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Introduction

A Garden Made of Language and Time

. . . It is not death

Has drawn me to this desolate world

I defy all waste and degradation

—These swaddling clothes

Are a sun that will not be contained in the grave

—Yang Lian, “Apologia to a Ruin”

Gardens are not merely earthly stuff. They occupy grounds in the mind as well. Some reach there by the beauty of their design, some by the power of their cultural symbolism. Many use both. Other gardens take up no space at all. Yet even as ruins, or as memories of ruins, they have the power to breathe life into worn words. They create spaciousness in dark times. This book explores strategies for creating spaciousness by translating what I have learned from the history of gardens into the garden that is history. It takes as its starting point a corner of China that managed to survive repeated devastation through fragile means such as language and the integrity of recollection. If the Singing Crane Garden (Ming He Yuan) can speak to us today, it is because its ruination was defeated by imagination, because voices from a distant past continue to speak about our predicament today.

The specific site that launched this inquiry lies in northwest Beijing. Removed from the bustle of the Tian An Men Square by several highways that ring the capital of China, the grounds of the Singing Crane Garden occupy a picturesque site at the heart of Beijing University (figure 1). A visitor who survived traffic-clogged streets and managed to gain entrance to the tightly guarded campus would have to continue on a northwest axis before reaching any sign of the Singing Crane Garden. A gray, new boulder in front of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology commemorates the garden’s name in bold characters and little historical detail (figure 2). This stone hints at a princely retreat of the nineteenth century while remaining quite mute about the atrocities that took place on these grounds in the 1960s. Cultural memory is evoked and dismissed all at once.

Figure 1. Beijing showing the location of Beijing University in the northwest area of the city. Drawn by Yishuo Hu.

This double gesturing is limited not to one rock, one courtyard at Beijing University, or one city in China. Rather, such layered connotations have been exposed and explored by scholars of Chinese and Western gardens alike. Denis Cosgrove, the British geographer, for example, wrote about the iconography of landscapes with just such attentiveness to the “curtain” that veils culturally organized spaces. His argument, simply put, is that landscapes beckon us to practice a distinctive mode of seeing—“a way in which some Europeans have represented themselves and the world about them and their social relationship with it, and through which they have commented on social relations.”¹ China, too, has a complex history of looking at the meanings of landscaped spaces. The Ming He Yuan boulder at Beijing University does not quite fit into these notions of representation. The paucity of physical evidence combined with politically informed reticence makes “reading” this garden a particularly interesting challenge.

Figure 2. New stone boulder inscribed with the characters “Ming He Yuan” (Singing Crane Garden). The calligraphy was done by Qigong, a surviving relative of the Manchu imperial family, who also suffered considerable persecution during the Cultural Revolution. The base of the boulder is set in a marble pedestal that commemorates the generosity of Jill Sackler in donating funds to the renovation of the grounds around the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology.

The Chinese scholar Feng Jin hinted at this predicament in a recent essay about the concept of “scenery” in the Chinese garden. Although his focus is not on the Singing Crane Garden in Beijing, he does note that the shortage of material remains has forced scholars to reconstruct garden-making on the basis of literary sources scattered throughout a vast body of ancient documents. The reason for this shortage is mentioned at the end of Feng Jin’s lengthy essay. The meanings of classical Chinese gardens, he suggests, are hard to decode “because the monopoly of the theory of class struggle prohibited any mention of literati culture.”² That is to say, the intellectuals who both built and appreciated gardens have been smeared with political disapproval in the late twentieth century. Whereas Denis Cosgrove is free to piece together the iconography of the English landscape, Chinese scholars have made their way to this same subject hampered by the repressive politics of the Maoist era. Not only are there fewer gardens left to study, but the very language for their explanation has been decimated by decades of propaganda and murderously real class struggle.

Reading a garden such as the Ming He Yuan, therefore, requires narrative strategies that circle its muted terrain, that give voice to all that has been silenced through violence and indirect commemoration. Poetry is repeatedly used in this book because it is well suited for indirection. To be sure, Chinese gardens have always been at home in words. There is a long tradition of poetry about landscaped spaces. Poems, in turn, appeared all around the garden: on rocks, walls, corridors, pavilions, and even mountainsides. With war and revolution, however, both gardens and the refined literati consciousness that nurtured them came under attack. What is left is just words: fragile, halting snippets that mark a longing for leisure and contemplation in the very places where bamboo, chrysanthemums, and gingko no longer flower at ease. In this study, poems from the Chinese have been rendered into idiomatic English, often altering shape and sound, to convey to a twenty-first century reader a wordless yearning to make sense of loss and devastation.

