SMALL-ROCK MOUNTAIN ABODE, YANGZHOU—SHITAO'S CRAFT...
1962
Monk Shitao (1642-c. 1707) was a preeminent painter of the early Qing, but his other artistic attainments also culminated in sublimity and played an innovative role in his time in verse, prose, calligraphy, and theories on painting. However, according to the Record of the Painted Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou, the Gazetteer of Yangzhou Prefecture under Jiaqing Reign and A Collection of Anecdotes in the Lü Garden, he was also a consummate rockwork crafter, having built a number of artificial mountains after he settled down in Yangzhou for the rest of his life.
Two of the artificial mountains built by Shitao in Yangzhou are recorded in history books. One of them is in the Garden of Ten Thousand Rocks. According to the Record of Painted Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou (Volume Two),
Shi Daoji, whose style name was Shitao….was also dexterous at piling up rocks as a sideline occupation. Yangzhou puts its name on the map with its famed gardens, and famed gardens make a name for themselves with piled-up rocks. The Yu's Garden of Ten Thousand Rocks crafted by Daoji remains a scenic attraction to this day.
The Gazetteer of Yangzhou Prefecture under Jiaqing Reign (Volume Thirty) has this to say:
The Garden of Ten Thousand Rocks, the former residence of a man surnamed Wang, was laid out according to one of Monk Shitao's paintings. The Lake Tai rocks collected in the garden were counted by tens of thousands, hence the garden's name. Its major attractions include the Loft in Aromatic Tree Shade, the Balustrade over Ripple Water, the Towering Pine Pavilion, and the Painted Boat Docked in a Plum Sea. The garden fell into decay after its rockeries were dismantled to build the Thatched Cottage in the Kangshan Mountain during the Qianlong reign.
The other artificial mountain crafted by Shitao is the Small-Rock Mountain Abode. As A Collection of Anecdotes in the Lü Garden (Volume Twenty) puts it,
The Small-Rock Mountain Abode is found at Garden Lane in New City, Yangzhou. Behind its two halls there is a square pond. An artificial mountain built of Lake Tai rocks sits on the pond, and looks exceptionally steep at a height of fifty or sixty feet. Legend has it that it was personally wrought by Monk Shitao.
We are no strangers to the Garden of Ten Thousand Rocks thanks to the many extant records about it, but no trace of it can be found in reality because it was ruined during the Qianlong reign of the Qing. The Thatched Cottage in the Kangshan Mountain, built with the rocks torn from the garden, is no more, too. The Small-Rock Mountain Abode, which I have discovered during my current visit to Yangzhou, therefore, is the only artificial mountain Shitao has bequeathed on the human world.
During my visit, which is part of a survey I have conducted over the last few years of ancient buildings, gardens and dwellings in Yangzhou, I espied an artificial mountain clinging against a wall in the Ho Family Garden (that is, the Whistling Scholar's Mountain Abode) at the eastern end of Garden Lane in the city's southeast corner. It was small in floor space, and the pond at its foot has long been levelled. Judging from its exquisite craftsmanship and its naturalistic, yet classical design, it is a rare objet d'art, and, dating back to the early Qing, the earliest of all artificial mountains known to exist in Yangzhou. Based on my analysis of its rock-piling technique, and by referring to descriptions of it in Qian Yong's A Collection of Anecdotes in the Lü Garden, I can ascertain that it is by far the only extant artificial mountain that Shitao has bestowed on humanity.
Seen from its plan, the Small-Rock Mountain Abode, facing south in front of the posterior wall of the Ho Family Garden, is a rectangular wall-hugging rockwork. The main peak rises from its western end to impose its steep and verdant presence upon the pond at its foot. A bridge propped up in the air is connected with a stone stairway which winds its way along the stone wall to the top of the peak. Below the peak stands the so-called "Small-Rock Mountain Abode," a two-bay square stone chamber (actually built of bricks). A mystic and seemingly unfathomable cave is ensconced beneath a range of small rocks that twist and turn eastward as a whole. As the western part of the cave has collapsed together with the building atop it, there is no way of knowing what the artificial mountain looked like in its entirety. Its layout by and large follows the tradition of Ming-dynasty artificial mountains, but through Shitao's ingenious craft, both its main peak and cave are brought into focus and properly set off by subsidiary structures. Manoeuvring in an untrammelled way despite the lack of space, the peerless monk painter kept density and space on an even keel in his masterpiece, and its lofty and steep image is apt to the name "Small-Rock Mountain Abode."
