the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.
In both worlds, Mianyu lived quite literally in the light of the past. In his posthumous collection entitled Ai ri zhai ji (Collection from the Studio of Cherished Days), the owner of the Singing Crane Garden summarized some of the wisdom he gained in his garden as well as in his more public life as an imperial kinsman. Addressing himself to a new generation of princes corrupted by wealth, opium, as well as the growing threat of internal rebellion and war with the West, Mianyu wrote: “Patience and the power of words can make or unmake a man. Haste in the pursuit of honor, like ill used words, place one’s virtue at risk. Ordinary folk rush about to try to outwit fate and believe everything they hear. A gentleman learns to still the burning fires of his mind. Therefore, his words reflect his heart.”17 Burning fires were anything but metaphorical by the time Mianyu’s descendants edited his works. Nonetheless, the power of words endured. Even if gardens could no longer house patience and virtue, the mind held on to them even as political and cultural change made them increasingly obsolete.
The tenacity of this attachment to cultural memory has also been noted by Craig Clunas in his study of Ming dynasty scholar gardens in the lower Yangtze area. Here, too, landscaped spaces occupied a double life between the physical and the symbolic. In contrast to Ming gardens, however, Qing princely retreats were not owned by Confucian literati. Their “cultural syntax,” to borrow from Clunas, was more mixed and multivocal. The Yangtze delta gardens of scholar-officials were anchored in the agriculture, poetry, and painting of the south. They were “fruitful sites” in ways that Mianyu’s garden never hoped to be.18 Imperial retreats bred dreams of leisure and hopes for respite from the increasingly arduous (and increasing unsuccessful) effort to reestablish Manchu authority over a war-shattered China. Gardens that had once been part of a complex cultural arrangement came to stand for the waning possibility of quieting the burning fires of the mind.
To understand this second, nonphysical life of the garden, we have to look beyond the conventional parameters of landscape history. John Dixon Hunt, a pioneer in garden theory, has argued that we must turn our focus to a broader spaciousness that he terms “the art of the millieu.” In Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory, Hunt points out that designed spaces are “both a physical object and a place experienced by a subject . . . the idea of a garden is at the same time paradoxically composed of perceptions of gardens in many different ways and different people and different culture and periods.”19 Lest this angle of vision become too diffuse, Hunt goes on to anchor the idea of the garden in the soil of language itself. Building upon the work of previous garden historians, he points out that most words for “garden” are rooted in the simple, important idea of enclosure. Whether one starts with “yard” in English, “hof” in Dutch, “gradina” in Romanian, the path leads directly to the idea of a fenced-in space (from the Indo-European gher [fence]).20
Figure 8. Chinese character yuan—originally suggesting an open park, later connoting a “garden” that encloses lakes, artificial hills, and pavilions.
The Chinese ideograph for “garden” mirrors this idea with its own multiple connotations. Yuan originally referred to an open park, a hunting preserve of the rich and the powerful (figure 8). Later, in the course of Chinese history, lettered gentlemen developed a taste for more intimate enclosures. Consequently, yuan took on the meaning of a cultivated space where one planted seeds of thought as well as seeds of plants. This evolution from a broad, nearly public yuan to a bordered, more private universe replete with lakes, hills, fir trees, lotus flowers, pavilions, and courtyards parallels the rise of the Confucian literati in the long centuries from the Han dynasty through the Song.21
Confucius himself hinted at the harvest of insight possible in a garden when he told his disciples: “The wise enjoys the streams, the benevolent the mountains; the wise are active, the benevolent passive, the wise are happy and the benevolent live long.”22 For the Master of the Analects, as for the Manchu Prince Mianyu in the nineteenth century, the natural universe served as a mirror for the moral virtues of men. The four lines that border the character yuan came to symbolize the walls (both of stone and of time) that enclosed the garden. Inside the four walls of the garden, we find the radical for “earth/soil,” which is the essential precondition for any garden. The small square at the center evokes lakes and ponds, which mirror both the sky and the mind of the observer.23 The play of strokes below the waters suggests trees and rocks that give the garden its distinctive character. Seen in this way, the garden is a frame within a frame. It demands discrimination (and often privileged education and leisure time) for the slow-paced unfolding of the carefully constructed vistas and cultural symbols.
The study of history also demands borders and boundaries. Inquiry into an event depends upon a fixed temporal framework. Like the hedge around the garden, the historian’s angle of vision must be initially constricted in order to give evidence its full weight. The Singing Crane Garden in this study is an example of such a framing device. Starting with the garden walls erected by Prince Hui and ending with the construction of the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Beijing University, this history uncovers various voices that give this corner of China its experiential depth.
Had the Singing Crane Garden been a walled pleasure palace alone, it would not have generated the many ripples of grief and insight that endured throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fertility of experience found on its scarred grounds is the result of the subtleness of imagination already apparent when Prince Mianyu wrote about fires of the mind. The Pavilion of Winged Eaves, as well as other physical remains that dot the campus of Beijing University today, are part of the framework that helps us understand both Prince Hui as well as inmates of the “ox pens” such as Ji Xianlin and Zhu Guanqian. Each found this site to be a protected space where language and time could unfold multiple meanings unhindered by the brutality of the public past.
Jing and Dong: Stillness and Motion in the Garden of History
The garden of historical memory thus took the place once occupied by historical gardens. As freedom to move through graceful spaces contracted over time, other skills of artful reflection came to the fore. The wealth of contemplative possibilities nurtured by classical landscaped spaces allowed Chinese intellectuals to survive long periods of spiritual desecration. Gardens, after all, had been places where mental discipline had been a central concern. In the words of Dorothy Graham, an American traveler who roamed the princely estates of Beijing in the 1930s, the limited enclosure of the yuan was designed to “calm the raging seas, temper the wind and adjust nature to the scale of man’s encompassing will.”24 For Graham, the turbulence tamed by Chinese gardens was largely metaphorical. Even the descendants of Manchu noblemen whom she visited and chatted with before the outbreak of war with Japan were able to stand a bit to the side of turbulent events. As distance from history vanished in the 1940s, the challenge of calming minds grew ever more intense.
Fortunately, that challenge had been embedded in classical garden design and provided a lexicon for living through, living with turbulence. Jing and dong are two aspects of the classical garden that are particularly useful in mapping the symbolic terrain of the Singing Crane Garden. The first suggests stillness, the second motion. Their layered and joined connotations go far beyond angles of vision provided by standing still or perambulating through a classical Chinese garden. Jing and dong are aspects of space, of persons and of history as well. Each has at least two faces, two phases, two voices—or better put, this duality hints at a multifaceted predicament that the garden mirrors and evokes.
Jing centers on the idea of unruffled waters. A smooth lake, a well-designed work of art, the echo of a temple bell are all part of the idea of jing. There are several Chinese homonyms for stillness that use this sound. Two that may be most useful here are one that
