Longing and Belonging in Chinese Garden History Stanislaus Fung The modern historiography of Chinese gardens is something less than 70 years old, but its story is both complex and much neglected. In common with much of garden history in general, the modern study of Chinese gardens has proceeded in the absence of an overall unifying paradigm, so that generalizations about fundamentals in scholarly approach are hazardous. Scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds have made contribu- tions to Chinese garden history, but the development of this domain of work has had a noncumulative character. It is not uncommon for important work in Chinese publications to be substantially overlooked for decades in subsequent publications in both Chinese and other languages.’ Without attributing a false coherence to a multifarious bibliography, the present essay is an attempt to articulate a sense of the basic aspects and prospects of the historiography of Chinese gardens by adopting a twofold strategy: (1) Exemplars. The essay focuses on exemplary works both in modern scholarship and in traditional literature as the fundamental units of understanding. From the numerous publications that have appeared ‘on Chinese gardens and the many traditional works that have been brought into the light of modern scholarship, the essay will gather a handful as examples. As Giorgio Agamben explains, “Neither particular nor universal, the example is a singular object that presents itself as such. . . . These pure singularities communicate only in the empty space of the example, without being tied by any common property, by any identity”? The logic of the example is therefore very useful in illuminating a multifarious situation without a unify paradigm, and in dealing with diversity in sources without reductive abstraction. (2) The I would like to thank Professors Roger T. Ames, Michel Conan, and David L. Hall, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their valuable comrn« proper names are given in t ated in standard pinyin, Where a modern Chine tion, I have followed the author's preferred form and given the pinyin version in brackets where possible 2 The study of Chinese garden designers, or more correctly, designers of rockeries, is a conspicuous case in point. See my “Guide to Secondary Sources on Chinese Gardens,” Studies in the History of Gandens and Designed Landscapes, fortheoming, section 15. ® The idea is taken from G. Agamben, The Coming Community, rans. M. Hardt, Minneapolis, 1993, 10-11 ts on an earlier ve first. C e author's ti Jon of this essay; Chinese and Japanese ese names, terms, and titles are transliter- traditional ne is known in a different form of translitera~206 Stanislaus Fung admixture of history and historiography. This essay emphasizes a sense of new pros- pects in the study of Chinese gardens by juxtaposing traditional sources and modern writings. The citation of modern studies of Chinese gardens and the discussion of traditional Chinese sources in a common space of examples has the effect of blurring the historical study of Chinese gardens and the modern historiography of Chinese gardens. This is because emerging possibilities for further research are often discovered in considering modern historiography in retrospect; this sense of possibilities can also inform our understanding of the significance of certain traditional writings, and a new understanding of the traditional writings can then offer a new understanding of the nature and specific assumptions of modern works of scholarship. In the midst of what ‘one might call a feedback to and fro, one is often assaying a new thought on a given topic as much as reporting on established scholarship on that topic. With these strategic remarks in mind, I would like to begin by offering readers unfa- miliar with the study of Chinese gardens a simple sketch of three waves of scholarship that can be thought of as bursts of scholarly activity, focusing on works that offered comprehen- sive surveys of Chinese garden history. Starting in the 1930s with the early systematizing work of the Japanese scholar Oka Oji, Shina tei'en ron (On the gardens of China), and Sugimura Yazo's Chagoku no niwa (Gardens of China), we have the first attempts at the comprehensive narrative of historical developments and trends in Chinese garden history.> Japanese interest in Chinese gardens has had a long history, and after the reforms of the Meiji period, it certainly became a significant source of influence for Chinese academic developments. Oka Oji’s work is the most comprehensive chronological work on Chinese gardens of its time, but due to the limited circulation of Japanese books in China for several decades after its publication, it would be misleading to suggest that later Chinese research built on its findings.