with the idea of “grasping.” The first jing is a classical phrase used to suggest quiet, tranquility, as well as the willpower to pacify a rebellion in an unruly border area. The second jing (identical in pronunciation and tone) suggests calm and stillness, as in a sea after the storm.
Garden viewing had long depended on jing, upon quiet watching—which meant that one literally had to stop walking, still the mind, allow a scene to emerge out of carefully structured greenery in an unhurried fashion. Jing depends upon—and creates—an inner quietude analogous to the introspection of the historian who seeks to make sense out of the discrete, fragmented pieces of evidence that frame a subject of inquiry.
Like a guest who has crossed the garden gate, the student of the past must also slow down, bend a bit to try on an angle of contemplation that may do justice to the complex, shadow-laden terrain. Standing still, one may be able to better fathom one corner of the garden of history. Jing is a quality of attentiveness used in this study to focus on specific sites within the old Singing Crane Garden, and within the gracefully designed Yenching University that thrived in northwest Beijing in the 1930s. Jing also helps illuminate moments of historical memory that offered solace to such beleaguered intellectuals as Zhu Guanqian during their incarceration in the ox pens.
Stillness in the garden, as in history, is short lived. It is necessarily followed by dong—a concept that suggests more than physical motion through shifting landscapes. At its core, this character centers on the idea of “power”—a muscle grown tough by heavy exertion. In garden viewing, dong is a gentle invitation to proceed along enclosed corridors dotted with windows that invite the eye to roam across artfully framed scenes. On the terrain of the Singing Crane Garden, however, another more violent idea of yun dong—“political mobilizations”—has reigned for decades. Especially during the terror of the Red Guards, “movement” was a heavy-handed form of enforced ambulation, of required dislodgement from loyalties to the past, a violent uprooting of historical memories. The historian who would map this landscape has to partake of dong as well. Motion, in this project, implies more than the effort required to gather new sources, add new voices to a complex event such as the conflagration of 1860 or the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. It requires, as this study shows, a reexamination of past certainties and conventional notions about the causality of both war and revolution.
Without jing, neither the garden nor history would make sense. Stillness and contemplation are prerequisites for the creation of meaning. Yet this is also true for dong, the effortful extension of vision beyond what is close at hand. This double challenge lies at the heart of garden viewing as well. Chen Congzhou, a seasoned survivor of many historical upheavals, describes mobility and stillness as two facets of a singular garden experience:
When looked at from a fixed position, the beauty of the changing seasons changes with the mood of man. . . . A garden without water, clouds, shadows, sounds, morning twilight and sunset is a garden devoid of natural beauty. For these, though ethereal, set off the actual scenes of a garden. Motion also exists in repose. Sitting in front of a rockery complete with horizontal and vertical holes . . . one would have an illusion of motion though the hill is at rest. The surface of water looks mirror-calm despite ripples. Likewise, a painting may look dead on the surface but is alive and moving all the same. A thing in repose is motionless if it is without vitality. Hence, we have the key to garden design in the relationship between in-motion [dong] and in-position [jing] garden viewings.25
Three and a half centuries before this Shanghai-based intellectual was free to ruminate about jing and dong, another Chinese scholar had begun to codify the various elements that lend complexity to garden viewing. Ji Cheng was the seventeenth-century author of Yuan Ye (The Craft of Gardens). Ji was an impoverished scholar from the picturesque and wealthy province of Jiangsu. By the time he published his compendium on garden design in 1634, the Ming dynasty was on the verge of collapse. Hard times had reached far south of the Great Wall. Manchu nomads already dreamt of a change in the mandate of heaven. Nonetheless, one decade before the end of the Ming, Ji Cheng took it upon himself to articulate the accumulated wisdom of classical aesthetics specifically as it related to its physical expression in landscaped spaces. He coupled the well-known concept of “yuan” with the less artful expression of “craft” (ye) to suggest practical strategies for garden design. Previous scholars had bought, designed, painted, and versified gardens, while leaving details about beams, stones, waterways, and plantings to professional gardeners who had a lower social status. By contrast, Ji Cheng set out to document technical aspects of design in a way that would flesh out the aspirations of his educated contemporaries. Craft, he argued, was the concrete way to create a garden that would enable one to nourish the mind: “to live as a hermit in the midst of the town.”26
A Daoist or a Buddhist hermit would have no difficulty nourishing the mind in the harmonious setting of a mountain temple. Scholar-officials of the Ming, and later Manchu princes, however, were weighed down by the cares of office and palace politics. Ji Cheng had understood the dilemmas of the rich and the powerful and found ingenious ways to articulate various strategies that would combine motion and stillness, experiences of nature with the numinous beyond.
Drawing upon a large literature that linked gardening arts with artful contemplation, Yuan Ye played with the intermingling of scenery and sentiment in a way that expanded the meaning of both. One specific technique codified by Ji Cheng was “borrowed views.” This was a scheme for drawing into the limited enclosure of the garden trees, mountains, vistas from far beyond so as to inspire the eye and the mind to seek out a vastness within. In borrowing views, a contemporary scholar points out, “the designer’s intentions and scenery are co-arising,” and the garden with “borrowed views” enjoins visitors to new occasions of “co-presenting and approaches their experience half-way in further conjunctions of sentiment and scenery.”27
In effect, Ji Cheng’s crafted structuring of vision created an event out of the physical stuff within and beyond the garden gates. It created a temporal flow, much like the historical narrative of a historian who seeks to anchor her subject in the shifting sands of time. An event is not merely a fixed moment of time when something happens. Even as dramatic and devastating an occurrence as the burning of the Summer Palace cannot be seen in isolation. The historian, too, depends on borrowed views, on the voices and memories of subjects close to the fiery vortex created by Lord Elgin’s troops in October 1860. In this book, I have used the voice of a neighboring witness, Prince Yihuan (1840–1849)—owner of the garden next to the Singing Crane Garden—to paint a more complex picture of what was lost and what endured in northwest Beijing. This history of ruination in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China draws upon the same wellspring of experience as Ji Cheng did, while expanding the idea of “borrowed views” to intellectual history as well.
In Ji’s classic there was ample room for motion and stillness, for presence as well as emptiness. In fact, one of the key themes illustrated in Yuan Ye are structures ranging from wooden pillars to stone tiles—all surrounding a “central void”—a space framed by markers arranged in a way that invites the visitor to contemplate what is missing at the core.28 By 1644, the empty center was no longer a poetic way of envisioning garden design. The “center” of power in Beijing had literally become emptied by rebels and invaders, and a new dynasty was taking shape among the ruins of the old. Here, too, an aspect of landscape design became extended into historical experience.
The “central void” was no longer a space to be contemplated with equanimity, but a trauma to live through, to give voice to. What was once an artful space bounded by pillars and stones had to be mapped with language instead. Historical memory took the place of garden design, much like the fate of Ji Cheng’s own manuscript—which disappeared from circulation until it was discovered by a Chinese scholar at Tokyo’s Imperial University in 1921. Uprooted, dislodged in both time and place, Yuan Ye made its way back to China in the 1930s just as war was breaking out and intellectuals began to cope with political disintegration once again.29 The idea of living “like a hermit in town”
