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[Gardens in dynastic China] were expensive pieces of real estate, but they were also consciously constructed and aesthetically perceived artifacts. They overlap intriguingly the boundaries of several Chinese categories, and have a power to illuminate the border regions they traverse. 1
The human relationship with land is fundamental. It predates society—we were pillaging the land for food and shelter long before we understood much of nature's power and abundance—and the phenomenon of the garden, which the settling of people in one location and the societies that evolved as a result, enabled. With the fact of the first consciously constructed dwelling established, as time flowed on, social structures gained ever deeper footholds within human communities and engendered inevitable societal differences; certain groups of people discovered new and various relationships to the land that afforded what we now describe as privilege. But these conditions further required a degree of economic stability before the land could be put to uses other than that of accommodating purely pragmatic needs of survival. As this economic foundation assumed tangible form, however, so too did the garden as enclosed stretches of nature, owned and altered at will by those to whom they were granted. In time, too, these gardens became less private, less exclusive, soon to occupy a place in almost every culture and geography worldwide, with some of the earliest examples dating back over four thousand years, to Egyptian times. Today we might venture to describe the garden as that most democratic and welcoming of all cultural forms. As one reads in the pages of this book,
Even the rank and file, including those who are hard up, know how to enjoy themselves by gracing their homes with miniature rockeries and potted islets.
That love is only slightly diminished today, as a result of the speed and voluminous elements of contemporary life which increasingly encroach on the time and the level of general knowledge once commonly held amongst that "rank and file."
In every sense, then, gardens embody man's relationship with nature culturally and, to recent generations carrying the insights of the father of psychoanalysis, the German Sigmund Freud, psychologically. From whatever perspective it is viewed, that relationship constitutes, arguably, a dominion over nature as much as an admiration of its forms and a tangible, if idealized, desire to enhance the natural world and experience it as nature surely intended—Man was, from the first, subject to the folly of immodesty. Ultimately, as demonstrations of our ability to bend and fashion nature to our vision and will, gardens are, both practically and metaphysically, a keystone of human civilization. From Mesopotamia to Greece, Rome to Europe and the modern world, examples abound, and for civilizations as diverse as Arab, Seljuk, Persian, Islamic, European, and Asian. Amongst all these, the most enduring association is perhaps that between China's classical cultural traditions and the exquisite aesthetics that affectionate energy brought forth in the process of creating some of the world's most famous gardens.
Gardens in China have their origins in imperial parklands and hunting grounds but proliferated in aesthetic form from the 12th century as private estates, the purview of wealthy individuals, became a phenomenon. As a concept, a garden provided "scholargentlemen a means, at least in part, of achieving these antithetical ideals of pursuing self-cultivation while fleeing from the 'dust' of the world and living in reclusion in nature." 2
The story of a garden almost always begins with an individual, be that the adroit lord of the manor or person of social standing who commissioned and funded it or in whose name it was enshrined. Equally, it might be the individual designer to whose vision the garden first owed its formal beauty and emotive appeal. From the 12th century onwards, the task of providing China's scholar-gentlemen with a sanctuary for self-cultivation provided a livelihood for numerous individuals who took on the responsibility of formulating garden designs, a task at which they worked assiduously as this book can attest. Foremost amongst these was the eminent 17th-century scholar Ji Cheng (1582- c . 1642), a native of Wujiang in Jiangsu province, who created a number of exquisite gardens, examples of which remain today as some of this art form's finest archetypes.
Significantly, Ji Cheng's concepts are preserved for posterity in the celebrated volume The Craft of Gardens , which its author completed in 1631, and with which his handiwork was readily compared through the succeeding several centuries. For recent generations, the singular significance of Ji Cheng's skill is how well his creations have stood the test of time. The Craft of Gardens continues to be of immeasurable influence to anyone interested in the richly entwined cultural concerns brought to bear on his life's work of cultivating gardens as an art form. This influence was firmly embraced by 20th-century garden expert, Chen Congzhou, whose diligent scholarly writings are collected together in this exhaustive volume.
