Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden. Vera Schwarcz
a slow-paced walk through a lang—the long, enclosed passage meant to link one vista to another, constantly surprising, constantly changing, constantly delighting. A lower, zigzagging wooden bridge finally brought visitors to the centerpiece of the garden, the stone-viewing pavilion so dear to the heart of Mi Wanzhong.
During one of our many conversations about the history of northwest Beijing, Hou Renzhi took out another, less colorful image of the Shao Yuan garden. This is an ink-and-brush sketch, most likely made by Mi Wanzhong’s assistant, to convey his master’s wishes concerning the architectural details of the site as it was being built (figure 14). In this garden, as in the lush painting, water predominates. Like in the rubbed-out remnant on the doorpost at Wang Yao’s house, scrawny willows bend into a still lake. In the very center of the sketch looms a larger, different kind of tree, perhaps a juniper. Beneath its branches, as in the hand scroll, stands Mi Wanzhong’s treasure: a large, strange-shaped rock.
Figure 13. Reproduction of color hand scroll painting by Mi Wanzhong toward the end of the Ming dynasty, ca. 1609. The scroll is being held in the Beijing University archives. This reproduction was made available to the author courtesy of Hou Renzhi.
Figure 14. Architectural sketch of central pavilion and ornamental rock in the Shao Yuan garden, attributed to Mi Wanzhong’s garden architect. Courtesy of Hou Renzhi.
Figure 15. “The Stone That Is Mi’s Friend,” ornamental rock currently in the courtyard of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, identified as belonging to the collection of Mi Wanzhong by Yang Chengyun in Gu yuan cong heng (Beijing, 1998), p. 15.
At the height of his fame and power, Mi had indulged a passion for collecting strange rock formations. In fact, the scholar-official was known among his friends as Mi Youshi—Mi, the Friend of Rocks. Dislodged from the center of imperial politics by misfortune, Mi embraced this love of hard stone ever more fervently. In the “bones” of the garden, he saw the kind of loyalty and truth that was sorely lacking at the court of the Ming emperor. Mi’s favorite stone was called “Neither-Nor-Rock” (fei fei shi). A tall, boldly perforated structure anchored by a cavernous, thin wall, this rock now adorns the courtyard of the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology (figure 15). Ignored in the 1950s, Mi’s rock was buried and thereby protected by rubble during the decade of the Cultural Revolution. Unlike residence 75, this remnant from the past was somewhat portable and thus survived relatively unscathed. Unlike the scholars on the door to Wang Yao’s study, unlike the body of the aged scholar and those of his colleagues, Mi’s fei fei shi could speak its own mind. It retained its “neither-nor” quality, its ability to challenge the powers at be. Placed in the heart of the Sackler Museum, it keeps its own counsel, labeled simply as “Mi’s Friend” by the very few who know or care about the history of old gardens embedded in today’s Beida.21
But old gardens have a way of speaking to—indeed, speaking for—those who cannot voice their own concerns. After the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644, the ruined Shao Yuan continued to whisper its secrets to visitors seeking solace from the new rulers of China. One Confucian scholar described the site—and indirectly, his outrage at the brutal destructiveness of the Manchu conquest—as follows.
Desolate with broken furrows and barren hills and covered with dusty crawling weeds, the place in its better days used to have verandas bright with sunshine and pavilions bathed in moonlight, cool balconies in summer days and warm houses in winter. The present dried pond, treadless paths, and snakes’ and foxes’ caves were once described by scholars and artists as places associated with poetry and delicate ladies and with archaic boats and cliffs in paintings. In place of the lotus flower building, the banks of pine trees, and the painted pleasure boats berthing against the houses, there are only houses with corroded beams and vast openings in the roofs. In the presence of such a miserable scene, one feels inevitably very sad. There is only one thing left behind. That is a huge stone standing as formerly in front of the courtyard and shaded by a Chinese juniper tree.22
The same stone that sits so proudly in the center of the Sackler courtyard today had more evocative powers in a time of violence and disarray. Set against dried ponds, it was a visual reminder that “liquid delight” flows only when scholars are well treasured. The huge stone and the juniper stand as witness to what endures when beauty has been crushed by violent events. If the stone could speak, perhaps it would give testimony. In the words of T. S. Eliot, whose “Waste Land” depicts a more modern desolation, it would cry out:
Son of man . . .
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images . . .
There is shadow under this red rock,
Come in under the shadow of this red rock,
And I will show you something . . .
I will show you fear in a handful of dust . . .23
Fear was more than a handful of dust on the grounds of the old Singing Crane Garden. Two centuries before Lord Elgin’s troops torched the princely gardens of the Qing, violence already haunted this corner of northwest Beijing. As shadowy places of refuge became scarce, rocks were left to speak a language previously cherished by poets, scholars, and garden designers alike.
One Foot on the Island of Immortals
When the Manchus launched their plans for conquest in the 1620s, they had hoped to present themselves as Confucian pacifiers of the realm. Mindful of the political disillusionment of scholar-officials such as Mi Wanzhong, they had named their dynasty Qing, “purity,” to connote a breath of fresh air after the supposedly “bright” Ming that ended up being ruled by thoroughly corrupt Chinese emperors. The Manchus even organized an army called the “Green Standard,” made up of ethnically Chinese forces, so the conquest would not look like an invasion. For a while, a minority of Ming intellectuals was persuaded that the new rulers offered an opportunity to cleanse and revive the Mandate of Heaven. When news of atrocities began to filter in from central China in 1644–46, the tide quickly turned. By that time, the Manchus were determined to stay and use force to enforce the new mandate.
In Beijing, the urge to dominate both politically and culturally was manifest in the rapid transformation of the Forbidden City into the administrative nerve center of the new empire. On the outskirts of Beijing, a different kind of domination and acculturation took place. Here, the Manchu rulers sought to take advantage of natural resources to create their own space of refuge, especially for times when the court could not travel back to the ancestral hunting grounds of Manchuria. The Kangxi emperor, who reigned from 1662 to 1723, was the first Manchu ruler to commit major resources to the building of a Garden of Perfect Brightness in the hamlet of Haidian. In keeping with his vision of himself as a World Pacifier (in both Confucian and Buddhist terms) he chose to name his place Yuan Ming Yuan—as an allusion to the “round” (all encompassing) and “brilliant” (far-reaching) illumination of Buddhist wisdom. His grandson, Qianlong, expanded the grounds until they became the largest single building project of the Qing dynasty. With an almost unlimited supply of silver, gold, and wood requisitioned from commoners and scholar-officials, he completely altered the natural and cultural terrain of the hamlet once known as the Shallow Sea. The disgraced Ming dynasty scholar Mi Wanzhong had been content to take a “spoon” of water from Haidian to create his Shao Yuan. The emperor Qianlong, by contrast, had an army of designers and diggers who did not rest until they brought to life a veritable sea—the central, vast lake of Yuan Ming Yuan called Fu Hai, or “Ocean of Blessings.”
The imperial will to overcome natural limitations in order to create a vast showcase for pleasure led to the incorporation of several other