Beyond Suzhou: Region and Memory in the Gardens of Sichuan
Author(s): Jerome Silbergeld
Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 2 (Jun., 2004), pp. 207-227
Published by: CAA
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3177415
Accessed: 17-04-2020 15:44 UTC
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Beyond Suzhou: Region and Memory in the Gardens
of Sichuan
Jerome Silbergeld
Bo (Li Bai), who wrote, "It would be easier to climb to
The title of Maggie Keswick's book The Chinese Garden, which
Heaven than to walk the Sichuan Road, / And those who
has served as American readers' most popular introduction
hear the tale of it turn pale with fear."8 Readily accessible only
to this topic since 1978, provides both a label and a limit for
through the treacherous Yangzi River gorges,9 Sichuan was
the study of Chinese gardens.' Put in the singular, it suggests
the nearly impregnable stronghold to which the Chinese
an isolated species so self-contained, so coherent and distinct
from other varieties, that little or no internal differentiation
government retreated for safety during its twentieth-century
need be discerned by the armchair audience.2 The titlewar
of with Japan. In earlier centuries, Sichuan became indeOsvald Siren's earlier classic on the subject (1949), which
pendent of the rest of China during nearly every major
Keswick's book supplanted, suggested otherwise: Gardens
national
of
upheaval, including the third, the tenth, the thirteenth, and the seventeenth centuries.10 In each of these
China. Yet Siren's first chapter, entitled "The Chinese Garden-A Work of Art in Forms of Nature," brings us right back
periods, as China experienced decline, Sichuan flourished,
benefiting from all those who fled the turmoil of the national
to the point, as does the very first sentence of his text, which
capital
begins, "The Chinese garden, considered as a special type
of and other cultural centers and filled Sichuan's cities
with refugee artists and poets."l Its cultural history resembles
landscape gardening..."3 To give them their due, these
books and various others of their class do differentiate, and
a light flickering on and off, sparkling when the rest of China
they recognize not just one type of garden but two: imperial
goes dark and dimming while the rest of China glows. Si-
gardens and scholars' gardens. This duality is based not
chuan
so (or Shu) has been described as a kingdom within a
much on historical evolution or geographic diversity as itkingdom,
is
and the Chinese have an expression about its hison royal versus private patronage and the predictable differtorical cycle of dynastic rise and fall: "When the nation has
ential in physical scale and degree of visual grandeur-in
not yet rebelled, Sichuan has already begun to rebel; when
other words, a sumptuary distinction.4 Only coincidentallythe
do nation is back at peace, Sichuan is the last to be pacified
two different regions tend to provide the essential examples
[Tianxia wei luan, Shu xian luan; Tianxia yi zhi, Shu hou zhi]."
The Chinese also have a familiar term for what we would
of these two different types: in the north, capital sites along
the Wei and Yellow River valleys, Xi'an and Luoyang, origicall a hick or a country bumpkin, and that is a xiali Ba ren,
nally offered up the grand imperial style, now hard to reconliterally, a "villager from Ba," or eastern Sichuan. This sug-
struct, while Beijing and the Manchu summer palacesgests
at how remote and provincial Sichuan might seem to the
Chengde today supply the only actual surviving examples;rest
in of China, its local customs poorly understood and its
the south, the Yangzi River delta towns give us the smaller,
history poorly recorded, so "quaint" that until a couple of
more austere private gardens, ranging from Yangzhouyears
to ago its famous river gorges appeared on a low-denomHangzhou, with Suzhou at their center. Siren wrote inination
his
bill with a Tibetan woman and Moslem man on the
reverse (Fig. 2). Yet Sichuan is scarcely a cultural backwater.
preface, "The present work is not the result of any systematic
The poets who came from or dwelt for periods of time i
preliminary studies, it has not been prompted by the ambiSichuan illuminate-even dominate-China's literary hall of
tion of scientific research, but is simply a resume of memories
including Sima Xiangru (179-117 B.C.E.), Yang Xion
I have preserved from former years of wandering abroad,fame,
of
(53 B.C.E.-18 C.E.), Chen Zi'ang (661-702), Li Bo (701-762
impressions I received in the course of rambles in Peking
Du Fu (712-770), Yuan Zhen (779-831), Su Shi (1037parks and the gardens of Suzhou."5 Later writers have been
1101), and Lu You (1125-1210). As for its architecture, at
scarcely less circumscribed in their wanderings, and this includes Chinese writers as well. As demonstrated by the map
first glance, it appears strikingly different from everything
one is taught about traditional styles and techniques-isofrom Peng Yigang's excellent Zhongguo gudian yuanlin fensi
[Analysis of the traditional Chinese garden] (Fig. 1), lated
the Sichuan preserving in its architecture some strange
as exotic to the traveler from another province as it is
author has made his way south to a few of the gardens in jewel,
the
to the foreigner already acclimated to China. Yet nationalist
Guangzhou area, but vast areas of China remain unexplored
by him and by others.6
pride after 1949 displaced regional awareness, and only with
itsofgradual revival since Mao Zedong's death in 1976 have
There's a hole where Sichuan ought to be in this map
conditions become ripe for Sichuan locals once again to
our architectural knowledge, so it is a map of our present
appreciate their distinctive cultural heritage and for a handignorance as well. It is also a reminder of the historical
ful of specialists to begin developing a crude index of Siisolation of this huge province: traditionally, larger in area
and population than any European country, it is walledchuan's
off early surviving architecture.
Before defining and interpreting a distinctive "Sichuan
from the rest of China in all directions by impassable mounstyle" (or what later will more accurately be refined into a
tains, like a huge Switzerland, and distinct in its own history
style"), something should first be said of the other
and regional customs.7 Sichuan's landlocked isolation "Chengdu
has
been famously described by the mid-eighth-century poet styles
Li
that are already well understood. The northern impe-
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208 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 2
BB ""e *S L
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rm ; m <fr t7jt<al(k^. I hmi h llS't' J lfl
_K,C ~ c, f 13f 1 Map of China showing areas where
garden research has been undertaken
*:"-'. j* .4 (from Peng Yigang, Zhongguo gudian
* Gc. Ot < Bat Ryuanlin fensi, 56)
2 Five-yuan note depicting the
Kuimen Gorge of the Yangzi River,
~:;:.i *;77'i ^?^ 1980
rial gardens, most scholars today believe, had their typological origins as long ago as three thousand years in vast royal
them of success in politics. The design of those gardens gave
hunting parks, in combination zoological, botanical, and
geological gardens (theme parks, in the most literal sense),
voices in Sima Xiangru's poem, knights from three different
parts of China (including Chu, just to the east of what is now
Sichuan), went on and on about their respective lords' royal
which both figuratively and literally were understood to rep-
later poets ample fuel for verbal extravagance; the three
resent the entire terrestrial realm. As microcosms now be-
parks, each proclaiming theirs the grandest, like three
lieved to have been constructed in order to legitimize
the braggarts on their barstools.'3 What we know of
drunken
authority of their royal owners, these vast parks aroseroyal
evenparks in the most recent thousand years suggests that
before the first emperor sat on the throne of a unified
China
they
pale in comparison with those earlier prototypes. The
in the late third century B.c.E.12 From early literaturefactors
like that led to this decline would not have been singular,
Sima Xiangru's famous "Zi xu," or "Sir Fantasy," we can
guess
but
the rise of private gardens must have helped to strip the
that the various regional rulers of early China competed
royal parks of their unique aura. We should also imagine, I
almost as much through the magnificence of their parks
andthat the rise of private gardens was met with efforts by
think,
their palaces as they did on the field of battle, confident
China's rulers to maintain their architectural exclusivity, but
perhaps that success in the architectural realm would assure
as the royal prerogative became increasingly less enforceable,
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REGION AND MEMORY IN TIIE GARDENS OF SICI-UAN 209
3 Copy after Wang Wei (699-759), Wang River Villa, section of a handscroll, ink and colors on silk, Ming
Museum (from Harry Trubner et al., Asiatic Art in the Seattle Art Museum [Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1
sumptuary laws were negotiated to minimize served
the rate
as a and
sacred precinct on which was set a Chinese-styled
scale of encroachment.
