Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden. Vera Schwarcz
one has to call to mind more than the structures that occupied the grounds surrounding the Pavilion of Winged Eaves. The surveyor of this site has to take into account the accelerating pace of an increasingly brutal history. It is in that framework that the respite provided by the Ming He Yuan begins to take shape in both words and time. This enlarged site may be understood in terms of Denis Cosgrove’s “symbolic landscapes”—but only if we grasp how metaphorical thinking became an increasingly endangered activity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. Encoding and decoding iconographies depends upon a safe historical distance from the subject under scrutiny. The distance diminished rapidly for Chinese intellectuals enmeshed in social revolution.
When Cosgrove cites Erwin Panovsky and John Ruskin to develop a paradigm for the social formation of landscapes, he is appealing to an intelligentsia that did not fear for its life, that contemplated the legacy of the past with a certain amount of equanimity. Hou Renzhi, by contrast, paid dearly for every bit of scholarly work that did not fit the paradigm of class struggle. Similarly, such noted garden historians as Chen Congzhou and Hu Dongchu were repeatedly persecuted for their efforts to document classical spaces where contemplation thrived. Chen Congzhou’s masterful study of Suzhou gardens published in 1956 was amply illustrated with poetic allusions to underscore the symbolic significance of the landscape. For this accomplishment, Chen was condemned as a “rightist,” demoted from his university position and ostracized until the 1980s. Hu Donchu, the author of the 1981 work The Way of the Virtuous: The Influence of Art and Philosophy on Chinese Garden Design, had paid his dues as well. A survivor of the Cultural Revolution, imprisoned in the ox pens, Hu had to bide his time until Mao died before he could turn to scholarship and the possibility of linking space and thought.
China’s scorched terrain, however, is not the only place where a garden of history took root as contemplative spaces vanished from sight. Simon Schama’s monumental inquiry Landscape and Memory also took its inspiration from a wounded imagination. Journeying back to Germany and Poland, where Jews and their cultured attachment to the past had been brutally extinguished, Schama acknowledges that he is constructing a refuge in the mind, an imaginary landscape to house what is missing in space. His study gives absence a presence. It seeks, in Schama’s own words, to see how “through a mantle of ash can emerge a shoot of restored life.”15
The Manchu prince Mianyu, owner of the Singing Crane Garden, would have understood this metaphor quite well. He lived through times in which ashes consumed much of his garden, but not the mind that cherished possibilities of cultural renewal. Mianyu was born to privilege and power. At that time of his birth in 1814, his father had already reigned for fourteen years as the Jiaqing emperor. By the time of Mianyu’s death in 1865, the Mandate of Heaven had been sorely tested by conflict with the West and by internal rebellion within. Physical spaces for imperial refuge had been assaulted, most notably the burning of the Summer Palace. Leisurely meditation on the harmony between man and nature had vanished with the pressure to defend the country and the court by force of arms. Prince Mianyu witnessed and took part in all this. His garden, though short lived, was part of a survival strategy that went beyond the space it occupied in a northwest corner of the imperial capital. It became, in the embroidering of memory, a shoot of restored life.
As the fifth, and youngest, son of the Jiaqing emperor, Mianyu had little hope of ruling China directly. When his father died in 1820, the six-year-old boy was elevated to prince of the second rank with the title of Hui Jun Wang. In 1839, in the middle of the Opium War, his princedom was elevated to the first degree with the title Hui Qin Wang. By 1853, when the Taiping Rebellion threatened to overthrow the war-weakened dynasty, Mianyu took charge of the forces defending the imperial capital—with the augmented title of “Feng ming da jiang jun” (Worthy Military General in Charge of Sustaining the Mandate).16 It was with such heavy burdens in mind that Prince Hui designed and cherished the Singing Crane Garden.
