ON GARDENS 3
Written in May 1980 in a guesthouse in Zhenjiang
Having finished the first two instalments of this discourse on the Chinese garden, I found I was so sentimentally attached to this field of endeavour that I could not call it quits any time soon. Sitting by the window of my studio on a sunny day, I set pen to paper once again to go on with this long and jumbled presentation in hopes to seek counsel and correction. Hence the title of this instalment, "On Gardens 3."
Tao Yuanming (c. 365-427), active during the interregnum between the Eastern Jin (317-420) and the Song (420-479) of the Southern Dynasties (420-589), writes in his essay "The Peach Blossom Spring":
There are no other species of trees [but peaches];
Fresh and lovely are aromatic grass and flowers.
These lines on the planting of flowers and trees in a scenic resort have become one of two unrivalled poetic gems along with his following lines,
Picking chrysanthemums by East Fence,
I gaze pensively on the south mountains.
The former line indicates that peach trees ought to be planted in groves and watched at a distance, so that their thick clusters of flowers, set daintily against greensward, arrest the eye spontaneously with the vista thus created. The latter line says nothing of the craft of gardens, but its implication on "view borrowing" is self-evident.
Watching mountains is like flipping over the pages of an album of paintings, which brings one view after another into focus; touring a mountain is like unfolding a long hand scroll of painting, which shows the continuity of a scenic scene. Sights for in-situ or in-motion viewing conjure up different aesthetic appeals. The point is that the observer "I" is always seen in the picture like in the following lines,
Alluring is the green mountain that I see;
I hope it'll stay this way when it sees me.
Where do such appeals stem from? From the poetic colophon on a painting or an inscription dedicated to a scenic sight. A painting without a colophon is uncouth; a view lacking a stone inscription (an inscribed board, or a couplet for that matter) looks perplexing. Literature and art are, indeed, inseparable. In his verse "Homeward Bound I Go!" Tao Yuanming portrays motion and sound beyond a view:
Purposeless, clouds idle away from mountain recess;
Tired of travels, it's time to go home the bird knows.
Upon arriving at the Slender West Lake in Yangzhou for a short visit one day, I got off the boat and went ashore to stop at the Moon Platform on the Lesser Golden Hill. While there, I went in-motion viewing by sauntering about to marvel at the moon, and did some in-situ viewing when I paused to get a personal touch with the sight. All the while the aroma of orchids kept wafting in and the shadows of bamboos quivered, the birds chirped to echo the creaking oars, and the setting sun tossed slanting rays on the windows. In this interplay of aroma, shadow, light and sound, one discovers motion through stillness, and finds stillness ensconced in motion. The law of dialectics is obviously at work in this typical example of garden-making.
When a garden is being made, scenery is created intentionally or happened upon unintentionally. This is particularly the case with private gardens, where the designer often feels helpless with the lack of space. However, such helplessness is oftentimes rescued with a desperate stroke that saves the entire garden. At the corner of the "Tiny Lodge at Floral Wharf" in the Lingering Garden, a long, narrow trail is segmented by a brick gate in a wall so that the visitor is enticed to explore how deep this otherwise teeny-weeny courtyard can be.
Things present cannot prove things past, nor can things foreign bear out things Chinese. The present and the past have their respective systems, and so have China and other nations. Therefore, no one is allowed to resurrect a ghost in someone else's corpse. It is equally absurd to impose one's opinion upon an ancient architect without knowing his philosophy and the functions of the buildings he designed. Take, for example, the shortcut passageway along the eastern wall of the Master-of-Fishnets Garden in Suzhou. Serving the same purpose as the "avoidance alleyway" in a mansion to keep women folk and servants off the male guests and masters of an estate, this passageway is set in striking contrast to a corridor straying up a mountain opposite it. Indeed,
No road is more convenient than a shortcut, but only a circuitous trail can ensure a wonderfest for the visitor.