® In what might be considered a second wave, starting only in the mid- 1980s, the early Japanese studies were superseded by Chinese works of comparable scope and detail. Zhang Jigji’s Zhongguo zaoyuan shi (History of Chinese gardens) and Zhou ® Oka Oj, Shina teen ron, Tokyo, 1934; Chinese trans, Zhongguo gongyuan yuanlin shi kao, rans. Chang Yingsheng, Beijing, 1988; Sugimura ¥oz0, Chiigoku no niwa, Tokyo, 1966. Cf. Goto Asataré, Shina no fikei to cl'en, Tokyo, 1928; i fokyo, 1934. * See Chen Zhi, “Zhongguo wenhua yishu dui Riben gudai tingyuan fengge de yingxiang,” in Chen Zhi zaoyuan wenji, Beijing, 1988, 214-22 It fs tempting to consider whether the writings of Japanese scholars on Chinese architecture and gardens were connected to Japanese imperialism or whether the Japanese were a vehicle of the cultural {imperialism of Western visual literacy. These questions have not, to the best of my knowledge, been addressed porary scholars, and detailed answers are not available without a much more detailed knowledge of xdern Japanese context of scholarly production, For suggestive remarks on Goté Asatar6, see J. A. Fogel, ‘The Literature of Tavel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862-1945, Stanford, Calif, 1996, 200-209. My sense is that st would not be appropriate to address the issues in terms of Japan's cultural domination of China The urgent question, to my mind, is not “Who dominated whom?” or "What were the effects of cultural {mperialismn?” but rather “What, in view of the importation of Western visual Iteracy to modern China, can. the present possiblities for cross-cultural exchange be?” Or, borrowing the words of Fred Dallmays, we can ask, how can one “salvage a incering cultural potential under the debris of Eurocentricism and traditional Orientalism”? E Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter, Albany, N.Y., 1996, xix a, Shina tele,207 Longing and Belonging in Chinese Garden History Weiquan’s Zhongguo gudian yuanlin shi (History of classical Chinese gardens) are works by senior scholars that come readily to mind among a large body of publications.° Then there is a third wave of scholarship, to which I belong, and from which perhaps the most impor- tant work is that of Wang Yi, a scholar of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and the author of Yuanlin yu Zhongguo wenhua (Gardens and Chinese culture).” With this rough characterization of three waves of scholarly studies, one can point out that the cat- egories “architecture” and “landscape architecture” in Chinese usage are modern categories and in fact came from post-Meiji Japan as kenchiku and zéen, Because the traditional Chi- nese order of knowledge did not include separate categories for what we now take for granted as disciplines or fields of academic study, we can see that there has been a sea change in the sorting and re-sorting of traditional writings pertinent to modern academic interest. This has been one of the major tasks, inventive as it was, that the early scholars such as Oka Oji and Chen Zhi have accomplished as their legacy. The current generation of scholars now face the task of dealing with the conceptual and theoretical issues that arise when Chinese garden history is discussed in a comparative way across different cultures. Of course, in a sense, this has been the case ever since the modern historiography of Chinese gardens began in the 1930s. It is important to bear in mind that generations of scholars have worked under ardu- ‘ous conditions of war and of the Cultural Revolution, and however much it might be necessary to continue, extend, and revise the tasks and findings of one’s academic predeces- sors, it would be indecent to overlook the personal, bodily commitment often required to broach certain traditional issues or to espouse certain values. Further, although the modern historiography of Chinese gardens has a history of only seven decades, its cultural trajectory and significance has to be understood against a broader and more complex time frame of the last 200 years. China has been going through momentous cultural and social changes as a result of its encounter with the West since the nineteenth century and is now entering a period when, for the first time, it seems to have found some way of dealing with the West.® The historiography of Chinese gardens and its prospects are very much part of a larger story of Westernization and modernization, Through the pioneering research of Chu-joc Hsia,° scholars have come to understand how much modern scholarship on Chinese architecture and gardens owes to the Beaux Arts tradition in assumptions, method, and approach.” When Chinese scholars identified traditional construction manuals as © Zhang Jai, Zhongguo za0y Beijing, 1990. ” WangYi, Yuanlin yu Zhongguo wenhua, Shanghai, 1990) * R. Huang, China: A Maco History. Turn of the Century ed., Armonk, NLY, 1997; Chinese version published as Huang Renyu, Zhongguo da lish, Tatbes, 1993. * Chu-joe Hsia [Xia Zinujiul is a professor of the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at the National if Manuel Castells at Berkeley, he has made conspicuous inese readers. He is founding editor of the refereed journal Chengshi yu i, Heterbin, 1986; Zhou Weiquan, Zhongguo gudian yuanlin shi, wan University. A studes presenting modern urban theory to C sheji/Cities and Design. © Chusjoe Hsia," Yingzao xueshe—Liang Sicheng jianzhushi lunshu gouzao zhi likun fenxi,” in Kongjan, :—lunwen xuan, 1987-1992, Taiwan shehut yenjiu congkan 3, Taibei, 1993, 1-40, forts lishi yu shehu208 — Stanislaus Fung counterparts to the European tradition of architectural treatises, when they affirmed the value of traditional timber architecture as something consonant with Pugin’s idea of struc- tural rationalism, when they considered the “bracket system’ as the Chinese counterpart to the classical orders in Western architecture—thanks to Chu-joe Hsia’s work, we can now see these as instances that betoken a revolution in historical perspective as the Chinese world became China in the world.A form of traditionalistic thought emerged in the course of this process, taking hold of studies of Chinese architecture and