intellectuals in China had spent time in the niu peng. I had heard much whispering about the brutalities committed in the first prison, set up at Beida. But I never knew exactly where my friends had suffered their humiliation and terror.
On this day of Shabbat, I backed away from the Sackler Museum and went to sit in a nearby pavilion, also new. A flood of questions came to my mind: How does Jewish money (I knew of Arthur Sackler’s background) come to provide a haven for architectural fragments that survived the Cultural Revolution? Is it an atrocity to have an art museum on the very ground where there had been so much suffering? Can art ever be a meaningful container for historical trauma? In the next hour I faced all the dilemmas that frame this book. I knew before I left the garden setting outside the Sackler Museum that I was willing to dedicate years to wrestling with those dilemmas. Even without being a historical geographer, I knew that I wanted to write a narrative about this layered terrain. In my journal, on Sunday night, I wrote: “A sense of congealed time, blood on the surface of deep waters. I bring with me a lot of Jewish history. I also realize with gratitude that a new subject has found me on my first Shabbat back in China. The new building, oddly perfect. Its simple doors studded with gilded knobs, like the noblemen’s mansions of old. The marble Qing sundial in front of the Sackler—a remnant of the old Yuan Ming Yuan (Summer Palace). A coming-out of Beida’s hidden treasures. And the ache. The guard who speaks about the ox pens, does he hear all the whispered cries behind the art? Inside the museum today, I glimpsed a broken vessel. The careful piecing together of a broken past. This is my own task now.”
In the weeks following the discovery of the new Sackler Museum I had ample occasion to savor what Diane Ackerman called “an alchemy of mind.” Different fragments of my past connection to Beida began to coalesce into a new angle of vision about both Chinese space and Chinese time. I did not yet know that my subject would become the garden. I had noticed only the museum. I had just begun to reconstruct the fabric of its connectedness to the painful events of the 1960s. The idea of a special refuge in the midst of terror had not become central to my thinking yet. Ming He Yuan—the Singing Crane Garden with its own history of ruination and remembrance in the nineteenth century—would take root in my mind later. For now, I concentrated on the museum and the ox pens. That was alchemy enough to start with.
Drawing upon many years of trusted intimacy at Beida, I used my remaining weeks in 1993 to interview as many of the old professors still alive who recalled, and were willing to talk about, their experiences during the Cultural Revolution. In less than twenty days, I was privileged to talk at length with historian Zhou Yiliang, biologist Chen Yuezeng, economist Chen Zhenhan, and the well-known Sanskrit scholar Ji Xianlin. Having previously written a book based on oral history, I found that doors of conversations opened more readily than I had expected. Professor Ji brought a unique intensity to our conversations. He led me to understand that he was planning to write his own memoir of the ox pens at Beida, but that the time was not yet ripe. In 1998, when this work, Niu peng za yi (Recollections of the Ox Pen), saw the light of day, my task in writing this book became much easier.
Ji Xianlin’s writing filled in one layer of the ground I came to explore in this book. An older strata was illuminated for me by the work and friendship of Hou Renzhi, the eminent geographer who pioneered the historiography of Beijing. A graduate of Yenching University, Professor Hou brought to his studies a scrupulous and lively imagination. His book Yan Yuan Shihua (Tales from Yan Yuan Garden) became my guide in this project. His detailed evocation of the Singing Crane Garden led me to want to know more about the Manchu noblemen who built up this terrain in the nineteenth century. Hou Renzhi’s friendship and interest in my work opened paths of inquiry I could not have imagined possible in October 1993. Aware that I wanted to link the old Ming He Yuan to the history of the ox pens and the Sackler Museum, he introduced me to two scholars who quite literally changed the shape of this book: Jiao Xiong and Yue Shengyang.
Jiao Xiong is a retired archivist who specializes in garden history. He is also a talented painter who agreed to reproduce for me the topography of all the princely gardens in northwest Beijing. Aided by his detailed paintings, I was able to enter the garden world of the nineteenth century. Yue Shengyang drew for me a detailed map of the ruins of the Ming He Yuan visible on the Beida campus today. On May 10, 1998, these two scholars accompanied me on a walk to trace the periphery of Singing Crane Garden. We started in front of the Sackler Museum. Dr. Yue quickly sketched for me a map of the niu peng—an enclosure he knew as a boy when he visited his imprisoned parents. This map revealed darker meanings of the “garden” than I had been able to fathom before. The end of our stroll took us to the entrance of the nineteenth-century garden—residence 75 behind the Sackler Museum.
There, another surprising illumination awaited me. This was the same courtyard that I had visited frequently in 1979–80, when I first came to live as an exchange scholar at Beida. This was the home of Wang Yao, a well-known historian of modern literature who became a friend and mentor. I knew he had been beaten severely during the Cultural Revolution (missing teeth and a care-worn face testified to the abuse).
As I stood outside Wang Yao’s old residence, his widow came out to greet me. It was this much-aggrieved woman who pointed out the defaced pillars that framed the entrance to Wang Yao’s study. It had not been enough to drag her husband away to the ox pens. Traces of history that linked this courtyard to Confucian gentlemen and Manchu princes had to be erased as well. Here, in the May sunshine, I came to understand a little better why willful ruination would become a central theme in this book.
The more evidence of devastation I uncovered, the more significance I attached to Arthur Sackler’s passion for cultural preservation. To trace the history of his life and his museum-building efforts around the world was not a simple proposition. A prominent psychiatrist, collector, and businessman, Dr. Sackler had many admirers and detractors. I have been especially fortunate in this project to be able to interview his close associates, each revealing a new facet of a man who came to build the art museum at Beida. In Jerusalem, Meir Meyer, acquisition director for the Israel Museum, was the first to discuss with me Arthur Sackler’s commitments as a Jew and as a man dedicated to the preservation of the Chinese heritage in art. This alchemy of mind was further elaborated in my conversations with Heather Peters, Lo Yi Chan, Lois Katz, and Curtis Cutter. All of them worked closely with Arthur Sackler and were familiar with the history of the Beijing museum. Jill Sackler, Dr. Sackler’s widow, shared with me her own reflections about the past and future of the museum in Beida. The man who opened up the Sackler story in the most intimate way was a doctor by training: Hu Qimin (Tommy Hu) worked with Arthur Sackler from the first medical conference that the Sackler Foundation sponsored in China to the establishment of the China Medical Tribune and the Sackler Museum at Beida. I am grateful to him for letting me know that this history mattered not just for Western academics but for Chinese survivors of the ox pens as well.
Professors Zhang Zhuhong and Zhang Zhilian from the history department of Beijing University have also been greatly encouraging in this research. Each provided access to written sources and interviews that enriched the framework of analysis presented here. With their help and with support from the Office of the Vice President and the Foreign Students’ Department at Beida, I was able to develop a comprehensive chronology of events before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution. My goal, as Chinese scholars and friends have come to understand, was never to besmirch the reputation of Beijing University. Its centrality in the events of the 1960s, its link to Yenching and to the princely gardens of the nineteenth century, is no accident. The very excellence of the minds that congregated in this corner of China made it repeatedly vulnerable to the designs of those bent upon destroying the tradition of refuge and reflection embodied by the old Ming He Yuan.
The Singing Crane Garden became for me, too, an oasis in times of turmoil. I began full-time research on this project a year before I became enveloped by administrative duties at Wesleyan University. Continued research for this book anchored me during the ravage of September 11, 2001. Working on ruined Chinese gardens has been a constant reminder of the fragility and importance of historical memory. Every time I reentered this work, I became more appreciative of the spaces for