What I am driving at here is that, to make convincing comments on a garden, one must delve into its history and, more than anything else, become well acquainted with the lifestyle of its day. Every garden provides an integral sightseeing route that cannot be put upside down. This is like a piece of writing that must have a beginning, development, transition and a conclusion, or you may also compare it to a hand scroll of painting that must have a frontispiece at the right side, the painting itself in the middle, and a margin at the left side for colophons. Today, however, the Humble Administrator's Garden has shifted its entrance to a side gate in its eastern section, and the Master-of-Fishnets Garden is entered from the back door of its northern part—both arrangements fly in the face of common sense and bring to mind the fun-spoiling things listed in Yishan's Records of Miscellaneous Things by Li Shangyin (813-858)1:
Shooing passers-by away in a pine forest; shedding tears while watching flowers; laying out a mat on mosses and lichens; sunning one's underwear on a flowering tree's branch; carrying heavy luggage on a springtime pleasure trip; tethering a horse to a stalagmite; holding a torch under the moon; building a storied house behind a mountain; growing vegetables in an orchard; and breeding poultry under a flower trellis.
To this list I would add one more item, that is, "Opening a back door to let in visitors." I wonder what our garden managers will think of it. There is a saying in Suzhou that the city's four renowned gardens—the Dark Blue Waves Pavilion, the Lion's Grove, the Humble Administrator's Garden, and the Lingering Garden—belong respectively to the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties. The fact is, however, the Lingering Garden and the Humble Administrator's Garden were both built in the Ming and rebuilt in the Qing, which makes people wonder why each of them should be dated back to a different dynasty. In my opinion, they would not have become Suzhou's "Big Four" without different personalities: the Masterof-Fishnets Garden is made for in-situ viewing and the Humble Administrator's Garden for in-motion viewing, while the Dark Blue Waves Pavilion is known for its ancient looks and the Lingering Garden for its sumptuous decoration. In this way, visitors can easily know what the "Big Four" really stand for.
Garden-making is comparable to creative writing that allows for a wealth of changes. Can anyone come up with a good composition who, instead of seeking forcefulness of articulation and soundness of conception, depends solely on play of words? The key to literature lies in style and momentum, which can be masculinely virile or femininely gentle. Can landscape gardening stay different? Jumbled logic and incoherence never yield a fluent and coherent piece of writing. A garden-maker bent on making a name for himself with a single pavilion or verandah goes nowhere, because structures like these, though much extolled today as dainty garden-making "sketches," can hardly reflect the essence of Chinese culture, let alone foster a riveting aura in a garden to be laid out.
Buildings in the south are represented by the hut that is mostly open, and those in the north are typified by the cabin that is mostly closed, with the former originating from bird nests and the latter from animal dens. That is why in the south open structures are supplemented with luxuriant trees and slender bamboos, a combination that was exactly the embryo of south China's gardens. Roominess and airiness are as essential to gardens as they are to buildings. This is where northern gardens compare unfavorably with their southern and central China counterparts, because northern buildings are commended mostly for their profusion of doors and windows, as seclusion gets in the way of ventilation and blocks the view. As to dwelling houses, they must evince an endearing human touch, which is best illustrated in this remark of Tao Yuanming:
Birds are lucky having nests to lay back on.
In my case, I do have a home I can dote on.
Small gardens, like a tiny room with one or two famous paintings hanging in it, are suitable for in-situ viewing. Large gardens, evocative of a big art gallery, are appropriate for in-motion viewing. The former should be implicit and thought-provoking; the latter would look insipid and bland if they lack highlight scenery. A garden's function changes with the times, so does the creation of scenic attractions.
The way gardens are named is changing as well. It worked in pre-1949 years to call every garden "park," so that they could be told apart from private gardens, but this practice seems questionable nowadays. I once questioned the wisdom of turning every garden into a "park." Today, the city of Nantong in Jiangsu province has renamed its Wolf Hill Park "Northern Foothill Garden," Suzhou has renamed its East City Park "East Garden," and Kaifeng's Bianjing Park has become "Bianyuan Garden"—it seems the three cities have become national trendsetters in this regard. Different categories of gardens, such as city gardens, suburban gardens, flatland gardens and piedmont gardens, differ from one another in environment and topography, and therefore should not be designed identically.