gardens as it did other domains of cultural life, “insisting that the Chinese culture of the past still contained value in an entirely new cultural historic epoch.”"" Longing for tradition, for what is one’s own, and longing for overcoming the problems of the past, and for the sense of belonging that marks allegiance to tradition or an international world of scholarship: these are consider- ations that have commonly occasioned difficulty when tradition and modernity are con- ceived as mutually exclusive and opposed. It is beyond the scope of this essay to offer a full treatment of these cultural issues. My main object here is to offer a sense of the opportuni- ties for intercultural exchange in the domain of landscape architecture that our historical juncture seems to make available. Visual Economy One of the most conspicuous ways in which the study of Chinese gardens has been caught up in twentieth-century developments is the sea change in how the gardens are imaged in visual media. Western techniques of orthogonal drawing and spatial analysis, and the use of photography, have helped to produce our modern understanding of Chinese gardens. The study of the role of visual images in the historiography of Chinese gardens is a much neglected topic, and I can only indicate a few of basic considerations here. The use of Western photography has offered viewers an impression of Chinese gar- dens from the nineteenth century onward. The use of Western techniques of architectural drawing to depict Chinese gardens has a longer history, and this usage became common- place in the twentieth century.'? Images of extant gardens are often used anachronistically to refer to a historically nonspecific “traditional” past." Very rarely are sets of images used to document historical changes in gardens. An understanding of the processual nature of gardens is often sacrificed. The use of Western architectural drawing techniques has al- lowed modern notions of empty, isotopic space to be introduced to the study of Chinese gardens. The use of photography has broadened the range of visual images in the study of 4 BI Schwartz, “History and Culture in Levenson’s Thought,” in The Mozartian Historian: Essays on the ‘Works of Joseph R. Levenson, ed. M. Meisner and R, Murphey, Berkeley, 1976, 103, ? See for example, Liu Dunzhen, Suzhou gudian yuanlin, Beijing, 1979, and English Liu Dun- ‘hon, Chinese Classical Gardens of Suzhou, trans. Chen Lixian, ed. J.C, Wang, New York, 1993; Qian Yan, ed Classical Chinese Gardens, Hong Kong, 1982; Zhongguo meishu quan} bianjt weiyuanhi, ed, Zhongguo meish quanji lanzhu yishu bian, san, yuanlinjlanzhu, Beijing, 1988. ‘The problematic nature of this practice has been underlined implicitly by the recent work of Tanaka Tan, who compared textual records with extant gardens in order to show their differences. See Tanaka Tan, ‘Zhongguo zaogi yuanlin fengge yu Jiangnan yuanlin sil,” Chengshi yu sheji 1 (June 1997), 17-49.209 Longing and Belonging in Chinese Garden History Chinese gardens. When Chinese paintings, woodblock engravings, rubbings, and art objects of various kinds are used in conjunction with photographs and Western architectural draw- ings, the diversity of visual media involved in this visual economy is really considerable, but this became naturalized, so that most scholars have overlooked the specificity of the visual media involved. It would seem that the assumed referentiality of images—the idea that they allow viewers access to Chinese gardens as a visual reality—is a powerful and effective disincentive to probe into the function of representation. It is acommonplace among students of the visual arts that photographs do not permit an unmediated access to “external reality.” And we might wonder what readers do encoun- ter in a work such as Florence Lee Powell's In the Chinese Garden: A Photographic Tour of the Complete Chinese Garden, with Text Explaining Its Symbolism, as Seen in the Liu Yitan (the Liu Garden) and the Shih Tzu Lin (the Forest of Lions), Two Famous Chinese Gardens in the City of Soochow, Kiangsu Province, China.'* However, it is not necessary to choose between affirm- ing the truth of photographs and denouncing them for their “fictitious” nature and dread- ful “inauthenticity” as a mode of representation in the study of Chinese gardens. Recent work in comparative philosophy has given scholars good reason to reconsider the notions of image and representation involved here. Roger T. Ames writes, In our tradition, image in the vernacular combines the notions of perception and imagination, where the mimetic, representative, figurative, and fictive connotations of image are derived from the ontological disparity between a transcendentally “real” world and the concrete world of experience. The absence of such ontologi- cal disparity in the Confucian model will mean that image is the presentation rather than the representation of a configured world at concret level. ... The meaning resident in the image as established is the act of establishing the image itself. Contrary to one’s own naive expectations . .. what one finally “sees” in a work of art is the creative act that produced it. The creative process, not literal, and historical the object, is the repository of meaning. What is imaged is the process.!