Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden. Vera Schwarcz
in many different ways and different people and different culture and periods.”19 Lest this angle of vision become too diffuse, Hunt goes on to anchor the idea of the garden in the soil of language itself. Building upon the work of previous garden historians, he points out that most words for “garden” are rooted in the simple, important idea of enclosure. Whether one starts with “yard” in English, “hof” in Dutch, “gradina” in Romanian, the path leads directly to the idea of a fenced-in space (from the Indo-European gher [fence]).20
Figure 8. Chinese character yuan—originally suggesting an open park, later connoting a “garden” that encloses lakes, artificial hills, and pavilions.
The Chinese ideograph for “garden” mirrors this idea with its own multiple connotations. Yuan originally referred to an open park, a hunting preserve of the rich and the powerful (figure 8). Later, in the course of Chinese history, lettered gentlemen developed a taste for more intimate enclosures. Consequently, yuan took on the meaning of a cultivated space where one planted seeds of thought as well as seeds of plants. This evolution from a broad, nearly public yuan to a bordered, more private universe replete with lakes, hills, fir trees, lotus flowers, pavilions, and courtyards parallels the rise of the Confucian literati in the long centuries from the Han dynasty through the Song.21
Confucius himself hinted at the harvest of insight possible in a garden when he told his disciples: “The wise enjoys the streams, the benevolent the mountains; the wise are active, the benevolent passive, the wise are happy and the benevolent live long.”22 For the Master of the Analects, as for the Manchu Prince Mianyu in the nineteenth century, the natural universe served as a mirror for the moral virtues of men. The four lines that border the character yuan came to symbolize the walls (both of stone and of time) that enclosed the garden. Inside the four walls of the garden, we find the radical for “earth/soil,” which is the essential precondition for any garden. The small square at the center evokes lakes and ponds, which mirror both the sky and the mind of the observer.23 The play of strokes below the waters suggests trees and rocks that give the garden its distinctive character. Seen in this way, the garden is a frame within a frame. It demands discrimination (and often privileged education and leisure time) for the slow-paced unfolding of the carefully constructed vistas and cultural symbols.
The study of history also demands borders and boundaries. Inquiry into an event depends upon a fixed temporal framework. Like the hedge around the garden, the historian’s angle of vision must be initially constricted in order to give evidence its full weight. The Singing Crane Garden in this study is an example of such a framing device. Starting with the garden walls erected by Prince Hui and ending with the construction of the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Beijing University, this history uncovers various voices that give this corner of China its experiential depth.
Had the Singing Crane Garden been a walled pleasure palace alone, it would not have generated the many ripples of grief and insight that endured throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fertility of experience found on its scarred grounds is the result of the subtleness of imagination already apparent when Prince Mianyu wrote about fires of the mind. The Pavilion of Winged Eaves, as well as other physical remains that dot the campus of Beijing University today, are part of the framework that helps us understand both Prince Hui as well as inmates of the “ox pens” such as Ji Xianlin and Zhu Guanqian. Each found this site to be a protected space where language and time could unfold multiple meanings unhindered by the brutality of the public past.
Jing and Dong: Stillness and Motion in the Garden of History
The garden of historical memory thus took the place once occupied by historical gardens. As freedom to move through graceful spaces contracted over time, other skills of artful reflection came to the fore. The wealth of contemplative possibilities nurtured by classical landscaped spaces allowed Chinese intellectuals to survive long periods of spiritual desecration. Gardens, after all, had been places where mental discipline had been a central concern. In the words of Dorothy Graham, an American traveler who roamed the princely estates of Beijing in the 1930s, the limited enclosure of the yuan was designed to “calm the raging seas, temper the wind and adjust nature to the scale of man’s encompassing will.”24 For Graham, the turbulence tamed by Chinese gardens was largely metaphorical. Even the descendants of Manchu noblemen whom she visited and chatted with before the outbreak of war with Japan were able to stand a bit to the side of turbulent events. As distance from history vanished in the 1940s, the challenge of calming minds grew ever more intense.
Fortunately, that challenge had been embedded in classical garden design and provided a lexicon for living through, living with turbulence. Jing and dong are two aspects of the classical garden that are particularly useful in mapping the symbolic terrain of the Singing Crane Garden. The first suggests stillness, the second motion. Their layered and joined connotations go far beyond angles of vision provided by standing still or perambulating through a classical Chinese garden. Jing and dong are aspects of space, of persons and of history as well. Each has at least two faces, two phases, two voices—or better put, this duality hints at a multifaceted predicament that the garden mirrors and evokes.
Jing centers on the idea of unruffled waters. A smooth lake, a well-designed work of art, the echo of a temple bell are all part of the idea of jing. There are several Chinese homonyms for stillness that use this sound. Two that may be most useful here are one that has the “standing” radical built into it and another that combines the radical for “verdant” combined with the idea of “grasping.” The first jing is a classical phrase used to suggest quiet, tranquility, as well as the willpower to pacify a rebellion in an unruly border area. The second jing (identical in pronunciation and tone) suggests calm and stillness, as in a sea after the storm.
Garden viewing had long depended on jing, upon quiet watching—which meant that one literally had to stop walking, still the mind, allow a scene to emerge out of carefully structured greenery in an unhurried fashion. Jing depends upon—and creates—an inner quietude analogous to the introspection of the historian who seeks to make sense out of the discrete, fragmented pieces of evidence that frame a subject of inquiry.
Like a guest who has crossed the garden gate, the student of the past must also slow down, bend a bit to try on an angle of contemplation that may do justice to the complex, shadow-laden terrain. Standing still, one may be able to better fathom one corner of the garden of history. Jing is a quality of attentiveness used in this study to focus on specific sites within the old Singing Crane Garden, and within the gracefully designed Yenching University that thrived in northwest Beijing in the 1930s. Jing also helps illuminate moments of historical memory that offered solace to such beleaguered intellectuals as Zhu Guanqian during their incarceration in the ox pens.
Stillness in the garden, as in history, is short lived. It is necessarily followed by dong—a concept that suggests more than physical motion through shifting landscapes. At its core, this character centers on the idea of “power”—a muscle grown tough by heavy exertion. In garden viewing, dong is a gentle invitation to proceed along enclosed corridors dotted with windows that invite the eye to roam across artfully framed scenes. On the terrain of the Singing Crane Garden, however, another more violent idea of yun dong—“political mobilizations”—has reigned for decades. Especially during the terror of the Red Guards, “movement” was a heavy-handed form of enforced ambulation, of required dislodgement from loyalties to the past, a violent uprooting of historical memories. The historian who would map this landscape has to partake of dong as well. Motion, in this project, implies more than the effort required to gather new sources, add new voices to a complex event such as the conflagration of 1860 or the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. It requires, as this study shows, a reexamination of past certainties and conventional notions about the causality of both war and revolution.
Without jing, neither the garden nor history would make sense. Stillness and contemplation are prerequisites for the creation of meaning. Yet this is also true for dong, the effortful