eight-sided, nine-story pagoda, drawing the focus of the othe
The earliest private "garden" sites, it is thought, werebuildings
found
away from them and their courtyard interiors.16
rather than built, exemplified by the Bamboo Grove of
NanThe
secular, aristocratic gardens of the late Heian and K
jing's famous "Seven Sages" (a group of celebrated individumakura periods known to us through surviving screen paint
alists from the third century C.E.), or at least relativelyings,
simple,
such as the Jing6ji's Senzui bybbu (Landscape foldin
like Wang Xizhi's (303-361) waterside Orchid Pavilion
(Lan- retained much of this open, pond-oriented layo
screen),
ting) on the slopes of Mt. Lanzhu in Kuaiji Prefecture
(near
even
as the buildings themselves were being converted t
modern-day Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province) and Tao accommodate
Yuannative Japanese structural traditions.17
ming's (365-427) humble eastern fence, five willows,
and
The
next step historically, which generated the privat
chrysanthemum beds planted by his own hand somewhere
in as we know it in later times in Suzhou, gradual
garden
the shadow of Mt. Lu.14 It did not take long for the private
shifted the balance toward prioritizing mountains over water
garden to evolve from such humble means into privately
yang over yin, or at least toward equalizing the two, by fig
owned estates like Wang Wei's (699-759), which sprawled
ratively transporting the mountains into and distributin
along the banks of the Wang River south of Xi'an, with
them throughout the garden and representing them not by
rambling villas and thatched halls, a deer park, and even the
islands within water but by large chunks of rugged rock. Roy
site of an ancient temple ruin (Fig. 3).1 Recorded for posparks led the way, and in no royal park was this more elabo
terity in his own painting and poetry, and perhaps the most
rately carried out than in that of the early-twelfth-century
famous garden of all time, Wang Wei's Wang River Villa dates
emperor Huizong (Zhao Ji, 1082-1135, r. 1101-26), the
to the 730s and 740s, and by then private gardens ran both
Genyue (Gen Mountain) Garden in Bianliang (modern
large and small. Regardless of scale, they often shared a
Kaifeng). Motivated by the pronouncement of the royal fangstructural concept developed along the lines of emerging
shi (soothsayer) at the outset of Huizong's reign that for him
fengshui ideals like those that YangYunsong (ca. 840-ca. 888)
to breed male heirs, which he then lacked, he needed to
formalized soon afterward. This employed a classic pattern of
supply gen-indicated by the seventh of the Book of Divinamountains to the rear (meaning the north), water flowing
(the Yijing) eight trigrams, literally, a yangline over two
southward through the property and pooling in thetion's
front,
yin
lines,
reduplicated, and the fifty-second of the book's
and buildings well protected within a so-called dragon's lair,
sixty-four
hexagrams, standing for mountain and stability-in
making pooled waters central to the design and proximate
to
thedoform of more rockery in the northeastern part of the
the inhabitants, while mountains were peripheral to the
capital
main, with architecture opening outward to receive them
as city.18 Huizong went to work massively importing
rocks from
"borrowed scenery." Such pond-centered, outward-looking
the south of China and became infatuated with
the kind of rocks found in the acid waters of Lake Tai near
gardens typified a high Tang style found not just in private
Suzhou. With the help of flotillas that plied the Grand Canal
Chinese gardens but also in palace architecture and Buddhist
ferrying
temples, in China, Korea, and Japan, like the Hosshoji
in mountains of rock, his enterprise became known
from 1105 on as the Flower and Rock Network. This was
Kyoto, built on a grand scale by the Heian-period emperor
shortly afterward by Zhang.Hao (ca. 1180-12
Shirakawa from 1077 onward (Fig. 4). Here, a low-lyingdescribed
grassy
island set within the lake symbolized a world-mountain
who
andwrote, without much exaggeration:
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210 ART BUI,I,ITIN JUNE 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 2
I
_-
I
I I
I
I
- a;
I. C
!nl,
4 Hossh6ji, Kyoto, reconstr
ground plan, ca. 1083 (from
Kobayashi, Japanese Architec
The expenses involved... are easily
stones of
reckoned
scholars' gardens to
with be
mineral
alpigments, as in the
most infinite in number. Common
were
handscrollpeople
attributed to
Xie Huandis(act. 1426-52) depicting a
patched to search around cliffs and
sift famous
through
swamps.
historically
ninth-century
gathering but in a garden
Shrouded and secret locales were not disregarded.
... Mountains were hacked to pieces and rocks were
carted away.... every possible scheme was used in order
design that one might guess was brought thoroughly up-to-
to get the rocks out and to their destination.... The boats
continued, one after the other, day and night, without a
of the Chinese scholars' paintings, calligraphies, poems, mu-
break.... Still, they did not supply enough.19
Quite literally, Huizong broke the royal bank with these
enterprises and got into such political trouble for it that
neither he nor his dynasty could get out of it again. One
might think that the collapse of the Northern Song dynasty in
1126-27-with the sack of the capital city byJurched Tartars,
date (Fig. 5). Such gatherings are also a reminder that the
garden-based studio was the site where a substantial portion
sical compositions, and philosophical essays were produced
over the centuries, inspired by the garden's aesthetics and
energized by the gathered yang and yin forces placed at the
disposal of the painter-writer-musician. Paths of stone lead in
and around exotic rockery gathered from Lake Tai, erected
in the garden as miniature mountains, simulacra of the real
thing. Inside the studio, where the scholar executes a poem
or a painting-perhaps a painting-within-a-painting or a
the capture of Huizong and the Song royal family, and the
flight of a rump court south to Hangzhou-might forever
poem descriptive of this very garden-we also see the minia-
have given intensive gardening a bad name in China, but the
continued evolution of garden style toward petromania went
on unabated. It is not, however, in the increasingly conserva-
collectible items,20 we might regard such stones today as an
ture mountains further miniaturized into the form of a small
desk-top stone. Increasingly valuable in their own day as
tive traditions of palace gardens that this development cul-
early form of "found art" but for the fact, frequently over-
minates but rather in private scholars' gardens.
From the fourteenth century on, one increasingly finds the
visual celebration of rockery, of yang, wherever one turns to
whose intent was to thoroughly disguise their unnatural ef-
gaze on the garden. Some paintings rendered the gathered
include this material, this is what became of the high art of
looked, that they were often very carefully worked by artisans
forts. Although modern books on Chinese sculpture never
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REGION AN)D iMEMORY IN iTHE GARDENS OF SICIIUAN 211
5 Xie Huan, Ming dynasty (1368-1644), The Nine Elders of the Mountain of Fragrance, detail of a handscroll, i
height 12 in. (30.6 cm). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. A. Dean Perry, 1997.99 (photo
Museum of Art)
Chinese sculpture in the last millennium, an abstract equivalent to The Three Graces and other masterworks of the West-
ern classical tradition (Fig. 6). All these stones-taihu from
Suzhou, lingbi from Anhui, yingstones from Guangdong, and
so forth-allowed painters to model their landscapes without
having to leave their studios at all.21 Sliced marble from Dali
in deep southern Yunnan Province produced an accidental
landscape once every hundred slices or so, more valued the
closer they came to styles of landscape actually practiced by
painters. These were set into furniture or displayed on the
walls (Figs. 7, 8). Lovely examples were framed and hung, like
minimalist paintings. Outside the studio, terraces of inset
stones, selected for common size, color, and shape, dazzled
and directed the eye. Bridges of stone, elevated, imitate the
bridges leading to heaven and immortality-or imitated the
paintings of such bridges. A hierarchy of stone types was
6 Snow on Mount Yi, white marble scholar's rock, Qing dynasty.
established; a terrace could be built up of lesser quality yellow
Collection of Richard Rosenblum (from Robert Mowry, Worlds
stone (huang shi), with flanking stones made of so-called
within Worlds, no. 56)
bamboo shoot rockery guarding a central stone from Lake
Tai, very much like a Buddhist temple altar with guardian
deities flanking a central icon (Figs. 9, 10). The analogy was
With the bringing of mountains-as stones-directly into
undoubtedly intentional and the veneration of great rocks
the courtyard came the development of an architectural array
very real; their power-male, yang, phallocentric-was no less
that no longer turned outward toward some borrowed scenpotent than that of anthropomorphic icons, and no less
ery of distant mountains but rather looked inward, addressgenuine than their own aesthetic impact.