* Can we imagine the role of photography or of orthogonal drawings as eventful “presenta- tion,” in Ames’s sense, in the imaging of Chinese gardens? Here, I would like to propose that two exemplary modern works on Chinese gardens are indicative of future possibilities of exploration, In Chen Congzhou's study of Suzhou gardens, first published in 1956, black and white photographs are juxtaposed with quotations from Song dynasty song lyrics. One photograph, taken during daytime, is paired with the line, The courtyard deserted, the 1 BL. Powell, In the Chinese Garden: A PhotographieTour of the Complete Chinese Garden, with Te plaining Its Symbotism, as Seen in the Liu Yuan (the Liu Garden) and the Shih’Tzu Lin (the Forest of Lions), Two Famous Chinese Gardens in the City of Soochow, Kiangsu Province, China, New York, 1943. As an earlier example, see also E. L, Howard, Chinese Garden Ard lection of Photographs of Minor Chinese Buildings, New York, 1931 © RT. Ames, Meaning as Im: cian Epistemology” in Culture and nity: East-West Philosophical Perspectives, ed. E, Deutsch, Honotuts, 1991, 228-4210 Stanislaus Fung 1. The downstairs studio in the Storied Pavilion of Inverted Reflections in the Garden of the ‘Unsuccessful Politician (from Chen, Suzhou yuanlin, 95) moon rises over the steps—shadows of the balustrade all over the ground” (Fig. 1). Here a sunlit scene is used to evoke a moment of quiet drama in the evening."* With another photograph, following the poetic allusion of a bridge named “Little Rainbow,” Chen Congzhou juxtaposed it against the lines, "Walking with one’ reflection along the brook the sky lies under the clear brook / In the sky above are passing clouds; one seems to be in the passing clouds” (Fig. 2). The force of poetic evocation takes us beyond Peng Yigang's One is reminded of Hervé Guibert's Ghost Image, trans. R. Bononno, Los Angeles, 1996. Chen Congrhou, Suzhou yuanlin, Shanghai, 1956; Japanese trans, Tokyo, 1982211 Longing and Belonging in Chinese Garden History 2.The view looking north from Little Surging Waves in the Garden of the Unsuccessful Politician (from Chen, Suzhou yuantin, 80) more prosaic observation that the bridge serves as a dividing element that sets up a sense of spatial layering in the garden'® (Fig. 3). Professor Chen commented on his own book by referring to notions of the empty and the full derived from theories of Chinese painting and poetics: After accumulating materials for several years, I began writing by using what I had seen and thought about. My reflections were not baseless. I was seeking the empty Peng Yigang, Zhongguo gudian yuanlin fenxi, Beijing, 1986, analysis sheet 64. ® Soe F Cheng, Empty and Full‘The Language of Chinese Painting, rans, M. H. Kohn, Boston, 1994212 Stanislaus Fung Returning to Ames's remarks, we car 3. Analysis S yuanlin fenxi) Sheet 64, on spatial layering and sequencing ( from Peng, Zhongguo gudiar in the full, thinking that there would be some kind of basis, Sentiments are stimu- lated by touring, Originally, these Chinese gardens were the gardens of literati, and had as their guiding thoughts poctic sentiments and painterly ideas. For this reason, my photographs connected naturally with the poetic works of writers that I had read before. I therefore appended lines from Song dynasty song lyrics to each photograph. ... But in 1958, I was criticized for this, and was accused of having a strong sense of traditional literati consciousness. I could only lower my head and admit my failing—that my thinking had not been reformed properly, Now, thirt years later ... my “preposterous act” of former times is again praised by readers.” see that the meaning of the photographs becomes linked to the creative act of placing them next to the song lyrics. This process of making linkages is the repository of meaning, not the gardens themselves as landscape objects. The introduction of photography had the effect of transforming Chinese gardens from one kind of objects of pleasure (with implied uulturation of those who experience the gar- dens and so on) into another (with quite differently acculturized viewers). Professor Chen's juxtapositions dislocate the realistic effect of photographs and the visual drive to get a fix Chen Congzhou, "Wo de di yi ben shu-Suzhou yuanlin,” in Lien ging ji, Shanghai, 1987, 1213 Longing and Belonging in Chinese Garden History on an external reality by reopening the images to speculation. The juxtapositions stimulate the viewer to look and to look again, to do a double take, and take in the juxtapositions as a cultural practice With the benefit of hindsight, we can imagine two other ways of understanding the significance of Chen Congzhou's practice. On the one hand, following Ames's contrast of presentation and representation, we can turn to Michel Foucault's discussion of Magritte's Ceci n’est pas une pipe, where he contrasted Magritte’s practice with trompe I'ocil: “We are farthest from trompe-t'oeil. The latter secks to support the weightiest burden of affirmation by the ruse of a convincing resemblance.” If the photography of Chinese gardens con- stantly affirms before us, “This is a Chinese garden,” by a ruse of a resemblance, Professor Chen's poetic quotations have the effect of teasing apart the regime of representation that rules over resemblance. The photographs are liberated from the duty of making a full and thorough documentation of an external reality into an open-ended series of juxtapositions of text and image. On the other hand, following recent work on Chinese historical thinking, we can relate Professor Chen's practice to the notions of xing and bi, which characterize the “logic” ‘or modus operandi of Chinese historical