In 1170 the Song official Lu You traveled roughly five months by boat up the Yangzi from Shaoxing to his new post in Kuizhou (Sichuan), recording each day's stops, ruins, temples, gorges and local customs in dated entries. The diary treats an administrative relocation as an occasion for sustained observation of landscape and history rather than as mere transit.
Recording a long journey as discrete dated entries, each tied to a specific place reached that day, builds a cumulative record in which geography, ruins, weather and encounters accumulate through position in time rather than through argument. The structure lets small particulars stand on their own without needing to be justified by a thesis.
Arriving at a site, the traveler reads it simultaneously as present scene and as the accumulated residue of earlier poems, battles and figures associated with it, so that a riverbank or cliff is experienced as a palimpsest. What one sees at a place is shaped by what was recorded there before.
The diary repeatedly checks inherited written claims (locations of events, identities of ruins, names of places) against direct observation of the terrain, sometimes confirming and sometimes correcting the received account. Standing at a site is treated as evidence that can adjudicate between competing textual authorities.