Such a yearning may be discerned, for example, in the poetry of Yang Lian, a writer whose youth had been marred by the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. A former Red Guard, Yang was part of a generation of artists who sought out the ruined landscape of northwest Beijing in order to come to terms with the ravage in their own lives. Shortly after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, these artists congregated in the rice paddies that lay north, beyond the walls of Beijing University. Since the landscape outside had been intensely politicized, they sought out ruins to articulate their own severed connection to history. The broken stones of the old Summer Palace (Yuan Ming Yuan) provided an alternative to the denuded cultural imagination fostered in the university under the guidance of the Communist Party. Heading ever north, they created gardens of the mind out of words alone. Yang Lian’s poem “Apologia to a Ruin” speaks to this ravaged landscape directly. Seeking what is no longer there, Yang asserts that the journey is nonetheless worth taking:

. . . the only hope that illuminated me

Faint star out of its time . . .

Pitiless chiaroscuro of my soul.³

Yang Lian was part of a generation intentionally heading north, away from the ardor of the Maoist era that had been identified with the red sun. Yang’s friend and collaborator, the poet Bei Dao, even incorporated the idea of “north” into his pen name, which means “northern island.” Away from the enforced collectivism of class struggle, these poets sought and found language for other landscapes. The visual evidence of the ruins in northwest Beijing became a fulcrum for meditations about loss and desolation—as well as about renewal. Yang Lian’s poem concludes not with death, but with a willingness to defy “these swaddling clothes,” with a desire to excavate “a sun that will not be contained in the grave.”⁴

The history of the Singing Crane Garden is similarly illuminated by devastation. Around the gray boulder inside the exuberantly developing Beijing University, absence reigns. To map this terrain, one must learn to walk a little slower, listen more closely as time unfolds in guarded words. Like Yang Lian, I was also drawn to the northwest corner of Beijing by a darkened sun. I knew the traumatic history of the burning of the Summer Palace in 1860. I had studied the brutal impact of the Cultural Revolution upon Beijing University in the 1960s. But it was not death that pulled me on this project. Rather it was the possibility of cultural renewal in traumatized spaces. My ambition was to take the idea of the garden out of the ground and into the realm of history and language. In the end, the Singing Crane Garden may be no more than time and words. Yet in encompassing this space, both history and language may acquire new spaciousness, fresh meaning.

Winged Eaves and Liquid Light

The browning carapace of a pagoda may not seem like an auspicious place to think afresh about language and time. My own first glimpse of the Pavilion of Winged Eaves (Yi Ran Ting) in 1989 did not suggest the possibilities of renewed cultural imagination that thrive here. It was late May when I came upon the site, in the company of my five-year-old son. Most of our days in that spring of 1989 were engulfed by student demonstrations in Tian An Men Square. I was following the unfolding events with consuming interest. Having written a great deal about the struggle for science and democracy in modern China, I witnessed the tragic suppression of the student movement with dread and familiarity. The campus of Beijing University was, as many times before in the twentieth century, at the heart of student activism. To give my son a bit of relief from loudspeakers and protest posters, I took him for bike rides along the more isolated paths in the northwest corner of Beida. At first, the Pavilion of Winged Eaves was hardly visible among the weeds. It took the excited explorations of a five-year-old to uncover the broken slabs of stone leading to a square viewing area. Pillars that had once been painted bright red were now the color of dried blood. As I looked out from beyond the terrace railing, all I saw was scrawny trees and a tangle of electric wires (figure 3). Nothing here suggested that we had stumbled upon one of the most cherished meditation spots of the old Singing Crane Garden.

Figure 3. The Pavilion of Winged Eaves (Yi Ran Ting) in 1989.

Nothing, except perhaps the ceiling. This was home to fifty identical grus japonensis—red-crowned cranes. Each painted bird filled to the brim a blue circle framed by an artfully subdued square of green. Each crane had its wings spread to the very edge of the formal, geometrical sky—a perfect image of frozen time. Below the masters of this dancing yet stationary heaven was a series of carefully brushed images of marble bridges, carved lions, and more buildings with winged eaves (figure 4). Nothing in the shadowy interior of the pagoda informed the visitor that these were scenes from the campus of Yenching University, the American-sponsored institution that had occupied these grounds before 1952, before the national Beijing University was moved out north, away from the neighborhood of the Forbidden City.