The trouble with refurbishing gardens handed down by our forebears is that, in most cases, we are not clear about their original conceptions. I suggest such gardens be handled in two ways, that is, either to restore them or to change them. Before a famous garden is restored, relevant literature and pictures must be canvassed; otherwise, we run the risk of changing it arbitrarily. This is like mounting an old painting, in which a missing brush stroke must be restored to its original style and coloration, for only thus can the integrity of the painting stay intact. If we employ the artificial-mountain construction expertise of Ge Yuliang (1764-1830) to refurbish a rockery of the Ming (1368-1644), it is like grafting the orthodox brushwork techniques of the Four Wangs of the early Qing2 onto Shitao's landscape painting of an untrammeled style—the work will be robbed of its originality. By damaging such a cultural artefact, we are doing our ancestors a monstrous disservice. If a garden has fallen into total decay but what remains of its artificial mountains and waters can still be used, I see nothing wrong to rebuild it with a modern design. This is what I mean by "changing a garden."
The advent of potted plants and miniature landscapes in our country was closely related to architecture. In ancient times, dwellings lacked space and sunshine for they were mostly a combination of courtyards and atriums encircled by a wall or a storied walkway for rain-collecting and ventilating purposes. Residents in the Jiangnan area, which belonged to the fiefdom of Wu during the late Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC), are in the habit of arranging small rocks and plants into miniature landscapes to decorate their dwellings. For the potted plants or miniature landscapes to be enjoyable, the species chosen should be able to live on the sunshine and warmth that were allowed only briefly in such dwellings. The philosophy behind the potted plants is best portrayed in the poem of Su Shi (1037-1101),
Beyond a tiny window the drizzle off and on goes,
Yet even more enticing are the dimmed vistas.
Though the empty yard sunshine lacks,
Its grasses and trees still look lustrous.
All delightful things are probably born of life's everyday needs, for when one comes to a dead end, he thinks of changing his course, and only through such a change can he find his way out. This is what is meant by "survival of the fittest." Today, however, big and spacious gardens often display potted plants by the hundred, or transplant trees three meters tall in huge pots—they are going big for unwarranted reasons. Subject to excess evaporation resulting from high wind and the scorching sun, these miniature landscapes, made in violation of the principles for potted plants, have little chance of survival.
A sumptuous garden can hardly look simple and delicate, and a garden with subdued elegance can hardly achieve depth. Simplicity saves a garden from vulgarity, and depth makes up for the lack of taste. A few simple brush strokes can be pregnant with meaning, and a mere sketch can ooze heroic verve. As Yan Shu (991-1055)3 puts it,
The moonlight floods a yard full of pear flowers;
A breeze wafts over a pond amid willow catkins.
A brilliant piece of art tends to look colorful without vulgarity and become tasteful in simplicity. A garden belonging to royalty is likely to look too elaborate whereas a private garden, for the owner's limited resources, tends to be humble and shabby. The best way to avoid going too far or falling too short is to go fifty-fifty between the two extremes. To part with what one loves one must endure the pain, and to make up for what is lacking one must not be stingy. In painting, every brush stroke counts, so that one must think it over before committing brush to paper. Only thus can a young lady's painting be free from pretentious femininity; only thus can a Buddhist or Taoist painting shed chilliness and desolation. Nevertheless, fine examples are few and far between nowadays. Forcefulness ought to be modulated with grace while gracefulness ought to look forceful. An actor must not appear humble and pedantic when playing an inexperienced young scholar's role, and he must look upright and magnanimous when acting in the role of a general or a marshal, but in either case excellence is hard to come by. The craft of gardens is intimately associated with other branches of art. That is why I say that the gardens of the Ming, their differences in form notwithstanding, were born of the same ideas and sentiments as the literature, art and theater of their day.
Only those who appreciate gardens can craft gardens; only those who aim high can muster their abilities to measure up to it. A man who cannot tell tastes apart can never come up with a cookbook. In the same token, those in charge of making gardens ought to be a cut above field workers in education and cultural endowment. Ji Cheng (1582-c. 1642) says,
Thirty percent of the success of a garden created is attributed to the builder, and seventy percent of it is owed to its designer.
This old saying is in no way meant to belittle field workers, for it is meant merely to emphasize the importance of garden designers. The reason why the saying has become an excuse to put Ji Cheng under fire today is because those who read his The Craft of Gardens, the world's first ever monograph dedicated to landscaping and garden architecture, don't really understand an iota of it. To impose a political hat on academic discussion—this trend should never be made to last!
