Читать книгу Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden - Vera Schwarcz - Страница 9

Chapter 1

Singing Cranes and Manchu Princes

a place where thought

can take its shape

as quietly in the mind

as water in a pitcher . . .

—Wendell Berry, “The Thought of Something Else”

You do not have to be a Confucian scholar or a Manchu prince to know the value of a place where thought can take its shape at ease. Wendell Berry, a contemporary American poet of the South, likens the garden to water in a pitcher. Nothing is simpler, less adorned, less hard to find, yet more difficult to design. A garden, if well planned, is a place where one can get away from the clutter of daily life. An effective garden scours the mind and the soul. Contemplating what the Chinese call the “bones” of the garden—be they rocks, trees, water, or flowers—one is brought close to the architecture of the self. If one is truly fortunate, one is able to reshape one’s innermost being in the presence of the garden.

This transformation was the goal and privilege of men like Mianyu and Yihuan. What made gardens even more precious in their lifetime was the fact that quietude of mind was hard won and difficult to hold on to. The more violent the events that marked their days, the more tenacious became the dream of a place where thought could take shape like water in a pitcher. Such a longing for stillness in the midst of chaos may be glimpsed visually in the photographs of Chinese gardens taken by Oswald Siren at the end of World War II. His masterful study, Gardens of China, was first published in 1949 on the eve of Mao Zedong’s conquest of the mainland. Siren’s camera captured possibilities for reflections that were being destroyed by political upheaval. In the midst of war and revolution, these black-and-white images convey both the decay of actual gardens as well as the imperishable ideals that nurtured their beauty.

Figure 9. “Gourd-shaped garden gateway in Cheng Wang Fu,” Beijing. Photographed by Oswald Siren for The Gardens of China (New York, 1949), p. 78.

One particular image speaks volumes about the subtle angles of light needed to see the garden in its own time. Simply labeled “Gourd-shaped garden gateway in Cheng Wang Fu, Peking,” this photograph beckons the viewer to savor the spaciousness of historical images (figure 9). At first glance, you might think this is a study of gate architecture since the dark center of the image is indeed an artful opening that suggests an upright vegetable. It is not the gourd, however, that illuminates the image. The slanting sunlight from the end of the corridor beyond the gate is the real focus here. Peeling beams guard the passage, like so many silent witnesses to a slow-paced journey. The luminosity of the afternoon pours out of the gourd-gate with unrestrained generosity. It casts a bright halo on two slabs of well-worn rock. The “brush-handle” pattern of the outer balustrade echoes the bamboo grove that thrives beyond the gate.¹

“Come in, amble,” the image says. “Come in, stay a while,” the garden says. “Come in, look beyond the material remains of the past,” history says. Siren’s gourd-shaped gateway is one remnant of the vanished world of Cheng Wang Fu. Its aged wood beams, like the browning carapace of the Pavilion of Winged Eaves before 1998, convey the barest hint of the splendor that once reigned in the gracious dwelling of Prince Cheng (Yunxing, 1752–1823), an uncle of the owner of the Singing Crane Garden. Both Cheng Wang Fu and the Ming He Yuan have vanished from the Chinese landscape. What remains of these pleasure palaces is nothing but slanting afternoon light. Siren’s gift for indirect illumination inspires us to approach the garden slowly, mindful of thoughts that took shape here in times of upheaval and ravage.

To enter the world of the garden, it is not enough to document ownership and decay. One must, as Oswald Siren showed, take time for detours in the realm of the imagination. So much is missing from the material evidence of the past on the site of imperial gardens. So much depends on approaching absence with care. Edward Casey, in a different context, describes this journey as “in-dwelling”—a giving over of the self to the multilayered temporalities housed by the garden. This is not a space made up of only trees, water, and stone. It is, above all, a mood: “In gardens mood is an intrinsic feature, something that belongs to our experience of them. . . . In an empowered garden, I almost reside, yet I also walk about. . . . I dwell in multiple modes, in several registers and on many levels. This level leaves me on the edge of dwelling, just as gardens take me to the edge between built and natural places, or rather are that very edge.”² In-dwelling, in this sense, is a full-body experience, not merely an analytical goal. It enables one to go to the very edge of the familiar (be that in language or in space) and explore new modes of reflection.

Chinese gardens were designed to facilitate reflection. This goal is part and parcel of each element incorporated within the enclosure of the yuan. To walk the garden’s paths, to contemplate its shifting vistas, was to embark upon an inner journey in which intentionally layered grounds were meant to quiet the mind. Even before disturbing events invaded the garden, chaos was made at home there. What Casey describes as the feeling of the “edge of dwelling” was experienced in a more upsetting fashion by Father Jean Denis Attiret (1702–1768), one of the first Westerners exposed to Qianlong’s Summer Palace. A Jesuit who sought to bring the light of Christianity to the Qing court, Attiret was unprepared for the shadowy, odd spaces that thrived on the outskirts of Beijing. He stayed on as court painter and took the time to notice the unruly grace that enabled (indeed forced) new paths for reflection to develop in this strange land. He wrote back home to an audience unfamiliar with Chinese aesthetics. Contrasting what he saw in northwest Beijing with the mannered landscapes of Europe, Attiret concluded that Chinese gardens thrive on “Beautiful Disorder and wandering as far as possible from all Rules of Art . . . when you read this, you will be apt to imagine such Works as very ridiculous, and they must have a very bad Effect on the Eye: but once you see them, you would find it otherwise and would admire the Art, with which all this irregularity is conducted.”³ “Beautiful disorder” captured the subtle transition from chaos to cosmos attempted on the grounds of Ming He Yuan as well. A historian who would give voice to this terrain must also make room for all kinds of “irregularity”—for a flow of time that moves in and out of the language of memory, in and out of peace and war.

The Singing Crane Garden cannot be conceived primarily as a point in space. Rather it must be evoked in motion, through the movement of the mind’s eye, as it were. One way to begin that journey may be to follow the shifting meanings of the word “crane”—a bird whose name was anything but an accidental adornment to Mianyu’s retreat in northwest Beijing. The Manchu prince went as far as to commission the building of a whole section of the garden to house these large birds, known for heart-wrenching cries during their mating season. But it was not the physical birds that added reflective depths to Ming He Yuan. It was the visitor’s presumed familiarity with all the classical poetry and art that gave these creatures wings in the reflective consciousness.

The ancient classic Yi Jing (The Book of Changes) was the first to note the unique associations of ming he. From this earliest text, the crane stands out because of its preference for solitary spaces. The song of the crane, according to the Yi Jing, ‘“thrives in the shade, while tigers roar on mountains.”⁴ This contrast between the boisterous tiger and the reticent crane continued to enrich Chinese cultural imagination in later centuries to the point that a special term, “crying crane scholar” (he ming zhi shi), developed during the Han dynasty to refer to men of learning who developed their talents—their song, as it were—in the “shade,” away from the manifest rewards of political life.

