Producing publicness under constraint: the literati landscape of Baiyunxi in Ming–Qing China

This study examines Baiyunxi (白雲溪) in Changzhou during the Ming – Qing period as a case of how literati communities generated publicness under conditions of scarce land and fragmented urban space. Drawing on 35 poems, 23 prose essays, and 9 gazetteer entries, complemented by the pictorial source Yunxi Caotang Tu, and historical maps of Changzhou, the analysis applies a cross-media, multi-sensory framework and a triangulation approach to validate spatial and social evidence. The findings show that the literati transformed physical constraints into participatory practices through three interrelated mechanisms: (1) spatial permeability: linking private dwellings to shared waterways; (2) social diversity: forged through collaboration among literati and residents in festivals, performances, and gatherings; (3) collective memory: sustained by the repeated reproduction of Baiyunxi in texts, images, and seasonal rites. A controlled comparison with West Lake indicates that Baiyunxi’s publicness was community-generated at a micro scale, in contrast to state-managed, city-scale civic landscapes. The study offers empirically grounded evidence for the social production of space in late imperial China and expands Chinese garden historiography by identifying a mode of socially shared landscape-making rooted in imagination, collaboration, and participation, offering a historical precedent for bottom-up placemaking in high-density urban environments.