The Vermilion Bird: T'ang Images of the South

In the seventh century the great T'ang nation was obliged to reconquer the southern most portion of what had been considered Chinese territory for many centuries. The region had in fact remained largely an unassimilated wilderness, whose heavily forested marshes - monsoon lands with fringes of the true tropics - corresponded roughly with modern North Vietnam, along with the Chinese provinces of Guangxi and Guangdong. The Vermilion Bird attempts to recover the actual character of the monsoon...