Renowned for their moral character and careful use of language, such scholars must have appealed to Mianyu, a Manchu prince who sought to be an exemplar of Confucian virtues as well. He ming zhi shi were learned men who measured out speech, ethics, and aesthetics with exquisite care in realms beyond politics. A Han dynasty ruler was counseled by his advisers “to reject all those ministers who speak smooth words and to search far and wide for the Crying Crane Scholars.”⁵ Like hermits of old, he ming zhi shi were prized because they displayed the soul’s music in obscure, lonely places where “only children follow.” Sequestered from the din of public events, these men were certain that their woes would find a meaningful echo in the world. Purity of mind and a high threshold for solitude (indeed loneliness) were attributes of the crane that poets, artists, and garden builders sought to appropriate. Du Mu (803–853), a Tang dynasty luminary, phrased this longing as follows:

With pure note, he welcomes the evening moon,

With sad thoughts, he stands on cold bulrush.

Beneath jasper clouds, moving and stopping restlessly,

To him the spirit of the white egret is coarse.

All day long without the companionship of a flock,

By the side of the gully he laments his shadow’s solitude.⁶

In a more contemporary idiom, Taiwanese painter Chen Ch’i-kuan tried to capture the crane’s movements with a sparse calligraphy brush. Economic, bold strokes are used to lift the huge bird off the ground. Unlike the stiff, bold, nearly livid grus japonesis in the ceiling of the renovated Yi Ran Ting pavilion behind the Sackler Museum, Chen’s masterful scroll is a visual pathway through timelessness. Chen’s crane is nothing but bone, sinew, and ink. What was once an elongated leg becomes an arched head poised for cutting air. The cumbersome, earth-bound body has given way to largely empty space in which the painter allows himself a few bold scratches of the brush, as the crane soars, “its body and wings disappearing above the leaves with only dangling legs in the album. As the great bird glides, it fills three double-leaves! There is limitless imagination and joy in these powerful forms.”⁷

To bring the Singing Crane Garden to life requires a similar effort. I was fortunate to savor this possibility on May 10, 1998, when I walked the periphery of the old Ming He Yuan in the company of two scholars, Jiao Xiong and Yue Shenyang. Educated men scorched by China’s recent history, they opened for me vistas for reflection about gardens, cranes, historical tragedy, and much else along the way.

If You Love Pure Shadows

When we started our stroll on that windy spring morning, I had no way of knowing what winged moments of apprehension were to come upon us. I was prepared for scholarly conversation, not for the wordless understanding that ruined gardens such as the Singing Crane Garden demand, and foster. My two companions were polite, initially reserved. The older gentleman, Jiao Xiong, was a descendant of gardeners who once worked in the imperial Summer Palace. The younger man, Yue Shengyang, was a historical geographer who received his doctorate in Japan. I knew that Mr. Jiao was a well-known researcher about the history of princely gardens in northwest Beijing. I had seen some of his artful evocation of their landscapes in ink and brush. Dr. Yue arrived for our stroll with a gift: a map of the ruins of Ming He Yuan currently visible on the campus of Beijing University (figure 10). This careful drawing was faithful to the lay of the land and even evoked its former beauty by the nearly uninterrupted flow of water that Yue Shenyang conveyed in artful blue.

Following this map, we started out in the back of the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology, a site whose history I knew better than my companions. I had spent the previous year in interviews about Arthur Sackler and his complex connection to Beijing University. I shared this history to set my companions at ease, to signal that I understood the darker past of the Cultural Revolution, that I was familiar with the “ox pens” buried beneath these grounds. My goal was to invite them to share their own ruminations, if they so chose. Along the walk, they did.

Our first stop was a partly submerged rock platform. Yue Shengyang identified this as a piece of a moon viewing the terrace from the Ming He Yuan. Crossing a small alley we came to Red Lake (Hong Chi), a pool renamed to draw attention to Beida’s love of Chairman Mao. On the shores of Red Lake we came upon the remains of a moon gate from the nineteenth century. No afternoon light graced its empty, brittle wooden frame. The spaciousness of reflection that had been available to Oswald Siren in war-torn China had been erased from this corner of the Beijing University campus.

Figure 10. Map of the ruins of Singing Crane Garden as drawn for the author by Yue Shengyang in May 1998. Sites 1 and 2 lie on the north side of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology. Site 16 marks the location of the former home of Wang Yao, while site 17 designates the marble bridge still in use today.

Once past this gate, we proceeded to a little island, which may have been one of the artificial features designed by Mianyu. It was on a hill near a weed-choked pond that Yue Shengyang whispered something about the forgotten history beneath this ground: “This was a preferred spot for committing suicide during the Cultural Revolution. If you tried to drown yourself in the larger, more famous ‘Unnamed Lake’ (Wei Ming Hu), the Red Guards would fish you right out. You would face additional beatings for having succumbed to anti-revolutionary pessimism. Here, at least no one found you. Here you could die in peace.”⁸

When we reached site 14 on the map, marked simply as “building,” Dr. Yue revealed that this had been the home of his own parents, graduates of Yenching University, who were sorely persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. As distinguished faculty members, they had been given a gracious, one-story compound in the 1950s. By 1998, however, the Yue home had become a cluttered jungle of small rooms used by Beijing University’s manual laborers. Here, Yue Shengyang began to share some memories of his teenage years when he had watched his mother being dragged to the nearby “ox pens” by Red Guards. It had been the young boy’s painful duty to visit his incarcerated mother whenever possible. He was allowed to bring her a few necessities once in a great while. The grown man now recalled the humiliation, the swallowed rage. The Red Guards who tortured Yue Shengyang’s mother used the courtyard of Democracy Hall to spread their dogmatic faith in Maoism. This place is not marked on Dr. Yue’s map of ruins from the Ming He Yuan. It is inscribed in another, more durable fabric: that of historical memory. No sign appears on the Beida campus today to link Democracy Hall to the imprisonment of professors like Zhu Guanqian and Ji Xianlin. The building, used for the administrative offices of Beijing University, stands mute, almost innocent: a large, red building across the courtyard from the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology.

Figure 11. Site of the side entrance to the Singing Crane Garden, marked as “residence 79,” as it appeared in the summer of 1998.

It was a relief to turn our attention to the nearby site marked “small courtyard” (site 12), which housed more gracious remains from the nineteenth century. The past stood waiting here for us on that May day in the form of a worn wooden gate, topped with artfully carved lattice work and two marble pedestals. These were clearly Qing dynasty fragments—“used to dismount from horses,” Jiao Xiong explains. Marked as “residence number 79” (figure 11), this gate was a side entrance to the Singing Crane Garden. My companions take pleasure in identifying this concrete link to our subject and strain to read the faded couplet still visible on the cracked, reddish boards. Where we might have expected traces of Maoist slogans, we read instead: le tian zhi ming, an tu jiao ren (Rejoicing in heaven, know fate. At peace with earth, impart humanness). The beautiful rhythms of classical Chinese soothe us, even as Yue Shengyang recalls that this courtyard was once the home of Yang Falu, an expert in ancient cultural studies, who also suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution.