thinking. “Xing means to arise, to arouse—to be aroused by the past events to realize something: bi means to analogize, to ‘metaphor,’ from the far historical known to the novel uncertain present.” In this sense, the use of song lyrics in conjunction with photography “arouses” our attention and incites a serendipitous finding. At the same time, an analogy between the scene of the song lyric and the in ate scene of the photograph is established, metaphoring or ferrying us from the one to the other. By force of repetition as one encounters many juxtapositions of text and image, one gets a vague and rich sense of the sensibility that Professor Chen brings to the experience mmedi- of Chinese gardens. Peng Yigang's own Zhongguo gudian yuanlin fenxi (Analysis of classical Chinese gar- dens) is in appearance very different to Chen Congzhou's work. Peng’s book is the most complete account of the spatial analysis of Chinese gardens, and uses Western techniques of architectural drawing extensively. However, Peng's spatial analysis is structured overall by headings such as introvert-extrovert, sequestration and exposition—counterparts and coun- terpoints that help maintain a sense of the reciprocity of ways of looking, along the lines of yin and yang. Peng's work seems to suggest a way of using Western techniques of architec- tural drawing in a way that cannot be identified as a simple appropriation. There is a large domain of research, yet to be explored by contemporary scholars, that would entail a study of how hazardous the transmission of modern Western techniques of architec- tural drawing to twentieth-century China has been, and how cultural differences might have been involved as techniques of drawing traveled to China. We can locate here an interesting possibility of “mutual regard” in diverse fields of contemporary scholarship 2 M. Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe trans. and ed. J. Harkness, Berkeley, 1983, 43, ® Chun-chich Huang [Huang Junjie]. "Historical Thinking in Classical Confucianism,” in Time ané Space in Chinese Culture, ed. Chun-chieh Huang and E. Zurcher, Leiden, 1995, 77214 — Stanislaus Fung in landscape architecture. If the modern Chinese have been rushing to import orthogo- nal drawing techniques in the study of landscape, the same techniques that contempo- rary scholars like James Corner are attempting to displace by developing them into newly sophisticated modes of landscape notation, it might be interesting for Professor Corner to see how traditional Western modes of drawing might be deployed in an unconventional manner, and for Chinese scholars to see how the conceptual founda- tions of orthogonal drawing are being challenged and new modes of notation ex- plored. To be sure, these two works by Chen Congzhou and Peng Yigang are not typical of twentieth-century scholarship on Chinese gardens, but they suggest a way of thinking about it. Modernization and Westernization as they are involved in the production of knowl- edge of Chinese gardens do not amount to a kind of telos, an end accomplished and finished in simple and dreadful inauthenticity. Rather, for those interested in historiographical pros~ pects, it seems more fruitful to compare what appears to have been installed in the course of Westernization with what has happened in spite of it Garden History If we turn from twentieth-century writings to traditional writings on Chinese gar~ dens, there is a significant “blackout.” The use of visual means to record gardens takes a clear second place} the primacy of the word is conspicuous. However, the term for garden history, literally yuan shi, is scarcely to be found at all. In more than 2000 years of recorded history, there is, to the best of my knowledge, only one instance of the usage of the term yuan shi. In a late Ming anthology Bing xue xie (Portable ice and snow), offering literary “ice and snow’ that bring @ refreshing chill to “fiery households” and help readers ward off the world of vulgarity," there is an essay titled “Yuan shi xu” (Preface to garden history) by the great literatus Chen Jiru (1558-1639), The text begins, I once said that there are four difficulties with gardens: it is difficult to have fine mountains and waters; it is difficult to have old trees; itis difficult to plan; and it is difficult to assign names. Then there are three easy things: the powerful can easily seize the garden; in time, it can easily become unkempt; and with an uncultivated owner, it easily becomes vulgar. Nowadays, there are many famous gardens in Jiangnan. I often pass by them and rest my eyes on them. However, when I next visit them, they might still have bright flowers and shaded ferns, but the owner would not have the leisure to be there, or even if he could be there, he would fling his arm around and depart like a courier; or he would diminish the plans of his forebears, altering them abruptly each summer so that the garden would not be Landscape Medium,” Word an graphy and Landscape Studs wing and Making i Ph ® J. Corner, “Representation and Landscape: Image 8, 3 (July-September 1992), 243-75. Also relevant is T. Dav Landscape Journal 8, 1 Spring 1989), 1-12. * Chen Jiru, "Yuan shi xu,” in Bing xue xic, comp. Wet Yong, Guo xue zhen ben w 2hongl, Shanghai, 1935, 1-1-2 cu [a yi jf, at st215 Longing and Belonging in Chinese Garden History completely renovated when his bones would already have decayed; or in the twin- Kling of an eye, he would sell it to another family, and then if a huge plaque