SUMMER PALACE, BEIJING
Translated by Duan Huixiang
I love mounting a tall loft at moonlit night,
To toast long and gentle the hills in the west.
These lines, written by Mi Wanzhong (1570-1628)1 of the Ming in his garden in the western suburbs of Beijing, are apparently inspired by the following lines by Tao Yuanming (c. 365-427)2, a poet of the late Eastern Jin and the early Song of the Southern Dynasties:
While picking asters 'neath Eastern Fence,
My gaze upon the Southern Mountain falls.
Both Mi's "toast" and Tao's "gaze" are in tribute to mountains in the distance. This is what is meant by view borrowing, a Chinese landscape gardening technique. Such borrowing, designed to incorporate a scene faraway and diversify the vista in a garden being built, has been in practice since antiquity. However, the term "view borrowing" was actually coined by Ji Cheng (1582-c. 1642) in the late Ming as he enunciates in no uncertain terms in The Craft of Gardens,
To borrow from a view means that although the interior of a garden is distinct from what lies outside it, as long as there is a good view you need not be concerned whether it is close by or far away.
No place is better for garden-making than the western outskirts of Beijing, where the Western Hills rise like a zigzagging screen and clear spring water converges in many a lake or marsh. This explains why the gardens in this city were concentrated in its western outskirts in ancient times, when they eventually reached their apex during the Ming and the Qing. One of them is the world-famous Garden of Perfect Splendor, nicknamed "Garden of Ten Thousand Gardens." The key to the success of this garden lies in "accommodating scenery to waters, and borrowing views from the Western Hills"—in short, view accommodating and view borrowing, two major concepts in the classical craft of Chinese gardens. For a garden as large as this, the vistas would not have been so sagaciously arranged without acting on such concepts. It shows that landscape gardening is heralded by conception. Both view accommodating and view borrowing ought to be applied more emphatically in gardens in the outskirts of a city surrounded with plenty of idyllic views. Of all the Beijing gardens, the well-preserved Summer Palace is another illustrious case in point.
Pillaged and torched by the allied Anglo-French invaders in 1860 and the allied troops of eight Western powers in 1900, the Garden of Perfect Splendor was reduced utterly to ruins and has remained so to this day. This leaves the Summer Palace as the only large garden in Beijing I can refer to in my delineation of the technique of view borrowing.
The Summer Palace, ten kilometers to the northwest of downtown Beijing, abounds in intriguing sights, where waves in the Kunming Lake lap at the foot of the lush-green Longevity Hill in the north and the picture-perfect Jade Spring Mountain serpentines to the west.
Known as "Jug Hill and Gold Sea"3 during the Yuan, the Summer Palace was augmented during the Ming and renamed "Garden of Fine Mountains." In 1702, the forty-first year of the Kangxi reign of the Qing, it became the emperor's "Jug Hill Temporary Palace." After undergoing massive reconstructions in 1750, the fifteenth year of the Qianlong reign, it was called "Limpid Ripples Garden." It was destroyed by the allied Anglo-French invaders in 1860, and restored and renamed "Garden for Nourishing Harmony of Heaven and Earth" (but more popularly known as the Summer Palace) in 1886, only to be torched and damaged once again at the hands of the Eight-Power Alliance invaders in 1900. The Summer Palace as it is today was born of restoration work done in 1903.
The Summer Palace was created by extending an existing body of water in elaborate imitation of the West Lake of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. The West Causeway, the islands, the misty weeping willows, and the painted bridges look like adaptations of the Jiangnan area's "light make-ups" to the northland's "rouged and powdered beauty" of Beijing. Such mock-ups may look like their prototypes, but are apparently different in aesthetic appeals.
The Summer Palace sprawls in an area of less than four square kilometers. With three quarters of its space covered by water, it is a veritable Jiangnan garden in north China. Upon entering the garden from the East Palace Gate, one sees the Benevolence and Longevity Hall, an imposing structure with eaves flying like a giant bird's wings over a massive artificial mountain and rockeries in front of it. As one strolls around the hall and turns south, the vista opens widely upon the sparkling Kunming Lake.
Overlooking the Kunming Lake is the Longevity Hill crowned with the Buddhist Incense Belvedere, a four-storied octagonal edifice that commands the vintage point of the entire garden. Mount the belvedere, and one takes in the Western Hills, evoking a beauty's eyelashes, and the lake, looking like a gigantic mirror. Looking down from the belvedere, one sees a cluster of pavilions and halls hugging the terrain and the Long Corridor meandering its way along the lakeshore like a ribbon, all of which are found on a single garden's premises. The garden's illimitable array of scenic delights, however, is achieved primarily by view borrowing. It is with such borrowings that the nearby Jade Spring Mountain and its pagoda are seemingly shifted right before the balustrades of the lakeside True-Meaning Lake and Mountain Pavilion, whereas the Western Hills in the distance makes their presence felt as part and parcel of the cityscape of the nation's capital. Indeed, the landscape of the Summer Palace is peerless for its mixture of intricate grace and awesome magnificence.
It seems there is nothing the roofed walkway cannot do to wreak a riot of picturesque changes in the Chinese garden. The Long Corridor in the Summer Palace is an outstanding example in this regard, as it keeps the visitor engrossed while ushering him into what looks like a hand scroll of landscape painting. As the scenery changes with the shift of the visitor's footsteps, he is led by the corridor for a rambling of the royal garden and summering palace of yore without realizing it. The gardens and buildings inside a scenic resort like the Summer Palace, indeed, made an ideal dwelling place for the Qing monarchs away from the Forbidden City.
The Garden of Harmonious Charms is nestled alone at the eastern foot of the Longevity Hill. In it, runoffs converge in a pond encircled by pavilions and verandahs, a tiny bridge is kept so close to the pond's surface that it is perceptibly mistaken for a pontoon, and a roofed walkway winds its way to vistas designed for in-situ viewing in every corner. As a small garden standing on its own inside of a large one, the Garden of Harmonious Charms is a replica of the Solace-Imbued Garden in Wuxi, another mountain-foot garden that, too, has a pool to collect rainwater and exterior views to borrow from.
Water twists and turns in line with embankments and is segmented by dykes. In the Summer Palace, water is divided up by long courseways to bring forth varied scenery, whereas bridges are designed so beautifully that every one of them is picturesque enough to be patterned after in painting. Sparkling, dustless and gentle is the Jade Belt Bridge, and the Seventeen-Arch Bridge appears like a rainbow descending upon water. When the hills shimmer in ethereally springtime mist, and when lake-side fresh willow trigs start stroking the water, the views presented to those boating on the Kunming Lake are categorically different from what they see ashore, whereas the fact that the Western Hills are always in the picture indicates how thoroughly the view-borrowing technique is executed in the Summer Palace.