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212 ART BUI.'LETIN JUNE 2004 VOIUME I,XXXVI NUMBER 2
7 Marvelous Peaks, Blue and Green, framed marble from Dali,
Yunnan Province. Suzhou, Liu Garden
8 Ma Shirong (active ca. 1132-62), Landscape, fan painting,
ink and colors on silk. Beijing, Palace Museum (from Song ren
hua ci [Beijing: Zhongguo gudianjishu chubanshe, 1957],
ing the miniature mountains close at hand. And with an no. 32)
increasingly self-enclosed and inward-oriented garden, urban, small in scale, and intimate, outer and internal walls
came to matter immensely, defining space as a more complex and surprise, diminished and exaggerated emotions: in other
matter than ever before. Made semipermeable by elaborately words, visual melodrama, but of an intellectually discriminatshaped doorways and uniquely patterned lattice windows that ing sort. A typical view revealed only bits and pieces of a
ultimately became a decorative end in themselves (Fig. 11), complex and convoluted world, an effect comparable to gazthey took a space already small and made it even smaller ining through a crystal on a world in fragments, ongoing and
order to diversify it and thereby make it seem larger. Every endless. The spatial organization dizzied the eye, engaged the
garden became a series of minigardens, each different from senses, and involved the mind, like the multidimensional,
its minineighbors, all spatially interpenetrating (Fig. 12). multimedia display of a great Baroque cathedral-this in
These gardens operated through the principles of gradual contrast to the Renaissance-like clarity set forth in earlier,
disclosure and played on viewer expectations-anticipationsimpler pre-Song gardens.
9 Liu Garden, Suzhou, rocks in the
design of a temple altar
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REGION AND MEMORY IN THE GARDENS OF SIICHUAN 213
11 Zhuozheng Garden, Suzhou, lattice win
10 Toshodaiji, Kondo (Golden Hall), Nara, main altar, ca. 759
(from Minoru Ooka, Temples of Japan and Their Art [New York:
Weatherhill / Heibonsha, 1973], pl. 43)
';i<8-.1"s
f
-
,/
'
--
-
'2'
T 11
' 9) 0 0 0
-' 0 o o c
0
0
oo s o
0
0
0
0
O
. S o o
-., 'o o o o
.' , o OO
Nets, Suzhou, ground plan (from
Keswick, Gardens of China, 1978, 17)
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A
214 ART BU. LLETIN JUNE 2004 VOIUME LXXXVI NUMBER 2
c
4
4
4
4.
I,
z
-?.--
.,e
z
s
z
5
II,
-L
-?I
-L?
bLLilu
13
Du
Fu
Thatched
Hall,
Much
of
this
sense
of
attention
to
(1301-1374)
engaging
the
visitor's
im
and
Wen
Zh
tional
expectations
with
1551
depictin
a
pavilion
conventionally
of
Chinese
ga
of
the
garden,
disclosing
Suzhou's
so-c
viding
the
tourist
a
prim
products
of
m
garden.
But
in
Suzhou'
Nets,
a
pavilion
the
is
twentiet
hauled
ings
is
as
pe
half,
and
plastered
up
ag
a
pavilion
to
dating
facilitate
of
bui
a
g
date
of
a
pain
here
dislodged,
and
the
r
like
an
icon
nese
in
a
painter
templ
gardens
of
detailed
Suzhou
are
subje
f
eve
prises,
moresurpassed
often
than
n
alter
such
su
Figuring
out
how
quic
and
how
to modern
date
archite
hist
with
accuracy
den's
continuing
evolutio
historian
a increasingly
series
of
co
made
of
wooden
The
Chinese
modul
necessity
dictates.24
in
supplying
Aft
all
of
one
age
sites.
but
In
a
bioni
sur
the
rockery,
easier
the
water
and
mo
fe
relevant
text
of
a
garden.
Dated
pain
gardens
serve
matters.
as
valuable
It
is,
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REGION ANI) MEMORY IN THE GARDENS OF SICHUAN 215
.
?
.
.
-
?
.
i~'~" .. , , . ~ ~,, e .~ ~ ~ ~ ~~~~.
.
-.
X,
1
> > r + ^<-tw , - .i':'., ' ' '-' ,~[..''i.: '?' . ' '- -
: i~~~~~~~~~~~i
14 Shrine of the Three Sus, Meishan, schematic drawing (from
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.-
_ t ,~Z .RI
*?1,~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~[~ ::'.~-~.~y. r ..:
15 River Viewing Tower Park,
Chengdu, rockery
All the
of this
is general background based on
that it is easier to describe with some accuracy
differenSuzhou
model but essential to appreciate before
tiation by place, region by region, in Chinese
architectural
Even
the most cursory look at the lay
history than it is to account for the subtleSichuan.27
changes in
style
over relatively short periods of time.
du's Du Fu Thatched Hall (Du Fu cao tang, na
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216 \AR BUIIETIN JUNE 2004 VOI.UMEE I.XXXVI NUMBER 2
16 Shrine of the Three Sus, Hall of
the Wooden Miniature Mountain
17 Du Fu Thatched Hall, Water Gate (Shui Hsien, foreground) and Droplets-of-Dew and Wind-in-the-Leaves Veranda
Fengye Zhi Xuan, background)
Tang poet Du Fu) or Meishan's Shrine of the Three Sus
(Sanor by conscious archaism preserving an open-styl
vation
Su ci, named for the Song poet Su Shi, his father,architectural
and
design reminiscent of classic Tang garden
brother) reveals the historically conservative aspect(Figs.
of Si13, 14). Unlike Suzhou's urban gardens, which turne
chuan-style garden layout, whether by uninterrupted inward
preser- on a mere half acre to an acre of land, these gardens
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REGION ANI) MEMO)RY IN THE (AR)DENS OF SICIIUAN 217
18 Du Fu Thatched Hall, Water
Bamboo Dwelling (Shui Zhu Ji), view
from the interior
19 Huanxiu Garden, Suzhou, limestone garden rock
20 Shrine of the Three Sus, black walls
are often suburban or rural and sprawl over five or six acres,
tion, often unkempt and including thick stands of tall bam-
like an aristocratic Tang estate (Fig. 3). Their architectural
boo (Figs. 18, 36), adds a visual density to the garden not
array, rather than dense and crowded, is sparse, their courtprovided by the architecture itself. Partly as a result, the
yards large and loosely compounded. Each main compound
entire palette by which Sichuan gardens are colored differs
tends to retain its structural independence. Water is brought
from that of Suzhou or Beijing as conventionally as the
in from sources to the north, drawn down the west side and Venetian palette did from the Florentine or the Roman.
sometimes the east, and pools in front of the main halls. In The palette of royal architecture in Beijing, like that in
Chengdu's or nearby Meishan's gardens, the mountains reTang-period Chang'an, was grand, loaded with deeply satumain far outside the garden; the stones inside are few, rela-rated reds, greens, blue, and gold. Suzhou wall colors, by
tively unimportant, and mostly of local varieties that a Suzhou
contrast, are plain, simple, and elegant: uniformly whiteconnoisseur would consider provincial and inferior (Fig. 15).washed stucco-covered walls contrast cleanly with brownish
Their near absence takes us back to an earlier era. The most
red lacquered columns and doors, pale stone, and gray-tiled
conspicuous miniature mountain (jia shan, "false mounroofs. Limestone set against lime-painted stucco walls protains") at the Shrine of the Three Sus is made not of stone
ducesbut
a beautiful tonal minimalism (Fig. 19). In Sichuan, on
the other hand, as in Meishan's Shrine of the Three Sus,
of wood (Fig. 16). The horticulture in Suzhou's gardens
today is carefully limited and distributed, much of it semior
black lacquer
columns, doors, and windows, gray roof tiles,
fully miniaturized, just as the rockery is. In contrast,
Si- some black- and gray-colored walls all plunge the
and even
chuan's gardens settle beneath a spreading canopy architecture
of fullinto reclusively deep shadow (Fig. 20). And in
scale vegetation, far wider in variety and collectively casting
a
the maintenance
of these gardens, one finds water deep
darker shadow over the gardens (Figs. 17, 18). The green,
vegetadark and fertile as compared with Suhzou's garden
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218 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 2
21 Wu Hou Ci, Chengdu, red wall with carved calligraphic inscription by Yue Fei (1103-1141)
22 River Viewing Tower
culture today (Fig. 17). The occasional use of dark red walls
in some of these gardens, a peculiarity I will come back to
shortly, further adds to the tonal depth (Figs. 21, 35, 36),
as do the shadows cast by multisided, multistoried towers
(lou)--an architectural element not to be confused with the
Buddhist pagoda (ta), though not unrelated-almost never
seen in Suzhou gardens (Fig. 22). The circular (one-sided),
square (four-sided, not rectangular), or polygonal (eight- or
twelve-sided) building, with conical or pyramidal roof, is rare
in China, almost always seen either as state temples, as Bud-
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REGION AND IMEMORY IN T-IE GARDENS OF SICHUAN 219
dhist pagodas, or as single-story garden pavilions (ting) and
towers (lou).28 The dual appearance of such structures in
temple and in garden architecture reinforces an awareness of
the garden's religious overtones. Sichuan's multistoried towers, reaching heavenward, invoke this relation even more
strongly than the ordinary garden pavilion.