Truth becomes falsehood when falsehood usurps truth; real becomes surreal where surreal becomes real. In the Grand View Garden portrayed in A Dream of Red Mansions, there is truth in falsehood and falsehood in truth, and there are things that the author sees with his own eyes as well as things that he fabricates. This is why readers find the novel intriguing. In the same token, an artificial mountain is fantastic if it looks real, but a real mountain becomes weird if it looks unreal. A real person may look like a wax figure, and a wax figure may look real, herein lies the trick. The key to successful garden-making lies in grasping its quintessence, but it is really disappointing that quite a few people have dedicated their careers to this craft but never learned how to grasp it! It is, indeed, challenging to craft a garden. To erect an artificial mountain peak in a garden is an undertaking that conceals illusion in reality—meaning that the designer should approach the rockery with his heart and go further to bring his creation to life by imparting a personality to it.
Conception, which Wang Guowei (1877-1927) puts as "envisioned
setting" in his Poetic Remarks on the Human World, is as pivotal to literature and art as it is to landscape gardening. This term can be interpreted and expressed differently on different subjects, so that there is poetic conception in poetry, lyrical conception in lyrics, and musical conception in music. Poetic conception can be perceived in Chang Jian's4 "An Inscription Dedicated to the Posterior Meditation Chamber of the Cleaved Mountain Temple":
A path leads to a quiet realm of bough and flower,
In whose recess is hidden a meditation chamber.
Lyrical conception can be perceived in Yan Jidao's "Riverside Narcissus":
Inebriated, I dreamed of a shut-up terraced tower,
Sobering up, I saw curtains hanging a lot lower.
And musical conception can be perceived in "Autumn Reverie" by the master playwright Ma Zhiyuan (c. 1250-c. 1324)5:
Dry vines, crows nesting in old tree at sunset;
A small bridge on a rivulet rippling by a hut.
Conception changes with the setting, and the same happens to garden-making as well. A garden's poetic sentiment and pictorial imagination find expression in actual scenes and sights known collectively as "envisioned setting."
Imagined aura fades in a vista too revealing;
It enhances if such vista is concealed subtly.
Water ought to be brought in along the lie of land;
Never should pine trees be transplanted in rows.
Where there's kiosk or terrace there is water;
Thou' houses are many, hills can't be blocked.
The number of lofts and decks may be limited,
Their fascinations can be limitless;
There may be just a single brook,
It can still tangle and entangle by itself.
These quotations were written by our forebears while sight-seeing or appreciating a particular painting, but all the conceptions implied in them are compatible to garden-making. If a garden can look like what one of these quotes describes, then it speaks volumes for the aura its creator has conceived for it.
In garden-making the relationship between mountain and water cannot be severed, nor can they be handled separately or in stereotyped ways, because they supplement each other and can be put together in many a combination. A waterless mountain can look like having a creek or pool at its foot, and a rock-less body of water can have rocks implied in it—in both scenarios mountain and water are mutually containing in a natural high-and-low relationship that, however, can be achieved only with a well-conceived plan. This is exactly the case with the vistas in front of the Gen'an's Parlor in Gu Wenbin's estate at Suzhou's Iron Bottle Lane.
Artificial mountains in Jiangnan gardens are often accentuated with a white-washed wall that serves as a "sketch pad" on which a compact assembly of steep rockeries is "sketched." Without such a wall, an artificial mountain would look like a pell-mell of rocks. This is why well-structured artificial mountains are such a rarity in big gardens built nowadays. The mountain and water brought into a garden are like the bone and flesh of a living creature or the brush and ink in a Chinese painting. Only with both "bone" and "flesh" and both brush and ink can a painting or artificial mountain come to life, which is why the paintings of the Qing-dynasty master Shitao can stay peerless through the ages. Zheng Xie was a professional calligrapher, but his paintings, like a garden constructed by an engineer rather than a garden crafter, fall short of lasting appeal because, owing to his stress on brushwork and neglect of nuance in ink application, his paintings have plenty of bones but little flesh.