A decade after our discovery, in 1998, all that changed. China’s foremost educational institution was celebrating its centenary, consciously laying claim both to the old Imperial University founded in 1898 as well as to the twentieth-century campus of Yenching. The brownish carapace was gone. Reddish pillars had been painted a sinewy green. Broken railings had been replaced with a simplified version of “veranda”-style woodwork that was tinted with a jarring red. The stone steps had been repaired (figure 5). The artificial hillock was reconstructed with new bricks. The cranes, too, had been touched up and looked more frozen in their broken flight. The scenic spots from the Yenching campus were repainted too, made more schematic, more recognizable for the many alumni and visitors walking around with a newly published school map. At the entrance of the pavilion was a formal slab to mark the place of dead beauty (figure 6):

Figure 4. Painted ceiling of the Pavilion of Winged Eaves, 1989.

Figure 5. Renovated Pavilion of Winged Eaves as it appeared in the summer of 1999.

XIAO JING TING—SCHOOL SCENES PAVILION

The original name of the School Scenes Pavilion was Yi Ran Ting, which was part of the Singing Crane Garden refurbished in 1926 after the founding of Yenjing University, when it was decorated with ten famous spots of Yenjing University—hence its name of “School Scenes Pavilion.” This name was retained during the restoration that begun in 1984.⁵

The official and repetitious language conveys the bare bones of the history buried here. Only two dates are carved in stone: 1926 and 1984. The decades before and after are consigned to silence. The gray marker erected in 1998 makes no mention of the niu peng—“ox pens”—erected at the foot of the pagoda to incarcerate and torture eminent professors during the 1960s. It is equally reticent about 1860, when the Singing Crane Garden was scorched by British armies on their way to the burning of the Summer Palace. It does not even nod toward the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology established on the grounds of the former ox pens, and it keeps utterly quiet about the struggles that accompanied its design after the Tian An Men massacre of 1989. The School Scenes Pavilion is, like a child standing on good behavior, properly warned against talking to strangers. It keeps family secrets buried behind a naively verdant exterior.

Figure 6. Stone tablet installed in front of the Pavilion of Winged Eaves as restorations began in 1984. Photograph by the author.

To excavate voices that celebrated beauty and mourned its desolation on these grounds, one has to practice what the Italian chemist-writer Primo Levi called “hard listening.” A survivor of Auschwitz, Levi knew how easily history swallows the evidence for its own existence. It is not only massive atrocities like the Holocaust that stifle our access to the past. The very passage of time (invariably codified and manipulated by political authorities) brings to us only the freshly painted bones of garden history. One has to dig below stone markers and refurbished monuments to hear what Levi called “the hoarse voices of those who can no longer speak.”⁶

On the campus of Beijing University, such voices are marked by a reticent attachment to the old sites, old names, old knowledge. One of the most eloquent among them belongs to Hou Renzhi, a British-educated historical geographer who has been quietly reconstructing the history of Beijing and its princely gardens. In a slim, bilingual volume dedicated to the history of Bejing University, he includes a line drawing of the Yi Ran Ting that speaks volumes for the beauty that once thrived and was squelched here. A solitary pine and the winged roof give voice to the seasoned memory of a scholar who had been forced to repent for the historical knowledge that had set him apart from “revolutionary masses.” Politically persecuted in 1957 and during the Cultural Revolution, this eminent graduate of Yenching University writes about his beloved campus in roundabout terms. Whereas European geographers such as Denis Cosgrove are able to stretch disciplinary boundaries with intellectual ease and theoretical verve, Hou Renzhi has undertaken the same project in China against great odds. For Cosgrove, the iconography of landscape is an opportunity to map relations of power and of perception across the history of English elites. Hou Renzhi’s scholarly life, by contrast, has been characterized by political campaigns during which the Communist Party kept denouncing the literati values that once nourished garden spaces. Hou’s book about the history of Beijing University is dedicated to a new, post–Cultural Revolution generation of undergraduates. It seeks to awaken in them an appreciation for the ground that lies beneath their feet. Hence the artful drawing of the Yi Ran Ting.

