LITMIR.BIZ

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of class struggle, these poets sought and found language for other landscapes. The visual evidence of the ruins in northwest Beijing became a fulcrum for meditations about loss and desolation—as well as about renewal. Yang Lian’s poem concludes not with death, but with a willingness to defy “these swaddling clothes,” with a desire to excavate “a sun that will not be contained in the grave.”⁴

      The history of the Singing Crane Garden is similarly illuminated by devastation. Around the gray boulder inside the exuberantly developing Beijing University, absence reigns. To map this terrain, one must learn to walk a little slower, listen more closely as time unfolds in guarded words. Like Yang Lian, I was also drawn to the northwest corner of Beijing by a darkened sun. I knew the traumatic history of the burning of the Summer Palace in 1860. I had studied the brutal impact of the Cultural Revolution upon Beijing University in the 1960s. But it was not death that pulled me on this project. Rather it was the possibility of cultural renewal in traumatized spaces. My ambition was to take the idea of the garden out of the ground and into the realm of history and language. In the end, the Singing Crane Garden may be no more than time and words. Yet in encompassing this space, both history and language may acquire new spaciousness, fresh meaning.

      Winged Eaves and Liquid Light

      The browning carapace of a pagoda may not seem like an auspicious place to think afresh about language and time. My own first glimpse of the Pavilion of Winged Eaves (Yi Ran Ting) in 1989 did not suggest the possibilities of renewed cultural imagination that thrive here. It was late May when I came upon the site, in the company of my five-year-old son. Most of our days in that spring of 1989 were engulfed by student demonstrations in Tian An Men Square. I was following the unfolding events with consuming interest. Having written a great deal about the struggle for science and democracy in modern China, I witnessed the tragic suppression of the student movement with dread and familiarity. The campus of Beijing University was, as many times before in the twentieth century, at the heart of student activism. To give my son a bit of relief from loudspeakers and protest posters, I took him for bike rides along the more isolated paths in the northwest corner of Beida. At first, the Pavilion of Winged Eaves was hardly visible among the weeds. It took the excited explorations of a five-year-old to uncover the broken slabs of stone leading to a square viewing area. Pillars that had once been painted bright red were now the color of dried blood. As I looked out from beyond the terrace railing, all I saw was scrawny trees and a tangle of electric wires (figure 3). Nothing here suggested that we had stumbled upon one of the most cherished meditation spots of the old Singing Crane Garden.

Figure 3. The Pavilion of Winged Eaves (Yi Ran Ting) in 1989.

      Nothing, except perhaps the ceiling. This was home to fifty identical grus japonensis—red-crowned cranes. Each painted bird filled to the brim a blue circle framed by an artfully subdued square of green. Each crane had its wings spread to the very edge of the formal, geometrical sky—a perfect image of frozen time. Below the masters of this dancing yet stationary heaven was a series of carefully brushed images of marble bridges, carved lions, and more buildings with winged eaves (figure 4). Nothing in the shadowy interior of the pagoda informed the visitor that these were scenes from the campus of Yenching University, the American-sponsored institution that had occupied these grounds before 1952, before the national Beijing University was moved out north, away from the neighborhood of the Forbidden City.

      A decade after our discovery, in 1998, all that changed. China’s foremost educational institution was celebrating its centenary, consciously laying claim both to the old Imperial University founded in 1898 as well as to the twentieth-century campus of Yenching. The brownish carapace was gone. Reddish pillars had been painted a sinewy green. Broken railings had been replaced with a simplified version of “veranda”-style woodwork that was tinted with a jarring red. The stone steps had been repaired (figure 5). The artificial hillock was reconstructed with new bricks. The cranes, too, had been touched up and looked more frozen in their broken flight. The scenic spots from the Yenching campus were repainted too, made more schematic, more recognizable for the many alumni and visitors walking around with a newly published school map. At the entrance of the pavilion was a formal slab to mark the place of dead beauty (figure 6):

Figure 4. Painted ceiling of the Pavilion of Winged Eaves, 1989.

Figure 5. Renovated Pavilion of Winged Eaves as it appeared in the summer of 1999.

      XIAO JING TING—SCHOOL SCENES PAVILION

      The original name of the School Scenes Pavilion was Yi Ran Ting, which was part of the Singing Crane Garden refurbished in 1926 after the founding of Yenjing University, when it was decorated with ten famous spots of Yenjing University—hence its name of “School Scenes Pavilion.” This name was retained during the restoration that begun in 1984.⁵

      The official and repetitious language conveys the bare bones of the history buried here. Only two dates are carved in stone: 1926 and 1984. The decades before and after are consigned to silence. The gray marker erected in 1998 makes no mention of the niu peng—“ox pens”—erected at the foot of the pagoda to incarcerate and torture eminent professors during the 1960s. It is equally reticent about 1860, when the Singing Crane Garden was scorched by British armies on their way to the burning of the Summer Palace. It does not even nod toward the Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology established on the grounds of the former ox pens, and it keeps utterly quiet about the struggles that accompanied its design after the Tian An Men massacre of 1989. The School Scenes Pavilion is, like a child standing on good behavior, properly warned against talking to strangers. It keeps family secrets buried behind a naively verdant exterior.

Figure 6. Stone tablet installed in front of the Pavilion of Winged Eaves as restorations began in 1984. Photograph by the author.

      To excavate voices that celebrated beauty and mourned its desolation on these grounds, one has to practice what the Italian chemist-writer Primo Levi called “hard listening.” A survivor of Auschwitz, Levi knew how easily history swallows the evidence for its own existence. It is not only massive atrocities like the Holocaust that stifle our access to the past. The very passage of time (invariably codified and manipulated by political authorities) brings to us only the freshly painted bones of garden history. One has to dig below stone markers and refurbished monuments to hear what Levi called “the hoarse voices of those who can no longer speak.”⁶

      On the campus of Beijing University, such voices are marked by a reticent attachment to the old sites, old names, old knowledge. One of the most eloquent among them belongs to Hou Renzhi, a British-educated historical geographer who has been quietly reconstructing the history of Beijing and its princely gardens. In a slim, bilingual volume dedicated to the history of Bejing University, he includes a line drawing of the Yi Ran Ting that speaks volumes for the beauty that once thrived and was squelched here. A solitary pine and the winged roof give voice to the seasoned memory of a scholar who had been forced to repent for the historical knowledge that had set him apart from “revolutionary masses.” Politically persecuted in 1957 and during the Cultural Revolution, this eminent graduate of Yenching University writes about his beloved campus in roundabout terms. Whereas European geographers such as Denis Cosgrove are able to stretch disciplinary boundaries with intellectual ease and theoretical verve, Hou Renzhi has undertaken the same project in China against great odds. For Cosgrove, the iconography of landscape is an opportunity to map relations of power and of perception across the history of English elites. Hou Renzhi’s scholarly life,

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