Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden. Vera Schwarcz
You do not have to be a Confucian scholar or a Manchu prince to know the value of a place where thought can take its shape at ease. Wendell Berry, a contemporary American poet of the South, likens the garden to water in a pitcher. Nothing is simpler, less adorned, less hard to find, yet more difficult to design. A garden, if well planned, is a place where one can get away from the clutter of daily life. An effective garden scours the mind and the soul. Contemplating what the Chinese call the “bones” of the garden—be they rocks, trees, water, or flowers—one is brought close to the architecture of the self. If one is truly fortunate, one is able to reshape one’s innermost being in the presence of the garden.
This transformation was the goal and privilege of men like Mianyu and Yihuan. What made gardens even more precious in their lifetime was the fact that quietude of mind was hard won and difficult to hold on to. The more violent the events that marked their days, the more tenacious became the dream of a place where thought could take shape like water in a pitcher. Such a longing for stillness in the midst of chaos may be glimpsed visually in the photographs of Chinese gardens taken by Oswald Siren at the end of World War II. His masterful study, Gardens of China, was first published in 1949 on the eve of Mao Zedong’s conquest of the mainland. Siren’s camera captured possibilities for reflections that were being destroyed by political upheaval. In the midst of war and revolution, these black-and-white images convey both the decay of actual gardens as well as the imperishable ideals that nurtured their beauty.
Figure 9. “Gourd-shaped garden gateway in Cheng Wang Fu,” Beijing. Photographed by Oswald Siren for The Gardens of China (New York, 1949), p. 78.
One particular image speaks volumes about the subtle angles of light needed to see the garden in its own time. Simply labeled “Gourd-shaped garden gateway in Cheng Wang Fu, Peking,” this photograph beckons the viewer to savor the spaciousness of historical images (figure 9). At first glance, you might think this is a study of gate architecture since the dark center of the image is indeed an artful opening that suggests an upright vegetable. It is not the gourd, however, that illuminates the image. The slanting sunlight from the end of the corridor beyond the gate is the real focus here. Peeling beams guard the passage, like so many silent witnesses to a slow-paced journey. The luminosity of the afternoon pours out of the gourd-gate with unrestrained generosity. It casts a bright halo on two slabs of well-worn rock. The “brush-handle” pattern of the outer balustrade echoes the bamboo grove that thrives beyond the gate.1
“Come in, amble,” the image says. “Come in, stay a while,” the garden says. “Come in, look beyond the material remains of the past,” history says. Siren’s gourd-shaped gateway is one remnant of the vanished world of Cheng Wang Fu. Its aged wood beams, like the browning carapace of the Pavilion of Winged Eaves before 1998, convey the barest hint of the splendor that once reigned in the gracious dwelling of Prince Cheng (Yunxing, 1752–1823), an uncle of the owner of the Singing Crane Garden. Both Cheng Wang Fu and the Ming He Yuan have vanished from the Chinese landscape. What remains of these pleasure palaces is nothing but slanting afternoon light. Siren’s gift for indirect illumination inspires us to approach the garden slowly, mindful of thoughts that took shape here in times of upheaval and ravage.
To enter the world of the garden, it is not enough to document ownership and decay. One must, as Oswald Siren showed, take time for detours in the realm of the imagination. So much is missing from the material evidence of the past on the site of imperial gardens. So much depends on approaching absence with care. Edward Casey, in a different context, describes this journey as “in-dwelling”—a giving over of the self to the multilayered temporalities housed by the garden. This is not a space made up of only trees, water, and stone. It is, above all, a mood: “In gardens mood is an intrinsic feature, something that belongs to our experience of them. . . . In an empowered garden, I almost reside, yet I also walk about. . . . I dwell in multiple modes, in several registers and on many levels. This level leaves me on the edge of dwelling, just as gardens take me to the edge between built and natural places, or rather are that very edge.”2 In-dwelling, in this sense, is a full-body experience, not merely an analytical goal. It enables one to go to the very edge of the familiar (be that in language or in space) and explore new modes of reflection.
Chinese gardens were designed to facilitate reflection. This goal is part and parcel of each element incorporated within the enclosure of the yuan. To walk the garden’s paths, to contemplate its shifting vistas, was to embark upon an inner journey in which intentionally layered grounds were meant to quiet the mind. Even before disturbing events invaded the garden, chaos was made at home there. What Casey describes as the feeling of the “edge of dwelling” was experienced in a more upsetting fashion by Father Jean Denis Attiret (1702–1768), one of the first Westerners exposed to Qianlong’s Summer Palace. A Jesuit who sought to bring the light of Christianity to the Qing court, Attiret was unprepared for the shadowy, odd spaces that thrived on the outskirts of Beijing. He stayed on as court painter and took the time to notice the unruly grace that enabled (indeed forced) new paths for reflection to develop in this strange land. He wrote back home to an audience unfamiliar with Chinese aesthetics. Contrasting what he saw in northwest Beijing with the mannered landscapes of Europe, Attiret concluded that Chinese gardens thrive on “Beautiful Disorder and wandering as far as possible from all Rules of Art . . . when you read this, you will be apt to imagine such Works as very ridiculous, and they must have a very bad Effect on the Eye: but once you see them, you would find it otherwise and would admire the Art, with which all this irregularity is conducted.”3 “Beautiful disorder” captured the subtle transition from chaos to cosmos attempted on the grounds of Ming He Yuan as well. A historian who would give voice to this terrain must also make room for all kinds of “irregularity”—for a flow of time that moves in and out of the language of memory, in and out of peace and war.
The Singing Crane Garden cannot be conceived primarily as a point in space. Rather it must be evoked in motion, through the movement of the mind’s eye, as it were. One way to begin that journey may be to follow the shifting meanings of the word “crane”—a bird whose name was anything but an accidental adornment to Mianyu’s retreat in northwest Beijing. The Manchu prince went as far as to commission the building of a whole section of the garden to house these large birds, known for heart-wrenching cries during their mating season. But it was not the physical birds that added reflective depths to Ming He Yuan. It was the visitor’s presumed familiarity with all the classical poetry and art that gave these creatures wings in the reflective consciousness.
The ancient classic Yi Jing (The Book of Changes) was the first to note the unique associations of ming he. From this earliest text, the crane stands out because of its preference for solitary spaces. The song of the crane, according to the Yi Jing, ‘“thrives in the shade, while tigers roar on mountains.”4 This contrast between the boisterous tiger and the reticent crane continued to enrich Chinese cultural imagination in later centuries to the point that a special term, “crying crane scholar” (he ming zhi shi), developed during the Han dynasty to refer to men of learning who developed their talents—their song, as it were—in the “shade,” away from the manifest rewards of political life.
Renowned for their moral character and careful use of language, such scholars must have appealed to Mianyu, a Manchu prince who sought to be an exemplar of Confucian virtues as well. He ming zhi shi were learned men who measured out speech, ethics, and aesthetics with exquisite care in realms beyond politics. A Han dynasty ruler was counseled by his advisers “to reject all those ministers who speak smooth words and to search far and wide for the Crying Crane Scholars.”5 Like hermits of old, he ming zhi shi were prized because they displayed the soul’s music in obscure, lonely places where “only children follow.” Sequestered from the din of public events, these men were certain that their woes would find a meaningful echo in the world. Purity of mind and a high threshold for solitude (indeed loneliness) were attributes of the crane that poets, artists, and garden builders sought to appropriate. Du Mu (803–853), a Tang dynasty luminary, phrased this longing as follows: