article, translated from Chinese and commented by K. I. GOLYGINA The Book of Mountains and Seas is known to the Russian reader in the translation of E. M. Yanshina's Catalog of Mountains and Seas (Moscow, 1977, 1st ed.), which embodied the ideas about the monument that had developed by that time in Chinese and Western science. The Book of Mountains and Seas is a geographical description of mountains, hills and deserts and the unusual animals and birds that live on them, it is a description of kingdoms and their strange inhabitants, places where the gods live and their resting places. Modern researchers of the" Book of Mountains and Seas " in China, emphasizing any one thematic aspect of the text, suggest that it should be considered: the world's first geographical description of ancient China or the rich lands of the Chinese paradise, or even territories from the Pamirs to the west, covering Russia and Bulgaria and all the oceans; description of the Inca country in North America; an ancient encyclopedia of everything; mythology; the ancient history of the clans that originated from Huang-di, Yao, Shun and other divine progenitors. At the same time, no one doubts that it is the landscape that is described in the basis. The geographical concept won all translations of the monument into European and Eastern languages. But in the history of Chinese bibliographic science, the geographical interpretation of the monument was not the only one and generally recognized. The historian Ban Gu (32-92 AD), in his work" History of the House of Han", dedicated to the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD), in the section" Description of arts and literature", referred this text to the "Art of Numbers", as he saw in it the embodiment of the practice of interpreting signs by the outlines of celestial bodies. Therefore, in his time, the Book of Mountains and Seas was perceived as a book of signs revealed by the heavens. In the " History of the House of Sui "(ding. Sui: 581 - 618), the monument ... Read more