of terrain and art to the point that the aging Qianlong preferred to walk the portrait gallery of his garden rather than dislodge his body from the inner palaces of the Yuan Ming Yuan.
One of the scenes that captures Qianlong’s territorial and cultural ambitions is entitled Ru gu han jin (Imbibe the past; it contains the present) (figure 16). It depicts the emperor’s private library as a double-roofed pavilion encircled by a group of other halls to encourage the perusal of old scrolls.27 During the reign of this absolute ruler, the state had the right to confiscate any book or any work of art that Qianlong wished to add to the imperial collection. Some were requisitioned because they contained anti-Manchu sentiments, some just because the emperor fancied the writer or the artist. If the emperor chose, he could study the old. If he wanted to, he could fathom how it contained the present. The political assumption was that he defined both. Much like Mao Zedong in his later years, Qianlong imagined himself as both teacher and student. Unlike Mao, however, he never fell into a total contempt for the old. He never forced scholars to erase their attachment to Confucian tradition, to wash their minds. Qianlong never beat them to death just because they took the link between past and present to heart.
Figure 16. Ru gu han jin (Imbibe the past; it contains the present). The eleventh painting in the series “Forty Scenes of the Yuan Ming Yuan.” Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.
The message evoked by the title of this eighteenth-century painting is that traditional Confucian wisdom had much to contribute to the political policies of the Qing regime. This was not simply propaganda for the consumption of Chinese scholar-officials. The same dictum prevailed within the palace compound, where Chinese tutors were hired to instruct young princes in poetry and classics. These arts were meant to refine the moral personality. At the same time, Manchu kinsmen oversaw the young men’s military and Buddhist education. A poet of some skill himself, Qianlong rewarded his children when they became capable of producing classical verses on appropriate themes. To inspire further literary virtuosity, he ordered a special pillar to be installed in the princes’ study hall. It was marked with a tablet inscribed by the emperor himself depicting cranes alighting on pines.28 This pillar was meant to be a visual reminder that future heirs had to soar to ever-greater heights of literary and political accomplishment.
No longer just a symbol of moral rectitude and solitude as it had been for Confucian and Daoist scholars, the crane tablet in the princes’ study hall was an official reminder concerning a moral commitment to serve in the world. Previous generations of ming he zhi shi had cultivated rectitude in shadowy spaces apart from the bright light of political entanglement. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Haidian had become a famed showcase for the display of literary and cultural genius. Cranes would have to learn to sing in gilded cages, or be erased from the garden landscape altogether.
No “cage” was as lavishly gilded in the late Qianlong era as that of the Gentle Spring Garden (Shu Chun Yuan), a pleasure palace belonging to an imperial favorite called He Shen. A Manchu nobleman who served as an imperial bodyguard, He Shen had attracted the eye of the aging emperor. Along with the affection of the doting Qianlong, He Shen acquired the grounds that currently surround the Unnamed Lake at Beijing University. In ironic contrast to its modest name, He Shen’s garden ended up rivaling the splendor of the nearby Yuan Ming Yuan. On a smaller scale, the favorite who rose to the rank of minister used the most expensive building materials to create a sprawling complex of lakes, pavilions, and theaters.
The most ostentatious symbol of splendor was the marble boat that still graces the bank of Unnamed Lake today (figure 17). Like the rock in the center of the Sackler Museum, He Shen’s marble boat stands as a nearly mute witness to the history that unfolded in this corner of China. In an earlier era, when Yenching University occupied this site, He Shen’s garden was a sanctioned subject of study. Hou Renzhi picked up the thread from his teachers and traced the actual documents that granted this Manchu favorite a pleasure palace adjacent to Qianlong. As long as his imperial patron reigned, He Shen could build up the Gentle Spring Garden with unabashed luxury. When Qianlong, the longest reigning ruler in Chinese history, finally died in 1795, He Shen’s star fell with crushing rapidity.
Figure 17. The marble boat from the Shu Chun Yuan owned by the Manchu favorite He Shen (with the pagoda-style water tower in the distance across Unnamed Lake). Photograph by Marc Berger.
Jiaqing (r. 1796–1821) took over the actual reigns of power, which he had held only symbolically during the last year of his father’s life. One of the new emperor’s first measures was to arrest He Shen, confiscate his treasures, and execute him. According to a widely circulated list of He Shen’s holdings, he had built sixty-four pavilions inside the Shu Chun Yuan. The officials who actually searched the property reported that the Manchu favorite had amassed 1,003 houses as well as 357 verandas, apart from thousands of taels of silver and gold.29 This massive corruption case continued to shadow the gardens of Haidian well into the nineteenth century. Even after the Jiaqing emperor divided up He Shen’s pleasure palace among his children, the dread of moral turpitude infected the land. Mianyu, who incorporated the largest section of the Gentle Spring Garden into his own Ming He Yuan, was especially concerned with purging its evil name.
His nephew Yihuan took another route. Especially after the violent destruction of the Singing Crane Garden, the old marble boat spoke to him about the many layers of dreams, hopes, and illusions that seeded the ravaged land. In a poem whose title is best translated as “One Foot on the Isle of Immortals,” Yihuan described as follows the nineteenth-century ruins and the callous grandeur that produced them:
Lofty pavilions once reached the clouds
now topple into uncertain dust.
Towering graves dotted a winding cliff,
today they spill secrets into muddy waters.
Worn walls, cracked columns,
the trace of a timid leveret.
I cut a path through brambles
to unroll a curtain of thorns.
Imagine the minister with one foot on the isle of immortals,
sacred heaven of fleabane and bamboo.
Silk ropes fettered his body,
condemned to death three times.
Phoenix wings in aborted flight
never left this orphaned island.
Every sail leans on the wind that breaks it,
while the guest of ruins cherishes a shattered soul.30
Yihuan’s poetic evocation of this corrupt Manchu favorite does not offer forgiveness. It does not shy away from the fact that He Shen was condemned to death three times. Yihuan has no sympathy for the lavish tastes of the man who owned the marble boat and cracked pavilions. His poem, unlike the contemporary Beida photograph, allows us to encounter the orphaned island in all its desolation. What is being mourned here is not He Shen’s passing but the silencing of a landscape that once harbored so much delight. Why the landscape gets punished for the sins of its owner is a question that Yihuan asked himself over and over again, especially after the destruction of the Yuan Ming Yuan and its surrounding princely gardens.
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