Modestly titled Literati Gardens: Poetic Sentiment & Picturesque Allure , this compendium brings together transcripts from lectures Chen Congzhou presented at Shanghai's Tongji University between 1979 and 1982 and presented at various seminars with a range of articles penned for the university's journal. It further includes a range of articles published across China in museum newsletters and academic journals in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and on through to the early 1990s. Literati Gardens thus represents a serious, indepth work of research into the history of gardens across China concerning their form and content, the discrete biography of their creators and the individual characteristics that make up the rich history of garden design in China through time. Within the nation's distinct socio-cultural history, the concept of the garden as consciously formulated sanctuary-retreat was, from the first, viewed as "an artistic synthesis of architecture, rockery, water, and horticulture." Enclosed within physical parameters of a piece of land, a garden was cultivated for the pleasure of communing with nature but in an elegant, restrained manner. As so many classical brush paintings illustrate, where figures are depicted in states of meditative reflection standing on a rock, beneath a tree, or seated in a pavilion, at times with friends, but usually alone, these enclaves were viewed as a composite realm of navigable form, where the mind was calmed and wildness dispensed with.
It took designers and horticulturalists more than two thousand years—beginning in the Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BC)—to evolve a holistic conceptual aesthetic of the ideal garden which drew upon the multitude of sensibilities that were brought to other art forms through the same period. This process surely involved a great deal more trial and error than is ever discussed, although allusions can be read between the lines Chen Congzhou writes where plants are transplanted from their native regions and not to best effect, or where later hands are seen to intervene in the classical lines of an ancient garden. We might say the invisible force of time at work in nature here is complemented by the invisible hand of the original designer which sought to lead the meditative wanderer to the vistas that lie within. For it is once inside that the observant visitor recognizes a multitude of such scenic settings that allow one to "make sense of the divine philosophy implied in landscape gardening."
By Ji Cheng's time in the 17th century, the aesthetic was at a peak of perfection, aided by this particular master's contributions, which Chen Congzhou duly notes. "Love for nature, indeed, is borne deeply in the hearts of folks in Suzhou," he says, where many of Ji Cheng's designs flourished. "No place in the world has more traditional gardens—and has them in a complete array," Chen Congzhou confirms. From the first, the essential components remained elemental, but the garden was, under Ji Cheng's deft hand, a physical mapping of a harmony achieved through a sequence of imperceptible transitions, often completed using physical structures like the architectural form of the pavilion. These also provided places to pause, to contemplate, to enjoy and appreciate seasonal shifts reflected in changing contours and colors. "Ideal gardens," Chen Congzhou wrote in 1994, "are like superb lines of verse." In common with poems and paintings, the perfect garden, he adds, should be filled with "implicit undertones." These he recognizes in the work of many others besides Ji Cheng, for few it seems, at least in recent history, can have looked at so many gardens and looked so closely as Chen Congzhou. Intricately observed, detailed and described, Chen Congzhou's writings combine to a comprehensive survey of ancient buildings, gardens and dwellings. Even a casual glance reveals an extraordinary eye for details that are both lovingly observed and explained.
One example is the following anecdote concerning the structure of bridges found in simpler gardens:
The bridges in traditional Chinese gardens are often balustraded on one side and left open on the other, to the bewilderment of many observers. This arrangement is actually adapted to everyday rural life. When a peasant crosses a bridge with a load on both ends of his shoulder pole, or with a buffalo in tow, his movement is likely to be hampered if the bridge is narrow, and, worse, balustraded on both sides. This is why many rural bridges have no balustrades at all or have a balustrade on just one side. In what is a typical case of someone being well-read but having a poor memory of his ancestors' way of doing things, garden crafters of later generations often forget this simple reason and turn a small bridge into a narrow lane by sandwiching it between tall railings.