The site for this refuge was granted to him in 1835 by his second brother, who reigned as the Daoguang emperor from 1821 to 1850. Granting gardens to close kin had been a Manchu practice for more than a century before Mianyu came to own the Singing Crane Garden. These special gifts were marks of imperial favor, down payments on loyalty and service expected from those who became neighbors of the emperor’s Summer Palace. The actual plot of land occupied by Mianyu’s garden had been part of an imperial enclosure called Spring’s Mirror Garden (Jing Chun Yuan), which his father began to subdivide for his children (figure 7). A small, eastern portion was granted by the Jiaqing emperor to his favorite daughter in 1802. After his death, the Daoguang emperor saw fit to grant the much larger, western section to his brother, Prince Hui. Five years before China’s defeat in the first Opium War, eighteen years before he placed the fate of the capital in the hands of Mianyu, the supreme ruler of China understood the necessity of having a skilled and loyal brother nearby in the outskirts of Beijing.
The physical terrain of the Singing Crane Garden, and that of neighboring princely retreats, will be explored in more detail later. For now, it is the symbolic landscape that has to be brought into focus. As a Manchu prince, Mianyu was prepared to live with the past in mind. Coming from a nomadic tribe that occupied China in 1644, he had been schooled to value both Manchu traditions and the Chinese classics. Fluent in both languages, this nobleman lived in several cultural universes at once. When traveling beyond the Great Wall to the imperial hunting grounds of Jehol, he became a Manchu tribesman mindful of his authority among Mongol and Tibetan allies who also shared his Lamaist Buddhist faith. In the Forbidden City of Beijing or near the Summer Palace, he was a Confucian official, prepared to serve with virtue the ruler of the realm.
Figure 7. Princely gardens surrounding the old Summer Palace of Yuan Ming Yuan as noted inside the campus of Beijing University. Original map courtesy of Professor Hou Renzhi. This section redrawn by Yishuo Hu of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.
In both worlds, Mianyu lived quite literally in the light of the past. In his posthumous collection entitled Ai ri zhai ji (Collection from the Studio of Cherished Days), the owner of the Singing Crane Garden summarized some of the wisdom he gained in his garden as well as in his more public life as an imperial kinsman. Addressing himself to a new generation of princes corrupted by wealth, opium, as well as the growing threat of internal rebellion and war with the West, Mianyu wrote: “Patience and the power of words can make or unmake a man. Haste in the pursuit of honor, like ill used words, place one’s virtue at risk. Ordinary folk rush about to try to outwit fate and believe everything they hear. A gentleman learns to still the burning fires of his mind. Therefore, his words reflect his heart.”17 Burning fires were anything but metaphorical by the time Mianyu’s descendants edited his works. Nonetheless, the power of words endured. Even if gardens could no longer house patience and virtue, the mind held on to them even as political and cultural change made them increasingly obsolete.
The tenacity of this attachment to cultural memory has also been noted by Craig Clunas in his study of Ming dynasty scholar gardens in the lower Yangtze area. Here, too, landscaped spaces occupied a double life between the physical and the symbolic. In contrast to Ming gardens, however, Qing princely retreats were not owned by Confucian literati. Their “cultural syntax,” to borrow from Clunas, was more mixed and multivocal. The Yangtze delta gardens of scholar-officials were anchored in the agriculture, poetry, and painting of the south. They were “fruitful sites” in ways that Mianyu’s garden never hoped to be.18 Imperial retreats bred dreams of leisure and hopes for respite from the increasingly arduous (and increasing unsuccessful) effort to reestablish Manchu authority over a war-shattered China. Gardens that had once been part of a complex cultural arrangement came to stand for the waning possibility of quieting the burning fires of the mind.
To understand this second, nonphysical life of the garden, we have to look beyond the conventional parameters of landscape history. John Dixon Hunt, a pioneer in garden theory, has argued that we must turn our focus to a broader spaciousness that he terms “the art of the millieu.” In Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory, Hunt points out that designed spaces are “both a physical object and a place experienced by a subject .