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The traditional Chinese gardens are known as "literati gardens." Originated in the cultural heritages of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911), they were owned, designed and built by scholar-officials, men of letters, painters or garden-makers who excelled in prose, poetry, painting, calligraphy, opera and shared the desire to shun the turmoil of the mundane world by returning to nature. According to Chen Congzhou, the literati gardens are conceived in literature, and their names are spread through literature as well. In this mutually supplementary relationship, the gardens are tangible embodiments of literature, and literature finds tangible expression in gardens.
This bilingual Literati Gardens: Poetic Sentiments and Picturesque Allure features by far the largest translation of the late Tongji University professor's writings on gardens. As Chen Congzhou worked for much of his lifetime as a teacher, prose writer, painter and garden-maker in the literati tradition of the Ming and Qing dynasties, it is safe to say the Chinese text of this book is written by a modern-time literatus on literati gardens. In the sixteen articles featured in Section I, "Gardens Wrought in Spitten Images of Nature," Chen Congzhou turns himself into a scholarly tour guide to share his "everyday joy of rambling gardens" by showing his readers around some of the nation's best literati gardens. He ushers them into one fascinating scenery after another in deep recesses or along a serpentine stream or roofed walkway, and reels off one anecdote after another about people, history or events off his finger-tips, but all the while he does not forget to introduce garden-making precepts and technicalities such as siting, layout, view borrowing, in-situ and in-motion viewing. Section II, "Garden-Making Precepts and Aesthetic," begins with "On Gardens," a five-installment discourse that establishes him as the patriarch of gardens of 20th-century China and the legitimate heir to the mantles of Ji Cheng (1582- c . 1642), the 17th-century Chinese garden-maker whose The Craft of Gardens is the world's first ever garden-making manual. However, insofar as accomplishments are concerned, Chen considerably overshadows his predecessor. This is proved not only in "On Gardens," whose coverage is already broader and profounder than The Craft of Gardens , but also in his seven other essays presented in Section II, in which he goes beyond garden-making per se to delineate the intricate ties of the literati gardens with classical Chinese poetry and prose, traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, Kunqu Opera, and dwellers' everyday life.
Between the pages of this Chinese-English edition, he introduces hundreds of gardens and scenic views in detail or in passing, quotes more than one hundred works of literature, and cites even more literati-officials, writers, painters, garden crafters and owners. With such wealth of information and the author's compelling and exquisite narrative, it is hoped that the Literati Gardens will provide garden experts and students with a valuable textbook on all aspects of the legendary craft of Chinese gardens. As to our general Chinese or English readers, even if you are cocooned alone in your tiny room, with this book in hand you can still have the fun to traverse some of the nation's best gardens with exuberant flowers and bushes, limpid waters and ethereal mountains, and to ponder the poetic implications and picturesque charms of rosy clouds framing emerald pavilions, threads of rain and petals borne on a breeze, and gilded pleasure boats in waves of mist.
Chen Congzhou's success as an ingenious polymath in Chinese culture originated in his well-disciplined upbringing. He kowtowed to a portrait of Confucius in a traditional illiteracy-breaking ceremony to begin learning to read and write when he turned five, and, at seven, was sent to a small private school where he memorized classic texts in the morning and exercised calligraphy in the afternoon, with a class set aside every four days to make sentences. The studies went without letup all year long, and he must fluently recite all the texts he had been taught over the past twelve months before he could enjoy Spring Festival celebrations. When he turned eight, his newly widowed mother increased his workload by having him practice calligraphy from a copybook in the morning and keep family accounts using traditional Chinese numerical symbols 1 at night. He recalls in a short memoir, "A Man's Soliloquy Beside Bookshelves" 2 :
Life was boring and lonesome all those years, and my private teacher's sense of responsibility was stringent to the utmost, but it was exactly in those years that I acquired the basic skills in calligraphy and learning by heart, among other things.
