made at home there. What Casey describes as the feeling of the “edge of dwelling” was experienced in a more upsetting fashion by Father Jean Denis Attiret (1702–1768), one of the first Westerners exposed to Qianlong’s Summer Palace. A Jesuit who sought to bring the light of Christianity to the Qing court, Attiret was unprepared for the shadowy, odd spaces that thrived on the outskirts of Beijing. He stayed on as court painter and took the time to notice the unruly grace that enabled (indeed forced) new paths for reflection to develop in this strange land. He wrote back home to an audience unfamiliar with Chinese aesthetics. Contrasting what he saw in northwest Beijing with the mannered landscapes of Europe, Attiret concluded that Chinese gardens thrive on “Beautiful Disorder and wandering as far as possible from all Rules of Art . . . when you read this, you will be apt to imagine such Works as very ridiculous, and they must have a very bad Effect on the Eye: but once you see them, you would find it otherwise and would admire the Art, with which all this irregularity is conducted.”3 “Beautiful disorder” captured the subtle transition from chaos to cosmos attempted on the grounds of Ming He Yuan as well. A historian who would give voice to this terrain must also make room for all kinds of “irregularity”—for a flow of time that moves in and out of the language of memory, in and out of peace and war.
The Singing Crane Garden cannot be conceived primarily as a point in space. Rather it must be evoked in motion, through the movement of the mind’s eye, as it were. One way to begin that journey may be to follow the shifting meanings of the word “crane”—a bird whose name was anything but an accidental adornment to Mianyu’s retreat in northwest Beijing. The Manchu prince went as far as to commission the building of a whole section of the garden to house these large birds, known for heart-wrenching cries during their mating season. But it was not the physical birds that added reflective depths to Ming He Yuan. It was the visitor’s presumed familiarity with all the classical poetry and art that gave these creatures wings in the reflective consciousness.
The ancient classic Yi Jing (The Book of Changes) was the first to note the unique associations of ming he. From this earliest text, the crane stands out because of its preference for solitary spaces. The song of the crane, according to the Yi Jing, ‘“thrives in the shade, while tigers roar on mountains.”4 This contrast between the boisterous tiger and the reticent crane continued to enrich Chinese cultural imagination in later centuries to the point that a special term, “crying crane scholar” (he ming zhi shi), developed during the Han dynasty to refer to men of learning who developed their talents—their song, as it were—in the “shade,” away from the manifest rewards of political life.
Renowned for their moral character and careful use of language, such scholars must have appealed to Mianyu, a Manchu prince who sought to be an exemplar of Confucian virtues as well. He ming zhi shi were learned men who measured out speech, ethics, and aesthetics with exquisite care in realms beyond politics. A Han dynasty ruler was counseled by his advisers “to reject all those ministers who speak smooth words and to search far and wide for the Crying Crane Scholars.”5 Like hermits of old, he ming zhi shi were prized because they displayed the soul’s music in obscure, lonely places where “only children follow.” Sequestered from the din of public events, these men were certain that their woes would find a meaningful echo in the world. Purity of mind and a high threshold for solitude (indeed loneliness) were attributes of the crane that poets, artists, and garden builders sought to appropriate. Du Mu (803–853), a Tang dynasty luminary, phrased this longing as follows:
With pure note, he welcomes the evening moon,
With sad thoughts, he stands on cold bulrush.
Beneath jasper clouds, moving and stopping restlessly,
To him the spirit of the white egret is coarse.
All day long without the companionship of a flock,
By the side of the gully he laments his shadow’s solitude.6
In a more contemporary idiom, Taiwanese painter Chen Ch’i-kuan tried to capture the crane’s movements with a sparse calligraphy brush. Economic, bold strokes are used to lift the huge bird off the ground. Unlike the stiff, bold, nearly livid grus japonesis in the ceiling of the renovated Yi Ran Ting pavilion behind the Sackler Museum, Chen’s masterful scroll is a visual pathway through timelessness. Chen’s crane is nothing but bone, sinew, and ink. What was once an elongated leg becomes an arched head poised for cutting air. The cumbersome, earth-bound body has given way to largely empty space in which the painter allows himself a few bold scratches of the brush, as the crane soars, “its body and wings disappearing above the leaves with only dangling legs in the album. As the great bird glides, it fills three double-leaves! There is limitless imagination and joy in these powerful forms.”7
To bring the Singing Crane Garden to life requires a similar effort. I was fortunate to savor this possibility on May 10, 1998, when I walked the periphery of the old Ming He Yuan in the company of two scholars, Jiao Xiong and Yue Shenyang. Educated men scorched by China’s recent history, they opened for me vistas for reflection about gardens, cranes, historical tragedy, and much else along the way.
If You Love Pure Shadows
When we started our stroll on that windy spring morning, I had no way of knowing what winged moments of apprehension were to come upon us. I was prepared for scholarly conversation, not for the wordless understanding that ruined gardens such as the Singing Crane Garden demand, and foster. My two companions were polite, initially reserved. The older gentleman, Jiao Xiong, was a descendant of gardeners who once worked in the imperial Summer Palace. The younger man, Yue Shengyang, was a historical geographer who received his doctorate in Japan. I knew that Mr. Jiao was a well-known researcher about the history of princely gardens in northwest Beijing. I had seen some of his artful evocation of their landscapes in ink and brush. Dr. Yue arrived for our stroll with a gift: a map of the ruins of Ming He Yuan currently visible on the campus of Beijing University (figure 10). This careful drawing was faithful to the lay of the land and even evoked its former beauty by the nearly uninterrupted flow of water that Yue Shenyang conveyed in artful blue.
Following this map, we started out in the back of the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology, a site whose history I knew better than my companions. I had spent the previous year in interviews about Arthur Sackler and his complex connection to Beijing University. I shared this history to set my companions at ease, to signal that I understood the darker past of the Cultural Revolution, that I was familiar with the “ox pens” buried beneath these grounds. My goal was to invite them to share their own ruminations, if they so chose. Along the walk, they did.
Our first stop was a partly submerged rock platform. Yue Shengyang identified this as a piece of a moon viewing the terrace from the Ming He Yuan. Crossing a small alley we came to Red Lake (Hong Chi), a pool renamed to draw attention to Beida’s love of Chairman Mao. On the shores of Red Lake we came upon the remains of a moon gate from the nineteenth century. No afternoon light graced its empty, brittle wooden frame. The spaciousness of reflection that had been available to Oswald Siren in war-torn China had been erased from this corner of the Beijing University campus.
Figure 10. Map of the ruins of Singing Crane Garden as drawn for the author by Yue Shengyang in May 1998. Sites 1 and 2 lie on the north side of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology. Site 16 marks the location of the former home of Wang Yao, while site 17 designates the marble bridge still in use today.
Once past this gate, we proceeded to a little island, which may have been one of the artificial features designed by Mianyu. It was on a hill near a weed-choked pond that Yue Shengyang whispered something about the forgotten history beneath this ground: “This was a preferred spot
