A Jesuit Garden in Beijing and Early Modern Chinese Culture

Hui Zou

Description

In this volume, Hui Zou analyzes historical, architectural, visual, literary, and philosophical perspectives on the Western-styled garden that formed part of the great Yuanming Yuan complex in Beijing, constructed during the Qing dynasty. Designed and built in the late eighteenth century by Italian and French Jesuits, the garden described in this book was a wonderland of multistoried buildings, fountains, labyrinths, and geometrical hills. It even included an open-air theater. Through detailed examination of historical literature and representations, Zou analyzes the ways in which the Jesuits accommodated their design within the Chinese cultural context. He shows how an especially important element of their approach was the application of a linear perspective—the "line-method"—to create the jing, the Chinese concept of the bounded bright view of a garden scene. Hui Zou's book demonstrates how Jesuit metaphysics fused with Chinese cosmology and broadens our understanding of cultural and religious encounters in early Chinese modernity. It presents an intriguing reflection on the interaction between Western metaphysics and the poetical tradition of Chinese culture. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students in a variety of fields, including literature, philosophy, architecture, landscape and urban studies, and East-West comparative cultural studies.
Acknowledgments

Chapter One: A Theoretical and Historical Introduction to the Chinese Garden

Chapter Two: The Chinese Garden and the Concept of the Virtue of Round Brightness

Chapter Three: The Chinese Garden and the Concept of the Vision of Jing

Chapter Four: The Chinese Garden and Western Linear Perspective

Chapter Five: The Chinese Garden and the Concept of the Line Method

Conclusion

Works Cited

Appendix

1. Kangxi's Record of the Garden of Uninhibited Spring

2. Kangxi's Record of the Mountain Hamlet for Summer Coolness

3. Qianlong's Later Record of the Mountain Hamlet for Summer Coolness

4. Qianlong's Record of the Village of Ten Thousand Springs

5. Qianlong's Record of Kunming Lake by Longevity Hill

6. Qianlong's Record of the Garden of Clear Ripples on Longevity Hill

7. Qianlong's Record of the Best Spring of China on Jade-Spring Hill

8. Qianlong's Record of the Garden of Tranquil Pleasure

Index

Sujets

• Histoire
• History of Asia
• History
• Asia
• China

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781612491899
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Jesuit Garden in Beijing and Early Modern Chinese Culture
Comparative Cultural Studies Steven T t sy de Zepetnek, Series Editor
The Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies publishes single-authored and thematic collected volumes of new scholarship. Manuscripts are invited for publication in the series in fields of the study of culture, literature, the arts, media studies, communication studies, the history of ideas, etc., and related disciplines of the humanities and social sciences to the series editor via email at [e-mail] . Comparative cultural studies is a contextual approach in the study of culture in a global and intercultural context and work with a plurality of methods and approaches; the theoretical and methodological framework of comparative cultural studies is built on tenets borrowed from the disciplines of cultural studies and comparative literature and from a range of thought including literary and culture theory, (radical) constructivism, communication theories, and systems theories; in comparative cultural studies focus is on theory and method as well as application. For a detailed description of the aims and scope of the series including the style guide of the series link to http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/seriespurdueccs . Manuscripts submitted to the series are peer reviewed followed by the usual standards of editing, copy editing, marketing, and distribution. The series is affiliated with CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (ISSN 1481-4374), the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access quarterly published by Purdue University Press at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb .
Volumes in the Purdue series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/comparativeculturalstudies.html
Hui Zou, A Jesuit Garden in Beijing and Early Modern Chinese Culture
Yi Zheng, From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature
Agata Anna Lisiak, Urban Cultures in (Post)Colonial Central Europe
Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror , Ed. Sophia A. McClennen and Henry James Morello
Michael Goddard, Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism, and the Subversion of Form Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace , Ed. Alexander C.Y. Huang and Charles S. Ross
Gustav Shpet s Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory , Ed. Galin Tihanov
Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies , Ed. Louise O. Vasv ri and Steven T t sy de Zepetnek
Marko Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality
Thomas O. Beebee, Nation and Region in Modern American and European Fiction
Paolo Bartoloni, On the Cultures of Exile, Translation, and Writing
Justyna Sempruch, Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature
Kimberly Chabot Davis, Postmodern Texts and Emotional Audiences
Philippe Codde, The Jewish American Novel
Deborah Streifford Reisinger, Crime and Media in Contemporary France
Imre Kert sz and Holocaust Literature , Ed. Louise O. Vasv ri and Steven T t sy de Zepetnek
Camilla Fojas, Cosmopolitanism in the Americas
Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje s Writing , Ed. Steven T t sy de Zepetnek
Jin Feng, The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction
Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America , Ed. Sophia A. McClennen and Earl E. Fitz Sophia A. McClennen, The Dialectics of Exile
Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies , Ed. Steven T t sy de Zepetnek
Comparative Central European Culture , Ed. Steven T t sy de Zepetnek
Hui Zou