Figure 12. Entrance to the home of Wang Yao’s home, also identified as the entrance to the former Singing Crane Garden by Yang Chengyun in Gu yuan cong heng (The Journey of an Ancient Garden) (Beijing, 1998), p. 16.

The end of our stroll takes us to site 16 on Yue Shengyang’s map, the place that marks the main gate of the Singing Crane Garden. As I look up from the bluish paper, I stop in shocked recognition. This is residence 75—the home of my old teacher and dear friend, Wang Yao (figure 12). It was in this precise spot that I began my research in March 1979—when I went to visit for the first time China’s most famous literary historian, a man who became my guide and mentor in the study of modern intellectual history. Although I had earned a Ph.D. in Chinese history, it was as if I knew nothing. When I began to study texts with Wang Yao, when I began to hear the story of his own journey and suffering during the Cultural Revolution, I finally began to fathom what it means to live with China’s history.

I recall, as if it were yesterday, that chilly Thursday when I parked my recently bought bicycle near the marble bridge leading to Wang Yao’s house. My companion in 1979 was Yue Daiyun, who had told me, “Look well, this is a compound right out of the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber.”⁹ We had walked across the marble bridge and parked our bicycles near two stone lions—which even back then I knew were Qing period remains. Two decades later, I was quite literally back where I had begun. T. S. Eliot’s words from the end of the “Four Quartets” come back to me:

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And to know the place for the first time.¹⁰

The marble lions still stand at the entrance of Wang Yao’s house. Two smaller horse mounts are still in place. I recall the last time I saw Professor Wang here, in 1989, shortly before he died. Now, I am back with a new research project, but I do not have his trusted counsel, his seasoned view of literature and historical tragedy. I miss him as we cross the wooden threshold. To my great surprise, Wang Yao’s widow is in the house. I had heard that she had moved out. It just so happens that she is back this Sunday, to pack up old books, mementos of long years spent in scholarship—and persecution.

We are old friends. She had hosted me for meals many times. She knows that I have heard her husband’s stories of beatings during the Cultural Revolution. She greets me and my Chinese companions warmly. We speak about Wang Yao and the house that holds so many memories. I tell her that I am here to close a circle: I had begun my China studies with an abstract interest in intellectual history. I am back now to add flesh to the history that unfolded upon these grounds. I tell Wang Yao’s widow that I hope to write a book about the gardens that housed ideals of beauty and quietude for which so many suffered, including her husband.

“You want to see how far persecution went?” She asks me with quiet rage. Stepping outside the old, book-lined living room, she points to a cracked, stained, mold-encrusted outer wall. Getting closer, she points to a faint classical painting: A scholar on a marble bridge. “See that huge X through the face? The Red Guards did that when they came to take Wang Yao to the ox pens. It was not enough to drag him through mud. Not enough to strike his old body. They had to destroy any visible connection with the culture that once sustained him.”¹¹

The faded, defaced scholar is a physical link to my old teacher and to the Ming He Yuan as well. Jiao Xiong clinches the connection. He points out that Wang Yao’s library/sitting room may well have been the site of one of the first buildings encountered after one entered the garden in the nineteenth century. This was a place known as the Studio for Rethinking One’s Career.¹² Caught in very difficult times of war and rebellion, Prince Mianyu had created for himself a typical zhai, a secluded space for meditation where one traditionally abstained from meat, wine, and intimate relations before making offerings to gods and ancestors.¹³

This space of quiet, crane-like solitude did not survive the turmoil of twentieth-century China. Nothing remains today of the placard that hung in Mianyu’s library. What would Wang Yao think now if he could read its message: xi xin guan mian (cleanse the mind, take note of wonders)? More than a century after the death of the prince who built the Singing Crane Garden, I grasp how dangerously real words can be: xi xin was no metaphor during the 1960s. The Cultural Revolution had made “washing the mind” a literal, daily ritual. Wang Yao had been subjected to a brutal form of xi xin every day of his incarceration in the ox pens. Instead of meditating in the Studio for Rethinking One’s Career, highly educated intellectuals were obligated to write endless revisions of autobiographies filled with their “bourgeois crimes.” Cherished days, like carefully chosen words, lost almost all meaning during the 1960s. The Cultural Revolution had attacked buildings and gardens as well as the moral value of genuine memory.

Nonetheless, the ground has managed to outwit the ravage of time. On this May walk I realize that there are enough signposts remaining for those who wish to listen once again to the “cry” of the crane. On the wall opposite the crossed-out scholar, I make out another faded painting. In this one, the scholar keeps walking on a marble bridge. Two weeping willows lean over, as if to guide and welcome the solitary guest. Despite the stains and cracks, this image testifies to another kind of link to history and to memory. It is not only violence and brutality that weaves together Wang Yao’s story with that of a long-dead Manchu prince. It is also a capacity to endure, to go on, to take solace from nature’s rhythms and actually breathe new life into the ashes of old culture. My history of the Singing Crane Garden cannot accomplish all that, but I can mark the places and the lives that thrived in the shadows of its history.

Back at my dormitory, after this stroll full of surprises and discoveries, I sit down to record what I have heard and seen. I find that my own words fail to do justice to the stories shared by Yue Shengyang, Jiao Xiong, and Wang Yao’s widow. As often before, I find myself turning to poetry, especially to the verses of Yihuan, who managed to give voice to quietude despite the deafening din of political upheaval that surrounded him daily:

If you love pure shadows

cling to the shore where the ash tree thrives

If you ache for your lost hut

lean on stone hewn in blameless mountains

Today, a broad and straight road opens

to drum beat and cymbal music.

Enfolded by cliffs, you can still follow a serpentine path,

shunning all that is coarse

For humble dwelling, three pillars suffice,

there is no joy like leaving entanglement behind.¹⁴

Entitled simply “Ou cheng” (By Accident), this poem captures both the genuine emotion as well as the posturing that thrived in imperial gardens. It also speaks to my own “accidental” discovery of an old connection to Ming He Yuan. Prince Yihuan, like Mianyu (and even Wang Yao, during the years when he lived safely among his books), had much more than a humble dwelling with three pillars. These men were not Daoist hermits or Buddhist monks. Nonetheless, each loved pure shadows in his own way. Each clung to some lakeshore where the ash tree thrives. Each had sought a path around the highway of history, away from the drumbeat of political violence. Though unsuccessful, they left enough literary and artistic remains that I am able to piece together a vision of refuge that still lingers on in the hamlet of Haidian.

Liquid Delight in the Shallow Sea

It was not an accident, of course, that Manchu emperors and princes were drawn to this site. The village of Haidian lay on the outskirts of the imperial city and was long known for its gracious gardens. Already in the Ming dynasty, scholars and imperial kin had come to find refuge here. What Haidian had to offer was what garden builders needed the most: water. Called “liquid delight,” this was the essential prerequisite for landscape design, as could be glimpsed even in the blue hues added to Yue Shengyang’s map of the Ming He Yuan ruins. Without water, nothing grew. With water, it was not only trees and flowers that flourished. It was also the contemplative mind that drew sustenance here from vistas of liquid stillness. Skillfully channeled waterfalls and artfully crafted fishponds became the hallmarks of Haidian. Mighty boulders were excavated and imported from the shores of Taihu, a southern lake renowned for strange-shaped rocks that added “boniness” to the garden. Undulating hills were created artificially, by moving mounds of earth, as can be seen beneath the Yi Ran Ting today.

