Abstract: In the 1930s and 1940s,a large number of people from home and abroad visited the northern Shaanxi region centered around Yanan,and wrote a huge and widely circulated “Journey to Northern Shaanxi”.“Scenery” became an important part of the travelogue that cannot be ignored.Exploring the sensory existence of “scenery” in “Journey to Northern Shaanxi” not only enriches and strengthens our understanding of “scenery” as a “cognitive device”,but more importantly,provides us with the possibility of revealing the relationship between practical non-fiction literary genres and literary imagination.The “scenery” in the travelogue of northern Shaanxi contains rich connotations of “landscape politics”,and behind it lies complex ideological and even political imagination.The traveler is not simply a simple recorder of the scenery,but a creator of the scenery in a certain sense.The “scenery” in the works of foreign travelers provides a cross-cultural imagination with the color of “Eastern utopia”.“Scenery” and “imagination” actually constitute an interactive and interdependent mode.“Scenery” constructs and stimulates a kind of “New China” imagination,while the latter provides a pre-existing perspective or “cognitive device” for the former.

Key words: Journey to Northern Shaanxi, landscape, travel writing, imagination