Introduction
If you observe where a man lives and how he enjoys himself, then you know clearly whether he is talented or not (du juchu wanhao :u cai bu cai liaoran ke~hi lit/!; lit JJ(, tf Jl·J ;t ;r- ;t r ~;if ~11 ).
The Chinese garden as a topic of scholarly inquiry has been explored from a variety of angles. Much has been written about its structural features as well as its cosmological, religious, philosophical, moral, and aesthetic un derpinnings. More recently, attention has also been called to the garden as a site of economic production and consumption.1 The coverage of studies on the garden in Chinese literature ranges from an individual work or 2 3 4 author to a group of authors to a historical period. This book deals with the poetic configurations of the urban private garden from the mid-Tang to the Northern Song (approximately from the ninth to the eleventh cen-
EPIGRAPH: Preface to "On the Pavilion at Administrative Assistant Hua the Twelfth's Resi dence in Ruzhou" ;Q 1;: + :::.. .f•J 't i-k 1tl ~ I*J .:f, QTS, 349.3907. 1. E.g., Joanna F. Handlin Smith, "Gardens in Ch'i Piao-chia's Social World"; and Clunas, Fruitful Sites. z. E.g., Westbrook, "Landscape Description in the Lyric Poetry and 'Fuh on Dwelling in the Mountains' of Shieh Ling-yw1"; Plaks, Archetype and Allegory; Xiaoshan Yang, "Having Ic Both Ways"; Chi Xiao, The Chinese Garden as Lyric Enclave. 3· E.g., Owen, "The Formation of the Tang Estate Poem." 4. E.g., Hou Naihui, Shiqing yu youjing; Lin Jizhong, Tangshi yu ~huangyuan wenhua. 2 Introduction tury) in relation to the development of the private sphere m Chinese literati culture. I follow Stephen Owen's use of the term "private sphere" in reference to literary culture to mean "a cluster of objects, experiences, and activities that belong to a subject apart from the social whole, whether state or family." This abstract "sphere requires a space," which, "above all, was the garden.''5 There were certainly components of the private sphere other than those as sociated with gardens, and some of them are brought to bear on my investi gation. Ultimately, however, my treatment of the private sphere is meant to be illustrative rather than inclusive; to be more specific, it concentrates on what Ouyang Zhan called juchu wanhao .% J}t J;t -J(f, with juchu understood as referring to gardens and wanhao to the finer things in life enjoyed for their aesthetic appeal. I hasten to emphasize here that I am not offering a survey of gardens as a poetic topic. Indeed, this book, as indicated by its subtitle, is not even exclu sively about the garden. Nonetheless, all the major issues raised in the course of my discussion are linked directly or indirectly to aspects of garden culture, whose shifting significance was in turn caught up in larger cultural changes from the mid-Tang onward. My goal is to describe and interpret some of the new values and new rhetorics that were rooted in and helped to shape the process of self-cultivation and self-imaging of the Chinese literati in a given historical period. I will leave it to readers to judge whether the issues that I raise have wider implications and applicability; the task that I set myself is to reveal the correlation between the evolution of the private sphere and the conscious efforts of Tang-Song literati to search for alternatives when con ventional values, whether political, moral, or aesthetic, were found to be in applicable or inadequate. Chronologically, Chapters 1 and 2 of this book draw on examples from the mid-Tang; Chapters 3 and 4 straddle the mid-Tang and the Northern Song; Chapter 5 focuses on the Northern Song. Thematically, the first two chapters deal with the garden in its function as the physical space of a poeti cally constructed private sphere; the next two examine the modes in which certain cultural artifacts moved to and across different private spaces; the last chapter investigates the rhetorics of joy (le ~) and leisure (xian ffl.~) that dominated the poetic representations of the life of the elderly as it was an chored in gardens.
5· Owen, The End of the Chinese "Middle Ages," p. 88.