Called the Shallow Sea, this northwest corner of metropolitan Beijing remains well endowed with underground springs even today. This phenomenon, too, is no accident of nature. It took informed geographers and geologists to locate and preserve these source springs, especially in the Maoist years of the communist regime, when building the new was a political priority and destroying the old an ideological obligation. Few cared, or dared, to voice their concern for the waters that nourished classical gardens.

One of those who did was Hou Renzhi, who recalled with fondness the gracious setting of Yenching University before it became part of the new Beida. Even when nostalgia for pre-liberation garden design was forbidden, he found a way to argue for and record the reopening of a Qing dynasty water channel in the early 1950s. Beijing University had just been moved out of the center of the city to Yan Yuan (the garden name for Yenching University). Hou Renzhi mobilized and joined a group of students to dredge one of the rivers of Haidian:

I myself took part in the action and remember that in one afternoon when the filthy mud in the opening had all been out, a young student was so excited that he went voluntarily on all fours through the opening from the west side to the east. His passing through proved that the waterway was completely cleaned. Although he was covered all over with mud, he jumped and laughed jubilantly together with us. This little but dramatic scene of joy impressed me so much that it remains fresh in my mind. The upper part of the river has now changed direction thus enabling the water to flow into the campus.¹⁵

Hou Renzhi’s own delight in the muddy student reflects the commitment of a historical geographer to the unique qualities of the ground beneath his feet. It was still more than three decades before his views would be consulted in the design and naming of the Sackler Museum gardens built upon the site of the old Ming He Yuan. This celebration of physical labor also took place a half a decade before the eminent scholar would be condemned as a “rightist” (in 1957) and almost a decade before his own incarceration in the niu peng.

In the early 1950s, it was still possible for intellectuals to savor connectedness to the soil. Traditional Chinese culture had long sanctioned the scholars’ interest in water, in rocks, in trees, in the simple life that so attracted Yihuan when he longed to leave entanglements behind. Tuan Yi-fu, a Chinese geographer who developed his career in America, summarized this attachment to the local in terms of the character tu, meaning connection to locality, to hearth, to a world bounded by physical boundaries. Far from being opposed to “cosmos,” this tu can help us “appreciate intelligently our culture and landscape.”¹⁶ Tuan, unlike Hou Renzhi, lives in an intellectual environment in which he is free to advocate the ideal of a “cosmopolitan hearth.” Scholars in Mao’s China—even when willing to get down into the mud to clear old water channels—were condemned for the knowledge that linked soil, culture, and tradition to the legacy of artful garden design.

In the late Ming dynasty, by contrast, when the political fate of the rulers of Beijing looked quite bleak, Ji Cheng found an opportune moment to sum up the art of gardening and its connection to local resources. His Yuan Ye dwells on many details about “borrowed” scenery and how it could be used to design contemplative spaces. The starting point of all garden craft, according to Ji, lay in the same element that Hou Renzhi still treasured in the 1950s—water: “Before beginning to dig one should investigate the sources and note how the water flows. Where it flows in an open channel one builds the pavilion on posts. If one throws a bridge over the water one may erect the study pavilion on the opposite bank. If one piles up stones to form a surrounding wall, it may seem as if one lived among mountains.”¹⁷

The goal of the garden was to create a connection to the realm of nature beyond its gates. Ji Cheng, mindful of the worldly cares of his wealthy patrons, understood how they longed to live as if they were among the mountains. He did not need poems, like those that Yihuan composed in the nineteenth century, to understand the crushing burdens of politics. His Yuan Ye brought to life a vision of refuge alongside the realities of obligation that surrounded late Ming scholar-officials. From bamboo, which symbolized strength in the midst of adversity, to the evergreen pines that conveyed moral rectitude, the classical Chinese garden was filled with elements designed to comfort the mind’s eye in times of distress.

Even such a small feature as a bracket that sustained the corner of a pavilion roof had a name that served to wake the mind. If the joint faced in one direction only, the bracket would be called tou xin, or “stolen heart.” If the joint completed a well-balanced square under the eaves, it was called ji xin, or “accounted heart.”¹⁸ Since classical Chinese makes no distinction between “heart” and “mind,” these brackets underneath the roof (like the garden as a whole) provided a well-informed gentleman with an opportunity to balance inner and outer worlds.

“Stolen heart,” like “accounted heart,” was a design element that linked garden culture to the predicament of scholars in need of spiritual and physical refuge from the din of political entanglements. Few expressed this need as artfully as Mi Wanzhong (1570–1628), the famous scholar-official who designed Shao Yuan—the most renowned garden in the hamlet Haidian. At the height of his fame, Mi reigned almost like an emperor in the realm of painting and calligraphy. A common saying paid homage to his reputation: “Dong in the south, Mi in the north.” This was an appreciative statement acknowledging two unrivaled masters: Dong Qichang in Jiangsu province and Mi Wanzhong in the Beijing area. At the height of his reputation, Mi needed no retreat from politics; he had not yet turned his artistic attention to details such as “stolen heart.”

This discovery came as a result of his fall from political grace. An outspoken opponent of powerful court eunuchs, Mi was removed from office in 1600. There were no ox pens in China in those days for a scholar who defied the will of the powerful. Exile to the far corners of China was the common fate of lesser luminaries. A disgraced courtier like Mi was left to nurse his wounds near the city of his former glory. The beauty of Haidian suddenly took on fresh appeal. Mi Wanzhong had more spiritual and material resources than other critics of Ming corruption. He knew the history of gardens. He was a skilled and famous painter. He knew how to entice the eye, the heart, and the mind away from disaster.

In 1612, Mi Wanzhong began the design and building of his Haidian garden. By the time it was completed two years later, its fame rivaled the admiration once garnered by his paintings and calligraphy. The name of the garden, like its design, was meant to create an alternative vision to the desiccating squabbles at court. Mindful of the importance of water in northwest Beijing, Mi decided to use it skillfully to embellish the symbolic destiny of his family line:

Because there was only a ladleful of water in the garden and because he thought that a ladle was a suitable container for the Rice (Mi) family, he named his new garden Shao Yuan—Ladle Garden. Shortly after this, Marquis Li Wei, whose family name meant Plum, established his beautiful and famous park just west of Ladle Garden . . . both parks were so beautiful that a certain Grand Secretary of the Ming Dynasty is reported to have praised their delicious flavor, saying: “the Rice garden is not tasteless nor the Plum garden sour.” Long after the Ming dynasty had fallen and the Plum family’s garden had become an imperial park, the Rice family still lived prosperously in their delightful Ladle Garden.¹⁹

Mi Wanzhong was not content to design a garden to perpetuate the family name in times of political disgrace. He was not soothed by the waters of Haidian and the opportunity to dip his “Ladle Garden” into the refreshing source springs.

