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Chapter 1 Provenance Before discussing the rise of the Yuanming Yuan, the greatest garden the Chinese have ever built, let us first summarize traditional Chinese garden art. Garden design and construction constitute a vital part of the Chinese cultural tradition. Living in a beautiful and diverse natural environment with a unique landscape, the Chinese have developed a distinct garden aesthetic over the span of three thousand years. Generally speaking, Chinese artists, whether poets, painters, or garden designers, have emulated nature and appreciated the feeling of a genuine harmony between man and nature. It is well known that in China poetry and painting have a close kinship. Modern scholars have often quoted Su Shi’s (1036–1101) celebrated comment on the works of the Tang artist-poet Wang Wei (699–759), “whereas a poem conceives a painting, a painting suggests a poem” (shizhong youhua huazhong youshi) (quoted in Zhao Lingchi n.d., ce 22, 8:9a). To be sure, each genre has its own standard and style, but both share the popular theme of underlining the beauty of the landscape and implying intangible sentiments. A close kinship also exists between poetry and garden. “Ideal gardens,” as an eminent scholar of Chinese gardens has put it, “are like superb lines of verse” (Chen Congzhou 1994, 5). The same kinship can be found between landscape painting and garden design (cf. Fu Baoshi 1973, 33–48). Both Chinese painters and garden designers share, for example, the fundamental principle of suggestiveness: showing no base of distant mountains, no roots in distant forests, and no hulls of distant ships. Not rare at all in the history of Chinese gardens were designs built on the basis of a famous landscape painting. As a recent writer has rightly pointed out, Chinese painting in e¤ect sets the tone for Chinese garden making (Peng Yigang 1988, 7). Indeed, profoundly inspired by the vast stretches of the countryside, Chinese landscapers were heavily influenced by the ink-wash landscape paintings and the poems reflect-| 9  ing the natural beauty. It can be said with certainty that both painting and poetry have rendered an especially refined sensibility in the conceptualization of the traditional Chinese garden art. Like poems and paintings, gardens are integrated works of art, lyricism, and picturesqueness. Many designers, who were also competent painters and poets, quite naturally gave the garden environment a compositional form, which spontaneously yielded an atmosphere of pictorial and poetic feeling. This is why a standard traditional Chinese garden can often be considered the physical expression of the slow unfolding of a painted scroll (Wu Shichang 1934, 80–114). For all its artificiality, the overall outlook of a Chinese garden should appear to be formed as naturally as in nature. Since the harmony of garden architecture with the surrounding landscape is essential for Chinese garden design, superimposing man-made structures on landscape requires integrating the artificial with the natural into a symphonic unity. In contrast to the geometric formality of Renaissance gardens, Chinese garden art appreciates untrammeled beauty with an emphasis on free form, continuous flow, and unexpected twists and turns. The ambiance of being in real nature, however, is artificially created. The vastness of nature has to be shrunk into a landscape mode, requiring only “a foot to create whole nature,” or squeezing “the world in a pot.” Miniature mountains with peaks, precipices, gorges, valleys, streams, and cataracts are common in Chinese gardens. This “symbolic representationism” di¤ers from the European tradition of realism, although English gardens of the eighteenth-century had become pastoral. The traditional Chinese gardens generally can be classified into four di¤erent categories , namely, the scenic park for the general public, the monastic gardens of religious institutions , residential gardens owned by literati, and the oldest and most spectacular royal demesne (huangjia yuanlin), or imperial garden. A quick survey of royal demesnes in Chinese history readily yields three common characteristics . First, they are colossa, with a huge enclosure of the best scenic parkland and numerous structures, in order to convey the awe-inspiring might and prestige of the Son of Heaven, the ruler of the universal empire. Dignified grandiosity is an essential artistic feature of the royal demesne. Second, the garden structures are destined to be luxurious, sublime, and palatial-looking so as to give an image of architectonic sumptuousness. Third, they recreate settings of fairy tales, such as a jeweled palace in Elfland’s hills, to express the delight and fantasy of the immortal world...

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