After he was enrolled in a church-run primary school as a third-year grader at age ten, his mother put him under the tutelage of an uncle on her side for after-school education in such classics as The Finest of Ancient Prose , Children's Treasury of Knowledge and Three Hundreds of Tang Poems , all of which he smoothly committed to memory. He says,
What was required of the school children of my age was to learn by rote all the books you could lay your hand on, practice calligraphy with a writing brush, and nothing else. It may sound primitive nowadays to ask someone to memorize all the classic texts, but looking back, it beats all the sophisticated things like computers and audiovisual devices, because all the knowledge I acquired through such training can never be disowned, and because I, with time, could fathom out what was said in the books and put them at my fingertips, which means I could retrieve them from my mind and put them to use without the aid of reference books or such gadgets as photocopiers. Learning by rote is one of the many things in this world that appear to be stupid but are actually rather smart.
Rigorous school and family training and self-study helped cultivate a photographic memory in him. Apart from the classroom book knowledge he had memorized, he also remembered every morsel of culture or folkways that came casually to his attention, including couplets, inscribed steles and name boards, and street scenes, as well as tidbits and anecdotes overheard from elders'chitchats over a cup of wine or tea. According to him,
I know how to use my brain like a data bank, in which all my knowledge is systematically categorized, so that all the new things I have learned can be put where they belong in my mind for easy retrieval.
His well-developed memory made his studies so much easier and enjoyable, and it also kindled an unquenchable thirst to learn more. As a young boy he learned to paint, mount and repair paintings, grow grass and flowers, and build mini-landscapes. He availed himself with every opportunity to learn how houses were built from the treatment of timber to the installation of beams and rafters, and how rocks were selected and piled up to become rockery or mountain. All the knowledge and expertise accumulated year in, year out replenished the easily retrievable stock of encyclopedic knowhow in his mind.
In his youth he loved to visit his mentors in their homes, so that he could see their manuscripts and book collections, and learn things that could not be learned in the classroom. In the course of it, he fostered a modest attitude toward teachers. Some of them might be hot-tempered and given to scolding people, but he never minded:
The sterner the teacher's countenance turns, the more obedient the student should be, because they love teaching and are so pleasant and affable when they talk, offering extremely valuable things derived from their lives' experience. When they hit the nail on the head, you see the light right away.
Without an obedient attitude, he adds, "How can you find favor with your teacher?" Such modesty won him the mentoring of the right man at the right time throughout his formative years. The foremost scholar in classical Chinese architecture Liang Sicheng (1901-1972), for example, voluntarily became his mentor and close friend despite their age gap because of his modesty and the fact that he could recite the seemingly onerous text of the professor's Annotated Treatise on Architectural Methods from cover to cover.
His strict training in literature and art culminated in excellence in multiple fields. When he was a junior high student he was already contributing to local newspapers and journals with writings on local history, folkways, anecdotes, handicrafts, fauna and flora, etc., to the great emolument of his teachers. He published an article about his favorite poetess Li Qingzhao (1084-1155), "A Chronology of Li Qingzhao and Husband" at age twenty-two, and A Chronology of the Life of Xu Zhimo (1889-1931) nine years later, which remains a crucial reference source for studies of the prominent modern Chinese poet. After graduating from Hangchow University with a bachelor's degree, a multi-talented Chen taught Chinese, history, geography, drawing, and biography as a high school teacher, and art history, education, aesthetics, and poetry as a junior college teacher. When he turned thirty, he held his first personal retrospective of figure, landscape and floral paintings in Shanghai as a fledgling ink and wash painter. By the time he became a Tongji University professor in classical Chinese architecture and gardens, he was already an accomplished essayist, prose-writer, poet, and painter, a calligrapher whose inscriptions graced many gardens and buildings around the country, a self-styled "carpenter" and ink-slab carver, and the first man to connect garden aesthetic with Kunqu Opera librettos, among other things.
