of its appeal, however, lies in the very history that spelled disaster for physical gardens. What once flourished in space now took root in the mind.
The devolution of the physical garden can easily be mistaken as death. And indeed, there are many signs in China today of this phenomenon as chronicled in John Minford’s essay “The Chinese Garden: Death of a Symbol.” Minford’s focus is on cluttered, crowded spaces such as apartment houses in Hong Kong and formerly gracious gardens in Suzhou where all that lingers from the past are poetic names, now gutted of affective meaning.30 In contrast to Minford’s bleak assessment, this book reveals an enduring search for cultural meaning in the very places where ruination appeared to be most extreme. On the very site of the destroyed Singing Crane Garden and the ox pens of the Cultural Revolution, the quest for self-knowledge grew ever more acute over time. In the midst of chaos and disorder, seeds of renewed vision arose from the ground up.
What began to wane at the end of the nineteenth century is the very idea of a retreat from politics. Techniques used to muffle the sound of public events temporarily lost their efficacy—and soon thereafter, their legitimacy. Nonetheless, words that framed that longing endured. On the grounds of the old Singing Crane Garden, it was a foreign architect—Henry K. Murphy (1877–1954)—who brought back some of the structural elements codified by Ji Cheng. Using winged roofs and cinnabar pillars, Murphy managed to create Yenching University, a campus for liberal learning where an attachment to historical memory was both sanctioned and valued. Although the Maoist revolution attacked both the ideal of liberal learning and the physical structures of Yenching, the site retained its capacity for “envelopment.” This is a concept developed by philosopher Edward Casey in his book The Fate of Place. Envelopment describes the tenacity of solace in certain locations that goes far beyond material elements. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, Casey calls upon historians to go past “the hard shell of containing surfaces” in order to unearth the process through which a place surrounds us “no longer as an airtight, immobile limit—but as envelopment itself.”31
This history of the Singing Crane Garden uses Casey’s concepts to map a terrain beyond the immobile (and nearly forgotten) shards of an imperial pleasure palace. My goal here is not only to document events that gave birth to Mianyu’s garden in the 1830s and its ruination in the 1860s and 1960s. Rather, I hope to evoke the spaciousness of imagination that survived in the midst of trauma and destruction. Making sense of envelopment in the midst of disaster depends upon a slow-paced, circuitous inquiry. Hou Renzhi hinted at this process in his own book about the gardens of Beijing University. Addressing himself to a new generation of career-minded, politically savvy Chinese students, the aged scholar argued for a change of pace, for a little less dong, a bit more jing—or better yet, for more attentiveness to the gravity of historical memory in the very place where forgetfulness had reigned for so long: “As you roam around the Unnamed Lake, appreciating the scenic beauty reflected in the water and feeling relaxed and delighted after hours of intensive study, have you ever asked yourself how the lake came to be what it is? And when you step out of the library or the laboratory and stroll by yourself, totally refreshed, among woods surrounding the lake, have you ever wondered who built the secluded paths?”32
Give Voice to the Past
Hou Renzhi asked these questions in the 1980s, when Beijing University was just beginning to recover from the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution. The Pavilion of Winged Eaves had not yet been renovated. It sat as a mute, browning witness to a past that had no place in the official recollections of the university. Plans for the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology had not been finalized, though discussions between party officials and the foreign donor had begun. Professor Hou was an enthusiastic supporter of the project, a consultant about the history of the Singing Crane Garden and a quiet accomplice to the unmentionability of the ox pens that had occupied these grounds in the recent past. All that Hou Renzhi could do is orient the forthcoming project in relationship to the landscape he knew so well: “A new exhibition hall for archaeology is to be built southwest of the Yi Ran Pavilion with the aid of the American Dr. Sackler Foundation. This is a step forward in the remarkable progress made recently by our university in its international exchange programs.”33
This cheerful tone was meant to encourage officials to proceed with the project, despite their reservations about bringing funding from the capitalist West onto the Beida campus. In the early 1980s, Hou Renzhi could not have anticipated the derailment—and near death—of the Sackler Museum project in the wake of the political turbulence of 1989. All that the learned geographer could do is to place markers, a framework of physically anchored historical memory, around the museum project. The new archaeology museum, Hou Renzhi eagerly noted, would be linked in spirit and in location to the Yenching archaeology department, which had been dismantled and absorbed by the new Beijing University after the establishment of communist rule in 1949. With the new museum, Hou Renzhi foresaw, would come further sanctions for a fuller, scholarly engagement with a past that had been so often attacked.
After the opening of the Sackler Museum in May 1993, Beijing University’s archaeology department did indeed fulfill the muted hopes expressed a decade earlier. In fact, when the museum mounted an exhibition of the history of archeological studies in Beijing, the visual link between past and present was made amply clear. The old Yenching exhibition hall was portrayed alongside the new museum with the aid of classical Chinese phrases. An aged, gray stone structure seemed to reach out to the colorful, winged roof of the Sackler institution while a Confucian saying guided the viewer in interpreting the message: wen gu er zhi xin, ji wan kai lai—“cherish the past to know the present, continue to march toward the future.” Nine carefully chosen Chinese characters summed up the public version of historical memory at Peking University. Yes, the past is to be treasured, but only if it leads to a full-hearted appreciation of the new. The point was to move forward, with confidence—and one assumes, faith in a socialist future shaped by the guidance of the Communist Party. The new museum of art and archaeology served as a useful framework for an inspirational narrative about a history in which shadows had to remain unnamed.
This didactic message had nothing to say about the ravage that destroyed the old Summer Palace, or about Henry Murphy’s efforts to gather relics in northwest Beijing. The new archaeology museum was designed, as we shall see, as a gracious home for shards of the ancient past. At the same time, it had to remain reticent about what happened to those remnants during the Cultural Revolution, what happened to scholars who were attacked simply for doing research about a past that had been condemned as “feudal” and as “bourgeois.” A new museum was born out of a covenant to say little about the destructions that surrounded it.
Memory and mourning had no place in the new, beautiful building that stood on the grounds of the Singing Crane Garden. To go beyond the formulaic injunction of wen gu er zhi xi, ji wang kai lai, one has to turn to older voices that once surrounded the Ming He Yuan. One such voice that helps illuminate the past is that of Prince Yihuan, nephew and neighbor of the owner of the Singing Crane Garden. In the decades after the ravage of 1860, this younger Manchu prince continued to visit the ruined gardens of northwest Beijing in a conscious effort to articulate a grief that had no room in the public life of the Qing dynasty. A man deeply implicated in the politics of his day, Yihuan nonetheless knew that poetry was the only way to mark the void that remained in China’s landscape and identity in the wake of historical trauma. In a work entitled “Visiting Ming He Yuan in the Company of My Ninth Brother,” he instructs a still younger man in the art of memory and mourning:
Airy pavilions and stately halls—
ground into oblivion.
White mulberries swallowed by the blackest seas,
and you don’t grieve?
Still seeking miracles? A rescuing dragon?
Nothing but bitter dreams.
No matter how fierce the tiger