Within the political limitations of the 1980s (when the book was first published), the learned historian managed to hint at the pain buried around the pagoda with the winged eaves. In a particularly poignant and muted passage, the author departed from the obligatory optimism of socialist historiography. Having championed the expansion of geography into the realm of history and literature (much like Cosgrove), Hou Renzhi now speaks directly to those who will shape the iconography of landscape in the future, when cultural memory may be accessed more freely: “If we do not recall the past, we can hardly believe what a painful experience this quiet corner on our campus has undergone. We are sure, the past is not to be forgotten.”⁷ The explicit historical reference here is to 1860, which also ravaged the old Ming He Yuan. But with an informed ear one can hear a subtle reference to the suffering inflicted on Chinese intellectuals at Beijing University during the Cultural Revolution. Hou Renzhi knows that without recalling the past, without providing glimpses of the Yi Ran Ting, future generations will not be able to converse with the landscape, with history, with language itself.

A similarly muted reference to the Yi Ran Ting appears in an essay by Ji Xianlin, the eminent Sanskrit scholar who was also incarcerated in the ox pens of Beijing University. Like Hou Renzhi, Ji Xianlin has paid dearly for all the knowledge accumulated abroad, for his long-standing attachment to cultural memory. During the darkest years of the Cultural Revolution, he shared his incarceration quarters with Hou Renzhi, as well as another eminent scholar, Zhu Guanqian. A philosopher by training, Zhu had written extensively about the history of tragedy before he actually lived through one in the 1960s. In an essay dedicated to the memory of this “pen-mate,” Ji Xianlin records the solace that landscaped spaces—or better yet, the informed memory of a vanishing world—provided during weeks and months of beatings and torture. Ji’s essay describes how the garden helped Zhu Guanqian to preserve his sanity under duress.

Language was not much help in this nightmare. Each word, spoken or written, could become a liability in the eyes of Red Guards who monitored the activities and thoughts of aged prisoners. All that remained was the possibility of looking out of the window with informed eyes: “At night, after the lights were turned off, Zhu tossed and turned in his bed studying the famous Yi Ran Ting pavilion glimpsed through a window. . . . In the morning, he would run to a corner and practice tai ji quan. One time he was discovered by the so-called ‘staff to promote reform.’ They beat him fiercely. In the eyes of these young lords, our bodies and souls had committed grave sins.”⁸

More than a century after its destruction, this remnant of the Singing Crane Garden provided comfort to the knowing eye. Like Hou Renzhi’s drawing, it is a sliver of an ample past. Yet it sufficed to stem the tide of despair. Ji Xianlin even goes so far as to suggest that the spiritual practice of looking beyond the window of the ox pens, combined with the risky regime of martial arts, enabled Zhu Guanqian to overcome the temptation of suicide—a terrible desire to which many of their fellow intellectuals succumbed during the Cultural Revolution.

This evocative power of fragments is also explored by the American sinologist Stephen Owen in his path-breaking work on Chinese cultural memory. Far from needing an entire landscape to activate imagination, Owen argues, Chinese poets, writers, and thinkers were able to reconstruct entire worlds from snippets, from an old arrow head, from a nameless skull.⁹ Why not the Yi Ran Ting? Why not use the fading light provided by this pavilion to begin to imagine how landscaped spaces can inform, enrich, and indeed heal the wounds of history?

The very name of this pavilion weaves it into a history that used to sanction and cherish reflection. Yi Ran Ting harks back as far as the Song dynasty, when scholar-official Ou-Yang Xiu (1007–1072) used it to play with the phrase “winged eaves.” Serving in central China where mountain peaks invite rooftops to follow their rhythm, Ou-Yang Xiu delighted in letting his eyes roam from hill to pavilion, and back. Just as the actual structure at Beijing University provided solace for pained minds, so too, Ou-Yang Xiu’s idea of yi ran ting promised inner peace and relief from the din of public life. Warmed by the friendship of fellow poets, the Song statesman envisioned a place where thoughts, like mountains, could rise on winged words.¹⁰

It took the power and privilege of an emperor to bind place and name in the capital city of Beijing. By the time of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), pavilions with winged eaves dotted north and south China alike. The most beautiful, most daring ones were located in south and central China. In the north, where Manchu rulers held the reigns of government, the landscape was less suitable for soaring cornices. Nonetheless, the idea of yi ran ting endured because it offered a verbal link to the imaginative landscape of the south. The Qianlong emperor (who reigned as Hongli from 1711 to 1795) stood at the apex of this aesthetic of cultural domination. Not content to encode the world beyond the Great Wall with his cultural authority, Qianlong took pride in visiting sites and writing poems about the gardens of the south as well.