does not label the entrance, a strong lock would bolt the door shut; or trees would be cut down to make mortars, and rocks would be pulled down to make plinths. The fallen beams and ruined walls would be like a house abandoned during a drought. ven if the eaves, rafters and shingles are maintained well, and the pines and chry- santhemums are the same as before, the owner of the garden could be an old wine- drinking and meat-eating reprobate, and every fern and every tree, every word and every sentence would cause the viewers to belch and feel like vomiting. They would stop their noses, cover their faces, and could not remain there for another moment. Having it would be a cause for regret; how could this compare to the pleasure of being rid of it? Chen Jiru’s preface turns out to be written for his friend Fet Yuanlu, the owner of the Garden of Daily Visits (Ri she yuan), who wes something of a reclusive writer. Chen says that Fei Yuanlu “was always writing prolifically, and in this he was in no way inferior to the ancients. Occasionally, he made use of his leisure to be a poet and engaged in elegant affairs. He composed verses in appreciation of things, and extending his delight, he continued by recording them, thereby forming a school of garden history." It would appear, therefore, that this "garden history” is basically a poetic record of experiences in a particular garden, by no means a comprehensive historical narrative, with garden” as an overarching category, detailing historical developments, trends, and changes in Chinese garden making over various dynasties. This latter kind of history did not be- come available until the twentieth century, when Oka Oji produced his work. Traditional Chinese writings on gardens are focused on concrete particulars, and there is an enduring reluctance to operate at the level of treatises on general principles. We are in the context of a substantial philosophical problem here, for discussions of the foundations of historiogra- phy in the Western tradition, as I understand it, are closely related to notions of space and time in Kant and Hegel. For Kant, time and space are a priori theoretical forms of intuition, prior to thinking, Recent work in comparative philosophy has shown how Chinese no- tions of space and time are concrete. temporal corridor, in which events occur." The traditional writings narrate particular gar- dens with a temporal field that each garden subtends.The distinctions that I am making here have tended to be obfuscated in the first two waves of modern scholarship. It is therefore the task of the current wave of scholarly studies to reconsider fundamental questions there is no sense of time as a prioti form, or an abstract Ata broader level of consideration, the focus of narration in traditional writings does 8 Ibid, 1. ® Tid. 1:2 ® See Huang and Zurcher, eds., Time and Space in Chinese Culture, Leiden, 1995. For a broader discussion of space-time in the context of Chinese garden history, see the important essay by D, L. Hall and RT. Ames, ‘The Cosmological Setting of Chinese Gardens,” Studies in the His forthcoming, of Gardens and Designed Landscapes,216 Stanislaus Fung not shift from particularity toward generalization and abstraction, but broadens to show how gardens were part of the transformation of dynastic fortunes. In this regard, Li Gefei's “Luoyang mingyuan ji” (Record of the celebrated gardens of Luoyang) (1095) is particu- larly illuminating. Unlike many “records” (ji) that deal with an individual garden, the focus of this text on the gardens of an imperial capital seems a promising location for generalized description, Instead, the text offers nineteen sections, each dealing with an individual garden, to which is appended the following “discourse” (lun): Luoyang is situated in the centre of the world, commanding the [easterly entrance to the] pass between Xiao and Mian, fronting onto the throat and collar of Qin and Long [in the west], and is the nexus of thoroughfare in Zhao and Wei. Hence it is a place contested from the four directions. Everything is quiet when there are no incidents in the empire, but whenever trouble arises, Luoyang is the first to endure troops. I therefore once said the rise and fall of Luoyang is a sign of the empire's order or chaos. In the times of Jingguan and Kaiyuan (617-741), dukes and minis- ters and imperial relatives established residences and set out mansions in the East- ern Capital, said to be over 1000 in number, When it came to the time of disorder and rebellion which was followed by the violence of the Five Dynasties. The pools and ponds, bamboos and trees [of these places] were trampled by troops and fell into ruins, hillocks and wastelands. Tall pavilions and grand trees were consumed in smoke and fire, and transformed into ashes. They came to an end together with the Tang dynasty, passing away with it, with few places remaining, I therefore once said, “The prosperity and decline of gardens are signs of the rise and fall of Luoyang. Since the order and disorder of the empire is indexed by the rise and fall of Luoyang, and the rise and fall of Luoyang is indexed by the prosperity of gardens, how could the composition of records of celebrated gardens be in vain?® ‘This famous discussion of the historical rise and fall of gardens has two important features The point of departure for articulating a sense of historical process is not the changes in positive characteristics of gardens summarized and narrated and accounted for. Rather, itis the ephemerality of gardens that offers the springboard for historical reflections that relate gardens to a broad picture of historical change.