Once the splendid Shao Yuan was complete, Mi Wanzhong proceeded to grace it with his painterly talent. The result is one of the most gracious, lush, detailed hand scrolls in the history of garden art. A copy of this scroll can be found in the rare book collection of the Beijing University library. One of the few scholars who had access to the fragile remnant was Hou Renzhi, the scholar who knew how to cherish the same waters, the same landscape that had inspired Mi Wanzhong at the end of the Ming dynasty.

Professor Hou has written extensively about the history of Shao Yuan and was kind enough to share with me one of the few color reproductions of the Beida hand scroll (which is no longer available for scholarly perusal). In this painting, the eye of the viewer is invited to travel slowly from the serpentine island on the left toward a central pavilion where scholars gather for the savoring of cultural arts (figure 13). An arched marble bridge is the first man-made element a guest would encounter, a concrete reminder that this is not the effete world of the imperial palace in Beijing but rather a wondrous refuge, a place where thought can take its shape at ease. As if echoing the mind’s call, a boat called the Barge of Tranquility (Ding Fang) ferries guests slowly across waters named the Waters of Linguistic Refinement (Wen Shui Po).²⁰ This barge and these waters were meant to aid the mind in focused contemplation. Having reached the other shore, having further divested oneself of the cares of history and politics, guests could begin a slow-paced walk through a lang—the long, enclosed passage meant to link one vista to another, constantly surprising, constantly changing, constantly delighting. A lower, zigzagging wooden bridge finally brought visitors to the centerpiece of the garden, the stone-viewing pavilion so dear to the heart of Mi Wanzhong.

During one of our many conversations about the history of northwest Beijing, Hou Renzhi took out another, less colorful image of the Shao Yuan garden. This is an ink-and-brush sketch, most likely made by Mi Wanzhong’s assistant, to convey his master’s wishes concerning the architectural details of the site as it was being built (figure 14). In this garden, as in the lush painting, water predominates. Like in the rubbed-out remnant on the doorpost at Wang Yao’s house, scrawny willows bend into a still lake. In the very center of the sketch looms a larger, different kind of tree, perhaps a juniper. Beneath its branches, as in the hand scroll, stands Mi Wanzhong’s treasure: a large, strange-shaped rock.

Figure 13. Reproduction of color hand scroll painting by Mi Wanzhong toward the end of the Ming dynasty, ca. 1609. The scroll is being held in the Beijing University archives. This reproduction was made available to the author courtesy of Hou Renzhi.

Figure 14. Architectural sketch of central pavilion and ornamental rock in the Shao Yuan garden, attributed to Mi Wanzhong’s garden architect. Courtesy of Hou Renzhi.

Figure 15. “The Stone That Is Mi’s Friend,” ornamental rock currently in the courtyard of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, identified as belonging to the collection of Mi Wanzhong by Yang Chengyun in Gu yuan cong heng (Beijing, 1998), p. 15.

At the height of his fame and power, Mi had indulged a passion for collecting strange rock formations. In fact, the scholar-official was known among his friends as Mi Youshi—Mi, the Friend of Rocks. Dislodged from the center of imperial politics by misfortune, Mi embraced this love of hard stone ever more fervently. In the “bones” of the garden, he saw the kind of loyalty and truth that was sorely lacking at the court of the Ming emperor. Mi’s favorite stone was called “Neither-Nor-Rock” (fei fei shi). A tall, boldly perforated structure anchored by a cavernous, thin wall, this rock now adorns the courtyard of the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology (figure 15). Ignored in the 1950s, Mi’s rock was buried and thereby protected by rubble during the decade of the Cultural Revolution. Unlike residence 75, this remnant from the past was somewhat portable and thus survived relatively unscathed. Unlike the scholars on the door to Wang Yao’s study, unlike the body of the aged scholar and those of his colleagues, Mi’s fei fei shi could speak its own mind. It retained its “neither-nor” quality, its ability to challenge the powers at be. Placed in the heart of the Sackler Museum, it keeps its own counsel, labeled simply as “Mi’s Friend” by the very few who know or care about the history of old gardens embedded in today’s Beida.²¹

But old gardens have a way of speaking to—indeed, speaking for—those who cannot voice their own concerns. After the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644, the ruined Shao Yuan continued to whisper its secrets to visitors seeking solace from the new rulers of China. One Confucian scholar described the site—and indirectly, his outrage at the brutal destructiveness of the Manchu conquest—as follows.

Desolate with broken furrows and barren hills and covered with dusty crawling weeds, the place in its better days used to have verandas bright with sunshine and pavilions bathed in moonlight, cool balconies in summer days and warm houses in winter. The present dried pond, treadless paths, and snakes’ and foxes’ caves were once described by scholars and artists as places associated with poetry and delicate ladies and with archaic boats and cliffs in paintings. In place of the lotus flower building, the banks of pine trees, and the painted pleasure boats berthing against the houses, there are only houses with corroded beams and vast openings in the roofs. In the presence of such a miserable scene, one feels inevitably very sad. There is only one thing left behind. That is a huge stone standing as formerly in front of the courtyard and shaded by a Chinese juniper tree.²²

The same stone that sits so proudly in the center of the Sackler courtyard today had more evocative powers in a time of violence and disarray. Set against dried ponds, it was a visual reminder that “liquid delight” flows only when scholars are well treasured. The huge stone and the juniper stand as witness to what endures when beauty has been crushed by violent events. If the stone could speak, perhaps it would give testimony. In the words of T. S. Eliot, whose “Waste Land” depicts a more modern desolation, it would cry out:

Son of man . . .

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images . . .

There is shadow under this red rock,

Come in under the shadow of this red rock,

And I will show you something . . .

I will show you fear in a handful of dust . . .²³

Fear was more than a handful of dust on the grounds of the old Singing Crane Garden. Two centuries before Lord Elgin’s troops torched the princely gardens of the Qing, violence already haunted this corner of northwest Beijing. As shadowy places of refuge became scarce, rocks were left to speak a language previously cherished by poets, scholars, and garden designers alike.

One Foot on the Island of Immortals

When the Manchus launched their plans for conquest in the 1620s, they had hoped to present themselves as Confucian pacifiers of the realm. Mindful of the political disillusionment of scholar-officials such as Mi Wanzhong, they had named their dynasty Qing, “purity,” to connote a breath of fresh air after the supposedly “bright” Ming that ended up being ruled by thoroughly corrupt Chinese emperors. The Manchus even organized an army called the “Green Standard,” made up of ethnically Chinese forces, so the conquest would not look like an invasion. For a while, a minority of Ming intellectuals was persuaded that the new rulers offered an opportunity to cleanse and revive the Mandate of Heaven. When news of atrocities began to filter in from central China in 1644–46, the tide quickly turned. By that time, the Manchus were determined to stay and use force to enforce the new mandate.

