Western Ideas About Chinese Gardens

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Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 22 - 2000

Nature and Ideology in Western Descriptions of the Chinese Garden

Craig Clunas

To the first European who recorded his opinions of an actual garden in China, « nature » was never a part of the proposition at all '. What impressed the Jesuit Father Matteo Ricci about the great garden of Xu Hongji, Duke of Weiguo, which he visited in Nanjing in 1599, was the mannerist virtuosity of its complex design, with its « halls, chambers, loggias, towers, courtyards, and other magnificent edifices » dominated by « an artificially constructed mountain of rock, full of many caves, loggias, steps, small rooms, arbors, fishponds, and other gallantries » 2. The metaphor which came to Ricci's pen was that of the labyrinth, where « to visit all the parts required two or three hours of time, before making one's way out by another door ». Steeped as he was in the writings of Pliny and Cicero, Ricci was well aware of the terms of European debate about the relationship between garden culture and « nature », even if he did seek seek to read them into his experience of visiting a specific site in China 3. However, he cannot have known that in the fifty years preceding his arrival a reordering of priorities had taken place in China structured around a different polarity, one opposing the gardened landscape as mimesis of productive, more specifically fruitful, horticulture, to the garden as visually composed scene, faithful to formal canons of painting composition. This polarity within Chinese discourses of the garden, which never entirely disappears through the late imperial period, is explicitly not the subject of this paper 4. Nor am I interested here in the putative « influence » of gardens in China on garden-making practice outside that country. The objects of study with which this paper engages are not gardens in China at all, but statements about those gardens made by Europeans and Americans, statements which are themselves part of the great archive of Orientalism, in which the term nature is deployed in an essentializing way with regard to an undifferentiated « Chinese garden ». This is always done with more or less specific allusion to the « nature » (in the sense of essential, invariant characteristics) of China itself. Discussions of « the Chinese garden » are, therefore, I will argue, of some importance in mapping the larger set of practices of European and American ideological engagement with the Chinese polity in the high age of imperialism and beyond. It will be necessary to look at statements from a period much earlier than that

Western Ideas About Chinese Gardens

Source: https://www.persee.fr/doc/oroc_0754-5010_2000_num_22_22_1124

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