Acquiring Gardens | China Heritage Quarterly 1/21/14 11:17 PM
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Acquiring Gardens | China Heritage Quarterly 1/21/14 11:17 PM CHINA HERITAGE QUARTERLY ISSN 1833-8461 Search China Heritage Project, The Australian National University No. 9, March 2007 FEATURES Acquiring Gardens In the course of nearly one and a half millennia, various dynastic capitals— Kaifeng, Luoyang, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Beijing—were located on or adjacent to the Grand Canal. The rulers in these political centres sought to patronise or acquire the best of the nation's culture, so it is hardly surprising that distinctive cultural features of different regions spread to the capital of the day along the canal. Two of the signature cultural properties of Beijing today—Peking duck and Peking opera, both travelled to the capital via the Grand Canal—Peking duck from Shandong province and Peking opera from Anhui. However, Qing dynasty other aspects of the culture of Beijing and its environs that had 'travelled' there via the Grand Canal continue to be regarded as typically 'southern.' An example we examine here is the Suzhou-style garden with its fantastically shaped rocks and expansive vistas created within limited confines. This Fig.1 Suzhou sailing vessels of the zuochuan type moored on the Grand cultural feature, inspired by private gardens Canal, Qing painting by Xu Yang, Gusu fanhua tu, illustration courtesy Illustration from Wang Guanzhuo ed., Zhongguo guchuan tupu, Beijing: seen in southern China by the Qianlong Sanlian Shudian, 2000, colour frontispiece. Emperor (r.1736-1795), made its major entrée to Beijing via the Qing imperial garden palace, Yuanming Yuan (the Garden of Perfect Brightness, see issue no.8, December 2006 of China Heritage Quarterly). During his sixty-year reign, Qianlong undertook six tours of inspection through southern China, taking him to the major cities of Jiangning (now Nanjing), Yangzhou, Wuxi, Suzhou and Hangzhou (see 'The Southern Expeditions of Emperors Kangxi and Qianlong' in the Features section of this issue). (Fig.1) Aside from the duties incumbent upon him as the ruler of the Manchu-Qing empire, the emperor clearly took great pleasure in the south and its natural and manmade landscapes. His southern tours of inspection also represent the pinnacle in this enterprise developed by his grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor (r.1662-1722), and one of the most tangible reminders of the south for Qianlong were the four southern-style gardens that he had constructed in the vicinity of the Yuanming Yuan garden palace and its environs north-west of Beijing. Yuanming Yuan was the garden palace complex gifted by the Kangxi Emperor to his fourth son Yinzhen, the future Yongzheng Emperor. However, it was in 1744 that his grandson Hongli, the Qianlong Emperor, set about creating vistas which were near replicas or faithful evocations of impressive private landscaped gardens which the Qianlong Emperor had visited in the course of his journeys to the south. The most renowned of these were four southern gardens, the 'Ten Vistas' inspired by the West Lake of Hangzhou, Anlan Yuan (Tranquil Wave Garden) in Haining, Jichang Yuan (Garden Conferring Pleasure) in Wuxi, and the Forest of Lions (Shizi Lin) in Suzhou. (Fig.2) Although the existence of these acquired gardens is well documented and the general outline of what the Qianlong Emperor achieved in these northern replica gardens are clear, architectural historians have yet to examine the actual process of by which this imperial acquisition took place. This is a reflection of the relative anonymity of the landscape gardener and even of the architect in Chinese history. What remains of these imitative gardens today are the poems, essays and paintings that celebrate them, although these often depict ideal, rather than real, individual gardens. (Figs.3&4) Scholars have not yet examined in detail the records of the imperial household with a view to studying the accounts of expenditure on the replica gardens, the commissions issued to gardeners and the acquisition of rocks, plants and materials for use in their construction. The partial destruction of Yuanming Yuan in 1860 and the subsequent dismantling and neglect of the immense site also ensured that little attention was paid to the fate of individual elements of the complex. The majority of Qianlong's landscaping innovations and introductions were focused in the eastern section of Yuanming Yuan, where, by 1751, he had basically completed construction of a Chinese-style complex of http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=009_gardens.inc&issue=009 Page 1 of 9 Acquiring Gardens | China Heritage Quarterly 1/21/14 11:17 PM completed construction of a Chinese-style complex of gardens, which he named Changchun Yuan (the Garden of Prolonged Spring). It occupied an area of approximately 70 hectares and was named for one of the buildings in Yuanming Yuan proper called Changchun Xianguan (the Lodge of the Immortals of the Prolonged