Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden - Vera Schwarcz Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture

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Crane Garden, they were tireless in sending me poems, tapes, cards, and essays about gardens, art, and suffering. Each helped flesh out the ideas that first accosted me outside the Sackler Museum on October 16, 1993. Each helped me realize that the garden is not only a physical space, but a spiritual opportunity as well. To dwell in landscaped spaces is to savor a delight that goes beyond flowers, lakes, trees, and rocks. It is to taste the eternal in the ephemeral. This is the main theme of the Song of Songs as well. I can think of no better way to show my gratitude to all who have helped me craft this book than to use the language of the Song of Songs in praise of garden lore:

      You, who dwell in the garden,

      Know that friends wait

      To hear your voice,

      Let it be heard now.

       Introduction

       A Garden Made of Language and Time

       . . . It is not death

       Has drawn me to this desolate world

       I defy all waste and degradation

       —These swaddling clothes

       Are a sun that will not be contained in the grave

       —Yang Lian, “Apologia to a Ruin”

      Gardens are not merely earthly stuff. They occupy grounds in the mind as well. Some reach there by the beauty of their design, some by the power of their cultural symbolism. Many use both. Other gardens take up no space at all. Yet even as ruins, or as memories of ruins, they have the power to breathe life into worn words. They create spaciousness in dark times. This book explores strategies for creating spaciousness by translating what I have learned from the history of gardens into the garden that is history. It takes as its starting point a corner of China that managed to survive repeated devastation through fragile means such as language and the integrity of recollection. If the Singing Crane Garden (Ming He Yuan) can speak to us today, it is because its ruination was defeated by imagination, because voices from a distant past continue to speak about our predicament today.

      The specific site that launched this inquiry lies in northwest Beijing. Removed from the bustle of the Tian An Men Square by several highways that ring the capital of China, the grounds of the Singing Crane Garden occupy a picturesque site at the heart of Beijing University (figure 1). A visitor who survived traffic-clogged streets and managed to gain entrance to the tightly guarded campus would have to continue on a northwest axis before reaching any sign of the Singing Crane Garden. A gray, new boulder in front of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology commemorates the garden’s name in bold characters and little historical detail (figure 2). This stone hints at a princely retreat of the nineteenth century while remaining quite mute about the atrocities that took place on these grounds in the 1960s. Cultural memory is evoked and dismissed all at once.

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      This double gesturing is limited not to one rock, one courtyard at Beijing University, or one city in China. Rather, such layered connotations have been exposed and explored by scholars of Chinese and Western gardens alike. Denis Cosgrove, the British geographer, for example, wrote about the iconography of landscapes with just such attentiveness to the “curtain” that veils culturally organized spaces. His argument, simply put, is that landscapes beckon us to practice a distinctive mode of seeing—“a way in which some Europeans have represented themselves and the world about them and their social relationship with it, and through which they have commented on social relations.”1 China, too, has a complex history of looking at the meanings of landscaped spaces. The Ming He Yuan boulder at Beijing University does not quite fit into these notions of representation. The paucity of physical evidence combined with politically informed reticence makes “reading” this garden a particularly interesting challenge.

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      The Chinese scholar Feng Jin hinted at this predicament in a recent essay about the concept of “scenery” in the Chinese garden. Although his focus is not on the Singing Crane Garden in Beijing, he does note that the shortage of material remains has forced scholars to reconstruct garden-making on the basis of literary sources scattered throughout a vast body of ancient documents. The reason for this shortage is mentioned at the end of Feng Jin’s lengthy essay. The meanings of classical Chinese gardens, he suggests, are hard to decode “because the monopoly of the theory of class struggle prohibited any mention of literati culture.”2 That is to say, the intellectuals who both built and appreciated gardens have been smeared with political disapproval in the late twentieth century. Whereas Denis Cosgrove is free to piece together the iconography of the English landscape, Chinese scholars have made their way to this same subject hampered by the repressive politics of the Maoist era. Not only are there fewer gardens left to study, but the very language for their explanation has been decimated by decades of propaganda and murderously real class struggle.

      Reading a garden such as the Ming He Yuan, therefore, requires narrative strategies that circle its muted terrain, that give voice to all that has been silenced through violence and indirect commemoration. Poetry is repeatedly used in this book because it is well suited for indirection. To be sure, Chinese gardens have always been at home in words. There is a long tradition of poetry about landscaped spaces. Poems, in turn, appeared all around the garden: on rocks, walls, corridors, pavilions, and even mountainsides. With war and revolution, however, both gardens and the refined literati consciousness that nurtured them came under attack. What is left is just words: fragile, halting snippets that mark a longing for leisure and contemplation in the very places where bamboo, chrysanthemums, and gingko no longer flower at ease. In this study, poems from the Chinese have been rendered into idiomatic English, often altering shape and sound, to convey to a twenty-first century reader a wordless yearning to make sense of loss and devastation.

      Such a yearning may be discerned, for example, in the poetry of Yang Lian, a writer whose youth had been marred by the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. A former Red Guard, Yang was part of a generation of artists who sought out the ruined landscape of northwest Beijing in order to come to terms with the ravage in their own lives. Shortly after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, these artists congregated in the rice paddies that lay north, beyond the walls of Beijing University. Since the landscape outside had been intensely politicized, they sought out ruins to articulate their own severed connection to history. The broken stones of the old Summer Palace (Yuan Ming Yuan) provided an alternative to the denuded cultural imagination fostered in the university under the guidance of the Communist Party. Heading ever north, they created gardens of the mind out of words alone. Yang Lian’s poem “Apologia to a Ruin” speaks to this ravaged landscape directly. Seeking what is no longer there, Yang asserts that the journey is nonetheless worth taking:

      . . . the only hope that illuminated me

      Faint star out of its time . . .

      Pitiless chiaroscuro of my soul.3

      Yang Lian was part of a generation intentionally heading north, away from the ardor of the Maoist era that had been identified with the red sun. Yang’s friend and collaborator, the poet Bei Dao, even incorporated the idea of “north” into his pen name, which means

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