The dark naturalism of Sichuan's gardens matches the
character of the province, heralded in its own poetry as
"luxuriant," "secluded," "dangerous," and "heroic."29 This
rustic preference for rugged, primitive naturalism rather
than urbane elegance is pursued in Sichuan's finest garden
architecture, from its general aspect down to its smallest
details. The placement of roof tiles, which in most Suzhou
buildings typically includes a smooth sheathing layer of flat
tile and a layer of mud beneath the double layer of trough
and seam-covering tiles, in Sichuan is structurally much sim- 23 Du Fu Thatched Hall, bamboo gate and fence
pler, more primitive: the lower layers of sheathing and mud
are completely omitted, with the trough (yin) tiles slung
directly onto the rafters, visibly hanging down between them,_ . t7..?, ' -
and with small amounts of mud troweled between them and
the thin strip of each rafter to hold them in place. All the tiles - "i'are thinner than in Suzhou, the roof weight considerably less, '
and the whole affair technically less polished, with leaking
rainwater a much more common problem and replacement
more frequent. In Sichuan gardens, one finds primitive bamboo gateways and wattle fences that a Japanese gardener
might feel at home with (Fig. 23) but unlike those that are
usually found in Suzhou or Beijing, Xi'an or Guangzhou. On
Mt. Qingcheng, the sacred mountain chain west of Chengdu,
where institutionalized Daoism found its first home in the
first century C.E., one finds pavilions so primitive they look
almost like a bird's nest stuck together with twigs, or at least
like a man-made birdcage (Fig. 24). The timbers are not even
stripped of their bark. This reversion to the primordial ori-
gins of human architecture touches aesthetic bedrock and
resonates compellingly with Daoist fundamentals. Ironically,
then, this simple structure constitutes one of Sichuan's most
esteemed works of architecture.
Most importantly, most Sichuan buildings are engineered
in an entirely different way from Chinese buildings elsewhere, the two systems as different as Gothic was from Ro-
manesque but with region as well as chronology shaping the 24 Hillside pavilion, Mt. Qingcheng (photo: Jim Dawson)
, o t4?4?
25 Tailiang construction (from L - XL
Andrew Boyd, Chinese Architecture and
Town Planning [London: Alec Tiranti,
1962], 29)
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220 ART BUI.ILETIN JUNE 2004 VOILUME IXXXVI NUNMBER 2
26 Du Fu Thatched Hall, Water
Bamboo Dwelling, view from the rear
27 North Hotsprings Park, Chongqing, chuandou construction
28 Wu Hou Ci, roof-ridge decoration
difference. Best known throughout most of China, the tai- virtually no architectural renderings from Sichuan exist to
liang or liangzhu system of stacked and elevated tie beams and steer architectural historians toward a dated history, and
struts used for suspending the roof beam, purlins, and rafters Chinese painters everywhere tend to shy away from depicting
is efficient, reducing the need for tall timber (Fig. 25). But
the gable end-the informal but structurally more revealing
Sichuan's chuandou system uses tall timber from ground to
side of buildings.) Other features found consistently throughroof, often placed at close intervals along the gable end and
out this architecture include radically upturned corners with
tied together with horizontal beams that penetrate the holhigh ridges made of sculpted clay;3l ridge beams tiled with
lowed-out posts (Fig. 26). When repeated through the length sacred jewel patterns, derived from the pearl-and-flame motif
of the building, this arrangement of posts breaks the interior of Buddhist architecture but typically found on even the
space into small rooms, so the system is no more efficient in humblest domestic buildings (Fig. 28) ;32 decorative sus-
expanding space than it is in conserving raw materials, but pended plumbs carved in floral designs (occasionally found
elsewhere in China but consistently used only here); the
until recently, rugged Sichuan has had timber to spare. The
tailiang system is basically designed for efficiency but operates
within a narrower range of variables, both structurally and
visually, providing little aesthetic variety. Sichuan's chuandou
system, on the other hand, leaves the architect free to use the
frequent use of stilts to support second-story storage rooms
and sometimes whole hillside buildings; the rarity of brackets,
which elsewhere serve as a defining feature of institutional
architecture; and diagonal struts, often carved with symbolic
gable ends of the building like a painter's canvas, creating patterns, extending upward from the columns to the eaves
patterns that emerge, like Piet Mondrian's designs, in seem-
purlins and taking over the function of the missing brackets
ingly endless variation (Fig. 27).30 (As mentioned earlier, (Fig. 29).
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REGION AND MEMORY IN TI-IE GARDENS OF SIC-IUAN 221
30 Ise Shinto Shrine, Yojoden (photo: Yoshio Watanabe, from
Kenzo Tange et al., Ise: Prototype ofJapanese Architecture, 136)
I
29
I
Du
I
Fu
bearing
Thatched
Hall,
W
struts
31 Farmhouse
northwest of Chengdu
If
Sichuan's
architectur
viving
Japanese
architec
coincidental.
There
is
a
logical remnant
of a distant past that might be supplanted
needs
to
be
explored
at
by a more sophisticated technology
but notShin
surpassed aesJapan's
national
Ise
thetically. Historically,
I propose this thesis: that Sichuan's
distinguishing
features
architecture
preceded China's tailiang;
that itsh
(chigi)
and chuandou
a
series
of
once spread over most(Fig.
of China; that tailiang was
develcalled
katsuogi
30).
these
"have
oped in
a
the early
function,
centuries before the Common Era to
not structural,"33 but on thatched farmhouses near
cope with northern China's gradual deforestation, emergChengdu, we find strikingly similar features, with bundles ing more or less together with dougong bracketing; and that
of rice thatch that help lash down the ridge beam and over the succeeding centuries, chuandou gradually reattach the roofing thatch (Fig. 31). In one of Sichuan's treated to southern and southwestern China with the refinest old buildings, the Water Bamboo Dwelling at the Ducession of China's vanishing woodlot of tall evergreen
Fu Thatched Hall (with a remarkable under-the-floor sys-study of the posthole pattern in ancient raised-founda
tem of ventilation), the latticed windows, full-length along remains dating all the way back to the Shang dynasty
three sides of the building (Fig. 32), bring to mind Ise's 1600-ca. 1035 B.C.E.) in north-central China (Fig. 33),
Yojoden, the latter building probably derived in form from arrayed in depth across the gable end of buildings, supa stable for Japan's sacred horses, and one can readily ports this possibility, complemented by the persistence
imagine that its Chengdu counterpart, if not original tointo recent times of occasional chuandou engineering in
the eighth century, was at least inspired by the memory of the north. The presence of chuandou-like inserted tie
beams and multiple gable-end ground-to-roof columns in
Du Fu's great love for horses and horse paintings.34
Overall, Sichuan's style is both primitive and sophisti-early-eighth-century Japan in buildings like the Horyuji's
cated-like a Gothic cathedral or, like Ise itself, an ontoDenpodo (at Ikaruga, Nara Prefecture, originally a secular
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222 ART BUI.I.ETIrN JUNE 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 2
33 Schematic reconstruction of ceremonial structure at
Anyang, Henan Province, ca. 1250 B.C.E. (drawing by Shi
Zhangru, from Kwang-chih Chang, The Architecture of Ancient
China, 2nd ed. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968],
fig. 81)
.