Some 42,000 of his poems survived, each marking a place, a moment—not unlike the red seal on each item of his vast imperial art collection.¹¹ One such verse, titled “Yi Ran Ting,” marks a specific spot in northwest Beijing. Located on the periphery of Qianlong’s Summer Palace, this promontory was not unlike the one occupied by the School Scenes Pavilion today. Set apart from the main road leading to Yuan Ming Yuan and to the temple complex on Jade Mountain further north, this was a place to sit and contemplate the passage of time:

Meandering toward the west,

I came upon a pavilion.

Seated under its winged eaves,

I savor liquid light.

Blue seems near enough to touch,

Green beams afar, a taste of the untamed.¹²

Qianlong’s words would echo throughout the centuries that followed the emperor’s excursion to Yi Ran Ting. Liquid light and a taste of the untamed continued to attract princes and scholars alike. The fact that a famous ruler had stopped to notice nature here added cultural glory to an already gracious setting. Place and name were thus joined in an enduring bond. The Singing Crane Garden that came to house the old pavilion became part of a northern lineage of respite from the eventfulness of the public past. In ways that Qianlong could not have imagined, imprisoned intellectuals in the 1960s looked for and found here liquid light as well.

The character yi in classical Chinese has several meanings. It connotes “wings” as well as “refuge” and “assistance.”¹³ Space imaginatively reconstructed can aid the mind to soar. It can also shelter intellectuals from violent events. The Yi Ran Ting which stands on the cement hill at Beijing University today is a silent witness to both these possibilities. Its upturned roof protects more than the school scenes repainted in 1998. It frames the spaciousness of historical reflection possible on layered grounds.

The density of voices belonging to those who built, celebrated, mourned, and commemorated the Singing Crane Garden would be a meaningless cacophony without the Yi Ran Ting. This physical link between nineteenth-century princes and twentieth-century Red Guards allows us to decode different meanings of experiential time in one corner of China. It is as if one patch of a large quilt hinted at the design of the missing whole. We may never know the fullness of beauty that was the entire coverlet. But even a remnant, imaginatively grasped, expands the possibilities of historical understanding. In the words of Gaston Bachelard (a French philosopher who explored the interstices between physical and temporal existence), “Space that has been seized upon by the subject is not an object to be measured by the estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in . . . with all the partiality of the imagination.”¹⁴

To Still the Burning Fires of the Mind

Bachelard’s insight about the role that imagination plays in expanding the boundaries of space is especially useful in mapping the garden that once surrounded Yi Ran Ting. The space occupied by the Singing Crane Garden depended upon and nourished subjectivity. To study it, in turn, one has to call to mind more than the structures that occupied the grounds surrounding the Pavilion of Winged Eaves. The surveyor of this site has to take into account the accelerating pace of an increasingly brutal history. It is in that framework that the respite provided by the Ming He Yuan begins to take shape in both words and time. This enlarged site may be understood in terms of Denis Cosgrove’s “symbolic landscapes”—but only if we grasp how metaphorical thinking became an increasingly endangered activity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. Encoding and decoding iconographies depends upon a safe historical distance from the subject under scrutiny. The distance diminished rapidly for Chinese intellectuals enmeshed in social revolution.

When Cosgrove cites Erwin Panovsky and John Ruskin to develop a paradigm for the social formation of landscapes, he is appealing to an intelligentsia that did not fear for its life, that contemplated the legacy of the past with a certain amount of equanimity. Hou Renzhi, by contrast, paid dearly for every bit of scholarly work that did not fit the paradigm of class struggle. Similarly, such noted garden historians as Chen Congzhou and Hu Dongchu were repeatedly persecuted for their efforts to document classical spaces where contemplation thrived. Chen Congzhou’s masterful study of Suzhou gardens published in 1956 was amply illustrated with poetic allusions to underscore the symbolic significance of the landscape. For this accomplishment, Chen was condemned as a “rightist,” demoted from his university position and ostracized until the 1980s. Hu Donchu, the author of the 1981 work The Way of the Virtuous: The Influence of Art and Philosophy on Chinese Garden Design, had paid his dues as well. A survivor of the Cultural Revolution, imprisoned in the ox pens, Hu had to bide his time until Mao died before he could turn to scholarship and the possibility of linking space and thought.