Spring), where he had grown up as a young man under his grandfather's tutelage. He prepared the new garden complex as the residence for his retirement, so it had none of the characteristically complex architectural structures of the Yuanming Yuan which had to function as both political work places and residences. Changchun Yuan was designed to provide tranquillity and solitude. Fig.2 Jin Tingbiao, Hongli gongzhong xingle tu (The Ironically, the gardens of southern China, epitomised by Qianlong Emperor enjoying his pleasures in the palace), transverse scroll, detail. Source: Gugong Bowuyuan ed., those of Suzhou, were, in fact, originally inspired by gardens Gugong Bowuyuan cang Qingdai gongting huihua (Qing in the vicinity of Beijing, created by the early emperors of the palace paintings in the collection of the Palace Museum, Ming dynasty who sought to reassert agriculture and Beijing), Beijing: Wenwu Chubanshe, 1992, p.192. agricultural policy by example in the western parts of the capital that had been Fig.3 Scene from a typical Suzhou garden. Zhuozheng Fig.4 Another scene from a typical Suzhou garden. Yuan, Suzhou [BGD] Zhuozheng Yuan, Suzhou [BGD] transformed by the Mongols into a hunting park. The Suzhou garden, which came to epitomise the ability to create spaces for philosophical retreat, aesthetic transcendence and desirable connoisseurship in urban settings, is often depicted as the exemplification of the Daoist ideal of man and nature in harmony. Yet the economic, cultural and social origins of the Suzhou garden, among a class of scholar-officials who were simultaneously also what we might describe anachronistically as serious-minded hobby farmers of the early Ming period, represent one local interpretation of a political economy originally practised in Beijing.[1] Fig.5 Wen Zhengming (1470-1559) made many paintings of Suzhou gardens in the Ming period. This is a detail from his painting of the garden at Huishan, Wuxi, Huishan ronghui tu (Gathering of personages at Huishan) in the collection of the Palace Museum, Beijing. Source: Zijincheng (Forbidden City), no. 140, July 2006, p.32. However, the veracity of the relationship between gardens visited by the emperor in the south, and those of the same name he created at Yuanming Yuan, can never be known, except through the idealised vistas that appear in several albums of paintings and woodblock illustrations. Few scroll paintings depicting the replicated gardens, http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=009_gardens.inc&issue=009 Page 2 of 9 Acquiring Gardens | China Heritage Quarterly 1/21/14 11:17 PM several albums of paintings and woodblock illustrations. Few scroll paintings depicting the replicated gardens, either before or after, survive. (Figs. 5&6) Yet the fact that many of Qianlong's artistic exercises entailed a passion for faithfully transforming objects from one artistic medium into another would suggest that the gardens of the south that he sought to acquire through replication were veracious reproductions of originals.[2] Fig.6 Detail of Wen Zhengming's Huishan ronghui tu. Source: Zijincheng (Forbidden City), no. 140, July 2006, p.32. By the time Ji Cheng's work on the theory and practice of landscape gardening titled Yuanye (The craft of gardens) had been compiled at the end of the Ming dynasty, a theory of garden culture and its associated aesthetic had emerged in China. Born in 1582 in Tongli (Fig.7), a canal town not far from Suzhou, Ji Cheng systematised a tradition of horticultural and related writing to which many Ming scholars, including the 'Gongan School' essayist Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610), contributed. Ji Cheng's Yuanye may have been consigned to obscurity, because the preface was written by the notoriously corrupt Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646), but it is also the articulation of professional knowledge in its time. We can assume that the Qianlong Emperor was in a position to gain access to the information contained in Yuanye, even if we have no record of the emperor referring to this particular text. The fact that two of the four southern gardens—Shizi Lin and Jichang Yuan (Huiyuan) (Figs. 8&9)—which the Qianlong Emperor recreated in Yuanming Yuan, have survived largely intact to the present day gives us some idea of the originals on which the imperial copies were based. Fig.7 View of the Tuisi Garden in Tongli outside Suzhou. This garden is said to have been established in the Ming dynasty. [BGD] http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=009_gardens.inc&issue=009 Page 3 of 9 Acquiring Gardens | China Heritage Quarterly 1/21/14 11:17 PM Fig.8 Woodblock illustrations of the garden at Huishan visited by the Qianlong Emperor. Source: Nanxun shengdian, Taipei: Xinxing Shuju, 1979, pp.5518-9. http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=009_gardens.inc&issue=009 Page 4 of 9 Acquiring Gardens | China Heritage Quarterly 1/21/14 11:17 PM Fig.9 Woodblock illustrations of the Shizi Lin garden in Suzhou visited by the Qianlong Emperor.