It was literature that ushered Chen Congzhou into studies of literati gardens and classical architecture and turned him into the all-important practitioner and theoretician in both fields. He says in a June 1984 sketch, "Miscellaneous Recollections by a Table Lamp":
As I recollect today, I was fond of reading the lyrical poems of Li Qingzhao, who drew my attention to her father Li Gefei ( c. 1045- c. 1105) and his book, A Record of the Celebrated Gardens in Luoyang . The venerated Li thus became my first teacher in the studies of gardens. In that book he taught me how to appreciate gardens and talk about them, but more importantly, it was his literary talent and grace that deepened my passion for gardens. Because his Record mentioned the Classic of Architectural Carpentry 3 , I came to know the Treatise on Architectural Methods , which became my major textbook on architecture. When I had trouble understanding the Treatise , I looked around and got hold of A Compendium of Architectural Methods and interpretative articles written by scholars of the older generation, which turned me into a self-educated student in this field. Later, I joined these scholars and adopted architecture as my career for the rest of my teaching career. No one could have imagined that my humble achievements in traditional architecture and gardens should be owed to Li Qingzhao. This sounds so incredible, but that's what really happened to me.
Obviously from this crucial switch in his career, 20th-century China gained her foremost scholar capable of interpreting literati garden-making precepts and aesthetics in terms of literature and art, and making gardens with his own hands. This is amply reflected in the Literati Gardens: Poetic Sentiments & Picturesque Allure , a book with a simple theme but complex topics. Its narrative is paced by the author's lucid and elegant prose belonging in a semi-vernacular, semi-classical school that puts him on a par with such eminent essayists and prose masters as Li Gefei, Zhang Dai (1597-1689), Yuan Mei (1716-1797) and Li Dou (1749-1817). Relying solely on the comprehensive data he had memorized, he apparently finished writing every essay at one sweep, without so much as a halt to look up references. As a result, his Chinese writings are sparsely annotated, with the few available footnotes looking more like his afterthoughts than interpretations, and in these writings, so many prose passages and poems are quoted without mentioning their titles and authors, and virtually all the ancients and his contemporary friends are addressed by their sobriquets or style names. In all, Chen Congzhou's classical garden literature makes pleasant and intellectual reading for well-read Chinese readers who either can take the "missing parts" for granted or simply do not want their enjoyment of his limpid prose impeded by what they may see as so many frivolous things.
As much as I enjoyed reading Congzhou's prose as a translator, I could not afford to ignore these things when I was entrusted to produce a bilingual book of sinology for international readers by matching his Chinese texts with English renditions I was supposed to deliver. If all those "frivolous things" were not properly addressed in English along with so many historical and literary allusions, professional parlance and technical terms, our English readers unfamiliar with the Chinese culture might be hard put to make sense of the book.
For this reason, we took pains in researching the Chinese texts while translating them into English. A wealth of "invisible" information "surfaced" in the process, including 140 titles of literary works and 197 personal names. The simplest sort of information thus found, such as a quoted poem's title or an author's name, is blended into the flow of the English narrative as far as possible. While all the style names and sobriquets are retained in the Chinese text, they are replaced with formal names in the English text as per a sinology stylebook, but we make a point of attaching the style name or sobriquet where a formal name is annotated in a footnote. The names of people, gardens, scenic attractions, terminologies, and so on are also categorized in the Glossary's four columns. The lion's share of our research findings, however, are represented in 260 English footnotes we have written. Chen Congzhou's twenty original footnotes, including four stripped from relevant original texts for succinctness's sake and eight unusually long ones that are highly informative and of stellar literary value, are also rendered into English and attributed to his name.
In the days and months in which we were immersed in this task of research-based translation, we were increasingly fascinated by the garden and scenery names that kept popping into our eyes. We pondered their literary and poetic meanings and undertones and cultural roots, and replaced some long-standing pinyin names that mean little to foreign readers with our English translations, such as "Shanjuan's Hermitage Cave" for Shanjuan Cave, "Solace-Imbued Garden" for Jichang Garden, "Gratification Garden" for Yuyuan Garden, Mountain-Level Hall for Pingshan Hall, each having a footnote attached to explain the reason. We have also found some long established English names of gardens and scenery inappropriate, including the very popular "Cloud-Dispelling Hall" for 排云殿 in the Summer Palace, which should be "Hall of Immortals Lining Up in Clouds." We have no intention to shake up all the available English translations of Chinese literati garden names, some of which are well-established and have even made the UNESCO world heritage list, even though we are doubtful about their correctness. We offer our English versions with a desire to return the Chinese names of gardens and famous scenery to their cultural origins, and to help English-speaking readers appreciate their rich, profound, and oftentimes poetic and picturesque implications.