China’s scorched terrain, however, is not the only place where a garden of history took root as contemplative spaces vanished from sight. Simon Schama’s monumental inquiry Landscape and Memory also took its inspiration from a wounded imagination. Journeying back to Germany and Poland, where Jews and their cultured attachment to the past had been brutally extinguished, Schama acknowledges that he is constructing a refuge in the mind, an imaginary landscape to house what is missing in space. His study gives absence a presence. It seeks, in Schama’s own words, to see how “through a mantle of ash can emerge a shoot of restored life.”¹⁵

The Manchu prince Mianyu, owner of the Singing Crane Garden, would have understood this metaphor quite well. He lived through times in which ashes consumed much of his garden, but not the mind that cherished possibilities of cultural renewal. Mianyu was born to privilege and power. At that time of his birth in 1814, his father had already reigned for fourteen years as the Jiaqing emperor. By the time of Mianyu’s death in 1865, the Mandate of Heaven had been sorely tested by conflict with the West and by internal rebellion within. Physical spaces for imperial refuge had been assaulted, most notably the burning of the Summer Palace. Leisurely meditation on the harmony between man and nature had vanished with the pressure to defend the country and the court by force of arms. Prince Mianyu witnessed and took part in all this. His garden, though short lived, was part of a survival strategy that went beyond the space it occupied in a northwest corner of the imperial capital. It became, in the embroidering of memory, a shoot of restored life.

As the fifth, and youngest, son of the Jiaqing emperor, Mianyu had little hope of ruling China directly. When his father died in 1820, the six-year-old boy was elevated to prince of the second rank with the title of Hui Jun Wang. In 1839, in the middle of the Opium War, his princedom was elevated to the first degree with the title Hui Qin Wang. By 1853, when the Taiping Rebellion threatened to overthrow the war-weakened dynasty, Mianyu took charge of the forces defending the imperial capital—with the augmented title of “Feng ming da jiang jun” (Worthy Military General in Charge of Sustaining the Mandate).¹⁶ It was with such heavy burdens in mind that Prince Hui designed and cherished the Singing Crane Garden.

The site for this refuge was granted to him in 1835 by his second brother, who reigned as the Daoguang emperor from 1821 to 1850. Granting gardens to close kin had been a Manchu practice for more than a century before Mianyu came to own the Singing Crane Garden. These special gifts were marks of imperial favor, down payments on loyalty and service expected from those who became neighbors of the emperor’s Summer Palace. The actual plot of land occupied by Mianyu’s garden had been part of an imperial enclosure called Spring’s Mirror Garden (Jing Chun Yuan), which his father began to subdivide for his children (figure 7). A small, eastern portion was granted by the Jiaqing emperor to his favorite daughter in 1802. After his death, the Daoguang emperor saw fit to grant the much larger, western section to his brother, Prince Hui. Five years before China’s defeat in the first Opium War, eighteen years before he placed the fate of the capital in the hands of Mianyu, the supreme ruler of China understood the necessity of having a skilled and loyal brother nearby in the outskirts of Beijing.

The physical terrain of the Singing Crane Garden, and that of neighboring princely retreats, will be explored in more detail later. For now, it is the symbolic landscape that has to be brought into focus. As a Manchu prince, Mianyu was prepared to live with the past in mind. Coming from a nomadic tribe that occupied China in 1644, he had been schooled to value both Manchu traditions and the Chinese classics. Fluent in both languages, this nobleman lived in several cultural universes at once. When traveling beyond the Great Wall to the imperial hunting grounds of Jehol, he became a Manchu tribesman mindful of his authority among Mongol and Tibetan allies who also shared his Lamaist Buddhist faith. In the Forbidden City of Beijing or near the Summer Palace, he was a Confucian official, prepared to serve with virtue the ruler of the realm.

Figure 7. Princely gardens surrounding the old Summer Palace of Yuan Ming Yuan as noted inside the campus of Beijing University. Original map courtesy of Professor Hou Renzhi. This section redrawn by Yishuo Hu of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.

In both worlds, Mianyu lived quite literally in the light of the past. In his posthumous collection entitled Ai ri zhai ji (Collection from the Studio of Cherished Days), the owner of the Singing Crane Garden summarized some of the wisdom he gained in his garden as well as in his more public life as an imperial kinsman. Addressing himself to a new generation of princes corrupted by wealth, opium, as well as the growing threat of internal rebellion and war with the West, Mianyu wrote: “Patience and the power of words can make or unmake a man. Haste in the pursuit of honor, like ill used words, place one’s virtue at risk. Ordinary folk rush about to try to outwit fate and believe everything they hear. A gentleman learns to still the burning fires of his mind. Therefore, his words reflect his heart.”¹⁷ Burning fires were anything but metaphorical by the time Mianyu’s descendants edited his works. Nonetheless, the power of words endured. Even if gardens could no longer house patience and virtue, the mind held on to them even as political and cultural change made them increasingly obsolete.

