The Chinese Garden, and: Special Issue on Chinese Gardens of Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes (review)

"A small book about a big subject": we do share this sentiment expressed by Joseph Cho Wang in the preface to his general introduction to Chinese gardens. As the Chinese garden itself encompasses the whole universe within its small, enclosed world, so this little book offers the general reader a short but quite complete view of the classical Chinese garden tradition. The book is published in the excellent collection of handy hardcover series "Images of Asia" from Oxford University Press, all of which are written by specialists in their own field (Joseph Cho Wang is a professor of architecture at Virginia Tech). This volume is well constructed, thoroughly informative, clearly edited, and well illustrated, and it offers the reader a very useful introduction to the subject, complete with a selective bibliography of sources, albeit exclusively in the Chinese and English languages. It also contains an index, although it is regrettable that this is an index of proper nouns only and is not thematic.

As the title itself shows, the author accepts the existence of a specific Chinese tradition of gardens, which, beyond important variations in time and space, was sparked by the creations of kings and emperors and has been dominated over the centuries by the tastes of the literati. It is indeed very difficult to encompass such a large subject within so few pages, and the author summarizes his material in a way generally accepted by scholars from China on this question, and tends to stress continuity rather than change.

The first chapter provides an overall view of the historical development of the Chinese garden from the hunting grounds for imperial pleasure (you) of the Shang dynasty and the first imperial parks of the Qin and Han to Qianlong's extraordinary Yuanming yuan in the Qing, which was described and praised in a letter dated 1743 by French Jesuit Jean-Denis Attiret (who is quoted here in passing without being named, despite the fact that he was one of the most influential writers of the period for the West on the subject). The Yuanming yuan was destroyed in 1860 by an Anglo-French military expedition.

The other important part of this historical tradition is the private garden, which, according to the author, "appeared in China in [the] 5th century A.D." This seems difficult to accept: the celebrated poet Tao Qian (alias Tao Yuanming, 365-427), who advocated the return to a simple rustic life and grew chrysanthemums by the fence of his hermitage, could have had this idea only if there had already been a long tradition of maintaining such small private gardens for personal enjoyment. It would be hard to imagine the existence over the centuries of imperial gardens—after all, they were just like private gardens albeit on a large scale—without any corresponding gardens for less-exalted personages, even if the latter were not expressly mentioned in texts. What was perhaps new at this time was the fact that intellectuals deliberately chose to retire to such places to escape the troubles of political life.

In the next three chapters, the main core of his book, Wang proposes what he calls a three-level approach to the study of classical Chinese gardens: the Garden as a Setting for the Good Life, the Garden as Art, and the Garden as an Ideal. In the first of these chapters we are offered a somewhat impressionistic depiction of the literati's idea of the garden and the Good Life that it allows, based exclusively on literary accounts and not on a direct analysis of actual gardens themselves. However, the quotations provide a quite complete picture of how a...