,
4
.
these gardens, a different pattern of usage, and a different
mode of patronage. Whereas Suzhou's finest gardens were
typically private landholdings whose wealthy owners were
32 Du Fu Thatched Hall, Water Bamboo Dwelling, view of
main entrance
often historically marginal figures,3" the major Sichuan
gardens are associated with revered contributors to Sichuan's regional society and literature. Among them are
the brilliant hydrologist Li Bing (early third century
residence, donated and converted in 739 into a Buddhist
B.C.E.), who tamed and reshaped Sichuan's river system as
lecture hall) suggests that chuandou, at least in a hybridized governor of the Shu Commandery under Qin authority,37
form, was still available for transmission from the southern and his son Erlang, the tamer of Sichuan's forests-the two
coast of China at that relatively late date (Fig. 34).35
deified and worshiped together at the Two Kings Shrine, at
In all, then, Sichuan's chuandou architecture is like starDujiangyan;38 or the early-third-century burial ground of
light that allows us to peer into China's distant architec- the ruler Liu Bei (162-223) of the Shu-Han Kingdom and
tural past. This does not imply simply some laggard con- the shrine of his minister, the immensely talented and
servatism, for in decorative details Sichuan has readily popular Zhuge Liang (181-234), who chose to be buried
blended native features with southern Chinese, Southeast
outside the province rather than upstage his own ruler
Asian, and even Tibetan elements into its art of building, (the two figures were subsequently conjoined at the Zhaotogether with northern and northeastern features broughtlie Miao and Wu Hou Ci in Chengdu, Figs. 21, 28, 35);39
in during the various early politically driven migrations the Zither Terrace of the poet Sima Xiangru and the
into the province. But there is a core traditionalism in itsfamous well at which he and his wife Zhuo Wenjun made
approach, evident in the chuandou engineering system andtheir humble living producing wine, in Qiongthe classically Tang-like arrangement of buildings within lai; Chen Zi'ang's study on Jinhua Mountain; Chengdu's
the landscape, and additionally coded by the red stucco Thatched Hall of the eighth-century poet Du Fu, probably
walls mentioned earlier: red stucco used sometimes for
dating back to about the tenth century (Figs. 13, 17, 18, 23,
26, 29,for
32); the Longxi Garden of the eighth-century poet
buildings, sometimes for freestanding walls, sometimes
the long, curving walkways unique to Sichuan's
Ligardens
Bo, in Qinglian Xian; the River Viewing Tower Park,
(Figs. 21, 35). Elsewhere, red walls are normally which
limited
overlooks
to
Chengdu's Brocade River, dedicated to
royal palaces, temples, and shrines, as well as for
the
enshrinninth-century female poet Xue Tao (768/781-831/
ing workers' factories in the Communist era. Their
832), now
preswith its famous assortment of bamboo (Figs. 22,
ence in Sichuan gardens signals the distinctive function
36);40 theof
Shrine of the Three Sus at Meishan: the great
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REGION AND MEMORY IN THE GARDENS OF SICHUAN 223
:
? s-;li ??
.liEliE
*?- ???
:? ?-
?!; ' . ?;,?,
??: ?r
.? _i :
34 Horyilji, Ikaruga, Nara Prefecture, Denpodo, early 8th
century (from Kakichi Suzuki, Early Buddhist Architecture in
Japan, pl. 90)
eleventh-century poet-statesman-calligrapher painter Su
Shi, his father Su Xun (943-1047), and his younger
brother Su Che (1039-1112) (Figs. 14, 20); the shrine of
poet Lu You at the Yanhua Pool where he served in
Shuzhou (now called Chongqing, southwest of Chengdu); 35 Wu Hou Ci, red-walled walk, behind the Tomb of Liu Bei
and others.41
(Hui Ling)
As suggested earlier, the dating of these garden sites and
their architecture is particularly challenging, and only more
recent dates can sometimes accurately be provided. For ex-with her famous papermaking, was first established in the
ample, the poet Wei Zhuang (836?-910), boating down
Ming dynasty (1368-1644), although it was not originally
Chengdu's Washing Flowers Stream (Huanhua xi), noted in named after Xue Tao, while the stone stela inscribed "Xue
verse that "the column bases still remain" from Du Fu's
Tao's Well" (Fig. 36) was written in 1644 by the mayor of
thatched hall on the west side of town, meaning, of
Chengdu,
course,Bei Yingxiong. The three pavilions of Poetry-chantthat nothing more survived-other than a solitary
ing,
thatched
Paper-washing, and Brocade-washing were not built until
room, which he recorded as hovering over the ruins.42
1814 His(the first of these three authorized by the provincial
torical records demonstrate that in the Northern
governor
Song peand city mayor) and then were rebuilt after burning
downrebuilt
in the early 1850s, and the landmark three-story tower
riod (960-1127), Li Dafang, the prefect of Chengdu,
Du Fu's thatched hall and hung his portrait and for
that
which
local
the garden was later given its name, in 1953, was
builtfunds
in 1889 (Fig. 22). The "tomb of Xue Tao" is hardly likely
officials in the early Southern Song (1127-1279) raised
be hers.44
to extend the hall, add courtyards, and plant trees, to
flowers,
As these two examples suggest, while some of Sichuan's
and bamboo. But how this or the approximately seventeen
recorded further restorations of the next threegarden
dynasties
sites may be original to their owners, others may
been selected and developed only long centuries after
reflected a Tang dynasty original style or is retainedhave
in today's
the death
style is not easily demonstrated.43 In the war with Japan,
theof those they honor (individual buildings are no
to date but are typically much younger than the site
entire site was horribly damaged and required easier
near-total
restoration after the Chinese civil war ended in 1949. In the
itself). But they all function as memorial sites. Thus, their
redand
walls (Figs. 21, 35), thus, the strong presence of meyears since 1981, I have seen both significant erasures
morial tablets, memorial halls, memorial images, and mewholesale additions. The River Viewing Tower Park associmorial
ated with the poetess Xue Tao is built on the wrong side
of stelae (Fig. 36). More like public parks, these were
town, as her known dwelling place was on the east side
sitesof
where the general public could come to venerate
Chengdu rather than the west (she was a near neighbor those
of Du great men and women of culture who had risen
Fu's estate). The well that can be seen there today, associated
among them. Like Beijing's royal gardens and unlike Su-
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224 \ARI BULL.ETIN JUNE 2004 VOLUME ILXXXVI NUMBER 2
36 River Viewing Tower Park, "Xue
Tao's Well" Stela
great yet
agrarian plain to the west (the Red Basin) and Ba in
zhou's private ones, Sichuan's gardens are institutional,
narrow valley district to the east, domains centered
before this century they were more public than the
either,
despite the fact that most if not all of them actually
de-Chengdu and Chongqing, respectively. Today, this
around
scend from once-private estates. Functionally, these
garancient
political divide has been reestablished with the
dens lie as much in the domains of tomb architecture and
removal in 1998 of Chongqing from the province of Siof Daoist temples and shrines as in that of domestic
garchuan
and the establishment of a Chongqing special ecodens. Some of their patrons who paid for their upkeep
and
nomic
zone that reports not to the provincial governor
development were probably actual descendants, likebut
the
Su
directly
to the State Council (Guowuyuan) in Beijing.
family of Meishan, which sports a huge population
today
Technically,
this makes Chongqing the largest municipalclaiming descent from the famous Su Shi. Otherwise,
paity in
the world, with a population of about thirty million
tronage seems to have been picked up by the civic
and anand
area
the size of Austria. What has been described
financial leaders of the community. The single-ownership
here as "Sichuan style" more closely conforms to a cla
and restricted urban scale of Suzhou's gardens allowed
Chengdu style than to the gardens of hilly Chongqin
periodically for the coherent refurbishing of an inherited
whose profiles are even more rugged and elevations m
design and account for the relative stylistic consistency
ofand whose collective architectural history bey
varied,
each as seen today. The varied architectural assemblage
the mid-nineteenth century is even murkier than that of
within any one Sichuan garden-set on a large and sprawlcounterpart in Chengdu.