In Beijing, the urge to dominate both politically and culturally was manifest in the rapid transformation of the Forbidden City into the administrative nerve center of the new empire. On the outskirts of Beijing, a different kind of domination and acculturation took place. Here, the Manchu rulers sought to take advantage of natural resources to create their own space of refuge, especially for times when the court could not travel back to the ancestral hunting grounds of Manchuria. The Kangxi emperor, who reigned from 1662 to 1723, was the first Manchu ruler to commit major resources to the building of a Garden of Perfect Brightness in the hamlet of Haidian. In keeping with his vision of himself as a World Pacifier (in both Confucian and Buddhist terms) he chose to name his place Yuan Ming Yuan—as an allusion to the “round” (all encompassing) and “brilliant” (far-reaching) illumination of Buddhist wisdom. His grandson, Qianlong, expanded the grounds until they became the largest single building project of the Qing dynasty. With an almost unlimited supply of silver, gold, and wood requisitioned from commoners and scholar-officials, he completely altered the natural and cultural terrain of the hamlet once known as the Shallow Sea. The disgraced Ming dynasty scholar Mi Wanzhong had been content to take a “spoon” of water from Haidian to create his Shao Yuan. The emperor Qianlong, by contrast, had an army of designers and diggers who did not rest until they brought to life a veritable sea—the central, vast lake of Yuan Ming Yuan called Fu Hai, or “Ocean of Blessings.”

The imperial will to overcome natural limitations in order to create a vast showcase for pleasure led to the incorporation of several other gardens into the enclosure of Yuan Ming Yuan. Starting with the Nine Islands of Peace (Jiuzhou Qingyan) built around a smaller lake called Back Lake (Hou Hu), Qianlong took over the Eternal Spring Garden (Changchun Yuan) in 1749 and the Variegated Spring Garden (Qichun Yuan) in 1751. Thus he expanded and created an ever more brilliant, ever more grandiose Garden of Perfect Brightness. And if the avaricious incorporation of smaller Chinese gardens into this expansive refuge was not enough, Qianlong also launched the building project of a huge European-style garden called the Palace of Balanced and Amazing Pleasures (Xieqi qu) designed by Italian and French Jesuits. The most prominent designer was Father Guiseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), who had delighted the great monarch with drawings of Italian and French palaces and fountains. With Castiglione’s designs, Qianlong obtained a massive pleasure compound on the scale of Versailles—with a vigor all its own.

The Manchu ruler shared the French king’s desire to use grandly designed spaces to enforce political hegemony. At the same time, the Qing ruler followed a cultural script that had its own aesthetic cadence. The geometric formality of seventeenth-century French gardens conveyed, in the words of historian Chandra Mukerji, the military ambitions of state over society. A walk in these gardens was “neither casual nor apolitical. It was an element of the geopolitics of the period . . . the petit parc embodied the territorial, optimistic and technical expertise on which French military geopolitical action was based.”²⁴ The total effect of Versailles was thus quite different from the aesthetic playfulness of the Yuan Ming Yuan. The near total isolation of state from society in Qing China may account for some of the fluidity of design possible in this corner of northwest Beijing. More important, Qianlong was a genius at accumulating, digesting, and reinterpreting various aesthetic traditions ranging from the Daoist to the Confucian, from the Buddhist to the baroque. The result, according to British biologist Joseph Needman, was a landscape architecture that far from “imprisoning and constraining Nature, actually flows along with it.”²⁵

This “flow” was no accident. More than a space to display power, the imperial gardens functioned as a reprieve from the burdens of rule. Qianlong himself defined this ideal when he wrote: “Every emperor and ruler, when he has retired from audience, and has finished his public duties, must have a garden in which he may stroll, look around and relax his heart. If he has a suitable place for this, it will refresh his mind and regulate his emotions. But if he has not, he will become engrossed in sensual pleasures and lose his will and power.”²⁶ Refreshing the mind was a different kind of necessity than the geopolitical calculations that occupied the heart of Versailles. Built to awe Chinese and Western visitors alike, the Yuan Ming Yuan nonetheless was large enough and meandering enough to accommodate a multiplicity of political and spiritual agendas. A center for Daoist contemplation, Buddhist sutra recitation, ancestor worship, and the Confucian arts of painting and poetry, Qianlong’s Haidian palace became a vessel to accommodate many seas and continents, both metaphorical and physical.

Not satisfied with creating worlds in space, Qianlong also commissioned artists to paint forty of his favorite scenes from the Yuan Ming Yuan. Father Jean Denis Attiret was one of a large group of Western and Chinese artists assigned to immortalizing the Garden of Perfect Brightness. Each “portrait” was first assembled carefully in space, then meticulously re-evoked with brush on silk. The result was a delightful mirroring of terrain and art to the point that the aging Qianlong preferred to walk the portrait gallery of his garden rather than dislodge his body from the inner palaces of the Yuan Ming Yuan.

One of the scenes that captures Qianlong’s territorial and cultural ambitions is entitled Ru gu han jin (Imbibe the past; it contains the present) (figure 16). It depicts the emperor’s private library as a double-roofed pavilion encircled by a group of other halls to encourage the perusal of old scrolls.²⁷ During the reign of this absolute ruler, the state had the right to confiscate any book or any work of art that Qianlong wished to add to the imperial collection. Some were requisitioned because they contained anti-Manchu sentiments, some just because the emperor fancied the writer or the artist. If the emperor chose, he could study the old. If he wanted to, he could fathom how it contained the present. The political assumption was that he defined both. Much like Mao Zedong in his later years, Qianlong imagined himself as both teacher and student. Unlike Mao, however, he never fell into a total contempt for the old. He never forced scholars to erase their attachment to Confucian tradition, to wash their minds. Qianlong never beat them to death just because they took the link between past and present to heart.

Figure 16. Ru gu han jin (Imbibe the past; it contains the present). The eleventh painting in the series “Forty Scenes of the Yuan Ming Yuan.” Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

The message evoked by the title of this eighteenth-century painting is that traditional Confucian wisdom had much to contribute to the political policies of the Qing regime. This was not simply propaganda for the consumption of Chinese scholar-officials. The same dictum prevailed within the palace compound, where Chinese tutors were hired to instruct young princes in poetry and classics. These arts were meant to refine the moral personality. At the same time, Manchu kinsmen oversaw the young men’s military and Buddhist education. A poet of some skill himself, Qianlong rewarded his children when they became capable of producing classical verses on appropriate themes. To inspire further literary virtuosity, he ordered a special pillar to be installed in the princes’ study hall. It was marked with a tablet inscribed by the emperor himself depicting cranes alighting on pines.²⁸ This pillar was meant to be a visual reminder that future heirs had to soar to ever-greater heights of literary and political accomplishment.

No longer just a symbol of moral rectitude and solitude as it had been for Confucian and Daoist scholars, the crane tablet in the princes’ study hall was an official reminder concerning a moral commitment to serve in the world. Previous generations of ming he zhi shi had cultivated rectitude in shadowy spaces apart from the bright light of political entanglement. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Haidian had become a famed showcase for the display of literary and cultural genius. Cranes would have to learn to sing in gilded cages, or be erased from the garden landscape altogether.

