Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden. Vera Schwarcz
during the Cultural Revolution, I finally began to fathom what it means to live with China’s history.
I recall, as if it were yesterday, that chilly Thursday when I parked my recently bought bicycle near the marble bridge leading to Wang Yao’s house. My companion in 1979 was Yue Daiyun, who had told me, “Look well, this is a compound right out of the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber.”9 We had walked across the marble bridge and parked our bicycles near two stone lions—which even back then I knew were Qing period remains. Two decades later, I was quite literally back where I had begun. T. S. Eliot’s words from the end of the “Four Quartets” come back to me:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time.10
The marble lions still stand at the entrance of Wang Yao’s house. Two smaller horse mounts are still in place. I recall the last time I saw Professor Wang here, in 1989, shortly before he died. Now, I am back with a new research project, but I do not have his trusted counsel, his seasoned view of literature and historical tragedy. I miss him as we cross the wooden threshold. To my great surprise, Wang Yao’s widow is in the house. I had heard that she had moved out. It just so happens that she is back this Sunday, to pack up old books, mementos of long years spent in scholarship—and persecution.
We are old friends. She had hosted me for meals many times. She knows that I have heard her husband’s stories of beatings during the Cultural Revolution. She greets me and my Chinese companions warmly. We speak about Wang Yao and the house that holds so many memories. I tell her that I am here to close a circle: I had begun my China studies with an abstract interest in intellectual history. I am back now to add flesh to the history that unfolded upon these grounds. I tell Wang Yao’s widow that I hope to write a book about the gardens that housed ideals of beauty and quietude for which so many suffered, including her husband.
“You want to see how far persecution went?” She asks me with quiet rage. Stepping outside the old, book-lined living room, she points to a cracked, stained, mold-encrusted outer wall. Getting closer, she points to a faint classical painting: A scholar on a marble bridge. “See that huge X through the face? The Red Guards did that when they came to take Wang Yao to the ox pens. It was not enough to drag him through mud. Not enough to strike his old body. They had to destroy any visible connection with the culture that once sustained him.”11
The faded, defaced scholar is a physical link to my old teacher and to the Ming He Yuan as well. Jiao Xiong clinches the connection. He points out that Wang Yao’s library/sitting room may well have been the site of one of the first buildings encountered after one entered the garden in the nineteenth century. This was a place known as the Studio for Rethinking One’s Career.12 Caught in very difficult times of war and rebellion, Prince Mianyu had created for himself a typical zhai, a secluded space for meditation where one traditionally abstained from meat, wine, and intimate relations before making offerings to gods and ancestors.13
This space of quiet, crane-like solitude did not survive the turmoil of twentieth-century China. Nothing remains today of the placard that hung in Mianyu’s library. What would Wang Yao think now if he could read its message: xi xin guan mian (cleanse the mind, take note of wonders)? More than a century after the death of the prince who built the Singing Crane Garden, I grasp how dangerously real words can be: xi xin was no metaphor during the 1960s. The Cultural Revolution had made “washing the mind” a literal, daily ritual. Wang Yao had been subjected to a brutal form of xi xin every day of his incarceration in the ox pens. Instead of meditating in the Studio for Rethinking One’s Career, highly educated intellectuals were obligated to write endless revisions of autobiographies filled with their “bourgeois crimes.” Cherished days, like carefully chosen words, lost almost all meaning during the 1960s. The Cultural Revolution had attacked buildings and gardens as well as the moral value of genuine memory.
Nonetheless, the ground has managed to outwit the ravage of time. On this May walk I realize that there are enough signposts remaining for those who wish to listen once again to the “cry” of the crane. On the wall opposite the crossed-out scholar, I make out another faded painting. In this one, the scholar keeps walking on a marble bridge. Two weeping willows lean over, as if to guide and welcome the solitary guest. Despite the stains and cracks, this image testifies to another kind of link to history and to memory. It is not only violence and brutality that weaves together Wang Yao’s story with that of a long-dead Manchu prince. It is also a capacity to endure, to go on, to take solace from nature’s rhythms and actually breathe new life into the ashes of old culture. My history of the Singing Crane Garden cannot accomplish all that, but I can mark the places and the lives that thrived in the shadows of its history.
Back at my dormitory, after this stroll full of surprises and discoveries, I sit down to record what I have heard and seen. I find that my own words fail to do justice to the stories shared by Yue Shengyang, Jiao Xiong, and Wang Yao’s widow. As often before, I find myself turning to poetry, especially to the verses of Yihuan, who managed to give voice to quietude despite the deafening din of political upheaval that surrounded him daily:
If you love pure shadows
cling to the shore where the ash tree thrives
If you ache for your lost hut
lean on stone hewn in blameless mountains
Today, a broad and straight road opens
to drum beat and cymbal music.
Enfolded by cliffs, you can still follow a serpentine path,
shunning all that is coarse
For humble dwelling, three pillars suffice,
there is no joy like leaving entanglement behind.14
Entitled simply “Ou cheng” (By Accident), this poem captures both the genuine emotion as well as the posturing that thrived in imperial gardens. It also speaks to my own “accidental” discovery of an old connection to Ming He Yuan. Prince Yihuan, like Mianyu (and even Wang Yao, during the years when he lived safely among his books), had much more than a humble dwelling with three pillars. These men were not Daoist hermits or Buddhist monks. Nonetheless, each loved pure shadows in his own way. Each clung to some lakeshore where the ash tree thrives. Each had sought a path around the highway of history, away from the drumbeat of political violence. Though unsuccessful, they left enough literary and artistic remains that I am able to piece together a vision of refuge that still lingers on in the hamlet of Haidian.
Liquid Delight in the Shallow Sea
It was not an accident, of course, that Manchu emperors and princes were drawn to this site. The village of Haidian lay on the outskirts of the imperial city and was long known for its gracious gardens. Already in the Ming dynasty, scholars and imperial kin had come to find refuge here. What Haidian had to offer was what garden builders needed the most: water. Called “liquid delight,” this was the essential prerequisite for landscape design, as could be glimpsed even in the blue hues added to Yue Shengyang’s map of the Ming He Yuan ruins. Without water, nothing grew. With water, it was not only trees and flowers that flourished. It was also the contemplative mind that drew sustenance here from vistas of liquid stillness. Skillfully channeled waterfalls and artfully crafted fishponds became the hallmarks of Haidian. Mighty boulders were excavated and imported from the shores of Taihu, a southern lake renowned for strange-shaped rocks that added “boniness” to the garden. Undulating hills were created artificially, by moving mounds of earth, as can be seen beneath the Yi Ran Ting today.
Called the Shallow Sea, this northwest corner of metropolitan Beijing remains well endowed with underground springs even today. This phenomenon, too, is no accident of nature. It took informed geographers and geologists to locate and preserve these source springs, especially in the Maoist years of the communist regime, when building the new was a political priority and destroying the old an ideological obligation. Few cared, or dared, to voice their concern for the waters that nourished classical gardens.
One of those who did was Hou Renzhi, who