ing site, probably with a longer history and more diversiFurther study of institutional records may contribute t
fied patronage than any of Suzhou's gardens-reveals a
further differentiation, but it can still be expected to re
range of visual expression and mixture of details closely
force the general characteristics described here. Sich
juxtaposed, often impossible to sort out by date yet whose
style presumably also overlaps significantly with the
striking inconsistency speaks to a constant change around
gional styles ofYunnan to the south and Hunan to the
the stylistic edges even as the basic system appears to have
Still, just as the gourmet can readily differentiate betwee
remained unchanged. As described earlier, chuandou itself
the spicy cuisines of Sichuan and Hunan for which eac
seems to have encouraged such variation. The conservaequally
renowned, distinguishing what they do not
tism of Sichuan's garden style, then, can be explained not
share
from
what they do, there is a core style in Sichuan's
merely by the general conservatism of this landlocked
garden
architecture,
a particular function and a patronage
geographic bastion but more importantly by the special
pattern
that
come
together
to render Sichuan distinctive
tenacity with which Sichuan, long ignored in the public
in its garden heritage. The presence of such significant
record of China, has chosen to memorialize its favored
regional variation within the Chinese architectural domain
ancestors as a display of regional pride.
may not entirely negate the formulation of an essential
With regional differentiation as a central topic, it would
be inadequate here to essentialize "Sichuan" itself, for "Chinese garden," but it draws attention to the greater
complexity to be found within China's family of gardens
Sichuan is huge and internally differentiated, and aspects
of its style spread beyond the dotted lines of any map. and
In suggests further new horizons for regionally based
architectural study.
ancient times, the region was divided between Shu on the
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REGION AND MEMORY IN THE GARDENS OF SICHUAN 225
from
Jerome Silbergeld is the P. Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Professor
of the Southern Song capital at Hangzhou through the Yangzi River
gorges into Sichuan to take up an official post at Kuizhou: "Ru Shu ji
Chinese Art History at Princeton University and director of Prince(Record of Going into Sichuan)," in The Old Man Who Does as He Pleases:
ton's Tang Center for East Asian Art. He has written six booksPoems
on
and Prose by Lu Yu, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1973), 68-121.
traditional and modern Chinese painting and Chinese cinema (most
10. Throughout its long history, the area that constitutes modern-day Si-
recently, Hitchcock with a Chinese Face, forthcoming) [Departchuan has undergone repeated transformations in its political and cartographic identity, not until the late 13th century achieving a somewhat stable
ment of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.
existence under the name Sichuan (literally, the "Four Rivers," counting the
Min, Tuo,Jialing, and either the Qian, the Fou, or the Yangzi River). Looking
back into its tangled history prior to its conquest by the state of Qin in 316
B.C.E. (which later achieved the first unification of China), the region was
08544].
divided into two contending political-ethnic groups, one known as Shu,
centered around modern Chengdu in the west, the other called Ba, centered
Notes
in what is now Chongqing in the east. When China divided into three
contending regions following the fall of the Han dynasty in the early 3rd
century, one of these occupied the southwest, with Chengdu as its capital (far
This research was conducted in the context of helping to design the first
extensive in territory than modern Sichuan) and adopted the name
Sichuan-style garden in the West, for the city of Seattle: the Xi Hua Yuan, more
a
Shu-Han; when China was again disunited in the 10th century after the fall of
project begun in 1986 and still under way. I am greatly indebted to many
the Tang dynasty, Chengdu was the capital of the Qian (Former) Shu Kingmembers of the Garden Bureau of the Chongqing Municipal Bureau of Parks
dom and then of the Hou (Latter) Shu Kingdom (both states fairly close in
and Greenery and especially to vice-director Kuang Ping, who have helped to
stimulate renewed interest in this subject in their own native province, andscale
to to that of modern Sichuan Province). In a 1955 transformation, Sichuan
received the eastern portion of Xikang Province, primarily Tibetan in ethnicmany colleagues in the Seattle Chinese Garden Society, chartered by the
ity, the remainder of which was restored to Tibet. Sichuan remains the most
Seattle City Council, particularly to Jim Dawson, for many years the president
ethnically diverse province in China today.
of the society, as well as to Stella Chien for her cultural leadership. For the
11. For evidence of this among imperial court artists of the early Song
opportunity to present various aspects of this material and receive valuable
period, for example, see the essay by Wai-kam Ho, "Aspects of Chinese
responses to it, I am grateful to Professors Robert Bagley and Yoshi Shimizu
Painting from 1100 to 1350," in Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collecof Princeton University, Lothar von Falkenhausen of the University of Calitions of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum
fornia at Los Angeles, Mike Wan of Notre Dame University, Nancy Steinhardt
of Art, ed. Wai-kam Ho et al. (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art; Bloomand Julie Davis of the University of Pennsylvania, and Robert Harrist of
ington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1980).
Columbia University, and to Judith Whitbeck at the Staten Island Chinese
Scholars' Garden, as well as to various faculty and scholars of Lewis and Clark12. On the antiquity of Chinese royal parks, see Edward Schafer, "Hunting
Parks and Animal Enclosures in Ancient China," Journal of the Economic and
College in Portland, Oregon, the University of Washington in Seattle, the Asia
Social History of the Orient 11 (1968): 318-43.
Society in New York City, and the Institute for Advanced Study and American
Institute of Archaeologists in Princeton. I am also deeply grateful to two 13. Sima Xiangru, "Sir Fantasy," in Chinese Rhyme-Prose: Poems in the Fu
anonymous Art Bulletin readers for their probing and helpful comments. Form from the Han and Six Dynasties Periods, trans. and ed. Burton Watson
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 29-54. For an extensive
The photographs in this article were taken by the author except where
collection of such poetry, see Xiao Tong, Wen xuan, or Selections of Refined
noted otherwise. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are by the author.
Literature, vol. 2, Rhapsodies on Sacrifices, Hunting, Travel, Sightseeing, Palaces
1. Maggie Keswick, The Chinese Garden: History, Art, and Architecture (London:
and Halls, Rivers and Seas, trans. David Knechtges (Princeton: Princeton
Academy Editions; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978; 2nd ed., Cambridge,
University Press, 1987).
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003).
2. Keswick, 1978 (as in n. 1), 24, 2003 (as in n. 1), 37, mentions Sichuan 14. For studies of the Bamboo Grove illustrations, comprising four sets of
tiles from the late 4th to late 5th centuries, at least three of these
only three times during the course of her book, and only in the contextexcavated
of
from royal tombs (showing figures in simplified landscape settings, which
horticulture. Referring especially to Sichuan's azaleas and rhododendrons,
represented the beginnings of the cult of personality in Chinese portraiture),
she writes, "Indeed, in the end, obscure hills and valleys in Yunnan and
Sichuan did more to transform the horticultural traditions of the West than
see EllenJohnston Laing, "Neo-Taoism and the 'Seven Sages of the Bamboo
the designs of all the great pleasure gardens of China-and their underlying Grove' in Chinese Painting," Artibus Asiae 36 (1974): 5-54; and Audrey Spiro,
Contemplating the Ancients: Aesthetic and Social Issues in Early Chinese Portraiture
philosophy-put together."
3. Osvald Siren, Gardens of China (New York: Ronald Press, 1949), 3, my (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). On the historical background
and arts associated with the Orchid Pavilion gathering of 353, see Marshall
emphasis.
4. Very little research has been undertaken on art and the sumptuary laws
of China. See Craig Clunas, "The Regulation of Consumption and the Institution of Correct Morality by the Ming State," in Norms and the State, ed.
Chun-chieh Huang and Erik Ziircher (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), 39-49;
unfortunately, this does not cover architecture. However, in his book Fruitful
Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (London: Reaktion Books, 1996),
51, Clunas argues that by its conspicuous absence from Ming dynasty sump-
tuary legislation, which otherwise "encompassed every aspect of material
culture that it was possible to view as an object of consumption, from garments to dwellings to furniture and tableware," gardens must have been
viewed "as being something conceptually allied to production, rather than as an
object of luxury consumption," hence not specifically regulated. Such study
extended into other periods of time has yet to be undertaken.
5. Siren (as in n. 3), iii.
6. Peng Yigang, Zhongguo gudian yuanlin fensi [Analysis of the traditional
Chinese garden] (Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, 1986).
Stanislaus Fung's useful "Guide to Secondary Sources on Chinese Gardens,"
Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 18, no. 3 (July-Sept.
1998): 269-86, confirms this: Beijing-Chengde and the Jiangnan region
(Yangzhou-Suzhou-Nanjing-Hangzhou) dominate both Chinese and Western
Pei-sheng Wu, The Orchid Pavilion Gathering: Chinese Paintingfrom the University
of Michigan Museum of Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art,
2000), vol. 1, 102-9, vol. 2, 43-46. For later illustrations of Tao Yuanming's
homestead, see Elizabeth Brotherton, "Beyond the Written Word: Li Gonglin's Illustrations to Tao Yuanming's Returning Home," Artibus Asiae 59, nos.