No “cage” was as lavishly gilded in the late Qianlong era as that of the Gentle Spring Garden (Shu Chun Yuan), a pleasure palace belonging to an imperial favorite called He Shen. A Manchu nobleman who served as an imperial bodyguard, He Shen had attracted the eye of the aging emperor. Along with the affection of the doting Qianlong, He Shen acquired the grounds that currently surround the Unnamed Lake at Beijing University. In ironic contrast to its modest name, He Shen’s garden ended up rivaling the splendor of the nearby Yuan Ming Yuan. On a smaller scale, the favorite who rose to the rank of minister used the most expensive building materials to create a sprawling complex of lakes, pavilions, and theaters.

The most ostentatious symbol of splendor was the marble boat that still graces the bank of Unnamed Lake today (figure 17). Like the rock in the center of the Sackler Museum, He Shen’s marble boat stands as a nearly mute witness to the history that unfolded in this corner of China. In an earlier era, when Yenching University occupied this site, He Shen’s garden was a sanctioned subject of study. Hou Renzhi picked up the thread from his teachers and traced the actual documents that granted this Manchu favorite a pleasure palace adjacent to Qianlong. As long as his imperial patron reigned, He Shen could build up the Gentle Spring Garden with unabashed luxury. When Qianlong, the longest reigning ruler in Chinese history, finally died in 1795, He Shen’s star fell with crushing rapidity.

Figure 17. The marble boat from the Shu Chun Yuan owned by the Manchu favorite He Shen (with the pagoda-style water tower in the distance across Unnamed Lake). Photograph by Marc Berger.

Jiaqing (r. 1796–1821) took over the actual reigns of power, which he had held only symbolically during the last year of his father’s life. One of the new emperor’s first measures was to arrest He Shen, confiscate his treasures, and execute him. According to a widely circulated list of He Shen’s holdings, he had built sixty-four pavilions inside the Shu Chun Yuan. The officials who actually searched the property reported that the Manchu favorite had amassed 1,003 houses as well as 357 verandas, apart from thousands of taels of silver and gold.²⁹ This massive corruption case continued to shadow the gardens of Haidian well into the nineteenth century. Even after the Jiaqing emperor divided up He Shen’s pleasure palace among his children, the dread of moral turpitude infected the land. Mianyu, who incorporated the largest section of the Gentle Spring Garden into his own Ming He Yuan, was especially concerned with purging its evil name.

His nephew Yihuan took another route. Especially after the violent destruction of the Singing Crane Garden, the old marble boat spoke to him about the many layers of dreams, hopes, and illusions that seeded the ravaged land. In a poem whose title is best translated as “One Foot on the Isle of Immortals,” Yihuan described as follows the nineteenth-century ruins and the callous grandeur that produced them:

Lofty pavilions once reached the clouds

now topple into uncertain dust.

Towering graves dotted a winding cliff,

today they spill secrets into muddy waters.

Worn walls, cracked columns,

the trace of a timid leveret.

I cut a path through brambles

to unroll a curtain of thorns.

Imagine the minister with one foot on the isle of immortals,

sacred heaven of fleabane and bamboo.

Silk ropes fettered his body,

condemned to death three times.

Phoenix wings in aborted flight

never left this orphaned island.

Every sail leans on the wind that breaks it,

while the guest of ruins cherishes a shattered soul.³⁰

Yihuan’s poetic evocation of this corrupt Manchu favorite does not offer forgiveness. It does not shy away from the fact that He Shen was condemned to death three times. Yihuan has no sympathy for the lavish tastes of the man who owned the marble boat and cracked pavilions. His poem, unlike the contemporary Beida photograph, allows us to encounter the orphaned island in all its desolation. What is being mourned here is not He Shen’s passing but the silencing of a landscape that once harbored so much delight. Why the landscape gets punished for the sins of its owner is a question that Yihuan asked himself over and over again, especially after the destruction of the Yuan Ming Yuan and its surrounding princely gardens.

Hall of the Seeker of Radiant Virtue

When Mianyu received a large tract of Shu Chun Yuan in 1835, he did not have to worry about the marble boat. The eastern section of He Shen’s estate had already been bequeathed by the Jiaqing emperor to his daughter, Princess Changjing, in 1802. The larger, western section that became Singing Crane Garden awaited the needs and desires of the next ruler, Daoguang. In the meantime, gardens were being remodeled and renamed, with strategies similar to those used in the revision of a classical Chinese poem. The “right words” had to be found, thematic continuities maintained.

Qianlong’s imprint on this revision process and on Chinese culture more generally had been huge. The He Shen scandal was merely a symbol of the grandeur that was made possible by relative peace and the massive extraction of resources in the eighteenth century. The gardens of the nineteenth century were designed in a totally different cultural and political environment. Here, war with the West, massive internal rebellions, and a waning faith in the Mandate of Heaven marked the cadence of imperial life. In this vastly different world, Qianlong’s ideals endured nonetheless. The goal of combining martial and literary virtues, of blending Buddhist religion with Confucian filial piety, remained central, along with a cultured appreciation of landscaped spaces.

Mianyu grew up as an emperor’s son. Like his father, Jiaqing, he studied Confucian classics in the studio where cranes were displayed. Like other highborn kin of the emperor, he was expected to embody the Manchu ideal of mahahai erdemu—“manly virtue.” This included skill in archery, horsemanship, frugality, devotion to the ruling Aisin Gioro clan, and devotion in the service of the Son of Heaven.³¹ By the time Mianyu was born in 1814, his father had the reigns of power firmly in hand. Jiaqing had already announced that he would determine the names of his own children as well as the names of “all the sons and grandsons of his brothers—all those who shared first ideograph or part of an ideograph with his own descendants’ names.”³² He therefore gave much thought to his fifth son’s name: the first character, Mian, was to be a concrete link to all his brothers and kinsmen. It meant “prolonged,” “continuous,” and “unbroken.” Mianyu’s second name was also chosen by his father with care. A personal appellation given only to him, Yu meant at once “joyful” and “content.” This, however, was not to be taken as an invitation to pleasure. Rather, as the owner of the Singing Crane Garden demonstrated in his later years, it was to be an ideal of cultural refinement pursued with effort and determination.

The young boy’s fidelity both to the unbroken traditions of his imperial clan and to Confucian traditions of self-cultivation and contentment pleased his father. After Jiaqing’s death in 1820, the six-year-old was left in charge of Manchu uncles who oversaw his education. His second brother, who ruled as the Daoguang emperor, also recognized the boy’s talents and virtues. By 1839 Mianyu’s title had been raised to prince of the first rank. As Prince Hui (Hui Qin Wang), Mianyu was delegated to perform the Grand Sacrifices of the imperial Aisin Gioro clan. These sacrifices took place at the altars of Heaven and Earth and ensured the ceremonial legitimacy and cosmological benevolence of the Qing dynasty as a whole.³³ The first time this weighty responsibility fell upon the young price was in 1840, on the eve of war with England. A shortage of sons among imperial kin accounts partially for Mianyu’s high ceremonial profile. Another likely reason is Daoguang’s confidence in the young man’s mahahai erdemu. “Manly virtue” would be needed more and more as the fate of the dynasty became darkened by opium wars and peasant rebellion. By 1853, when the war-weary dynasty looked like it would be toppled by the Taiping insurgency, Mianyu took on the burden of military defense. With his new title of “Worthy Military General in Charge of Sustaining the Mandate,” he managed to protect the imperial capital from native rebels. By the time of his death in 1865, however, Mianyu had witnessed the invasion of Beijing by foreign troops as well as the destruction of the Summer Palace and his own beloved Ming He Yuan.

