opposite the crossed-out scholar, I make out another faded painting. In this one, the scholar keeps walking on a marble bridge. Two weeping willows lean over, as if to guide and welcome the solitary guest. Despite the stains and cracks, this image testifies to another kind of link to history and to memory. It is not only violence and brutality that weaves together Wang Yao’s story with that of a long-dead Manchu prince. It is also a capacity to endure, to go on, to take solace from nature’s rhythms and actually breathe new life into the ashes of old culture. My history of the Singing Crane Garden cannot accomplish all that, but I can mark the places and the lives that thrived in the shadows of its history.
Back at my dormitory, after this stroll full of surprises and discoveries, I sit down to record what I have heard and seen. I find that my own words fail to do justice to the stories shared by Yue Shengyang, Jiao Xiong, and Wang Yao’s widow. As often before, I find myself turning to poetry, especially to the verses of Yihuan, who managed to give voice to quietude despite the deafening din of political upheaval that surrounded him daily:
If you love pure shadows
cling to the shore where the ash tree thrives
If you ache for your lost hut
lean on stone hewn in blameless mountains
Today, a broad and straight road opens
to drum beat and cymbal music.
Enfolded by cliffs, you can still follow a serpentine path,
shunning all that is coarse
For humble dwelling, three pillars suffice,
there is no joy like leaving entanglement behind.14
Entitled simply “Ou cheng” (By Accident), this poem captures both the genuine emotion as well as the posturing that thrived in imperial gardens. It also speaks to my own “accidental” discovery of an old connection to Ming He Yuan. Prince Yihuan, like Mianyu (and even Wang Yao, during the years when he lived safely among his books), had much more than a humble dwelling with three pillars. These men were not Daoist hermits or Buddhist monks. Nonetheless, each loved pure shadows in his own way. Each clung to some lakeshore where the ash tree thrives. Each had sought a path around the highway of history, away from the drumbeat of political violence. Though unsuccessful, they left enough literary and artistic remains that I am able to piece together a vision of refuge that still lingers on in the hamlet of Haidian.
Liquid Delight in the Shallow Sea
It was not an accident, of course, that Manchu emperors and princes were drawn to this site. The village of Haidian lay on the outskirts of the imperial city and was long known for its gracious gardens. Already in the Ming dynasty, scholars and imperial kin had come to find refuge here. What Haidian had to offer was what garden builders needed the most: water. Called “liquid delight,” this was the essential prerequisite for landscape design, as could be glimpsed even in the blue hues added to Yue Shengyang’s map of the Ming He Yuan ruins. Without water, nothing grew. With water, it was not only trees and flowers that flourished. It was also the contemplative mind that drew sustenance here from vistas of liquid stillness. Skillfully channeled waterfalls and artfully crafted fishponds became the hallmarks of Haidian. Mighty boulders were excavated and imported from the shores of Taihu, a southern lake renowned for strange-shaped rocks that added “boniness” to the garden. Undulating hills were created artificially, by moving mounds of earth, as can be seen beneath the Yi Ran Ting today.
Called the Shallow Sea, this northwest corner of metropolitan Beijing remains well endowed with underground springs even today. This phenomenon, too, is no accident of nature. It took informed geographers and geologists to locate and preserve these source springs, especially in the Maoist years of the communist regime, when building the new was a political priority and destroying the old an ideological obligation. Few cared, or dared, to voice their concern for the waters that nourished classical gardens.
One of those who did was Hou Renzhi, who recalled with fondness the gracious setting of Yenching University before it became part of the new Beida. Even when nostalgia for pre-liberation garden design was forbidden, he found a way to argue for and record the reopening of a Qing dynasty water channel in the early 1950s. Beijing University had just been moved out of the center of the city to Yan Yuan (the garden name for Yenching University). Hou Renzhi mobilized and joined a group of students to dredge one of the rivers of Haidian:
I myself took part in the action and remember that in one afternoon when the filthy mud in the opening had all been out, a young student was so excited that he went voluntarily on all fours through the opening from the west side to the east. His passing through proved that the waterway was completely cleaned. Although he was covered all over with mud, he jumped and laughed jubilantly together with us. This little but dramatic scene of joy impressed me so much that it remains fresh in my mind. The upper part of the river has now changed direction thus enabling the water to flow into the campus.15
Hou Renzhi’s own delight in the muddy student reflects the commitment of a historical geographer to the unique qualities of the ground beneath his feet. It was still more than three decades before his views would be consulted in the design and naming of the Sackler Museum gardens built upon the site of the old Ming He Yuan. This celebration of physical labor also took place a half a decade before the eminent scholar would be condemned as a “rightist” (in 1957) and almost a decade before his own incarceration in the niu peng.
In the early 1950s, it was still possible for intellectuals to savor connectedness to the soil. Traditional Chinese culture had long sanctioned the scholars’ interest in water, in rocks, in trees, in the simple life that so attracted Yihuan when he longed to leave entanglements behind. Tuan Yi-fu, a Chinese geographer who developed his career in America, summarized this attachment to the local in terms of the character tu, meaning connection to locality, to hearth, to a world bounded by physical boundaries. Far from being opposed to “cosmos,” this tu can help us “appreciate intelligently our culture and landscape.”16 Tuan, unlike Hou Renzhi, lives in an intellectual environment in which he is free to advocate the ideal of a “cosmopolitan hearth.” Scholars in Mao’s China—even when willing to get down into the mud to clear old water channels—were condemned for the knowledge that linked soil, culture, and tradition to the legacy of artful garden design.
In the late Ming dynasty, by contrast, when the political fate of the rulers of Beijing looked quite bleak, Ji Cheng found an opportune moment to sum up the art of gardening and its connection to local resources. His Yuan Ye dwells on many details about “borrowed” scenery and how it could be used to design contemplative spaces. The starting point of all garden craft, according to Ji, lay in the same element that Hou Renzhi still treasured in the 1950s—water: “Before beginning to dig one should investigate the sources and note how the water flows. Where it flows in an open channel one builds the pavilion on posts. If one throws a bridge over the water one may erect the study pavilion on the opposite bank. If one piles up stones to form a surrounding wall, it may seem as if one lived among mountains.”17
The goal of the garden was to create a connection to the realm of nature beyond its gates. Ji Cheng, mindful of the worldly cares of his wealthy patrons, understood how they longed to live as if they were among the mountains. He did not need poems, like those that Yihuan composed in the nineteenth century, to understand the crushing burdens of politics. His Yuan Ye brought to life a vision of refuge alongside the realities of obligation that surrounded late Ming scholar-officials. From bamboo, which symbolized strength in the midst of adversity, to the evergreen pines that conveyed moral rectitude, the classical Chinese garden was filled with elements designed to comfort the mind’s eye in times of distress.
Even such a small feature as a bracket that sustained