Yangzhou is located in a plain between the Yangtze and the Huaihe River. With no quarriable mountains available in the vicinity, Yangzhou outdid Suzhou by procuring more varieties of materials for rockwork construction—including Lake Tai stones, yellow stones, snow stones and Lingbi stones—from Suzhou, Zhenjiang, Xuancheng and Lingbi counties in Anhui. As waterways are the only means of bulk transportation for Yangzhou, the stones shipped in are mostly of small sizes, a fact which is challenging to artificial mountain crafters and calls for higher stone-piling expertise. I surmise that Shitao must have made do with such small stones when he was building his mountain for the Garden of Ten Thousand Rocks. It is also apparent that he had taken great pains in selecting his rocks for the Small-Rock Mountain Abode, and put them together according to their sizes, textures and veins and following the principle that "construction of mountain peaks should accord with a painter's texturing brush strokes derived from natural peaks" (quoted from the Monk Balsam Pear on Painting) to bring about mountain tops reigning over ravines and cliffs whose shapes change all the time and appear to be at once linked and delinked. (For Shitao's theory on painting, see the colophon of A Small Landscape Painting by Monk Balsam Pear.) In this way no traces of axing and chiselling can be found on his tall peaks and deep caves, while the unity of his texturing work, the contrast between tangibles and intangibles, and the compact makeup of his designs are unimaginable for those who know little about the principles of painting or those who are not good enough to put such principles into practice. Shitao's techniques were frequently imitated, but because of lack of dexterity and understanding, his imitators could only pile up stone slabs horizontally and coat and imbed them with small stones. The artificial mountains thus built always look unnatural.
Because stones are somewhat hard to come by in Yangzhou, stone embankments are seldom built around ponds in local gardens, but stone walls are repeatedly built, which not only enhances scenic depth, but also saves land and stones, with the resulted products appearing more exquisite than those in Suzhou. Peaks, caves, stone stairways, stone bridges, and stepping stones are also properly crafted in Yangzhou gardens.
Qian Yong says in A Collection of Anecdotes in the Lü Garden (Volume Twelve),
Among the pioneering artificial mountain builders, Zhang Lian (1587-1673) was the best in the beginning years of the dynasty. During the Kangxi reign there was Monk Shitao, who was followed by such masters as Qiu Haoshi (1723-1795), Taoist Priest Dong (1736-1795), Wang Tianyu (1736-1795)1, and Zhang Guotai. More recently there was Ge Yuliang (1764-1830), a Changzhou native whose rock-stacking craft was better than those of others.
Ge Yuliang, who came to the fore in the wake of Shitao during the Qianlong-Jiaqing reigns, was a famous mountain builder who assimilated Shitao's techniques in many of his works. The artificial mountains he built in the Beauty-Encircled Mountain Abode of Suzhou and the Homecoming Swallow Garden of Changshu (as well as the Lesser Winding Gully built of yellow stones in the Qin's Imagined Garden in Yangzhou, which unfortunately, are in ruins today), show that he had improved his craft while inheriting Shitao's legacies. Because Ge had mastered Shitao's principle that "mountain peaks ought to accord with a painter's texturing brush strokes derived from natural peaks," the mountain he had built of Lake Tai stones in the Beauty-Encircled Mountain Abode look deep, tranquil and replete with surprises, while the one he built of yellow stones for the Homecoming Swallow Garden look natural and life-like despite their seemingly plain appearances. The former is complicated but well-organized, with the builder's workmanship shining forth through the kind of depth and tranquillity that evokes Wang Meng's horizontal painting scrolls; the latter looks simple but is never shallow thanks to the builder's rich expertise derived from Ni Zan's sketches. As each of the two rockeries used a different kind of stones, the builder adjusted his techniques accordingly, and came up with two masterpieces whose knolls and ravines and artistic allure stood out in distinct differences. It is thus no exaggeration to say that Shitao was as outstanding in building artificial mountains as he was in the realm of painting.
