Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture

Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture John Dixon Hunt, Series Editor This series is dedicated to the study and promotion of a wide variety of approaches to landscape architecture, with emphasis on connections between theory and practice. It includes monographs on key topics in history and theory, descriptions of projects by both established and rising designers, translations of major foreign-language texts, anthologies of theoretical and historical writings on classic issues, and critical writing by members of the profession of landscape architecture. The series was the recipient of the Award of Honor in Communications from the American Society of Landscape Architects, 2006. Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden Vera Schwarcz University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia Publication of this volume was aided by a grant from Wesleyan University. Copyright © 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schwarcz, Vera, 1947- Place and memory in the Singing Crane Garden / Vera Schwarcz. p. cm. — (Penn studies in landscape architecture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4100-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8122-4100-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Ming He Yuan (Beijing, China)—History. I. Title. SB466.C53M567 2008 712'.6 0951156—dc22 2007043620 Contents Preface vii Introduction: A Garden Made of Language and Time 1 1 Singing Cranes and Manchu Princes 31 2 War Invades the Garden 78 3 Consciousness in the Dark Earth 113 4 Red Terror on the Site of Ming He Yuan 148 5 Spaciousness Regained in the Museum 183 Conclusion: The Past’s Tiered Continuum 216 Dramatis Personae 225 Glossary of Chinese Terms 229 Notes 231 Bibliography 241 Index 251 This page intentionally left blank Preface Thinking about gardens leads naturally to an alchemy of mind. —Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight It is rare to be able to date the birth of a book. I feel grateful that I can point to the day, month, and hour: October 16, 1993–10:30 A.M. A brisk wind was blowing this Saturday across Beijing University. I was taking a walk on wooded paths in the northwest corner of campus I have come to know in- timately over the past twenty-five years. I had lived at Beida (the shortened name of Beijing University), I had returned for yearly visits, and I had written about its history in the 1910s and 1920s. This morning in October, I was unprepared for discovery. I was just strolling and thinking about the dense layers of friendship that bind me to this familiar ground. Suddenly I was accosted by a new building. It was located among the old Yenching University structures that I knew quite well. They connected the Beida of the Communist era back to the distinguished institution of liberal learning founded by American missionaries in the 1920s. Those buildings have more beauty, more history than the cement dormitories and classrooms built after 1949. The new building blended into the Yenching style, yet was far more graceful in its proportions, in the details of the paintings under its winged roofs. When I came to the front of the building I was surprised by the sign: Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology. How could this museum appear so suddenly? After all, I knew each part of this campus like the palm of my hand. True, I had not returned for a few years after the shock that followed the violent suppression of student demonstrations in June 1989. I entered the museum to chat with the ticket seller. It being Saturday, I was not carrying money, in keeping with my practice as an observant Jew. Having no cash, I had more time for conversation. In the colloquial language that has become one of my “mother tongues,” I asked the old man in the viii Preface ticket booth: “What was here before? This is my mu xiao [my “mother school”—I chose the Chinese intentionally to signal my intimacy with our shared space]. I know it too well for such a surprise!” The septuagenarian with a kind smile full of wrinkles turned out to be a retired manual laborer, a former groundskeeper at Beida. He answered me as if we had been old friends: “Oh, this was the place of the niu peng. The shacks where they herded all those brainy professors during the Cultural Revolution.” Niu peng—the “ox pens.” This then was the site that my old friends at Beida had hinted about so often, yet had refused to identify over two decades of friendship and interviews. Almost everyone I knew among the highly ed- ucated intellectuals in China had spent time in the niu peng. I had heard much whispering about the brutalities committed in the first prison, set up at Beida. But I never knew exactly where my friends had suffered their hu- miliation and terror. On this day of Shabbat, I backed away from the Sackler Museum and went to sit in a nearby pavilion, also new. A ﬂood of questions came to my mind: How does Jewish money (I knew of Arthur Sackler’s background) come to provide a haven for architectural fragments that survived the Cul- tural Revolution? Is it an atrocity to have an art museum on the very ground where there had been so much suffering? Can art ever be a meaningful con- tainer for historical trauma? In the next hour I faced all the dilemmas that frame this book. I knew before I left the garden setting outside the Sackler Museum that I was willing to dedicate years to wrestling with those dilemmas. Even without being a historical geographer, I knew that I wanted to write a narrative about this layered terrain. In my journal, on Sunday night, I wrote: “A sense of congealed time, blood on the surface of deep waters. I bring with me a lot of Jewish history. I also realize with gratitude that a new subject has found me on my first Shabbat back in China. The new building, oddly perfect. Its simple doors studded with gilded knobs, like the noblemen’s mansions of old. The marble Qing sundial in front of the Sackler—a remnant of the old Yuan Ming Yuan (Summer Palace). A coming-out of Beida’s hidden treasures. And the ache. The guard who speaks about the ox pens, does he hear all the whispered cries behind the art? Inside the museum today, I glimpsed a broken vessel. The careful piecing together of a broken past. This is my own task now.” In the weeks following the discovery of the new Sackler Museum I had ample occasion to savor what Diane Ackerman called “an alchemy of mind.” Different fragments of my past connection to Beida began to coalesce into a Preface ix new angle of vision about both Chinese space and Chinese time. I did not yet know that my subject would become the garden. I had noticed only the museum. I had just begun to reconstruct the fabric of its connectedness to the painful events of the 1960s. The idea of a special refuge in the midst of terror had not become central to my thinking yet. Ming He Yuan—the Singing Crane Garden with its own history of ruination and remembrance in the nineteenth century—would take root in my mind later. For now, I concentrated on the museum and the ox pens. That was alchemy enough to start with. Drawing upon many years of trusted intimacy at Beida, I used my re- maining weeks in 1993 to interview as many of the old professors still alive who recalled, and were willing to talk about, their experiences during the Cultural Revolution. In less than twenty days, I was privileged to talk at length with historian Zhou Yiliang, biologist Chen Yuezeng, economist Chen Zhenhan, and the well-known Sanskrit scholar Ji Xianlin. Having previously written a book based on oral history, I found that doors of conversations opened more readily than I had expected. Professor Ji brought a unique in- tensity to our conversations. He led me to understand that he was planning to write his own memoir of the ox pens at Beida, but that the time was not yet ripe. In 1998, when this work, Niu peng za yi (Recollections of the Ox Pen), saw the light of day, my task in writing this book became much easier. Ji Xianlin’s writing filled in one layer of the ground I came to explore in this book. An older strata was illuminated for me by the work and friendship of Hou Renzhi, the eminent geographer who pioneered the historiography of Beijing. A graduate of Yenching University, Professor Hou brought to his studies a scrupulous and lively imagination. His book Yan Yuan Shihua (Tales from Yan Yuan Garden) became my guide in this project. His detailed evoca- tion of the Singing Crane Garden led me to want to know more about the Manchu noblemen who built up this terrain in the nineteenth century. Hou Renzhi’s friendship and interest in my work opened paths of inquiry I could not have imagined possible in October 1993. Aware that I wanted to link the old Ming He Yuan to the history of the ox pens and the Sackler Museum, he introduced me to two scholars who quite literally changed the shape of this book: Jiao Xiong and Yue Shengyang.

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