In a scenic resort or garden, buildings should be positioned in light of the terrain or topography, but the main building should always face one direction squarely and extend at right angles. The reasons are obvious, but they are lost on quite a few unobservant scholars. The temples up the Golden Hill, the Jiao's Mountain, and the Unassailable Mountain South of the Yangtze in Zhenjiang differ in layout and style. The Golden Hill is encircled by temple buildings connected up and down the slopes by a three-dimensional road system; the Jiao's Mountain encircles all the temple buildings arranged in several courtyards in its embrace; and the Unassailable Mountain South of the Yangtze is crowned with a temple that overlooks its surroundings. All the three mountains rise over the same river, the Yangtze, but they look bewitching in different ways. The scenic beauty of the Golden Hill is best enjoyed at a distance; that of the Jiao's Mountain, by keeping the eyesight parallel to the ground; and that of the Unassailable Mountain South of the Yangtze, by looking down from its top. The designers of this trio kept their respective observational vintage points in mind when they took great pains on the layout of buildings until perfection was achieved; sublime, indeed, are both their knowledge and expertise.
A mountain need not be tall to look lofty; it is its topographical gradation that matters. A body of water need not be deep; it is its twists and turns that count. The beauty of a towering mountain lies in the scenes and sights deeply seated in it. The reason why the Yushan Mountain of Changshu, the Huishan Mountain of Wuxi, the Shangfang Mountain of Suzhou, and the mountains on the southern outskirts of Zhenjiang can become the apples in tourists' eyes in the Jiangnan area is because they are richly imbued with these features. Mount Tai leads the Five Holy Mountains because it has both mountains and waters. Despite its beautiful peaks, Mount Huangshan is handicapped by its lack of dashing cascades; it would not have become so renowned without its ocean of misty clouds that flow and ebb constantly in magical ways.
In a scenic resort, roads should be zigzagging rather than straight, and narrow trails ought to outnumber main roads, so that the scenery can be concealed bewitchingly in nooks and crannies. In this way visitors are well scattered and have plenty of views to explore and marvel at, gurgling springs to listen to and rockeries to hang about, and there would be enough settings to rhapsodize or contemplate on. Just as the saying goes, "Mountaineers dread mountains lacking depth; forest lovers dread woods falling short of density." In ancient times, stone stairs were built for mountain climbers to stop for respites and look around every now and then, an arrangement that accords with the physique of us Homo erectus. Today, however, quite a few mountain stairways have been changed into sloping roads that imperil the wayfarers and violate the law governing mountaineering. Worse, some mountain trails have been converted into highways that ruin the natural gullies and peaks and enshroud mountains in choking traffic dust, while the tourists, instead of having a good time sightseeing, are compelled to scramble with automobiles for the right of the road. In old days, the Twilight Mist Cave at the West Lake could only be reached by a few mountain tracks, but people today can virtually "descend" on it directly by automobiles; thus an otherwise fun-filled outing into the mountains is reduced to what looks like a flatland journey to the Peak Flown In from Afar at the Soul's Retreat Temple. You may applaud the convenience the highway brings to the journey, but where on earth are the spectacular morning mist and sunset glow that are part and parcel of the fun?
I learned that bus routes are being pencilled out for all the mountain resorts around the West Lake to cater to those who want to see it all on a single-day tour. I personally doubt the wisdom of such a plan, for once it comes under way, the size of the whole scenic zone will start shrinking with each passing day, while the principle that sight-seeing routes ought to be lengthened is violated. Being a tourist differs in purpose from being a hasty wayfarer. Sightseeing takes time, whereas traveling stresses speediness, but today these two things seem to have been put upside down. A highway spiralling up a solitary mountain makes it difficult to see fabulous sights in its deep recesses; like a snake coiling around someone's neck, such a road also dismembers the mountain and robs it of its lush verdure and breathtaking loftiness. The merits or demerits of it are evidenced by the roads already built on the Jade Emperor Mountain at the West Lake and the Drum Mountain of Fuzhou, but in the latter case, the ugliness of the road is fortunately covered up by multiple layers of mountain slopes. Absolute discretion ought to be applied before roads are paved in famous mountains because their legendary scenery can disappear forever once the demolition commences, even though the good or ill wrought by our garden creators can only be judged by future generations. It is imperative that old paths leading into mountains be properly preserved, at least for the sake of those willing to make unhurried journeys up there. Fountainheads are a mountain's eyes, but the bad news is that in a number of celebrated scenic resorts, such "eyes" have been damaged beyond repair. The Spouting Spring in Jinan, Shandong province, has lost its musical gurgles, and the Nine Creeks Gully in the mountains west of the West Lake are drying out—such happenings can on no account be overlooked. Destroying natural veins when reclaiming mountains, and digging wells to draw water from fountainheads—engineering projects undertaken in contradiction to landscaping plans can only jeopardize local interests and dismay landscape gardeners. Storied buildings, those in gardens in particular, should be roomy and airy, so that, as the poem goes,
Morn, painted beams "fly" over south bank into stratus;
Dusk, a pearled veil unfurls raindrops from west peaks.