Rereading Qian Yong's A Collection of Anecdotes in the Lü Garden and checking his records of the Small-Rock Mountain Abode, I found the address he gives of this rockery is factual. Of the two halls cited in this book, one is still there today, a threebay structure built of Phoebe nanmu during the Qianlong reign; the pond has long been filled in, but traces of Lake Tai stone embankments are still there. The mountain turns out to be fashioned out of Lake Tai stones as well, a fact that tallies with Qian Yong's record. The peak of the artificial mountain overlooks the surrounding wall at a proper height. And the mountain's imposing structure, its lone peak enveloped in greenery in particular, deserves the superlatives, "exceptionally perpendicular." According to Fu Baoshi's2 A Chronicle of Shitao the Venerable Buddhist, Shitao was a regular visitor to Yangzhou in the period 1678-1697, and he never left Yangzhou during the years from his settlement in the city in 1697, the thirty-sixth year of the Kangxi reign, to his death in 1707, the forty-sixth year of the Kangxi reign. The Great Mind-Cleansing Thatched Hut, the Thatched Belvedere Amidst Green Lotuses, the Heart-Ploughing Thatched Hut, and the Thatched Hut for Revering Mount Tai were names of his residences that he often signed—though not as often as the Mountain-Level Hall and the Quiet Prajna Temple—on his inscriptions and paintings during his years in Yangzhou3. In a colophon on his painting Cloud Waves over Mount Huangshan done in 1687 at age forty-five,4 he says, "It was a winter day in a ding-mao year that I overnighted at the Lane Under Giant Trees in Guangling after a failed northbound trip…." On a one-foot scroll done on a piece of Heart-Purifing Hall paper: "Signed on a winter day in a year of wu-yin at the Thatched Hut of East City in Guangling." In his "Postscript to the Album of Mount Huangshan Paintings" in 1699 at age fifty-seven: "Upon returning to Guangling after a tour of Mount Huangshan, Mr. Jin'an gathered us at Down the River Street to recount the sceneries of the mountain… in the seventh month of a year of ji-mao." The Small-Rock Mountain Abode is found in the southeast of the city, with Down the South River Street in front of it and Down the North River Street to the east, and Lane Under Giant Trees behind it. I am not sure if the "East City" mentioned in Shitao's colophon refers to the eastern part of Yangzhou today, but his "Down the River Street" is the present-day Down the South River Street or Down the North River Street, whereas Lane Under Giant Trees should be today's Big Tree Lane. Thus Shitao's lodging at the time was probably close by Garden Lane. He was born in 1642, and died in 1707, with his body entombed at the foot of the Shugang Hill5. Qian Yong was born in 1759, the twenty-fourth year of the Qianlong reign, and died in 1844, the twenty-fourth year of the Daoguang reign, just fifty-two years after Shitao's demise. This short span of time, plus the fact that Qian Yong, an artist with all-round attainments, had unique perspectives on gardens and architecture and had personally visited and recorded the famous gardens of his day, indicates that his A Collection of Anecdotes in the Lü Garden and his comments on Shitao in it are of immense reference value to researchers of Chinese garden history. Qian Yong himself had also settled in Yangzhou for some years, and had inscribed in his own handwriting many boards for the city's scenic resorts and gardens, including the nameboard of the Loft of Two-Thirds Bright Moonlight. This further convinces me that his records are well founded and, therefore, can never be put on a par with the notes of ordinary folks or hearsay. Moreover, judging from the time of Shitao's settlement in Yangzhou, the artificial mountain in the Small-Rock Mountain Abode should be attributed to his evening years, which fell on the early Qing.
Based on the sights I have presented in the foregoing, as well as the documentations I have cited, it is safe to attribute, at least initially, the Small-Rock Mountain Abode to Shitao as by far the only extant rockwork he had personally wrought. According to our survey findings of Yangzhou, this artificial mountain is also the earliest of its kind extant in Yangzhou today. It is not only a major testimony to the development of Chinese rockwork techniques, but also an authentic model of Shitao's landscaping painting. Insofar the craft of gardens is concerned, its value speaks for itself6.