Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (Ditu ji: Yige xiangxiang de chengshi de kaoguxue 地圖集:一個想像的城市的考古學) is a 1996 novel by Dung Kai-cheung. The novel explores the fictional city of Victoria, a stand-in for Hong Kong, through a series of maps and ideas about maps. The novel presents Victoria as a long-lost city of the past, and reconstructs it through a series of fragmentary symbols in a retrospective mode.

This book is made up of prose, it is the narrator's view of the old map of Hong Kong that will disappear in the distant future, and the narrator, a future archaeologist, tries to solve the mystery. He pieced together what Hong Kong looked like with maps and stories dug out of the rubble. Whether in translation or archaeology, the novel has all the necessary ingredients for scientific research in Hong Kong.

Contents

The book is divided into four parts:

Part 1: Theory

對應地　counterplace

共同地　commonplace

錯置地　misplace

取替地　displace

對反地　antiplace

非地方　nonplace

外領屬性　extraterritoriality

界限　boundary

無何有之地　utopia

地上地　supertopia

地下地　subtopia

轉易地　transtopia

多元地∕複地　multitopia

獨立地∕統一地　unitopia

完全地　omnitopia

Part 2: The City

海市　mirage—city in the sea

蜃樓　mirage—towers in the air

砵甸乍的顛倒視覺　Pottinger’s inverted vision

戈登的監獄　Gordon’s gaol

維多利亞之虛構一八八九　“plan of the City of Victoria,”1889

四環九約　the four wan and nine yeuk

東方半人馬　the Centaur of the East

閑話角與兵房　Scandal Point and the military cantonment

史密夫先生的一日遊　Mr. Smith’s one-day trip

總督府的景觀　the view from Government House

卑路乍夢中的蛤蟆　the toad of Belcher’s dream

裙帶路的回歸　the return of Kwan Tai Loo

太平山的詛咒　the curse of Tai Ping Shan

攻略遊戲　war game

Part 3: Streets

春園街　Spring Garden Lane

雪廠街　Ice House Street

糖街　Sugar Street

七姊妹道　Tsat Tsz Mui Road

堅拿道東與堅拿道西　Canal Road East and Canal Road West

愛秩序街　Aldrich Street

水坑口街　Possession Street

詩歌舞街　Sycamore Street

通菜街與西洋菜街　Tung Choi Street and Sai Yeung Choi Street

洗衣街　Sai Yee Street

眾坊街　Public Square Street

柏樹街　Cedar Street

Part 4: Signs

圖例之墮落　the decline of the legend

暴風之眼　the eye of the typhoon

赤□角空港　Chek Lap Kok Air Port

換喻之系譜　the metonymic spectrum

想像之高程　the elevation of imagination

地質種類分歧　geological discrimination

北進偏差　north-oriented declination

數目字之旅　the travel of numbers

符號之墓穴　the tomb of signs

時間之軌跡　the orbit of time

後記∕真誠的遊戲　董啟章

The English translation contains a preface by the author, entitled "An Archaeology for the Future."

Authorship

Dung Kai-cheung wrote the novel before the transfer of sovereignty of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China. The novel is part of a "V-City Trilogy."

Dung Kai-Cheung was born in Hong Kong in 1967, his ancestral home is Sanshui, Guangdong. He graduated from La Salle Primary School, La Salle Middle School, and the University of Hong Kong. In 1994, he received a master's degree in comparative literature from the University of Hong Kong and became a middle school teacher. In 1992, he started to publish articles and has been writing for 20 years. At the same time, he taught writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His literary works often talk about virtual, reality, and self-reflection. Hong Kong as a common topic in his works reflects the present society through seemingly trivial themes or trivial things in the city and produces universal significance. At the same time, he is also engaged in scriptwriting, bringing literature to the stage and diversifying his voice and orientation.

Dung Kai-Cheung has long been interested in the idea of the origin of species. His first story, “Xixiliya”(Cecilia), published in 1992, already shows signs of this. He also writes about subjects as general terms for the natural world, the environment of Darwin’s Origin of species, as well as for all the conditions necessary for creating and being created.

After the mid-1990s, the handover of Hong Kong inspired Dung, he wrote Dituji (The Atlas), seemingly an attempt to re-cast both the past and the present for a Hong Kong about to meet its doom. The book is stylistically an amalgam: true is mixed with false, text with pictures, anecdotes, and history are fused together.

Awards and Comments

• Long Form Winner of 2013 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards
  • Jurist Aishwarya Subramanian: “clearly delights in its own cleverness.”
  • Co-chair Kathryn Morrow: “a masterwork on the nature of translation itself. The prose is beautifully rendered into English, and the author’s essential subject is the process by which myth, legend, and fact translate themselves into human cultural artifacts.”
  • Jurist Martha Hubbard: “This beautiful and elegiac book examines the very nature of how knowledge is created … The language is at once poetic and specific. The book is so moving, I would deeply love to own a proper copy to keep and cherish.”
• Sophie Kalkreuth noted in this 2013 work that the book portrayed Hong Kong as a transit point and middle ground of conflict compared to mainland Chinese cities, Hong Kong -- no matter how busy and densely populated -- has a certain emptiness.
• The book translates maps into written text. It takes readers through questions of colonial modernity, historiography and colonial cultural identity in Hong Kong. Moreover, although the narrator sees himself as an archaeologist from the future, as you read the map, you will find that the author has a strong emotional attachment to Hong Kong.

Translation

The novel was translated into English by the author, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall and published by Columbia University Press. The translation won the long-form prize in the 2013 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards.

The process of text translation is essentially similar to the mining of the hidden past. At the same time, excavation becomes a means of preserving the unknown past through production. The Chinese phonetic concept analyzed in this section is a model of preservation behavior. By highlighting the complexity of language that has long existed in Hong Kong society, the text actually provides a powerful voice for the linguistic conflict that Hong Kong now faces between Mandarin and Cantonese.

Further Readings

• Chao, L. (2018). Hong kong as alternative sinophone articulation: Translation and literary cartography in dung kai-Cheung’S atlas: The archaeology of an imaginary city.Open Cultural Studies, 2(1), 771-780. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2018-0069
• Huang, H. Y. (2018). Worlding hong kong literature: Dung kai-cheung’s atlas. (pp. 167-178). Springer Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7766-1_10
• Hong, T. (2012). Dung kai-cheung. atlas: The archaeology of an imaginary city. Library Journals, LLC.

References

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