The tenacity of this attachment to cultural memory has also been noted by Craig Clunas in his study of Ming dynasty scholar gardens in the lower Yangtze area. Here, too, landscaped spaces occupied a double life between the physical and the symbolic. In contrast to Ming gardens, however, Qing princely retreats were not owned by Confucian literati. Their “cultural syntax,” to borrow from Clunas, was more mixed and multivocal. The Yangtze delta gardens of scholar-officials were anchored in the agriculture, poetry, and painting of the south. They were “fruitful sites” in ways that Mianyu’s garden never hoped to be.¹⁸ Imperial retreats bred dreams of leisure and hopes for respite from the increasingly arduous (and increasing unsuccessful) effort to reestablish Manchu authority over a war-shattered China. Gardens that had once been part of a complex cultural arrangement came to stand for the waning possibility of quieting the burning fires of the mind.

To understand this second, nonphysical life of the garden, we have to look beyond the conventional parameters of landscape history. John Dixon Hunt, a pioneer in garden theory, has argued that we must turn our focus to a broader spaciousness that he terms “the art of the millieu.” In Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory, Hunt points out that designed spaces are “both a physical object and a place experienced by a subject . . . the idea of a garden is at the same time paradoxically composed of perceptions of gardens in many different ways and different people and different culture and periods.”¹⁹ Lest this angle of vision become too diffuse, Hunt goes on to anchor the idea of the garden in the soil of language itself. Building upon the work of previous garden historians, he points out that most words for “garden” are rooted in the simple, important idea of enclosure. Whether one starts with “yard” in English, “hof” in Dutch, “gradina” in Romanian, the path leads directly to the idea of a fenced-in space (from the Indo-European gher [fence]).²⁰

Figure 8. Chinese character yuan—originally suggesting an open park, later connoting a “garden” that encloses lakes, artificial hills, and pavilions.

The Chinese ideograph for “garden” mirrors this idea with its own multiple connotations. Yuan originally referred to an open park, a hunting preserve of the rich and the powerful (figure 8). Later, in the course of Chinese history, lettered gentlemen developed a taste for more intimate enclosures. Consequently, yuan took on the meaning of a cultivated space where one planted seeds of thought as well as seeds of plants. This evolution from a broad, nearly public yuan to a bordered, more private universe replete with lakes, hills, fir trees, lotus flowers, pavilions, and courtyards parallels the rise of the Confucian literati in the long centuries from the Han dynasty through the Song.²¹

Confucius himself hinted at the harvest of insight possible in a garden when he told his disciples: “The wise enjoys the streams, the benevolent the mountains; the wise are active, the benevolent passive, the wise are happy and the benevolent live long.”²² For the Master of the Analects, as for the Manchu Prince Mianyu in the nineteenth century, the natural universe served as a mirror for the moral virtues of men. The four lines that border the character yuan came to symbolize the walls (both of stone and of time) that enclosed the garden. Inside the four walls of the garden, we find the radical for “earth/soil,” which is the essential precondition for any garden. The small square at the center evokes lakes and ponds, which mirror both the sky and the mind of the observer.²³ The play of strokes below the waters suggests trees and rocks that give the garden its distinctive character. Seen in this way, the garden is a frame within a frame. It demands discrimination (and often privileged education and leisure time) for the slow-paced unfolding of the carefully constructed vistas and cultural symbols.

The study of history also demands borders and boundaries. Inquiry into an event depends upon a fixed temporal framework. Like the hedge around the garden, the historian’s angle of vision must be initially constricted in order to give evidence its full weight. The Singing Crane Garden in this study is an example of such a framing device. Starting with the garden walls erected by Prince Hui and ending with the construction of the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Beijing University, this history uncovers various voices that give this corner of China its experiential depth.

