Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden. Vera Schwarcz
had reigned for so long: “As you roam around the Unnamed Lake, appreciating the scenic beauty reflected in the water and feeling relaxed and delighted after hours of intensive study, have you ever asked yourself how the lake came to be what it is? And when you step out of the library or the laboratory and stroll by yourself, totally refreshed, among woods surrounding the lake, have you ever wondered who built the secluded paths?”32
Give Voice to the Past
Hou Renzhi asked these questions in the 1980s, when Beijing University was just beginning to recover from the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. The Pavilion of Winged Eaves had not yet been renovated. It sat as a mute, browning witness to a past that had no place in the official recollections of the university. Plans for the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology had not been finalized, though discussions between party officials and the foreign donor had begun. Professor Hou was an enthusiastic supporter of the project, a consultant about the history of the Singing Crane Garden and a quiet accomplice to the unmentionability of the ox pens that had occupied these grounds in the recent past. All that Hou Renzhi could do is orient the forthcoming project in relationship to the landscape he knew so well: “A new exhibition hall for archaeology is to be built southwest of the Yi Ran Pavilion with the aid of the American Dr. Sackler Foundation. This is a step forward in the remarkable progress made recently by our university in its international exchange programs.”33
This cheerful tone was meant to encourage officials to proceed with the project, despite their reservations about bringing funding from the capitalist West onto the Beida campus. In the early 1980s, Hou Renzhi could not have anticipated the derailment—and near death—of the Sackler Museum project in the wake of the political turbulence of 1989. All that the learned geographer could do is to place markers, a framework of physically anchored historical memory, around the museum project. The new archaeology museum, Hou Renzhi eagerly noted, would be linked in spirit and in location to the Yenching archaeology department, which had been dismantled and absorbed by the new Beijing University after the establishment of communist rule in 1949. With the new museum, Hou Renzhi foresaw, would come further sanctions for a fuller, scholarly engagement with a past that had been so often attacked.
After the opening of the Sackler Museum in May 1993, Beijing University’s archaeology department did indeed fulfill the muted hopes expressed a decade earlier. In fact, when the museum mounted an exhibition of the history of archeological studies in Beijing, the visual link between past and present was made amply clear. The old Yenching exhibition hall was portrayed alongside the new museum with the aid of classical Chinese phrases. An aged, gray stone structure seemed to reach out to the colorful, winged roof of the Sackler institution while a Confucian saying guided the viewer in interpreting the message: wen gu er zhi xin, ji wan kai lai—“cherish the past to know the present, continue to march toward the future.” Nine carefully chosen Chinese characters summed up the public version of historical memory at Peking University. Yes, the past is to be treasured, but only if it leads to a full-hearted appreciation of the new. The point was to move forward, with confidence—and one assumes, faith in a socialist future shaped by the guidance of the Communist Party. The new museum of art and archaeology served as a useful framework for an inspirational narrative about a history in which shadows had to remain unnamed.
This didactic message had nothing to say about the ravage that destroyed the old Summer Palace, or about Henry Murphy’s efforts to gather relics in northwest Beijing. The new archaeology museum was designed, as we shall see, as a gracious home for shards of the ancient past. At the same time, it had to remain reticent about what happened to those remnants during the Cultural Revolution, what happened to scholars who were attacked simply for doing research about a past that had been condemned as “feudal” and as “bourgeois.” A new museum was born out of a covenant to say little about the destructions that surrounded it.
Memory and mourning had no place in the new, beautiful building that stood on the grounds of the Singing Crane Garden. To go beyond the formulaic injunction of wen gu er zhi xi, ji wang kai lai, one has to turn to older voices that once surrounded the Ming He Yuan. One such voice that helps illuminate the past is that of Prince Yihuan, nephew and neighbor of the owner of the Singing Crane Garden. In the decades after the ravage of 1860, this younger Manchu prince continued to visit the ruined gardens of northwest Beijing in a conscious effort to articulate a grief that had no room in the public life of the Qing dynasty. A man deeply implicated in the politics of his day, Yihuan nonetheless knew that poetry was the only way to mark the void that remained in China’s landscape and identity in the wake of historical trauma. In a work entitled “Visiting Ming He Yuan in the Company of My Ninth Brother,” he instructs a still younger man in the art of memory and mourning:
Airy pavilions and stately halls—
ground into oblivion.
White mulberries swallowed by the blackest seas,
and you don’t grieve?
Still seeking miracles? A rescuing dragon?
Nothing but bitter dreams.
No matter how fierce the tiger of regret,
we can defy it still.
Come, sit under these winged eaves,
give voice to what is gone.34
Written in the fall of 1860, this poem reaches beyond the grounds of the Singing Crane Garden. It comes forward to challenge and console those who seek knowledge of a missing past. Unlike the classical slogans that framed the exhibition about archaeological studies in the Sackler Museum, this use of classical language leaves room for doubt, for grief, for all the ruins that have no home in physical structures. The garden that was destroyed in space acquired a second life in the words of those committed to give voice to what is gone.
A historian of ruined landscapes, like Prince Yihuan, has to translate a past of wood and stone into a tapestry of words. The sinologist Frederick Mote suggested that this task is made easier for us by the Chinese tradition itself, which had long accustomed itself to translation from the broken remains of living history to the fragile, enduring medium of linguistic narrative. China, Mote notes, has the longest, most complex documentation of mankind’s past precisely because it “constantly scrutinized the past as recorded in words and caused it to function in the life of the present.”35 The problem that became acute on the site of the Singing Crane Garden was how to revive the past through words that had also come under attack.
Much like the Singing Crane Garden in its time, a narrative that would contain its ravage and its renewal needs a framework that goes beyond conventional history. Were the narrative too close to fiery events, memory would have no room to speak its halting tale. Dori Laub, a psychiatrist who has written about the “art of trauma,” suggests ways to listen to what is being said, and also silenced, by the words of history: “Indirect pointing to past meanings is an essential element in the art of trauma, in which the aim is not to come to an ‘objectively real’ depiction of an event but to create a protected space wherein the remembrance of traumatic experience can begin, if only haltingly, to occur.”36
I also used indirect pointing in this study by moving my narrative back and forth around the fulcrum that is the Singing Crane Garden. I have not shied away from the traumatic events that changed the shape of the garden and the fate of those who lived and studied on its terrain. At the same time, I have chosen to approach those events, through the voices and lives of a wide range of dramatis personae. Some were close to the epicenter of disaster, some quite far away. My goal has been to bring the past forward in time. Like the poet Yang Lian, I have been lingering among ruins (and ruined lives) not for the sake of death, but to illuminate a landscape that remains shadowy even today.
Chapter 1
Singing Cranes and Manchu Princes
a place where thought
can take its shape
as quietly in the mind
as water in a pitcher . . .