* At this broader level, the sense of the unfoldment of history is traditionally understood as the propensity of things.*' Propensity resides in concrete situations simply as a function of the configuration of forces, and when. the force of a tendency is exhausted, there is a moment of reversal, inaugurating a new and counter tendency in the unfoldment of events. There is a sea change in the narratival employment of historical material in the twen- ® Li Gefei, “Luoyang mingyuan ji” in Zhongguo lidat mingyuanji xuan nu, ed. Chen Zhi and Zhang Gongshi, Hefei, 1983, 38-55 P Tid. 54 ® See my "The Imaginary Garden of Liu Shilong.” Terra Nova (Cambridge, Mass}) 2, 4 (Fall 1997) 14-21 % F Jullien, The Propensity of Things"Toward a History of Bticay in China, trans, Janet Lloyd, New York, 1995217 Longing and Belonging in Chinese Garden History tieth century, in a way that parallels the situation in the discussion of visual imagery above. In narrating Chinese garden history, some scholars overlay modern notions of linear chro- nological development and of progress onto a traditional dynastic framework of historical understanding, Historical perspectivism is the outcome. Bai Juyi’sThatched Hut in Mount Lu, for instance, is the first example of Chinese gardens in the literati tradition, according to Sugimura.°? Other writers place it as an instance of the first mature fruits of the Chinese tradition of garden design. Wang Yi, however, considers the High Tang period as a pivotal point in the history of Chinese gardens. Before this time, Chinese gardens emphasized the experience of outdoor spaces, after this time, they were increasingly concerned with elabo- rating the relationship between interior spaces and outdoor areas." I would argue that this, is a suggestive view that might reward further study, for it allows us to think of Chinese garden history without recourse to a teleology, a generalized view of unilinear develop- ment, something that began and, later on, came to maturity, then to overelaboration, and finally went into decline. My sense is that just as Hayden White and the earlier work of Dominick LaCapra have taught us that historiographical employment of sources and his- torical facts is a constructive act that confers particular meanings, we might come to under stand how changes in the sense and drift of the history of Chinese gardens are as significant as the sea change in imaging Chinese gardens." In this regard, historians of Chinese gar- dens might well share with historians of gardens in other cultures a dissatisfaction with teleological explanations and an interest in issues of landscape and temporality.* Textual Study The Chinese tradition is very rich in the quantity and quality of writings on gardens. Indeed, Chen Congzhou recommends that "the study of Chinese gardens should begin “6 with the study of Chinese literature. has meant that, as Stephen Owen might put it, “the form of survival becomes the content of what survives.”*” Rather, as I have argued elsewhere, garden writing and garden making can be considered mutually generating activities in Chinese culture, each calling forth the other. *Itis therefore a matter of some regret that there is as yet no comprehensive guide to This is not only because the ephemerality of gardens classical Chinese writings relevant to the study of gardens. In recent years, important efforts have been made to broaden the range of historical sources that inform our understanding ® Sugimura, Chigoku no niwa, 44 © Wang, Yuanlin yu Zhongguo wenhua “ H.White, Topics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore, Md., 1978:D.LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History:Texts, Contexts, Language, aca, 1983. © See J. D. Hunt, “Approaches (New and Old) to Garden Histo * Chen Congzhou, “Zhongguo shiwen yu Zhongguo yuanlin (ony emphasis) 8S, Owen, Remembrances: The Experiene of the Past in Classical Chinese Literature, Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1986, 19. ® See my “Word and Garden in Chinese Essays of the Ming Dynasty: Notes on Matters of Approach Interfaces: Image, texte, language 11-12 ( June 1997), 77-90. * in this volume, Ashu,” sn Lian ging j218 Stanislaus Fung of Chinese gardens. Craig Clunas's study on Ming gardens as property from a materialist, perspective draws on agronomic texts as well as essays and historical notebooks of the period.** A recently published index of the contents of the personal literary collections in the Imperial Library (Si ku quan shu) allows easy identification and location of about 6500 sources on architecture and gardens in the genre of “records” (ji) 4° Although only a very small fraction of these essays have been studied in modern scholarship, a detailed view of the history of Chinese gardens will emerge in time from their study and allow us to uphold new quantitative criteria for the use of evidence, Future scholars can also build on the valuable efforts of Chen Zhi and others who have edited and annotated some of the more important Chinese writings on gardens, among which the seventeenth-century treatise Yuan ye is perhaps the most prominent today.” There is a significant problem arising from the preoccupation with annotation and translation of classical Chinese sources when an understandable focus on matters of seman- tic content diverts attention from