Had the Singing Crane Garden been a walled pleasure palace alone, it would not have generated the many ripples of grief and insight that endured throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fertility of experience found on its scarred grounds is the result of the subtleness of imagination already apparent when Prince Mianyu wrote about fires of the mind. The Pavilion of Winged Eaves, as well as other physical remains that dot the campus of Beijing University today, are part of the framework that helps us understand both Prince Hui as well as inmates of the “ox pens” such as Ji Xianlin and Zhu Guanqian. Each found this site to be a protected space where language and time could unfold multiple meanings unhindered by the brutality of the public past.

Jing and Dong: Stillness and Motion in the Garden of History

The garden of historical memory thus took the place once occupied by historical gardens. As freedom to move through graceful spaces contracted over time, other skills of artful reflection came to the fore. The wealth of contemplative possibilities nurtured by classical landscaped spaces allowed Chinese intellectuals to survive long periods of spiritual desecration. Gardens, after all, had been places where mental discipline had been a central concern. In the words of Dorothy Graham, an American traveler who roamed the princely estates of Beijing in the 1930s, the limited enclosure of the yuan was designed to “calm the raging seas, temper the wind and adjust nature to the scale of man’s encompassing will.”²⁴ For Graham, the turbulence tamed by Chinese gardens was largely metaphorical. Even the descendants of Manchu noblemen whom she visited and chatted with before the outbreak of war with Japan were able to stand a bit to the side of turbulent events. As distance from history vanished in the 1940s, the challenge of calming minds grew ever more intense.

Fortunately, that challenge had been embedded in classical garden design and provided a lexicon for living through, living with turbulence. Jing and dong are two aspects of the classical garden that are particularly useful in mapping the symbolic terrain of the Singing Crane Garden. The first suggests stillness, the second motion. Their layered and joined connotations go far beyond angles of vision provided by standing still or perambulating through a classical Chinese garden. Jing and dong are aspects of space, of persons and of history as well. Each has at least two faces, two phases, two voices—or better put, this duality hints at a multifaceted predicament that the garden mirrors and evokes.

Jing centers on the idea of unruffled waters. A smooth lake, a well-designed work of art, the echo of a temple bell are all part of the idea of jing. There are several Chinese homonyms for stillness that use this sound. Two that may be most useful here are one that has the “standing” radical built into it and another that combines the radical for “verdant” combined 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” became even less tangible than it had been at the end of the Ming. The tenacity 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 of regret,

we can defy it still.

Come, sit under these winged eaves,

give voice to what is gone.³⁴

Written in the fall of 1860, this poem reaches beyond the grounds of the Singing Crane Garden. It comes forward to challenge and console those who seek knowledge of a missing past. Unlike the classical slogans that framed the exhibition about archaeological studies in the Sackler Museum, this use of classical language leaves room for doubt, for grief, for all the ruins that have no home in physical structures. The garden that was destroyed in space acquired a second life in the words of those committed to give voice to what is gone.

A historian of ruined landscapes, like Prince Yihuan, has to translate a past of wood and stone into a tapestry of words. The sinologist Frederick Mote suggested that this task is made easier for us by the Chinese tradition itself, which had long accustomed itself to translation from the broken remains of living history to the fragile, enduring medium of linguistic narrative. China, Mote notes, has the longest, most complex documentation of mankind’s past precisely because it “constantly scrutinized the past as recorded in words and caused it to function in the life of the present.”³⁵ The problem that became acute on the site of the Singing Crane Garden was how to revive the past through words that had also come under attack.

Much like the Singing Crane Garden in its time, a narrative that would contain its ravage and its renewal needs a framework that goes beyond conventional history. Were the narrative too close to fiery events, memory would have no room to speak its halting tale. Dori Laub, a psychiatrist who has written about the “art of trauma,” suggests ways to listen to what is being said, and also silenced, by the words of history: “Indirect pointing to past meanings is an essential element in the art of trauma, in which the aim is not to come to an ‘objectively real’ depiction of an event but to create a protected space wherein the remembrance of traumatic experience can begin, if only haltingly, to occur.”³⁶

I also used indirect pointing in this study by moving my narrative back and forth around the fulcrum that is the Singing Crane Garden. I have not shied away from the traumatic events that changed the shape of the garden and the fate of those who lived and studied on its terrain. At the same time, I have chosen to approach those events, through the voices and lives of a wide range of dramatis personae. Some were close to the epicenter of disaster, some quite far away. My goal has been to bring the past forward in time. Like the poet Yang Lian, I have been lingering among ruins (and ruined lives) not for the sake of death, but to illuminate a landscape that remains shadowy even today.