Pine trees ought to be well spaced; their graceful shapes can shine forth only if they have fewer boughs and leaves. Only with both sturdiness and grace can a tree look impressive. Such unity of opposites always brings good effects. Burgeoning willows must have ancient-looking trunks, and bamboo groves must show off their tips with tender leaves. However, on the Memorial Causeway of Bai Juyi on the West Lake, all the old willows have been replaced with new saplings, and the place is robbed of its classical spectacle as a result. How can government reshuffling methods be applied to garden management?
Scenic resorts today are invariably equipped with many tea houses and toilets. Toilets should be concealed for obvious reasons but in our gardens, virtually all of them are ornamented with see-through lattice windows that are intended to evoke "dainty scenic sketches." But in reality they are not. I think perhaps it is my fault to publicize such windows in my 1953 book Lattice Windows, in which I wrote this doggerel:
I cry unfair for lattice windows misplaced,
To grace toilets all of them are being forced.
Lattice windows are designed to "divulge" views. Are there any views that a toilet is supposed to "divulge"? I remember seeing a newly built toilet whose walls were bristled with lattice windows, with a stone erected to its left inscribed with the words, "Fragrant Spring," while the inscription on another stone to its right says, "Flying Dragons and Dancing Phoenixes." People cannot but laugh out loud upon seeing them.
Tea houses, in my opinion, are suitable for sizeable scenic resorts, so that visitors can come to quench their thirst, but they are unnecessary in small scenic spots like the Xiling Seal Engravers Society at the West Lake and the Master-of-Fishnets Garden in Suzhou, which do not have enough space to spare for such facilities in the first place. The bad news is that most tea houses built in large scenic resorts look like a hotel or restaurant—seldom have I seen an appropriate one among them. The rub here is that what is primary and what is secondary are confounded, and that the incidental is taken for the fundamental. It seems commercialism is taking over our scenic resorts and gardens, with sightseeing tours being converted into shopping tours. Thus a venerated Buddhist temple becomes the venue of a temple fair, and wherever there is a famous garden there is a market. Indeed,
Now that the East Fence has become a fair,
Isn't it a shame for many a yellow aster?
Following this line of logic, one may ask, should the Chamber of Gardens be renamed Chamber of Commerce? It is, indeed, a typical case of dereliction of duty on the part of our garden administrators.
Among artificial-mountain builders in central Zhejiang province, technicality overweighs artistry, and cave construction becomes their forte, with the result that the mountains they have built often stand in isolation. The best artificial mountains in Hangzhou are found in the Hu's Estate at Shoe-shaped Ingot Street, the Wu's Estate at School Official Lane, and the Literary Waves Belvedere at the Gushan Mountain for the single reason that all of them are supplemented with bodies of water. A new type of artificial mountains emerged in more recent years, which were built on level ground, with a grotto inside of them and a terrace at the top. Being the crudest of all artificial mountains, they were invented by artisans of Dongyang, Zhejiang province, who were by no means experts in this field but bricklayers or, in the words of folks in Hangzhou, "sewer builders" out to hoodwink laymen by palming off fakery for the real thing. By the Republican years (1912-1949) the grottos had been replaced with tiny hills topped with a flower deck under the pretext that "caves are, in most cases, ill omens."
In ancient times, artificial mountain crafters belonged geographically to the Suzhou, Nanjing, Yangzhou, Jinhua and Shanghai schools, with the Shanghai school being a hybrid of the Nanjing and Suzhou schools. After the Southern Song, the best known artificial mountain experts, hailed from Wuxing, where they were referred to as "mountain smiths," and from Suzhou, locally known as "garden men." They were called "mountain craftsmen" in central Zhejiang province, "stone masons" in Yangzhou, and "mountain artisans" in Shanghai, the former Songjiang prefecture. The "Stone Masons Zhang and Son"—Zhang Lian (1587-1673) and his son Zhang Ran (fl. 17th century) from Songjiang—were so popular among the rich and powerful for their unrivalled expertise that they were eventually summoned to Peking, where their business was handed down to family members collectively known as "Mountain-making Zhangs."
