Not unlike works of art, history invites and creates a stillness in the midst of public frenzy.
At Wesleyan University, I have had four excellent Chinese research assistants: Yu Huan, Xie Yinghai, Michael Chang, and Chen-Wei Chung. They helped me find and translate key documents, including many nineteenth-century garden poems. Two members of the Asian Literature Department also provided help: Ellen Widmer with sources about Yenching, and Zhang Xiashen with translations from the Chinese. Debbie Sierpinski has once again worked with patience on the word-processing challenges of this project—our sixth manuscript together. John Wareham provided expert technical advice and help in reproducing all the images in this book. At Wesleyan, too, I have benefited from a Meiggs Grant that enabled me to take a leave of absence to bring this project to fruition. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, I have been privileged to work with John Dixon Hunt, an expert editor and path-breaking scholar of garden theory. It was his expertise and generosity of spirit that brought this work into the series on the history of landscape studies.
Finally, I want to pay tribute here to my family and friends who helped nourish the garden that became this book. Over the decade that it took to sort out the various histories of the Singing Crane Garden, they were tireless in sending me poems, tapes, cards, and essays about gardens, art, and suffering. Each helped flesh out the ideas that first accosted me outside the Sackler Museum on October 16, 1993. Each helped me realize that the garden is not only a physical space, but a spiritual opportunity as well. To dwell in landscaped spaces is to savor a delight that goes beyond flowers, lakes, trees, and rocks. It is to taste the eternal in the ephemeral. This is the main theme of the Song of Songs as well. I can think of no better way to show my gratitude to all who have helped me craft this book than to use the language of the Song of Songs in praise of garden lore:
You, who dwell in the garden,
Know that friends wait
To hear your voice,
Let it be heard now.
Introduction
A Garden Made of Language and Time
. . . It is not death
Has drawn me to this desolate world
I defy all waste and degradation
—These swaddling clothes
Are a sun that will not be contained in the grave
—Yang Lian, “Apologia to a Ruin”
Gardens are not merely earthly stuff. They occupy grounds in the mind as well. Some reach there by the beauty of their design, some by the power of their cultural symbolism. Many use both. Other gardens take up no space at all. Yet even as ruins, or as memories of ruins, they have the power to breathe life into worn words. They create spaciousness in dark times. This book explores strategies for creating spaciousness by translating what I have learned from the history of gardens into the garden that is history. It takes as its starting point a corner of China that managed to survive repeated devastation through fragile means such as language and the integrity of recollection. If the Singing Crane Garden (Ming He Yuan) can speak to us today, it is because its ruination was defeated by imagination, because voices from a distant past continue to speak about our predicament today.
The specific site that launched this inquiry lies in northwest Beijing. Removed from the bustle of the Tian An Men Square by several highways that ring the capital of China, the grounds of the Singing Crane Garden occupy a picturesque site at the heart of Beijing University (figure 1). A visitor who survived traffic-clogged streets and managed to gain entrance to the tightly guarded campus would have to continue on a northwest axis before reaching any sign of the Singing Crane Garden. A gray, new boulder in front of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology commemorates the garden’s name in bold characters and little historical detail (figure 2). This stone hints at a princely retreat of the nineteenth century while remaining quite mute about the atrocities that took place on these grounds in the 1960s. Cultural memory is evoked and dismissed all at once.
Figure 1. Beijing showing the location of Beijing University in the northwest area of the city. Drawn by Yishuo Hu.
This double gesturing is limited not to one rock, one courtyard at Beijing University, or one city in China. Rather, such layered connotations have been exposed and explored by scholars of Chinese and Western gardens alike. Denis Cosgrove, the British geographer, for example, wrote about the iconography of landscapes with just such attentiveness to the “curtain” that veils culturally organized spaces. His argument, simply put, is that landscapes beckon us to practice a distinctive mode of seeing—“a way in which some Europeans have represented themselves and the world about them and their social relationship with it, and through which they have commented on social relations.”1 China, too, has a complex history of looking at the meanings of landscaped spaces. The Ming He Yuan boulder at Beijing University does not quite fit into these notions of representation. The paucity of physical evidence combined with politically informed reticence makes “reading” this garden a particularly interesting challenge.
Figure 2. New stone boulder inscribed with the characters “Ming He Yuan” (Singing Crane Garden). The calligraphy was done by Qigong, a surviving relative of the Manchu imperial family, who also suffered considerable persecution during the Cultural Revolution. The base of the boulder is set in a marble pedestal that commemorates the generosity of Jill Sackler in donating funds to the renovation of the grounds around the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology.
The Chinese scholar Feng Jin hinted at this predicament in a recent essay about the concept of “scenery” in the Chinese garden. Although his focus is not on the Singing Crane Garden in Beijing, he does note that the shortage of material remains has forced scholars to reconstruct garden-making on the basis of literary sources scattered throughout a vast body of ancient documents. The reason for this shortage is mentioned at the end of Feng Jin’s lengthy essay. The meanings of classical Chinese gardens, he suggests, are hard to decode “because the monopoly of the theory of class struggle prohibited any mention of literati culture.”2 That is to say, the intellectuals who both built and appreciated gardens have been smeared with political disapproval in the late twentieth century. Whereas Denis Cosgrove is free to piece together the iconography of the English landscape, Chinese scholars have made their way to this same subject hampered by the repressive politics of the Maoist era. Not only are there fewer gardens left to study, but the very language for their explanation has been decimated by decades of propaganda and murderously real class struggle.
Reading a garden such as the Ming He Yuan, therefore, requires narrative strategies that circle its muted terrain, that give voice to all that has been silenced through violence and indirect commemoration. Poetry is repeatedly used in this book because it is well suited for indirection. To be sure, Chinese gardens have always been at home in words. There is a long tradition of poetry about landscaped spaces. Poems, in turn, appeared all around the garden: on rocks, walls, corridors, pavilions, and even mountainsides. With war and revolution, however, both gardens and the refined literati consciousness that nurtured them came under attack. What is left is just words: fragile, halting snippets that mark a longing for leisure and contemplation in the very places where bamboo, chrysanthemums, and gingko no longer flower at ease. In this study, poems from
