Seeds of a Different Eden: Chinese Gardening Ideas and a New English Aesthetic Ideal (review)

The past several years have seen a proliferation of new books concerned with European responses to China—and to things and ideas and challenges Chinese—in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Among the more notable are Robert Markley's The Far East in the English Imagination: 1600-1730 (Cambridge), Elizabeth Chang's Britain's Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford), and Adrienne Ward's Pagodas in Play: China on the Eighteenth-Century Italian Opera Stage (Bucknell). The development is welcome in eighteenth-century studies, where research on cross-cultural reflections and encounters has been too frequently confined to histories of colonialism and orientalism.

Mr. Liu's topic, the engagement of British eighteenth-century writers with Chinese ideas on gardening, has been frequently treated, most famously in Lovejoy's, "The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism" (1933), and continues to attract attention (see, for example, Tony Brown, "Joseph Addison and the Pleasures of Sharawadgi," 2007).

The book makes ambitious claims. We learn that the Chinese approach to landscape gardening (along with the cosmology that informed it) contributed to the evolution in conceptions of beauty in Britain from a focus on rules and conventions to a celebration of freedom and spontaneity, and therefore played a critical part in a paradigm shift central to the emergence of Western modernity. In six carefully researched chapters (including three devoted to Pope, Addison, and Shaftesbury), Mr. Liu argues forcefully that newly emergent ideas of "naturalness" and "irregularity" were inspired by widely circulated writings on Chinese gardening. More intriguingly, he suggests that many of those who promulgated these ideas in the British context concealed (or at least declined to acknowledge) their Chinese origins, preferring to ascribe them to Europe's own classical tradition, and resented suggestions that the English might be followers of the Chinese. This is a more significant claim than it might at first appear. If Mr. Liu is correct that English authors systematically assimilated Chinese ideas into their readings of European antiquity, the implication is that we should reconsider the history of eighteenth-century aesthetic thought as a strategic rewriting of the classical heritage motivated by the need to establish, retroactively, a local pedigree for a compelling and consequential foreign idea.

The chinoiserie style delighted in superficies, and it may be tempting to dismiss debates over the provenance of sharawadgi as similarly inconsequential. Mr. Liu, however, rightly insists on distinguishing Chinese gardening ideas from the more fanciful and hybridized chinoiserie of porcelain teapots and Chippendale furniture designs. Rather than regarding these ideas as part of a passing fad, we should recognize them, he argues, as manifestations of the deeper paradigm shift entailed by Europe's encounter, mediated by the Jesuits, with Chinese cosmology. An engaging chapter on the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and his responses to Chinese gardens and philosophical texts initially seems out of place in a book concerned primarily with eighteenth-century England. Understood, however, as a careful elaboration of the larger system of thought from which the Chinese delight in horticultural irregularity emerged, it provides critical ballast for the author's far-reaching claims regarding the ultimate impact of Chinese ideas in Europe.

This is largely a story about impact. The robust intellectual background Mr. Liu brings to the central argument in every one of his chapters admirably complicates the story: by no means do we find here a facile account of straightforward "influence" or "repudiation." There are, after all, a fair number of equally remarkable convergences in the cultural history of the two contexts at this time (the rise of popular vernacular fiction and a cult of sentiment being two of the most notable among them) that cannot be explained in terms of influence, but that have to be understood, rather, in terms of a more geographically capacious condition of early modernity than we are accustomed to imagining. That eighteenth-century English writers were responding in significant ways to Chinese...