While preparing Chen Congzhou's original Chinese texts to match our English translations for this bilingual book, my colleague and co-translator Zhong Zhilan amended quite a few typos, missing words and other mistakes that were unavoidable given the fact that these originals had been repeatedly typeset for different books by different publishers, and that the author habitually committed information from his memory to paper without looking up references. For example, he attributed two quotations in "On Gardens 4" to the same article "Record of the Estate of Suburban Delights" by Wang Shimin (1592-1680), but the second one is actually originated in Wang Baoren's Chronicle of the Respected Flagbearer . In another example, Chen's quotation from Wang Yuanqi in "On Gardens 5" puts it as "study its concept, strengths and drawbacks…," but the correct version reads, "study its concept and its composition, its discrepancies, strengths and drawbacks…." These and other oversights we have addressed in the current Chinese text and rendered into English accordingly. In between the copy-editing work, she also contributed her excellent English translation of the second longest, book-sized "Suzhou Gardens: An Overview" 4 and her classical-style Chinese translation of the "Notes from the Translator" while researching and proofreading every piece of my English texts, and working as copy editor, liaison, and Yangzhou gardens investigator; she also translated the articles of "Qiao's Garden, Taizhou" and "A Note on Rebuilding Water-Inked Garden." Three other young colleagues also contributed to the book. Ren Xiaomei offered her meticulously annotated English translation "Shen's Garden, Vernal Waves Bridge, Shaoxing" and her exquisite prose translation of the English Preface written by Karen Smith; Duan Huixiang translated "Summer Palace, Beijing," and Qian Jingyu did the "South-and-North Lakes."
The success or failure of the Literati Gardens: Poetic Sentiment & Picturesque Allure hinges on if the host of quoted classical poetic lines and prose passages in Chen Congzhou's narrative have been translated into proper English. We translated the lion's share of them on our own and enjoyed doing it very much, as we regarded them as the most meaningful and challenging part of the entire translation project. But at the same time we have also quoted from the peerless works by some of the world's elite translators, including James Legge's Book of Poetry , The Four Books , and The Yi King ; Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang's A Dream of Red Mansions and David Hawkes' The Story of the Stone: a Chinese Novel ; Cyril Birch's The Peony Pavilion ; Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-Hui's Six Records of a Floating Life ; Alison Hardie's The Craft of Gardens ; and Yang Xiaoshan's A Record of the Celebrated Gardens of Luoyang . (For a full list of the translated works we have quoted, adapted or consulted in this book, see "Bibliography.")
Before this book comes off the press, we would like to take the opportunity to thank the late professor's elder daughter Chen Shengwu for permitting us to publish this book, providing copies of her father's precious pictures and paintings, and taking time from her busy schedule to check up and replenish the "Chen Congzhou Timeline" we have compiled for this book; Yue Feng, last student of the late professor and author of the book Chen Congzhou's Life, for supplying the photo of the Astor Court on the cover of this book; Su Meijuan for correcting some of the mistakes in the original text; Wang Weiqiang for supplying a photo of the Gratification Garden; as well as Wang Shuaishuai and Yao Wu for supplying photos of the Summer Palace from their respective repositories. Our thanks also go to professor Han Feng with Tongji University, without whose advice we could not have presented the essays in such a logical and sensible order.
I am deeply indebted to Cheng Zhaojun of the Yangzhou Municipal Development and Reform Committee, and Zhao Yulong of the Municipal Garden and Forestry Administrative Bureau, for hosting my visit to Yangzhou and sponsoring a forum on Chen Congzhou's "Yangzhou Gardens and Dwellings" during Beijing's November 2014 APEC holiday; to Xu Shaofei for contributing vital corrections to this essay's original text at the forum and his appendix "Yangzhou Gardens Today."
It is my hope that this bilingual Literati Gardens: Poetic Sentiment & Picturesque Allure that we have managed to put on the table in the wake of twenty months of toil will do justice to the late professor's state-of-the-art garden prose and verse and live up to our Chinese and foreign readers' expectations.
Ling Yuan
Foreign Language Teaching and Publishing
Beijing, September 2018