Chen Congzhou's investigation of gardens was ever underscored by his interest in examining and re-establishing the personalities with which each garden was "imbued with the botanical character of the place in which it finds itself," and was, in many cases, conceived to express. He found in the writings of Ji Cheng inspiring examples of creativity in the diverse elements and materials that this master himself employed to achieve texture and depth in the designs and which were both a response to place and to craft, techniques in which Chen Congzhou delighted. Within the wide-ranging aspects of the gardens Chen Congzhou discussed, historic context is not without influence in the evolution of the garden as form and aesthetic, but his interpretations draw with particular intensity upon his deep knowledge of the arts and the evolving relationship these enjoyed with the concepts applied to garden designs. "…poetry and prose, calligraphy and painting, and theater and balladry are, after all, different forms of expression for the same thought or feeling." Chen Congzhou explains:
The gardens made by literati-officials, most of whom were proficient in poetry and prose and could paint and sing, were inevitably rooted in their shared ideals or feelings, with elegance as the chief mode of expression. Full of allusions to poetry and prose, their gardens achieve oneness with literature by means of inscribed boards and vertical couplets, as well as records and colophons on classical paintings. That is why whenever a visitor steps into such a garden, he feels as if he were visiting the realms of poetry and painting. If he is highly attained in literature, he may improvise a poem on the spot; if he is a painter, he may depict the garden's scenery with freewheeling brush strokes in the late Ming tradition. All this I believe has happened to every educated visitor to such a garden.
More pertinent still to the achievement to which Chen Congzhou's writings attest, he writes that "…to make convincing comments on a garden, one must delve into its history and, more than anything else, become well acquainted with the lifestyle of its day. Every garden provides an integral sightseeing route that cannot be put upside down. This is like a piece of writing that must have a beginning, development, transition and a conclusion…"
It is a process Chen Congzhou clearly adopted and followed. The density of detail involved in the lengthy descriptions, as well as the effects of repeated visits through time, may at times imbue the writing with a prosaic air, but, the gentle interweaving of references in the text to ink painting or Kunqu Opera, juxtaposed with a profusion of poems, serves to evoke the various moods one might encounter whilst perusing in a garden's myriad vistas should a visit be possible—and, should the garden be unaltered by the machinations of time and the demands of urban development and growth. The phenomenon of urban sprawl is not uncontainable, it is desired as a means of coping with the density of large cities and their burgeoning populations.
For the love Chen Congzhou exhibits in these writings, perhaps because of it, we understand that he was also aware of how gardens always were, as Craig Clunas describes at the beginning of this text, in essence "pieces of real estate." This sense is prescient today as those ancient gardens that continue to exist are preserved by contemporary hands and, increasingly, monetized in the name of modern tourism. Chen Congzhou laments the practice of renaming gardens and altering aspects of their content which disturbs the original aura of place with which they were imbued. He goes to great lengths to describe how the reorganisation of the form—such as the opening up of new gates, or the altering of pathways—impacts the flow of "beginning, development, transition and conclusion" upon which the design was conceived, and turning, in his view, that flow "upside down." That only lends greater import to the body of research and writings compiled here in the Literati Gardens: Poetic Sentiment & Picturesque Allure ; the life-time work of a man from possibly the last generation in China to experience a traditional education schooled in the four classics, to have been afforded a university education and to have seen the gardens he describes in an almost original state. The preserving of these writings together in one volume achieves a fitting tribute to the life work of a man delightfully evoked in the words of Song Fansheng, professor of Zhejiang University, as the "only man in modern China who could make gardens and restore old ones with his own hands while writing books to appreciate and comment on Chinese gardens."
That the poetic language of the original writings is also preserved in the masterful translation presented here is to the credit of the team led by Professor Ling Yuan, an FLTRP senior translator whose painstaking work on rendering Chen Congzhou's texts available in elegant English echo the diligent efforts that the great garden designers expended to cultivate a traditional garden. The translation is nothing less than meticulous, and every effort has been made to retain the authentic aura of the original text with particular diligence brought to achieving the appropriate meter of the poetic verse contained within and the descriptive names which apply. Like the gardens Chen Congzhou describes, the manifold writings in the Literati Gardens can be seen to overlap the boundaries of multiple intriguing "Chinese categories" and beautifully "illuminate the various borders they traverse."
Karen Smith
Chinese art historian, Great Britain
June 26, 2018