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 . . .
—Wendell Berry, “The Thought of Something Else”
You do not have to be a Confucian scholar or a Manchu prince to know the value of a place where thought can take its shape at ease. Wendell Berry, a contemporary American poet of the South, likens the garden to water in a pitcher. Nothing is simpler, less adorned, less hard to find, yet more difficult to design. A garden, if well planned, is a place where one can get away from the clutter of daily life. An effective garden scours the mind and the soul. Contemplating what the Chinese call the “bones” of the garden—be they rocks, trees, water, or flowers—one is brought close to the architecture of the self. If one is truly fortunate, one is able to reshape one’s innermost being in the presence of the garden.
This transformation was the goal and privilege of men like Mianyu and Yihuan. What made gardens even more precious in their lifetime was the fact that quietude of mind was hard won and difficult to hold on to. The more violent the events that marked their days, the more tenacious became the dream of a place where thought could take shape like water in a pitcher. Such a longing for stillness in the midst of chaos may be glimpsed visually in the photographs of Chinese gardens taken by Oswald Siren at the end of World War II. His masterful study, Gardens of China, was first published in 1949 on the eve of Mao Zedong’s conquest of the mainland. Siren’s camera captured possibilities for reflections that were being destroyed by political upheaval. In the midst of war and revolution, these black-and-white images convey both the decay of actual gardens as well as the imperishable ideals that nurtured their beauty.
Figure 9. “Gourd-shaped garden gateway in Cheng Wang Fu,” Beijing. Photographed by Oswald Siren for The Gardens of China (New York, 1949), p. 78.
One particular image speaks volumes about the subtle angles of light needed to see the garden in its own time. Simply labeled “Gourd-shaped garden gateway in Cheng Wang Fu, Peking,” this photograph beckons the viewer to savor the spaciousness of historical images (figure 9). At first glance, you might think this is a study of gate architecture since the dark center of the image is indeed an artful opening that suggests an upright vegetable. It is not the gourd, however, that illuminates the image. The slanting sunlight from the end of the corridor beyond the gate is the real focus here. Peeling beams guard the passage, like so many silent witnesses to a slow-paced journey. The luminosity of the afternoon pours out of the gourd-gate with unrestrained generosity. It casts a bright halo on two slabs of well-worn rock. The “brush-handle” pattern of the outer balustrade echoes the bamboo grove that thrives beyond the gate.1
“Come in, amble,” the image says. “Come in, stay a while,” the garden says. “Come in, look beyond the material remains of the past,” history says. Siren’s gourd-shaped gateway is one remnant of the vanished world of Cheng Wang Fu. Its aged wood beams, like the browning carapace of the Pavilion of Winged Eaves before 1998, convey the barest hint of the splendor that once reigned in the gracious dwelling of Prince Cheng (Yunxing, 1752–1823), an uncle of the owner of the Singing Crane Garden. Both Cheng Wang Fu and the Ming He Yuan have vanished from the Chinese landscape. What remains of these pleasure palaces is nothing but slanting afternoon light. Siren’s gift for indirect illumination inspires us to approach the garden slowly, mindful of thoughts that took shape here in times of upheaval and ravage.
To enter the world of the garden, it is not enough to document ownership and decay. One must, as Oswald Siren showed, take time for detours in the realm of the imagination. So much is missing from the material evidence of the past on the site of imperial gardens. So much depends on approaching absence with care. Edward Casey, in a different context, describes this journey as “in-dwelling”—a giving over of the self to the multilayered temporalities housed by the garden. This is not a space made up of only trees, water, and stone. It is, above all, a mood: “In gardens mood is an intrinsic feature, something that belongs to our experience of them. . . . In an empowered garden, I almost reside, yet I also walk about. . . . I dwell in multiple modes, in several registers and on many levels. This level leaves me on the edge of dwelling, just as gardens take me to the edge between built and natural places, or rather are that very edge.”2 In-dwelling, in this sense, is a full-body experience, not merely an analytical goal. It enables one to go to the very edge of the familiar (be that in language or in space) and explore new modes of reflection.
Chinese gardens were designed to facilitate reflection. This goal is part and parcel of each element incorporated within the enclosure of the yuan. To walk the garden’s paths, to contemplate its shifting vistas, was to embark upon an inner journey in which intentionally layered grounds