3-4 (2000): 225-63; and Susan Nelson, "Catching Sight of South Mountain:
Tao Yuanming, Mount Lu, and the Iconographies of Escape," Archives of Asian
Art 52 (2000-2001): 11-43. Each of these themes is rich in literary associations and linked to traditions of reclusion and political dissent. Unfortunately,
in all of this material nothing remains to reveal the authentic rudiments of
China's earliest garden designs.
15. From the considerable but fragmentary literature about the Wang River
Villa in art and verse, see 0 I (Wang Wei), in Bunjinga Suihen (Tokyo: Chuo
Koransha, 1974), vol. 1; and Roderick Whitfield et al., In Pursuit of Antiquity
(Princeton: Art Museum, Princeton University, 1969), 180-89, 199-211,
incorporating a translation by Chang Yin-nan and Lewis C. Walmsley of Wang
Wei's set of twenty poems.
16. On the sacred signification of the mountain, see Kiyohiko Munakata,
"Concepts of Lei and Kan-lei in Early Chinese Art Theory," 105-31, and
Lothar Ledderose, "The Earthly Paradise: Religious Elements in Chinese
Landscape Art," 165-83, in Theories of the Arts in China, ed. Susan Bush and
Christian Murck (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Rolf Stein, The
dong Province; no mention is made of Sichuan.
World in Miniature: Container Gardens and Dwellings in Far Eastern Religious
7. I am referring here to Sichuan as constituted for many centuries prior to
Thought, trans. Phyllis Brooks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and
1998, after which a large eastern sector of the province was administratively
Kiyohiko Munakata, Sacred Mountains in Chinese Art (Chicago: Krannert Art
removed and designated as a special economic zone. For an account of
Museum; Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1991). Today, the Hosshoji
Sichuan's early cultural history, see Michael Nylan, "The Legacies of the
can be reconstructed only from texts. Perhaps the finest example that can be
Chengdu Plain," in Ancient Sichuan: Treasures from a Lost Civilization, ed.
reconstructed from actual archaeological remains, excavated from 1954 to
Robert Bagley (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum; Princeton: Princeton University
1958, is the Motsuji in Hiraizumi, an early-12th-century construction by the
Press, 2001), 309-23.
Fujiwara family in its waning years, and especially Motsuji's subtemple Enryuji,
8. Translation adapted from Arthur Waley; for the full poem, see which follows a pattern very similar to that of Hosshoji; see Fujishima Ganjiro,
Waley, The Poetry and Career of Li Po (701-762) (London: Allen and Unwin,
Hiraizumi: Chusonji, Motsuji no zenjo (Hiraizumi-cho: Chusonji and Motsuji,
1950), 38-40.
1986). The finest surviving example of this type is undoubtedly the famous
9. See Lu You's remarkable account of his five-month journey in 1170
Phoenix Hall (Hoodo) of the Byodoin in Uji, southeast of Kyoto.
writing; in Chinese, a few publications can be found for the Lingnan (Guangzhou) area, and singular publications appear for Taiyuan, Wuhan, and Shan-
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226 ART BULLETIN JUNE 2004 VOLUME LXXXVI NUMBER 2
17. See Masao Hayakawa, The Garden Art of Japan (New York: Weatherhill;
Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1973), 34-37, fig. 76; and Bunji Kobayashi, Japanese Architecture (Tokyo: Sagami Shobo, 1957), pl. 42. For a textbook account of this era,
in English, see Alexander Soper, "Domestic Architecture of the Kamakura
Period," in The Art and Architecture ofJapan, by Robert Treat Paine and Soper,
ledge near his pond. But, based on Wen Zhengming's painting, we cannot
know how large it was or what it looked like. Artists, who were either painting
their own garden or a close friend's, emphasized the meaning of the garden
not its appearance. Ming scholar-officials were more concerned with the ideas
in a garden than physical attributes."
27. The most influential of all studies of Suzhou gardens has now been
rev. ed. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1975), 407-14. For a slightly earlier,
translated into English: Liu Dunzhen, Chinese Classical Gardens of Suzhou, trans.
Heian-period example, see the scaled model of the shinden-style Fujiwara
Chen Lixian (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992).
family residence, the Tosanj6den, in Bunji Kobayashi, pl . 37.
28. For literature on state temples (mingtang), quasi observatories with
18. See The I Ching [ Yijing] or Book of Changes, trans. Richard Wilhelm
and Cary F. Baynes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 200- astrological functions, emphatic seasonal, monthly, and complex numerical
associations that court advisers argued passionately and sometimes endlessly
204, 652-56. James Hargett, "Huizong's Magic Marchmount: The
Genyue Pleasure Park of Kaifeng," Monumenta Serica 38 (1988-89): 8,
describes this trigram as the "symbol for a son and, by extension, for
male fertility."
19. The largest of Huizong's rocks, brought to the capital in 1123,
required a special boat, new water gates, bridges, and city walls to be
constructed, and called for one thousand laborers to complete thejob. See
Hargett (as in n. 18), 12; also, James Hargett, "The Pleasure Parks of
Kaifeng and Lin'an during the Song (960-1279)," Chinese Culture 30, no.
1 (Mar. 1989): 61-78.
20. Craig Clunas, 1996 (as in n. 4), 75, writes, "Although modern writers
have often concentrated on the cosmological connections of rocks, and their
links with deeply held views about the nature of the universe, Ming writers are
as likely to associate them with the luxury consumption of the age." Most of
these Ming examples, more precisely, represented writers disassociating them-
selves from the luxury consumers of their day, antisnob snobs perhaps,
whatever their own actual economic practices may have been. See also the
numerous entries for "rocks" indexed in Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material
Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Urbana, Ill.: University of
over, and their successors down to the present day struggled to reconstruct or
merely understand, see Edward Soothill, Hall of Light: A Study of Early Chinese
Kingship (London: Lutterworth Press, 1951); and Nancy Steinhardt, "The Han
Ritual Hall," in Chinese Traditional Architecture (New York: China Institute,
1984), 70-77. See also Alexander Soper, "The 'Dome of Heaven' in Asia," Art
Bulletin 24 (1947): 225-48.
29. Rhyming in the original ("Emei Tianxia xiu / Qingcheng Tianxia yu /
Jianmen Tianxia xian / Kuimen Tianxiajian"), Sichuan's (anonymous) logo
poem names the province's four most famous sites, all of them dark and
dangerous, including theJianmen (Sword Gate) Pass ("so narrow that a single
swordsman could hold off an army of ten thousand"), which leads into the
Chengdu Plain from the north, and ending with the Yangzi River's Kuimen
Gorge (Fig. 2), which leads into the province from the east: "Mt. Emei, most
luxuriant place on earth / Mt. Qingcheng, most secluded place on earth /
Jianmen Pass, most dangerous place on earth / Kuimen Gorge, most heroic
place on earth."
30. Indicative of his lack of exposure to Sichuan architecture, the mod-
ern founder of Chinese architectural history, Liang Sicheng, makes no
mention of chuandou in the volume that summarized his pioneering
Chicago Press, 1991).
