Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden. Vera Schwarcz
the Shu Chun Yuan. The officials who actually searched the property reported that the Manchu favorite had amassed 1,003 houses as well as 357 verandas, apart from thousands of taels of silver and gold.29 This massive corruption case continued to shadow the gardens of Haidian well into the nineteenth century. Even after the Jiaqing emperor divided up He Shen’s pleasure palace among his children, the dread of moral turpitude infected the land. Mianyu, who incorporated the largest section of the Gentle Spring Garden into his own Ming He Yuan, was especially concerned with purging its evil name.
His nephew Yihuan took another route. Especially after the violent destruction of the Singing Crane Garden, the old marble boat spoke to him about the many layers of dreams, hopes, and illusions that seeded the ravaged land. In a poem whose title is best translated as “One Foot on the Isle of Immortals,” Yihuan described as follows the nineteenth-century ruins and the callous grandeur that produced them:
Lofty pavilions once reached the clouds
now topple into uncertain dust.
Towering graves dotted a winding cliff,
today they spill secrets into muddy waters.
Worn walls, cracked columns,
the trace of a timid leveret.
I cut a path through brambles
to unroll a curtain of thorns.
Imagine the minister with one foot on the isle of immortals,
sacred heaven of fleabane and bamboo.
Silk ropes fettered his body,
condemned to death three times.
Phoenix wings in aborted flight
never left this orphaned island.
Every sail leans on the wind that breaks it,
while the guest of ruins cherishes a shattered soul.30
Yihuan’s poetic evocation of this corrupt Manchu favorite does not offer forgiveness. It does not shy away from the fact that He Shen was condemned to death three times. Yihuan has no sympathy for the lavish tastes of the man who owned the marble boat and cracked pavilions. His poem, unlike the contemporary Beida photograph, allows us to encounter the orphaned island in all its desolation. What is being mourned here is not He Shen’s passing but the silencing of a landscape that once harbored so much delight. Why the landscape gets punished for the sins of its owner is a question that Yihuan asked himself over and over again, especially after the destruction of the Yuan Ming Yuan and its surrounding princely gardens.
Hall of the Seeker of Radiant Virtue
When Mianyu received a large tract of Shu Chun Yuan in 1835, he did not have to worry about the marble boat. The eastern section of He Shen’s estate had already been bequeathed by the Jiaqing emperor to his daughter, Princess Changjing, in 1802. The larger, western section that became Singing Crane Garden awaited the needs and desires of the next ruler, Daoguang. In the meantime, gardens were being remodeled and renamed, with strategies similar to those used in the revision of a classical Chinese poem. The “right words” had to be found, thematic continuities maintained.
Qianlong’s imprint on this revision process and on Chinese culture more generally had been huge. The He Shen scandal was merely a symbol of the grandeur that was made possible by relative peace and the massive extraction of resources in the eighteenth century. The gardens of the nineteenth century were designed in a totally different cultural and political environment. Here, war with the West, massive internal rebellions, and a waning faith in the Mandate of Heaven marked the cadence of imperial life. In this vastly different world, Qianlong’s ideals endured nonetheless. The goal of combining martial and literary virtues, of blending Buddhist religion with Confucian filial piety, remained central, along with a cultured appreciation of landscaped spaces.
Mianyu grew up as an emperor’s son. Like his father, Jiaqing, he studied Confucian classics in the studio where cranes were displayed. Like other highborn kin of the emperor, he was expected to embody the Manchu ideal of mahahai erdemu—“manly virtue.” This included skill in archery, horsemanship, frugality, devotion to the ruling Aisin Gioro clan, and devotion in the service of the Son of Heaven.31 By the time Mianyu was born in 1814, his father had the reigns of power firmly in hand. Jiaqing had already announced that he would determine the names of his own children as well as the names of “all the sons and grandsons of his brothers—all those who shared first ideograph or part of an ideograph with his own descendants’ names.”32 He therefore gave much thought to his fifth son’s name: the first character, Mian, was to be a concrete link to all his brothers and kinsmen. It meant “prolonged,” “continuous,” and “unbroken.” Mianyu’s second name was also chosen by his father with care. A personal appellation given only to him, Yu meant at once “joyful” and “content.” This, however, was not to be taken as an invitation to pleasure. Rather, as the owner of the Singing Crane Garden demonstrated in his later years, it was to be an ideal of cultural refinement pursued with effort and determination.
The young boy’s fidelity both to the unbroken traditions of his imperial clan and to Confucian traditions of self-cultivation and contentment pleased his father. After Jiaqing’s death in 1820, the six-year-old was left in charge of Manchu uncles who oversaw his education. His second brother, who ruled as the Daoguang emperor, also recognized the boy’s talents and virtues. By 1839 Mianyu’s title had been raised to prince of the first rank. As Prince Hui (Hui Qin Wang), Mianyu was delegated to perform the Grand Sacrifices of the imperial Aisin Gioro clan. These sacrifices took place at the altars of Heaven and Earth and ensured the ceremonial legitimacy and cosmological benevolence of the Qing dynasty as a whole.33 The first time this weighty responsibility fell upon the young price was in 1840, on the eve of war with England. A shortage of sons among imperial kin accounts partially for Mianyu’s high ceremonial profile. Another likely reason is Daoguang’s confidence in the young man’s mahahai erdemu. “Manly virtue” would be needed more and more as the fate of the dynasty became darkened by opium wars and peasant rebellion. By 1853, when the war-weary dynasty looked like it would be toppled by the Taiping insurgency, Mianyu took on the burden of military defense. With his new title of “Worthy Military General in Charge of Sustaining the Mandate,” he managed to protect the imperial capital from native rebels. By the time of his death in 1865, however, Mianyu had witnessed the invasion of Beijing by foreign troops as well as the destruction of the Summer Palace and his own beloved Ming He Yuan.
Three decades before, when he had begun work on the Singing Crane Garden, Mianyu chose a new name for himself. In keeping with the Confucian practice of a studio sobriquet, he chose an appellation that went beyond parental hopes at the time of his birth: Hall of the Seeker of Radiant Virtue (Cheng Hui Tang), a title that reveals a young man determined to erase the shadow of corruption and self-indulgence left over from the He Shen era. Even as he proceeded to design a huge pleasure garden, Mianyu wanted to be known as the prince who overcame the cursed ground, who helped restore the moral legitimacy of the Qing. By aligning himself with the idea of Cheng Hui Tang, Mianyu displayed a skilled blending of Manchu moralism and Confucian aesthetics. His garden mirrored this self-image:
Compared to the design of other princely gardens, Singing Crane Garden was unique. It adopted features of southern gardening while preserving the special feeling coveted in the gardens of the north. Its enclosed passageways led to a back garden filled with flowering lilac. The main building here was called Cheng Bi Tang, or the Hall for Azure Purity. When the garden was flourishing, the east courtyard was used for entertainment. It was here that a room supported by five carved columns housed an indoor opera stage. . . . Beyond, toward the central section of the garden, hills ran up and down silhouetted by far reaching branches of pine. Another pavilion would then come into sight flanked by ancient rockery and a magnificent cedar that seemed to scrape the sky. Throughout the garden, willowy stones and grand buildings conveyed a sense of elegance and serenity.34
Lilac, cedar, and a taste for Peking opera are bits of what we now know of Mianyu’s taste in gardens. A lot more comes alive from the poems of his nephew, Yihuan. The stones for mounting horses in front of Wang Yao’s