the Pavilion of Winged Eaves as restorations began in 1984. Photograph by the author.
To excavate voices that celebrated beauty and mourned its desolation on these grounds, one has to practice what the Italian chemist-writer Primo Levi called “hard listening.” A survivor of Auschwitz, Levi knew how easily history swallows the evidence for its own existence. It is not only massive atrocities like the Holocaust that stifle our access to the past. The very passage of time (invariably codified and manipulated by political authorities) brings to us only the freshly painted bones of garden history. One has to dig below stone markers and refurbished monuments to hear what Levi called “the hoarse voices of those who can no longer speak.”6
On the campus of Beijing University, such voices are marked by a reticent attachment to the old sites, old names, old knowledge. One of the most eloquent among them belongs to Hou Renzhi, a British-educated historical geographer who has been quietly reconstructing the history of Beijing and its princely gardens. In a slim, bilingual volume dedicated to the history of Bejing University, he includes a line drawing of the Yi Ran Ting that speaks volumes for the beauty that once thrived and was squelched here. A solitary pine and the winged roof give voice to the seasoned memory of a scholar who had been forced to repent for the historical knowledge that had set him apart from “revolutionary masses.” Politically persecuted in 1957 and during the Cultural Revolution, this eminent graduate of Yenching University writes about his beloved campus in roundabout terms. Whereas European geographers such as Denis Cosgrove are able to stretch disciplinary boundaries with intellectual ease and theoretical verve, Hou Renzhi has undertaken the same project in China against great odds. For Cosgrove, the iconography of landscape is an opportunity to map relations of power and of perception across the history of English elites. Hou Renzhi’s scholarly life, by contrast, has been characterized by political campaigns during which the Communist Party kept denouncing the literati values that once nourished garden spaces. Hou’s book about the history of Beijing University is dedicated to a new, post–Cultural Revolution generation of undergraduates. It seeks to awaken in them an appreciation for the ground that lies beneath their feet. Hence the artful drawing of the Yi Ran Ting.
Within the political limitations of the 1980s (when the book was first published), the learned historian managed to hint at the pain buried around the pagoda with the winged eaves. In a particularly poignant and muted passage, the author departed from the obligatory optimism of socialist historiography. Having championed the expansion of geography into the realm of history and literature (much like Cosgrove), Hou Renzhi now speaks directly to those who will shape the iconography of landscape in the future, when cultural memory may be accessed more freely: “If we do not recall the past, we can hardly believe what a painful experience this quiet corner on our campus has undergone. We are sure, the past is not to be forgotten.”7 The explicit historical reference here is to 1860, which also ravaged the old Ming He Yuan. But with an informed ear one can hear a subtle reference to the suffering inflicted on Chinese intellectuals at Beijing University during the Cultural Revolution. Hou Renzhi knows that without recalling the past, without providing glimpses of the Yi Ran Ting, future generations will not be able to converse with the landscape, with history, with language itself.
A similarly muted reference to the Yi Ran Ting appears in an essay by Ji Xianlin, the eminent Sanskrit scholar who was also incarcerated in the ox pens of Beijing University. Like Hou Renzhi, Ji Xianlin has paid dearly for all the knowledge accumulated abroad, for his long-standing attachment to cultural memory. During the darkest years of the Cultural Revolution, he shared his incarceration quarters with Hou Renzhi, as well as another eminent scholar, Zhu Guanqian. A philosopher by training, Zhu had written extensively about the history of tragedy before he actually lived through one in the 1960s. In an essay dedicated to the memory of this “pen-mate,” Ji Xianlin records the solace that landscaped spaces—or better yet, the informed memory of a vanishing world—provided during weeks and months of beatings and torture. Ji’s essay describes how the garden helped Zhu Guanqian to preserve his sanity under duress.
Language was not much help in this nightmare. Each word, spoken or written, could become a liability in the eyes of Red Guards who monitored the activities and thoughts of aged prisoners. All that remained was the possibility of looking out of the window with informed eyes: “At night, after the lights were turned off, Zhu tossed and turned in his bed studying the famous Yi Ran Ting pavilion glimpsed through a window. . . . In the morning, he would run to a corner and practice tai ji quan. One time he was discovered by the so-called ‘staff to promote reform.’ They beat him fiercely. In the eyes of these young lords, our bodies and souls had committed grave sins.”8
More than a century after its destruction, this remnant of the Singing Crane Garden provided comfort to the knowing eye. Like Hou Renzhi’s drawing, it is a sliver of an ample past. Yet it sufficed to stem the tide of despair. Ji Xianlin even goes so far as to suggest that the spiritual practice of looking beyond the window of the ox pens, combined with the risky regime of martial arts, enabled Zhu Guanqian to overcome the temptation of suicide—a terrible desire to which many of their fellow intellectuals succumbed during the Cultural Revolution.
This evocative power of fragments is also explored by the American sinologist Stephen Owen in his path-breaking work on Chinese cultural memory. Far from needing an entire landscape to activate imagination, Owen argues, Chinese poets, writers, and thinkers were able to reconstruct entire worlds from snippets, from an old arrow head, from a nameless skull.9 Why not the Yi Ran Ting? Why not use the fading light provided by this pavilion to begin to imagine how landscaped spaces can inform, enrich, and indeed heal the wounds of history?
The very name of this pavilion weaves it into a history that used to sanction and cherish reflection. Yi Ran Ting harks back as far as the Song dynasty, when scholar-official Ou-Yang Xiu (1007–1072) used it to play with the phrase “winged eaves.” Serving in central China where mountain peaks invite rooftops to follow their rhythm, Ou-Yang Xiu delighted in letting his eyes roam from hill to pavilion, and back. Just as the actual structure at Beijing University provided solace for pained minds, so too, Ou-Yang Xiu’s idea of yi ran ting promised inner peace and relief from the din of public life. Warmed by the friendship of fellow poets, the Song statesman envisioned a place where thoughts, like mountains, could rise on winged words.10
It took the power and privilege of an emperor to bind place and name in the capital city of Beijing. By the time of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), pavilions with winged eaves dotted north and south China alike. The most beautiful, most daring ones were located in south and central China. In the north, where Manchu rulers held the reigns of government, the landscape was less suitable for soaring cornices. Nonetheless, the idea of yi ran ting endured because it offered a verbal link to the imaginative landscape of the south. The Qianlong emperor (who reigned as Hongli from 1711 to 1795) stood at the apex of this aesthetic of cultural domination. Not content to encode the world beyond the Great Wall with his cultural authority, Qianlong took pride in visiting sites and writing poems about the gardens of the south as well.
Some 42,000 of his poems survived, each marking a place, a moment—not unlike the red seal on each item of his vast imperial art collection.11 One such verse, titled “Yi Ran Ting,” marks a specific spot in northwest Beijing. Located on the periphery of Qianlong’s Summer Palace, this promontory was not unlike the one occupied by the School Scenes Pavilion today. Set apart from the main road leading to Yuan Ming Yuan and to the temple complex on Jade Mountain further north, this was a place to sit and contemplate the passage of time:
Meandering toward the west,
I came upon a pavilion.
Seated under its winged eaves,
I savor liquid light.
Blue seems near enough to touch,
Green beams afar, a taste of the untamed.12
Qianlong’s