considerations of a cross-cultural nature. Yuan ye is very much a case in point. Published in, or shortly after, 1635, it was hardly discussed in tradi- tional writings, but in this century, thanks to Japanese scholars who thought that the refer- ence to zao yuan in one of its prefaces made it the source of the Chinese and Japanese term for the modern profession of “landscape architecture,” it has become an almost indispens- able text to modern scholarship. This sea change in status is, in fact, no less dramatic than those of visual economy and historical sensibility that have been highlighted above. In this instance, a preoccupation with matters of semantic content can easily fall into the trap of naive assimilation of terms from one cultural context to another in order to satisfy profes- sional interests. The fact that Yuan ye extolled the importance of master designers of gardens made it easily assimilable to modern understandings of the central role of professional designers. And much of the twentieth-century reception of this text has simply used a very sketchy understanding of it to provide the voice of the Chinese garden designer as an intentional subject. By drawing on recent scholarship in architectural theory, landscape theory, and com- parative philosophy, I have tried to show elsewhere that a new reading of Yuan ye can be generated, Following Augustin Berque's observation that the Chinese tradition has devel- oped within a non-dualist cosmology and has not entertained “the subject/object opposi- tion,”"*] articulated the ramifications of this worldview by a close reading of certain key terms characterizing the importance of the master designer in Yuan ye.** Here too, it is necessary to emphasize the relevance of a discussion of landscape design without recourse to the binary opposition of subject and object, which has been much criticized in contem- » C.Clunas uitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty © Si ku quan shu wenji pianmu fenei suoyin, Tabet, 1989. “Ji Cheng, Yuan ye zhu shi, 2nd rev. ed., ed, Chen Zhi, Beijing, 1988; Zhang Jiajt, Yuan ye quan shi ‘Taiyuan, 1993; English trans, Ji Cheng, The Craft of Gardens, trans. A. Hardie, New Haven, 1989; and French, rans.,Ji Cheng, Yuanye! Le traité du jardin, trans. C. B. Chiu [Qiu Ziiping], Besancon, 1997, © A Berque, “Beyond the Modern Landscape,” AA Files 25 (Summer 1993), 33. © S, Fung and M, Jackson, “Dualism and Polarism: Structures of Architectural and Landscape Architec~ China, London, 1996.219 Longing and Belonging in Chinese Garden History porary scholarship in landscape architecture. In this way, the interests of translation, close reading, and cross-cultural discussion are seen to be closely interwined. Conclusion By way of conclusion, I would like to offer some supplementary comments on the approach that I have sketched out for thinking about Chinese garden history and its pros- pects. The basic impetus of my thinking has been the trope of reversal. Where one might have been inclined to attend solely to the positive and general characteristics of studies of Chinese gardens that can be obtained from generalization and abstraction, I pursued the opposite direction of thinking toward particularity and exemplarity. Where the importa- tion of Western modes of representation might have prompted a simple narrative of West- ernization in which Chinese studies of gardens would share the same scholarly procedures and concerns as Western scholars, I pursued the significance of the incompleteness of West- ernization. Where one might begin by assuming, as most modern scholars had assumed, that historical sensibility and narration are transhistorical constants in the context of Chi- nese garden history, I have called attention to primary and contemporary sources that suggest a contrary interpretation. Finally, where modern scholars have isolated problems of translation from problems of analysis, and Chinese concerns from cross-cultural concerns, I have pointed to the significance of research that relates these problems and concerns to each other In relating Chinese concerns to cross-cultural frameworks of discussion, I think there is an important avenue of overcoming one aspect of Eurocentricism: I have in mind here the conception of culture that is based on the modern European notion of the autonomous and self-sufficient nation-state, according to which one would study French gardens and Japanese gardens as distinct domains of research. The critique of Eurocentricism involves not only the simplistic broadening of scholarly interests to the history of non-Western gardens, but must question the assumption that nation-states with national languages are the only possible cultural formations that produce “gardens,” an assumption that under writes an introvert special tion called Chinese garden history. When Chen Congzhou's photographs and song lyrics are scrutinized, or when the cross-cultural trafficking of tech niques of visual analysis in garden history is studied closely, we find intimations of how “Westernized” Chinese historiography can contribute to new developments in a more general understanding of the prospects of garden history as an academic study. The Eurocentric assumption that the “flow” of scholarly proprieties has been “one-way” can, if one follows these intimations, give way to dialogic exchange tural Discourse in China and the West,” Intestiees (Auckland) 4 (1996);S. Fung, “Body and Appropriateness in Yuan ye,” Intesight 4 (1997), 84-91