Three decades before, when he had begun work on the Singing Crane Garden, Mianyu chose a new name for himself. In keeping with the Confucian practice of a studio sobriquet, he chose an appellation that went beyond parental hopes at the time of his birth: Hall of the Seeker of Radiant Virtue (Cheng Hui Tang), a title that reveals a young man determined to erase the shadow of corruption and self-indulgence left over from the He Shen era. Even as he proceeded to design a huge pleasure garden, Mianyu wanted to be known as the prince who overcame the cursed ground, who helped restore the moral legitimacy of the Qing. By aligning himself with the idea of Cheng Hui Tang, Mianyu displayed a skilled blending of Manchu moralism and Confucian aesthetics. His garden mirrored this self-image:

Compared to the design of other princely gardens, Singing Crane Garden was unique. It adopted features of southern gardening while preserving the special feeling coveted in the gardens of the north. Its enclosed passageways led to a back garden filled with flowering lilac. The main building here was called Cheng Bi Tang, or the Hall for Azure Purity. When the garden was flourishing, the east courtyard was used for entertainment. It was here that a room supported by five carved columns housed an indoor opera stage. . . . Beyond, toward the central section of the garden, hills ran up and down silhouetted by far reaching branches of pine. Another pavilion would then come into sight flanked by ancient rockery and a magnificent cedar that seemed to scrape the sky. Throughout the garden, willowy stones and grand buildings conveyed a sense of elegance and serenity.³⁴

Lilac, cedar, and a taste for Peking opera are bits of what we now know of Mianyu’s taste in gardens. A lot more comes alive from the poems of his nephew, Yihuan. The stones for mounting horses in front of Wang Yao’s house provide material presence of a refuge that is no more. Jiao Xiong’s skilled painting, however, brings to life the main features that adorned the grounds of the Ming He Yuan (figure 18). With this “map” one can begin to enter the garden, as Mianyu’s guests might have a century and a half ago.

The main entrance to the Singing Crane Garden was in the southeast corner. Inside the first gate were a screen wall and a marble bridge across a stream. According to Hou Renzhi, this is the same stream that flows past Wang Yao’s old residence.³⁵ Once past the entrance, Mianyu’s guests would have an option to savor several main sections of the prince’s garden. Straight ahead lay the eastern, more public space where entertainment took place. The central section of the Ming He Yuan, also accessible by the second gate (where residence 79 may be found today) had a different tone: Here was a more contemplative space, graced with a courtyard for cranes and for their gamekeeper. A more adventurous guest might opt to take the path to the western section of the estate, where fishponds and a unique island revealed Mianyu’s more private spiritual pursuits. From the public to the personal, the garden paths conducted the visitor in a journey that traversed both physical and mental spaces. Each name in the garden, each pavilion, captured part of what the “Seeker of Radiant Virtue” was all about.

Figure 18. Painting of the Singing Crane Garden (Ming He Yuan) executed for the author by Jiao Xiong, former archivist at the Bureau of Antiquities, in 1998. (1) Main entrance to Singing Crane Garden—close to the entrance of residence 75, home of Wang Yao. (2) Marble bridge leading to inner gate of Singing Crane Garden, most likely moved to the other side of the moat in front of Residence Number 75. (3) Studio for Rethinking One’s Career (Tui Sheng Zhai), also the site of the western wall of the library/sitting room of Wang Yao. (4) Pavilion of Winged Eaves (Yi Ran Ting) first celebrated in an eighteenth-century poem by the Qianlong emperor, later glimpsed with longing by intellectuals imprisoned in the “ox pens” of the Cultural Revolution (1966–69). (5) Secondary entrance to the Ming He Yuan, currently the site of residence 79, several doors down from the more elaborate entrance to the former home of Wang Yao. (6) The Hall of Azure Purity (Cheng Bi Tang)—this was the main center for entertainment (opera, poetry recitals, musical performances with singing girls, and so on) of the Singing Crane Garden. (7) Crane’s Nest (He Chao) courtyard for housing cranes and the gamekeeper of the Singing Crane Garden. (8) Garden of Delight in Spring (Chun Xi Yuan)—a courtyard designed for savoring early blossoms in the Ming He Yuan. (9) Flourishing Deer Island (Fu Lu Dao)—one of the most remote corners of the Singing Crane Garden designed to symbolize the owner’s hopes for longevity and prosperity.

The centerpiece of Mianyu’s garden, in the eyes of most guests, was Cheng Bi Tang. With its triple roof, this was an impressive structure that housed a well-designed stage surrounded by five magnificently carved columns. An outspoken critic of the elite’s indulgence in Peking opera (and the sexual favors of theater entertainers), Mianyu nonetheless displayed the cultured taste of an educated gentleman. It was in this part of the garden that he hosted lavish banquets, family ceremonies, poetry-writing feasts attended by Manchu noblemen and Confucian scholars alike. These grand events impressed upon the guests the high social status of the man who was a favored younger brother to the Daoguang emperor. The Hall of Azure Purity was thus a morally lofty name capacious enough to house Mianyu’s most physical pleasures.

A less grandiose but nonetheless important structure was situated close to Cheng Bi Tang. This was the library “For the Cherishment of New Learning,” (Huai Xin Shu Wu).³⁶ The idea of huai xin—literally, “cleaving to the new”—might at first glance seem odd for a man who was a tireless advocate of traditional virtues. Living in a time of rapid change, however, Mianyu appreciated the value of innovation. He was well aware that the foundations of Confucian learning had been challenged by Western technological expertise. He grasped the limitation of classical learning and worked to keep his outlook fresh. The goal of this kind of learning (like that of the garden as a whole) was not novelty per se. It was to engage with fresh vision the master texts of a time-tested tradition. Upon this site, Beijing University developed its first archaeological exhibitions, before establishing the independent archaeology department currently housed in the Sackler Museum.

“New Learning” and “Azure Purity” were not rigid, walled-in concepts on the grounds of the Ming He Yuan. They conveyed Mianyu’s fluid, earthy approach to both power and culture. Similarly, the idea of “singing cranes” was both physical and metaphorical at once. Behind the dilapidated gate to residence 79 was the Crane’s Nest (He Chao), an enclosure for Mianyu’s gamekeeper and several pairs of cranes. Mating season was an occasion when the garden and its name became one—blending public ceremonies with a symbolic appreciation of solitude and shadows.