21. For the Chinese classic on the connoisseurship of stones, see Tu Wan's
career, A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture: A Study of the Development of
Stone Catalogue of Cloudy Forest, trans. Edward Schafer (Berkeley: University of
Its Structural System and the Evolution of Its Types (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
California Press, 1961). Among the excellent emergent contemporary works
on "scholar's stones," see especiallyJohn Hay, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth:
The Rock in Chinese Art (NewYork: China House Gallery, 1985); Robert Mowry,
Worlds within Worlds: The Richard Rosenblum Collection of Chinese Scholars' Rocks
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, 1997); David Sensabaugh, "Fragments of Mountain and Chunks of Stone: The Rock in the
Chinese Garden," Oriental Art 44, no. 1 (spring 1998): 18-27; and Stephen
Little, Spirit Stones of China: The Ian and Susan Wilson Collection of Chinese Stones,
Paintings, and Related Scholars' Objects (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago;
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). On the depiction of gardens
and garden stones in painting, see, for example, Keswick (as in n. 1), chap. 5,
"The Painter's Eye"; Jan Stuart, "Ming Dynasty Gardens Reconstructed in
Words and Images," Journal of Garden History 10, no. 3 (1990): 162-72;June Li
andJames Cahill, Paintings of Zhi Garden by ZhangHong: Revisiting a Seventeenth-
Century Chinese Garden (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
1996); Robert Harrist, Painting and Private Life in Eleventh-Century China:
Mountain Villa by Li Gonglin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); and
Philip Hu, "The Shao Garden of Mi Wanzhong (1570-1628): Revisiting a Late
Ming Landscape through Visual and Literary Sources," Studies in the History of
Press, 1984). But evidence of chuandou's antiquity does appear there,
unlabeled, in Liang's drawing, fig. 14, of a ceramic house model from a
Han dynasty tomb, lst-2nd century c.E., from Changsha, which then as
now lay one province to the east of Sichuan. Evidence of chuandou architecture's still more ancient roots in Sichuan itself is found in a cluster of
houses from about 1000 B.C.E. from Shi'erqiao, where Chengdu now
stands, whose long end beams (drilled at regular horizontal intervals) and
planks of wood, walls of bamboo, and straw roofs were sufficiently well
preserved when excavated in the late 1980s to permit a reasonable recon-
struction; see "Chengdu Shi'erqiao Shangdai jianzhu yizhi diyiqi fajue
jianbao" [Preliminary report on the excavation of the first-period architectural remains from the Shang Dynasty at Shi'erqiao, Chengdu], Wenwu
379, no. 12 (Dec. 1987): 1-23, fig. 11, pl. 2.1; and Jay Xu, "Sichuan before
the Warring States Period," in Bagley (as in n. 7), 34-35, fig. 10.
31. This curvature becomes increasingly pronounced as one travels south
from Chengdu toward Yunnan Province, suggesting Southeast Asian origins.
32. In 2001, retracing the ancient path of Emperor Minghuang's (r. 71356) famous flight from insurrectionist troops in 756 from the northern capital
at Chang'an into Sichuan, I observed these decorative ridge tiles suddenly
Gardens and Designed Landscapes 19, nos. 3-4 (July-Dec. 1999): 314-42. On
the literary lore of rocks, see Judith T. Zeitlin, "The Secret Life of Rocks:
Objects and Collectors in the Ming and Qing Imagination," Orientations 30,
begin to appear within the first five miles or so south of the Shaanxi-Sichuan
border and thereon continue with great regularity. Rarely in architecture
no. 5 (May 1999): 40-47.
does regionalism so closely approximate political boundaries.
33. Noboru Kawazoe, in Kenzo Tange, Noboru Kawazoe, and Yoshio Wa-
22. This particular scene is re-created in the Astor Court of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, but minus the rock and thus without the most
tanabe, Ise: Prototype of Japanese Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1965), 168.
important point. See Alfreda Murck and Wen Fong, "A Chinese Garden
Court: The Astor Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art," Metropolitan
Museum of Art Bulletin 38, no. 3 (winter 1980-81): 1-64 (in particular, cover
photograph and fig. 31).
23. In the Garden of the Master of Fishing Nets, the view from the main hall
to the central lake is blocked by a two-story-tall pile of rocks, turning the eye
instead to the narrow, shaded, "backyard," which in turn focuses attention on
the garden's signature (net-shaped) lattice windows. This rock pile is referred
to by name as the Barrier of Clouds, transforming yanginto yin. A second-story
library must be accessed outdoors by yet another pile of "clouds." A rare,
black-painted wall serves as a night sky, turning an open moon-gate into a
white shining orb, beside which is planted a cassia tree, Chinese symbol of the
moon (the largest rock of all). A half dozen other "tricks" become apparent,
but perhaps only on one's fourth or fifth visit to the garden.
24. Lothar Ledderose, "Building Blocks, Brackets, and Beams," chap. 5 in
Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000).
25. For the handscroll by Ni Zan and Zhao Yuan, see Osvald Siren, Chinese
Painting, Leading Masters and Principles (London: Lund, Humphries, 1958),
vol. 6, pl. 102. For Wen Zhengming's 1551 album of eight leaves, now in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, see Whitfield et al. (as in n. 15), 66-75; and
Richard Edwards et al., The Art of Wen Cheng-ming (1470-1559) (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1976), entry no. 51.
26. A study of some of Wen Zhengming's Zhuozheng Garden illustrations
has ledJan Stuart (as in n. 21), 171, to conclude, "The only evidence that Wen
Zhengming's album can provide about the physical appearance of the
[Zhuozheng Garden] is that [owner] Wang Xianchen must have had a rock
34. For discussion of some of Du Fu's renowned poems on the horse
paintings of his day, especially those by Cao Ba (act. mid-8th century) and
Han Gan (ca. 715-after 781), who were said to set the standard for all time,
see Wang Bomin, ed., Li Bo, Du Fu lun hua shi sanji [Miscellaneous notes on
poems by Li Bo and Du Fu about painting] (Shanghai: Xiling yinshe, 1983),
78-90;Joseph Lee, "Tu Fu's Art Criticism and Han Kan's Painting," Journal of
the American Oriental Society 90, no. 3 (July-Sept. 1970): 449-61; and David
Hawkes, A Little Primer of Tu Fu (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 133-44.
35. Several similarly constructed buildings still exist from that moment in
time, little altered despite periodic reconstructions, including the sutra re-
pository and belfry in the main compound of Horyuji's west precinct,
Kairyuoji's west Kondo (Nara), and the Tegaimon from Todaiji (also Nara).
See Mary Neighbour Parent's detailed study The Roof in Japanese Buddhist
Architecture (New York: Weatherhill; Tokyo: Kaijima, 1983), 28-32, 44-47.
Parent (18-20) describes the period as one of a "flood of cultural importation
from Tang China" in architecture; she does not mention chuandou, and
nothing is really known as yet of its vestiges at that time in eastern China,
where this "flood" would have arrived from. However, further research could
be pursued on the basis of this Japanese material.
36. See Clunas, 1996 (as in n. 4); also, Liu Dunzhen (as in n. 27).
37. See Steven Sage, Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1992), 148ff.
38. Erlang's accomplishment became the subject of the commonly painted
theme known as "clearing out the forest" or "search for forest demons"; see
the example in the Princeton University Art Museum, illustrated in Wen
Fong, Images of the Mind (Princeton: Art Museum, Princeton University, 1984),
entry no. 19.
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REGION AND MEMORY IN THE GARDENS OF SICHUAN 227
39. RuiJiabai, "Chengdu Wu Hou Ci" [The Wu Hou Ci in Chengdu],
42.
inWei
Wu Zhuang, in ibid., 33.
Hou Ci shi shuo [A historical account of the shrines to Wu Hou, Zhuge
Liang],
43.
Guo Yang, Du Fu yi Cao Tang [Du Fu and the Thatched Hall]
by Li Zhaocheng et al. (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1998),
51-91. Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1986), pamphlet, unpag. Aerial-vi
(Chengdu:
40. Zheng Zhengze and Ji Guoping, Nii shiren Xue Tao yii WangJiang
Louof the Du Fu Thatched Hall closely based on Qing-period sto
drawings
Gongyuan [The Poetess Xue Tao and the River Viewing Tower
Park]of 1793 and 1881 are published in Zhao Changgeng (as in n. 4
carvings
(Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1995).
42-43, showing ongoing changes in the particulars but stability in t
41. The lives and literature of many of these figures have been design
compiled,
principles described here. Both the Water Gate (Fig. 17) and t
together with ground plans of many of these gardens, in Zhao Changgeng,
Water Bamboo
Xi
Dwelling (Figs. 18, 26, 29, 32) make their first appearanc
Shu lishi wenhua mingrenjinian yuanlin [Memorial gardens of famous
inpeople
the 1881
in stone carving; however, the Water Bamboo Dwelling seems
Sichuan's historic culture] (Chongqing: Sichuan kexue jishu chubanshe,
have been reconstructed and rotated 90 degrees between 1881 and t
1989). As in the memorial stelae at these gardens, however, the
present
gardens
day.
themselves and their architectural and stylistic features are not analyzed
44. Zheng in
Zhengze andJi Guoping (as in n. 40), 130-31, 134-35, 138-39,
this biographical volume.
142-45.
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