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Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden
Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture
John Dixon Hunt, Series Editor
This series is dedicated to the study and promotion of a wide variety of approaches to landscape architecture, with emphasis on connections between theory and practice. It includes monographs on key topics in history and theory, descriptions of projects by both established and rising designers, translations of major foreign-language texts, anthologies of theoretical and historical writings on classic issues, and critical writing by members of the profession of landscape architecture. The series was the recipient of the Award of Honor in Communications from the American Society of Landscape Architects, 2006.
Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden
Vera Schwarcz
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Publication of this volume was aided by a grant from Wesleyan University.
Copyright © 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schwarcz, Vera, 1947-
Place and memory in the Singing Crane Garden / Vera Schwarcz.
p. cm. — (Penn studies in landscape architecture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4100-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8122-4100-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Ming He Yuan (Beijing, China)—History. I. Title.
SB466.C53M567 2008
712′.6 0951156—dc22
2007043620
Contents
Introduction: A Garden Made of Language and Time
1 Singing Cranes and Manchu Princes
3 Consciousness in the Dark Earth
4 Red Terror on the Site of Ming He Yuan
5 Spaciousness Regained in the Museum
Conclusion: The Past’s Tiered Continuum
Preface
Thinking about gardens leads naturally to an alchemy of mind.
—Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight
It is rare to be able to date the birth of a book. I feel grateful that I can point to the day, month, and hour: October 16, 1993–10:30 A.M. A brisk wind was blowing this Saturday across Beijing University. I was taking a walk on wooded paths in the northwest corner of campus I have come to know intimately over the past twenty-five years. I had lived at Beida (the shortened name of Beijing University), I had returned for yearly visits, and I had written about its history in the 1910s and 1920s. This morning in October, I was unprepared for discovery. I was just strolling and thinking about the dense layers of friendship that bind me to this familiar ground.
Suddenly I was accosted by a new building. It was located among the old Yenching University structures that I knew quite well. They connected the Beida of the Communist era back to the distinguished institution of liberal learning founded by American missionaries in the 1920s. Those buildings have more beauty, more history than the cement dormitories and classrooms built after 1949. The new building blended into the Yenching style, yet was far more graceful in its proportions, in the details of the paintings under its winged roofs. When I came to the front of the building I was surprised by the sign: Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology. How could this museum appear so suddenly? After all, I knew each part of this campus like the palm of my hand. True, I had not returned for a few years after the shock that followed the violent suppression of student demonstrations in June 1989.
I entered the museum to chat with the ticket seller. It being Saturday, I was not carrying money, in keeping with my practice as an observant Jew. Having no cash, I had more time for conversation. In the colloquial language that has become one of my “mother tongues,” I asked the old man in the ticket booth: “What was here before? This is my mu xiao [my “mother school”—I chose the Chinese intentionally to signal my intimacy with our shared space]. I know it too well for such a surprise!” The septuagenarian with a kind smile full of wrinkles turned out to be a retired manual laborer, a former groundskeeper at Beida. He answered me as if we had been old friends: “Oh, this was the place of the niu peng. The shacks where they herded all those brainy professors during the Cultural Revolution.”
Niu peng—the “ox pens.” This then was the site that my old friends at Beida had hinted about so often, yet had refused to identify over two decades of friendship and interviews.
