often altering shape and sound, to convey to a twenty-first century reader a wordless yearning to make sense of loss and devastation.
Such a yearning may be discerned, for example, in the poetry of Yang Lian, a writer whose youth had been marred by the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. A former Red Guard, Yang was part of a generation of artists who sought out the ruined landscape of northwest Beijing in order to come to terms with the ravage in their own lives. Shortly after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, these artists congregated in the rice paddies that lay north, beyond the walls of Beijing University. Since the landscape outside had been intensely politicized, they sought out ruins to articulate their own severed connection to history. The broken stones of the old Summer Palace (Yuan Ming Yuan) provided an alternative to the denuded cultural imagination fostered in the university under the guidance of the Communist Party. Heading ever north, they created gardens of the mind out of words alone. Yang Lian’s poem “Apologia to a Ruin” speaks to this ravaged landscape directly. Seeking what is no longer there, Yang asserts that the journey is nonetheless worth taking:
. . . the only hope that illuminated me
Faint star out of its time . . .
Pitiless chiaroscuro of my soul.3
Yang Lian was part of a generation intentionally heading north, away from the ardor of the Maoist era that had been identified with the red sun. Yang’s friend and collaborator, the poet Bei Dao, even incorporated the idea of “north” into his pen name, which means “northern island.” Away from the enforced collectivism of class struggle, these poets sought and found language for other landscapes. The visual evidence of the ruins in northwest Beijing became a fulcrum for meditations about loss and desolation—as well as about renewal. Yang Lian’s poem concludes not with death, but with a willingness to defy “these swaddling clothes,” with a desire to excavate “a sun that will not be contained in the grave.”4
The history of the Singing Crane Garden is similarly illuminated by devastation. Around the gray boulder inside the exuberantly developing Beijing University, absence reigns. To map this terrain, one must learn to walk a little slower, listen more closely as time unfolds in guarded words. Like Yang Lian, I was also drawn to the northwest corner of Beijing by a darkened sun. I knew the traumatic history of the burning of the Summer Palace in 1860. I had studied the brutal impact of the Cultural Revolution upon Beijing University in the 1960s. But it was not death that pulled me on this project. Rather it was the possibility of cultural renewal in traumatized spaces. My ambition was to take the idea of the garden out of the ground and into the realm of history and language. In the end, the Singing Crane Garden may be no more than time and words. Yet in encompassing this space, both history and language may acquire new spaciousness, fresh meaning.
Winged Eaves and Liquid Light
The browning carapace of a pagoda may not seem like an auspicious place to think afresh about language and time. My own first glimpse of the Pavilion of Winged Eaves (Yi Ran Ting) in 1989 did not suggest the possibilities of renewed cultural imagination that thrive here. It was late May when I came upon the site, in the company of my five-year-old son. Most of our days in that spring of 1989 were engulfed by student demonstrations in Tian An Men Square. I was following the unfolding events with consuming interest. Having written a great deal about the struggle for science and democracy in modern China, I witnessed the tragic suppression of the student movement with dread and familiarity. The campus of Beijing University was, as many times before in the twentieth century, at the heart of student activism. To give my son a bit of relief from loudspeakers and protest posters, I took him for bike rides along the more isolated paths in the northwest corner of Beida. At first, the Pavilion of Winged Eaves was hardly visible among the weeds. It took the excited explorations of a five-year-old to uncover the broken slabs of stone leading to a square viewing area. Pillars that had once been painted bright red were now the color of dried blood. As I looked out from beyond the terrace railing, all I saw was scrawny trees and a tangle of electric wires (figure 3). Nothing here suggested that we had stumbled upon one of the most cherished meditation spots of the old Singing Crane Garden.
Figure 3. The Pavilion of Winged Eaves (Yi Ran Ting) in 1989.
Nothing, except perhaps the ceiling. This was home to fifty identical grus japonensis—red-crowned cranes. Each painted bird filled to the brim a blue circle framed by an artfully subdued square of green. Each crane had its wings spread to the very edge of the formal, geometrical sky—a perfect image of frozen time. Below the masters of this dancing yet stationary heaven was a series of carefully brushed images of marble bridges, carved lions, and more buildings with winged eaves (figure 4). Nothing in the shadowy interior of the pagoda informed the visitor that these were scenes from the campus of Yenching University, the American-sponsored institution that had occupied these grounds before 1952, before the national Beijing University was moved out north, away from the neighborhood of the Forbidden City.
A decade after our discovery, in 1998, all that changed. China’s foremost educational institution was celebrating its centenary, consciously laying claim both to the old Imperial University founded in 1898 as well as to the twentieth-century campus of Yenching. The brownish carapace was gone. Reddish pillars had been painted a sinewy green. Broken railings had been replaced with a simplified version of “veranda”-style woodwork that was tinted with a jarring red. The stone steps had been repaired (figure 5). The artificial hillock was reconstructed with new bricks. The cranes, too, had been touched up and looked more frozen in their broken flight. The scenic spots from the Yenching campus were repainted too, made more schematic, more recognizable for the many alumni and visitors walking around with a newly published school map. At the entrance of the pavilion was a formal slab to mark the place of dead beauty (figure 6):
Figure 4. Painted ceiling of the Pavilion of Winged Eaves, 1989.
Figure 5. Renovated Pavilion of Winged Eaves as it appeared in the summer of 1999.
XIAO JING TING—SCHOOL SCENES PAVILION
The original name of the School Scenes Pavilion was Yi Ran Ting, which was part of the Singing Crane Garden refurbished in 1926 after the founding of Yenjing University, when it was decorated with ten famous spots of Yenjing University—hence its name of “School Scenes Pavilion.” This name was retained during the restoration that begun in 1984.5
The official and repetitious language conveys the bare bones of the history buried here. Only two dates are carved in stone: 1926 and 1984. The decades before and after are consigned to silence. The gray marker erected in 1998 makes no mention of the niu peng—“ox pens”—erected at the foot of the pagoda to incarcerate and torture eminent professors during the 1960s. It is equally reticent about 1860, when the Singing Crane Garden was scorched by British armies on their way to the burning of the Summer Palace. It does not even nod toward the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology established on the grounds of the former ox pens, and it keeps utterly quiet about the struggles that accompanied its design after the Tian An Men massacre of 1989. The School Scenes Pavilion is, like a child standing on good behavior, properly warned against talking to strangers. It keeps family secrets buried behind a naively verdant exterior.
Figure
