “Fuchuan”  receded into the institutional history of the temple and the pages of old local gazetteers. Less a literary conceit of later centuries than the innate skeleton of this landscape, it has carried, in its own rise and fall, the monastic and the lay alike.

Chen Xiaoguo was born in Zhongxiang, Hubei, barely thirty miles away. A homeland imprints its customs on the body; through the familiar ordering of human relations, it also lays down invisible constraints. Some dwell contentedly within it; others must travel some distance to find room for reverie. The dialect within earshot is still the familiar south-western Mandarin, yet the mountain underfoot no longer pulls him back to a so-called proper course of life, nor does the snow ask him to perform the expected homecomer. The edges of things extend elsewhere, sffused beneath the wet snow with a glow close to blue glaze; points of brightness leap from gaps that cannot be fully possessed—soil the snow has not yet covered, or an afterglow drifting on its surface.

An overturned boat is still a boat; the position once self-evident was one possibility among many. A host knows their dwelling anew by receiving a guest; a guest, received, answers the place. Identity’s dissolution clears room for another way of being. In this sahā world, one might as well remain a passer-by: allowing closeness, keeping room to withdraw.