Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden. Vera Schwarcz
as well. Chen Congzhou, a seasoned survivor of many historical upheavals, describes mobility and stillness as two facets of a singular garden experience:
When looked at from a fixed position, the beauty of the changing seasons changes with the mood of man. . . . A garden without water, clouds, shadows, sounds, morning twilight and sunset is a garden devoid of natural beauty. For these, though ethereal, set off the actual scenes of a garden. Motion also exists in repose. Sitting in front of a rockery complete with horizontal and vertical holes . . . one would have an illusion of motion though the hill is at rest. The surface of water looks mirror-calm despite ripples. Likewise, a painting may look dead on the surface but is alive and moving all the same. A thing in repose is motionless if it is without vitality. Hence, we have the key to garden design in the relationship between in-motion [dong] and in-position [jing] garden viewings.25
Three and a half centuries before this Shanghai-based intellectual was free to ruminate about jing and dong, another Chinese scholar had begun to codify the various elements that lend complexity to garden viewing. Ji Cheng was the seventeenth-century author of Yuan Ye (The Craft of Gardens). Ji was an impoverished scholar from the picturesque and wealthy province of Jiangsu. By the time he published his compendium on garden design in 1634, the Ming dynasty was on the verge of collapse. Hard times had reached far south of the Great Wall. Manchu nomads already dreamt of a change in the mandate of heaven. Nonetheless, one decade before the end of the Ming, Ji Cheng took it upon himself to articulate the accumulated wisdom of classical aesthetics specifically as it related to its physical expression in landscaped spaces. He coupled the well-known concept of “yuan” with the less artful expression of “craft” (ye) to suggest practical strategies for garden design. Previous scholars had bought, designed, painted, and versified gardens, while leaving details about beams, stones, waterways, and plantings to professional gardeners who had a lower social status. By contrast, Ji Cheng set out to document technical aspects of design in a way that would flesh out the aspirations of his educated contemporaries. Craft, he argued, was the concrete way to create a garden that would enable one to nourish the mind: “to live as a hermit in the midst of the town.”26
A Daoist or a Buddhist hermit would have no difficulty nourishing the mind in the harmonious setting of a mountain temple. Scholar-officials of the Ming, and later Manchu princes, however, were weighed down by the cares of office and palace politics. Ji Cheng had understood the dilemmas of the rich and the powerful and found ingenious ways to articulate various strategies that would combine motion and stillness, experiences of nature with the numinous beyond.
Drawing upon a large literature that linked gardening arts with artful contemplation, Yuan Ye played with the intermingling of scenery and sentiment in a way that expanded the meaning of both. One specific technique codified by Ji Cheng was “borrowed views.” This was a scheme for drawing into the limited enclosure of the garden trees, mountains, vistas from far beyond so as to inspire the eye and the mind to seek out a vastness within. In borrowing views, a contemporary scholar points out, “the designer’s intentions and scenery are co-arising,” and the garden with “borrowed views” enjoins visitors to new occasions of “co-presenting and approaches their experience half-way in further conjunctions of sentiment and scenery.”27
In effect, Ji Cheng’s crafted structuring of vision created an event out of the physical stuff within and beyond the garden gates. It created a temporal flow, much like the historical narrative of a historian who seeks to anchor her subject in the shifting sands of time. An event is not merely a fixed moment of time when something happens. Even as dramatic and devastating an occurrence as the burning of the Summer Palace cannot be seen in isolation. The historian, too, depends on borrowed views, on the voices and memories of subjects close to the fiery vortex created by Lord Elgin’s troops in October 1860. In this book, I have used the voice of a neighboring witness, Prince Yihuan (1840–1849)—owner of the garden next to the Singing Crane Garden—to paint a more complex picture of what was lost and what endured in northwest Beijing. This history of ruination in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China draws upon the same wellspring of experience as Ji Cheng did, while expanding the idea of “borrowed views” to intellectual history as well.
In Ji’s classic there was ample room for motion and stillness, for presence as well as emptiness. In fact, one of the key themes illustrated in Yuan Ye are structures ranging from wooden pillars to stone tiles—all surrounding a “central void”—a space framed by markers arranged in a way that invites the visitor to contemplate what is missing at the core.28 By 1644, the empty center was no longer a poetic way of envisioning garden design. The “center” of power in Beijing had literally become emptied by rebels and invaders, and a new dynasty was taking shape among the ruins of the old. Here, too, an aspect of landscape design became extended into historical experience.
The “central void” was no longer a space to be contemplated with equanimity, but a trauma to live through, to give voice to. What was once an artful space bounded by pillars and stones had to be mapped with language instead. Historical memory took the place of garden design, much like the fate of Ji Cheng’s own manuscript—which disappeared from circulation until it was discovered by a Chinese scholar at Tokyo’s Imperial University in 1921. Uprooted, dislodged in both time and place, Yuan Ye made its way back to China in the 1930s just as war was breaking out and intellectuals began to cope with political disintegration once again.29 The idea of living “like a hermit in town” became even less tangible than it had been at the end of the Ming. The tenacity of its appeal, however, lies in the very history that spelled disaster for physical gardens. What once flourished in space now took root in the mind.
The devolution of the physical garden can easily be mistaken as death. And indeed, there are many signs in China today of this phenomenon as chronicled in John Minford’s essay “The Chinese Garden: Death of a Symbol.” Minford’s focus is on cluttered, crowded spaces such as apartment houses in Hong Kong and formerly gracious gardens in Suzhou where all that lingers from the past are poetic names, now gutted of affective meaning.30 In contrast to Minford’s bleak assessment, this book reveals an enduring search for cultural meaning in the very places where ruination appeared to be most extreme. On the very site of the destroyed Singing Crane Garden and the ox pens of the Cultural Revolution, the quest for self-knowledge grew ever more acute over time. In the midst of chaos and disorder, seeds of renewed vision arose from the ground up.
What began to wane at the end of the nineteenth century is the very idea of a retreat from politics. Techniques used to muffle the sound of public events temporarily lost their efficacy—and soon thereafter, their legitimacy. Nonetheless, words that framed that longing endured. On the grounds of the old Singing Crane Garden, it was a foreign architect—Henry K. Murphy (1877–1954)—who brought back some of the structural elements codified by Ji Cheng. Using winged roofs and cinnabar pillars, Murphy managed to create Yenching University, a campus for liberal learning where an attachment to historical memory was both sanctioned and valued. Although the Maoist revolution attacked both the ideal of liberal learning and the physical structures of Yenching, the site retained its capacity for “envelopment.” This is a concept developed by philosopher Edward Casey in his book The Fate of Place. Envelopment describes the tenacity of solace in certain locations that goes far beyond material elements. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, Casey calls upon historians to go past “the hard shell of containing surfaces” in order to unearth the process through which a place surrounds us “no longer as an airtight, immobile limit—but as envelopment itself.”31
This history of the Singing Crane Garden uses Casey’s concepts to map a terrain beyond the immobile (and nearly forgotten) shards of an imperial pleasure palace. My goal here is not only to document events that gave birth to Mianyu’s garden in the 1830s and its ruination in the 1860s and 1960s. Rather, I hope to evoke the spaciousness of imagination that survived in the midst of trauma and destruction. Making sense of envelopment in the midst of disaster depends upon a slow-paced, circuitous inquiry. Hou Renzhi hinted at this process in his own book about the gardens of Beijing University. Addressing himself to a new generation of career-minded, politically savvy Chinese students, the aged scholar argued for a change of pace, for a little less dong, a bit more jing—or better yet, for more attentiveness