Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden. Vera Schwarcz
Nine Islands of Peace (Jiuzhou Qingyan) built around a smaller lake called Back Lake (Hou Hu), Qianlong took over the Eternal Spring Garden (Changchun Yuan) in 1749 and the Variegated Spring Garden (Qichun Yuan) in 1751. Thus he expanded and created an ever more brilliant, ever more grandiose Garden of Perfect Brightness. And if the avaricious incorporation of smaller Chinese gardens into this expansive refuge was not enough, Qianlong also launched the building project of a huge European-style garden called the Palace of Balanced and Amazing Pleasures (Xieqi qu) designed by Italian and French Jesuits. The most prominent designer was Father Guiseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), who had delighted the great monarch with drawings of Italian and French palaces and fountains. With Castiglione’s designs, Qianlong obtained a massive pleasure compound on the scale of Versailles—with a vigor all its own.
The Manchu ruler shared the French king’s desire to use grandly designed spaces to enforce political hegemony. At the same time, the Qing ruler followed a cultural script that had its own aesthetic cadence. The geometric formality of seventeenth-century French gardens conveyed, in the words of historian Chandra Mukerji, the military ambitions of state over society. A walk in these gardens was “neither casual nor apolitical. It was an element of the geopolitics of the period . . . the petit parc embodied the territorial, optimistic and technical expertise on which French military geopolitical action was based.”24 The total effect of Versailles was thus quite different from the aesthetic playfulness of the Yuan Ming Yuan. The near total isolation of state from society in Qing China may account for some of the fluidity of design possible in this corner of northwest Beijing. More important, Qianlong was a genius at accumulating, digesting, and reinterpreting various aesthetic traditions ranging from the Daoist to the Confucian, from the Buddhist to the baroque. The result, according to British biologist Joseph Needman, was a landscape architecture that far from “imprisoning and constraining Nature, actually flows along with it.”25
This “flow” was no accident. More than a space to display power, the imperial gardens functioned as a reprieve from the burdens of rule. Qianlong himself defined this ideal when he wrote: “Every emperor and ruler, when he has retired from audience, and has finished his public duties, must have a garden in which he may stroll, look around and relax his heart. If he has a suitable place for this, it will refresh his mind and regulate his emotions. But if he has not, he will become engrossed in sensual pleasures and lose his will and power.”26 Refreshing the mind was a different kind of necessity than the geopolitical calculations that occupied the heart of Versailles. Built to awe Chinese and Western visitors alike, the Yuan Ming Yuan nonetheless was large enough and meandering enough to accommodate a multiplicity of political and spiritual agendas. A center for Daoist contemplation, Buddhist sutra recitation, ancestor worship, and the Confucian arts of painting and poetry, Qianlong’s Haidian palace became a vessel to accommodate many seas and continents, both metaphorical and physical.
Not satisfied with creating worlds in space, Qianlong also commissioned artists to paint forty of his favorite scenes from the Yuan Ming Yuan. Father Jean Denis Attiret was one of a large group of Western and Chinese artists assigned to immortalizing the Garden of Perfect Brightness. Each “portrait” was first assembled carefully in space, then meticulously re-evoked with brush on silk. The result was a delightful mirroring of terrain and art to the point that the aging Qianlong preferred to walk the portrait gallery of his garden rather than dislodge his body from the inner palaces of the Yuan Ming Yuan.
One of the scenes that captures Qianlong’s territorial and cultural ambitions is entitled Ru gu han jin (Imbibe the past; it contains the present) (figure 16). It depicts the emperor’s private library as a double-roofed pavilion encircled by a group of other halls to encourage the perusal of old scrolls.27 During the reign of this absolute ruler, the state had the right to confiscate any book or any work of art that Qianlong wished to add to the imperial collection. Some were requisitioned because they contained anti-Manchu sentiments, some just because the emperor fancied the writer or the artist. If the emperor chose, he could study the old. If he wanted to, he could fathom how it contained the present. The political assumption was that he defined both. Much like Mao Zedong in his later years, Qianlong imagined himself as both teacher and student. Unlike Mao, however, he never fell into a total contempt for the old. He never forced scholars to erase their attachment to Confucian tradition, to wash their minds. Qianlong never beat them to death just because they took the link between past and present to heart.
Figure 16. Ru gu han jin (Imbibe the past; it contains the present). The eleventh painting in the series “Forty Scenes of the Yuan Ming Yuan.” Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.
The message evoked by the title of this eighteenth-century painting is that traditional Confucian wisdom had much to contribute to the political policies of the Qing regime. This was not simply propaganda for the consumption of Chinese scholar-officials. The same dictum prevailed within the palace compound, where Chinese tutors were hired to instruct young princes in poetry and classics. These arts were meant to refine the moral personality. At the same time, Manchu kinsmen oversaw the young men’s military and Buddhist education. A poet of some skill himself, Qianlong rewarded his children when they became capable of producing classical verses on appropriate themes. To inspire further literary virtuosity, he ordered a special pillar to be installed in the princes’ study hall. It was marked with a tablet inscribed by the emperor himself depicting cranes alighting on pines.28 This pillar was meant to be a visual reminder that future heirs had to soar to ever-greater heights of literary and political accomplishment.
No longer just a symbol of moral rectitude and solitude as it had been for Confucian and Daoist scholars, the crane tablet in the princes’ study hall was an official reminder concerning a moral commitment to serve in the world. Previous generations of ming he zhi shi had cultivated rectitude in shadowy spaces apart from the bright light of political entanglement. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Haidian had become a famed showcase for the display of literary and cultural genius. Cranes would have to learn to sing in gilded cages, or be erased from the garden landscape altogether.
No “cage” was as lavishly gilded in the late Qianlong era as that of the Gentle Spring Garden (Shu Chun Yuan), a pleasure palace belonging to an imperial favorite called He Shen. A Manchu nobleman who served as an imperial bodyguard, He Shen had attracted the eye of the aging emperor. Along with the affection of the doting Qianlong, He Shen acquired the grounds that currently surround the Unnamed Lake at Beijing University. In ironic contrast to its modest name, He Shen’s garden ended up rivaling the splendor of the nearby Yuan Ming Yuan. On a smaller scale, the favorite who rose to the rank of minister used the most expensive building materials to create a sprawling complex of lakes, pavilions, and theaters.
The most ostentatious symbol of splendor was the marble boat that still graces the bank of Unnamed Lake today (figure 17). Like the rock in the center of the Sackler Museum, He Shen’s marble boat stands as a nearly mute witness to the history that unfolded in this corner of China. In an earlier era, when Yenching University occupied this site, He Shen’s garden was a sanctioned subject of study. Hou Renzhi picked up the thread from his teachers and traced the actual documents that granted this Manchu favorite a pleasure palace adjacent to Qianlong. As long as his imperial patron reigned, He Shen could build up the Gentle Spring Garden with unabashed luxury. When Qianlong, the longest reigning ruler in Chinese history, finally died in 1795, He Shen’s star fell with crushing rapidity.
Figure 17. The marble boat from the Shu Chun Yuan owned by the Manchu favorite He Shen (with the pagoda-style water tower in the distance across Unnamed Lake). Photograph by Marc Berger.
Jiaqing (r. 1796–1821) took over the actual reigns of power, which he had held only symbolically during the last year of his father’s life. One of the new emperor’s first measures was to arrest He Shen, confiscate his treasures, and execute him. According to a