A Jesuit Garden in Beijing and Early Modern Chinese Culture

Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2011 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zou, Hui, 1967-
A Jesuit Garden in Beijing and Early Modern Chinese Culture / Hui Zou.
p. cm. -- (Comparative cultural studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55753-583-2
1. Yuan Ming Yuan (Beijing, China)--History. 2. Historic gardens--China--Beijing. 3. Gardens, European--China--Beijing--History--18th century. 4. Jesuits--China--Beijing--History--18th century. 5. Kangxi, Emperor of China, 1654-1722. 6. Qianlong, Emperor of China, 1711-1799. 7. Gardens--China--Beijing--Design--History--18th century. 8. Gardens--Social aspects--China--Beijing--History--18th century. 9. Landscape gardening--China--Beijing--History--18th century. 10. China--Civilization--1644-1912. I. Title.
SB466.C53Y838 2011
712 .60951156--dc22
2010044565
Cover image: Detail, copperplate of the Hill of Line Method, drawn by Lantai Yi, 1786. Yuan Ming Yuan, 1783-1786. Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One A Theoretical and Historical Introduction to the Chinese Garden
Chapter Two The Chinese Garden and the Concept of the Virtue of Round Brightness
Chapter Three The Chinese Garden and the Concept of the Vision of Jing
Chapter Four The Chinese Garden and Western Linear Perspective
Chapter Five The Chinese Garden and the Concept of the Line Method
Conclusion
Works Cited
Appendix
1. Kangxi s Record of the Garden of Uninhibited Spring
2. Kangxi s Record of the Mountain Hamlet for Summer Coolness
3. Qianlong s Later Record of the Mountain Hamlet for Summer Coolness
4. Qianlong s Record of the Village of Ten Thousand Springs
5. Qianlong s Record of Kunming Lake by Longevity Hill
6. Qianlong s Record of the Garden of Clear Ripples on Longevity Hill
7. Qianlong s Record of the Best Spring of China on Jade-Spring Hill
8. Qianlong s Record of the Garden of Tranquil Pleasure
Index
Acknowledgments
This book is a result of my journey of research over the past ten years. I am indebted to Alberto P rez-G mez in architectural history, Michel Conan in garden history, and James Bradford in philosophy, who all influenced my understanding of the built environment through an interdisciplinary perpsective. I also received valuable comments from David Leatherbarrow, Marco Frascari, Louise Pelletier, Gregory Caicco, George Hersey, Stanislaus Fung, Martin Bressani, John Dixon Hunt, Peter Jacobs, Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, Steven West, Richard Strassberg, Martin J. Powers, Giorgio Galletti, Xin Wu, Aicha Malek, Jonathan Chaves, Lara Ingeman, John Witek, Duncan Campbell, and John Finlay. This diverse group of scholars came from the various disciplines of architectural history, garden history, and Sinology. During my field and archival research in China, I exchanged views with a number of architecture and garden historians including Xiaowei Luo, Weiquan Zhou, Zhaofen Zeng, Hongxun Yang, and Enyin Zhang, to whom I pay my high respect in the Confucian sense. I am grateful to Barbara R. Martin for reading my manuscript with such patience. My gratitude also goes to John E. Hancock, Jean-Paul Boudier, Wenhong Zhu, and Fangji Wang for their support and friendship. For the research and writing of the book I benefited from assistance from the following libraries and I am grateful for the help I received: McGill University, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Dumbarton Oaks Researach Library and Collection, Library of Congress, Georgetown University, the Chinese painting collections of Freer Gallery, University of Florida, National Library of China, and The First Historical Archive of China. My translations of the Qing emperors garden records presented in the appendices were supported by a fellowship of garden history at Dumbarton Oaks of Harvard University in 2001-2002. My research and writing has been wholeheartedly supported by my family and I dedicate this book to them. I thank the editor of the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies, Steven T t sy de Zepetnek, for his interest in and support of my work. Last but not least, I thank the anonymous reviewers of the book for their valuable comments and the staff of the Purdue University Press for their professional assistance.
Chapter One
A Theoretical and Historical Introduction to the Chinese Garden
In modern-day China, when people hear the term yuanming (literally, round brightness), they probably think of two wonders: one is the bright full moon appearing at the middle of each month; another is the Yuanming Yuan, literally, Garden of Round Brightness, which exists only in their minds. On the night of the eighth full moon, when the moonlight is the brightest of the year, each Chinese family celebrates the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival by remembering its family members who live a great distance away. The memory of the dearest under the round brightness somehow echoes the nostalgia for the lost Yuanming Yuan. As an imperial garden of the Qing dynasty, the Yuanming Yuan is unique in the history of gardens because of its grandness as well as its enclosed, small Western garden. For many Chinese, the memory of this lost garden is typically composed of two mental images: the first of a huge fire burning down the garden and the second of white marble stones of Western buildings scattered along the grass. Regarding the name of the garden, Yuanming, there is not a clear and unified understanding of its meaning in scholarship or by the public. What causes confusion is the question of how a poetical Chinese name, which recalls the full moon, can be connected with the exotic images of Western buildings.
The Yuanming Yuan was built by Emperor Yongzheng and named by his father, Emperor Kangxi, in 1709. In his record of the garden, Yongzheng states tha