the new rulers of China. One Confucian scholar described the site—and indirectly, his outrage at the brutal destructiveness of the Manchu conquest—as follows.
Desolate with broken furrows and barren hills and covered with dusty crawling weeds, the place in its better days used to have verandas bright with sunshine and pavilions bathed in moonlight, cool balconies in summer days and warm houses in winter. The present dried pond, treadless paths, and snakes’ and foxes’ caves were once described by scholars and artists as places associated with poetry and delicate ladies and with archaic boats and cliffs in paintings. In place of the lotus flower building, the banks of pine trees, and the painted pleasure boats berthing against the houses, there are only houses with corroded beams and vast openings in the roofs. In the presence of such a miserable scene, one feels inevitably very sad. There is only one thing left behind. That is a huge stone standing as formerly in front of the courtyard and shaded by a Chinese juniper tree.22
The same stone that sits so proudly in the center of the Sackler courtyard today had more evocative powers in a time of violence and disarray. Set against dried ponds, it was a visual reminder that “liquid delight” flows only when scholars are well treasured. The huge stone and the juniper stand as witness to what endures when beauty has been crushed by violent events. If the stone could speak, perhaps it would give testimony. In the words of T. S. Eliot, whose “Waste Land” depicts a more modern desolation, it would cry out:
Son of man . . .
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images . . .
There is shadow under this red rock,
Come in under the shadow of this red rock,
And I will show you something . . .
I will show you fear in a handful of dust . . .23
Fear was more than a handful of dust on the grounds of the old Singing Crane Garden. Two centuries before Lord Elgin’s troops torched the princely gardens of the Qing, violence already haunted this corner of northwest Beijing. As shadowy places of refuge became scarce, rocks were left to speak a language previously cherished by poets, scholars, and garden designers alike.
One Foot on the Island of Immortals
When the Manchus launched their plans for conquest in the 1620s, they had hoped to present themselves as Confucian pacifiers of the realm. Mindful of the political disillusionment of scholar-officials such as Mi Wanzhong, they had named their dynasty Qing, “purity,” to connote a breath of fresh air after the supposedly “bright” Ming that ended up being ruled by thoroughly corrupt Chinese emperors. The Manchus even organized an army called the “Green Standard,” made up of ethnically Chinese forces, so the conquest would not look like an invasion. For a while, a minority of Ming intellectuals was persuaded that the new rulers offered an opportunity to cleanse and revive the Mandate of Heaven. When news of atrocities began to filter in from central China in 1644–46, the tide quickly turned. By that time, the Manchus were determined to stay and use force to enforce the new mandate.
In Beijing, the urge to dominate both politically and culturally was manifest in the rapid transformation of the Forbidden City into the administrative nerve center of the new empire. On the outskirts of Beijing, a different kind of domination and acculturation took place. Here, the Manchu rulers sought to take advantage of natural resources to create their own space of refuge, especially for times when the court could not travel back to the ancestral hunting grounds of Manchuria. The Kangxi emperor, who reigned from 1662 to 1723, was the first Manchu ruler to commit major resources to the building of a Garden of Perfect Brightness in the hamlet of Haidian. In keeping with his vision of himself as a World Pacifier (in both Confucian and Buddhist terms) he chose to name his place Yuan Ming Yuan—as an allusion to the “round” (all encompassing) and “brilliant” (far-reaching) illumination of Buddhist wisdom. His grandson, Qianlong, expanded the grounds until they became the largest single building project of the Qing dynasty. With an almost unlimited supply of silver, gold, and wood requisitioned from commoners and scholar-officials, he completely altered the natural and cultural terrain of the hamlet once known as the Shallow Sea. The disgraced Ming dynasty scholar Mi Wanzhong had been content to take a “spoon” of water from Haidian to create his Shao Yuan. The emperor Qianlong, by contrast, had an army of designers and diggers who did not rest until they brought to life a veritable sea—the central, vast lake of Yuan Ming Yuan called Fu Hai, or “Ocean of Blessings.”
The imperial will to overcome natural limitations in order to create a vast showcase for pleasure led to the incorporation of several other gardens into the enclosure of Yuan Ming Yuan. Starting with the Nine Islands of Peace (Jiuzhou Qingyan) built around a smaller lake called Back Lake (Hou Hu), Qianlong took over the Eternal Spring Garden (Changchun Yuan) in 1749 and the Variegated Spring Garden (Qichun Yuan) in 1751. Thus he expanded and created an ever more brilliant, ever more grandiose Garden of Perfect Brightness. And if the avaricious incorporation of smaller Chinese gardens into this expansive refuge was not enough, Qianlong also launched the building project of a huge European-style garden called the Palace of Balanced and Amazing Pleasures (Xieqi qu) designed by Italian and French Jesuits. The most prominent designer was Father Guiseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), who had delighted the great monarch with drawings of Italian and French palaces and fountains. With Castiglione’s designs, Qianlong obtained a massive pleasure compound on the scale of Versailles—with a vigor all its own.
The Manchu ruler shared the French king’s desire to use grandly designed spaces to enforce political hegemony. At the same time, the Qing ruler followed a cultural script that had its own aesthetic cadence. The geometric formality of seventeenth-century French gardens conveyed, in the words of historian Chandra Mukerji, the military ambitions of state over society. A walk in these gardens was “neither casual nor apolitical. It was an element of the geopolitics of the period . . . the petit parc embodied the territorial, optimistic and technical expertise on which French military geopolitical action was based.”24 The total effect of Versailles was thus quite different from the aesthetic playfulness of the Yuan Ming Yuan. The near total isolation of state from society in Qing China may account for some of the fluidity of design possible in this corner of northwest Beijing. More important, Qianlong was a genius at accumulating, digesting, and reinterpreting various aesthetic traditions ranging from the Daoist to the Confucian, from the Buddhist to the baroque. The result, according to British biologist Joseph Needman, was a landscape architecture that far from “imprisoning and constraining Nature, actually flows along with it.”25
This “flow” was no accident. More than a space to display power, the imperial gardens functioned as a reprieve from the burdens of rule. Qianlong himself defined this ideal when he wrote: “Every emperor and ruler, when he has retired from audience, and has finished his public duties, must have a garden in which he may stroll, look around and relax his heart. If he has a suitable place for this, it will refresh his mind and regulate his emotions. But if he has not, he will become engrossed in sensual pleasures and lose his will and power.”26 Refreshing the mind was a different kind of necessity than the geopolitical calculations that occupied the heart of Versailles. Built to awe Chinese and Western visitors alike, the Yuan Ming Yuan nonetheless was large enough and meandering enough to accommodate a multiplicity of political and spiritual agendas. A center for Daoist contemplation, Buddhist sutra recitation, ancestor worship, and the Confucian arts of painting and poetry, Qianlong’s Haidian palace became a vessel to accommodate many seas and continents, both metaphorical and physical.
Not satisfied with creating worlds in space, Qianlong also commissioned artists to paint forty of his favorite scenes from the Yuan Ming Yuan. Father Jean Denis Attiret was one of a large group of Western and Chinese artists assigned to immortalizing the Garden of Perfect Brightness. Each “portrait” was first assembled carefully in space, then meticulously re-evoked with