To sum up, the artificial mountains built in the Lake Tai basin are a school of their own. Those in Nanjing and Yangzhou became the "North Jiangsu School," and their counterparts in east Zhejiang belonged in another school. As was the case with any profession or trade, there were always skilled and less skilled artificial mountain builders. The less skilled knew no more than rocks and compiling skills per se, and it was beyond them to examine and select suitable rocks, let alone stone textures and veins. What they were interested in was to "finish a grotto in five days and an artificial mountain in ten days." They went about their business like a children's game, that is, copying and downsizing real mountains without realizing that building a good artificial mountain is nothing short of an art.
To tell whether an artificial mountain is original or a rehashed one, the foot of the mountain and the bottom of its grotto should be examined carefully, because both are the least susceptible to damage and therefore easy to tell if they were rebuilt or rehashed. Close examination of mortar joints, seams and stone veins and texture always yields tell-tale evidence because the seams between rocks can be old or new, the glues or mortar used to put the rocks together come of different formulas, and the patina on stones and the marks of axing and chiselling can be easily discerned. When refurbishing the Lingering Garden in Suzhou during the Jiaqing reign (1796-1820) of the Qing, the then owner, Liu Shu (1759-1816), had a Lake Tai stone fixed on a yellow stone rockery, and the difference is still there for all to see. Old artificial mountains were mostly built by putting many mountain rocks together in compact combinations, and wedges and mortar were applied profusely on the joints to keep the whole thing in balance. Once some of the rocks are moved or torn down, it would be difficult to leave such an artificial mountain's old appearance intact. A well-built artificial mountain must look natural through clever rockwork; its lines should be arranged like tactful brush strokes in a painting, and the space should be "contracted" skilfully by taking individual parts and the whole scene into full account—only by repeatedly weighing over all these factors can a satisfactory work be hammered out.
People are extolling the Gratification Garden in Shanghai lately, but they are often reticent about a structure that the garden used to be a part of—the Pan's Mansion across a lane to the east on Phoenix Tree Road at Anren Street, known as Anren Cove in old times. As Ye
Mengzhu (1623-?)6 says in A Compendium on Living in the World,
This is the largest estate in Shanghai. With its front gate opening onto an engraved screen wall, it looks tall and majestic. With row upon row of buildings connected by a double-floor roofed walkway, it is nearly comparable to a prince's vermillion mansion. Its posterior building is built entirely of Phoebe nanmu, and all the floors upstairs are paved with bricks so that they feel like level ground. Its structures are gilded or painted red and white, and carved in a most elaborate fashion.
This phenomenal complex stood testimony to the impressive scale of the Gratification Garden in its heyday. The pity is that nothing has been left of it today.
In A Compendium of Fragrant Cup Studio (Book Twelve), the early-Qing painter Yun Ge (1633-1690)7 puts it this way,
In the eighth month of a ren-xu year [1682], I was lodged as a guest in the Humble Administrator's Garden at Wumen [in Suzhou]. Long lines of trees were sodden with refreshing autumn rain when I sat, alone, in the Southern Verandah, and saw an artificial mountain rising high and steep above a pool of clear water from a transverse plateau on the other side of a rippling brook. Following a footpath that winds its way up the mountain, I spotted a grove of scholar trees, tamarisks, willows, junipers and cypresses whose tangled branches reached out into the skies, whereas the lotuses around the pond's embankment sported crimson flowers and emerald leaves. Looking down at the pool, I could count the fish swimming in the limpid water, which enabled me to indulge a little bit in Zhuangzi's fun of strolling along the Hao and Pu rivers.8 Departing from the Southern Verandah, I sauntered past the Bright Snow Pavilion, crossed the Red Bridge, and took a rockeryflanked road that conducted me northward across the transverse plateau to the artificial mountain, where a dyke led me to a small knoll hidden under the rich foliage of trees. There, the Pure Luster Loft sat on the pond opposite the roofed walkway on the other side of the brook, which offered the best vista on the premises.
The highlight of the Humble Administrator's Garden is the aforementioned Southern Verandah, known as the Leaning-on-Jade Verandah today. The Bright Snow Pavilion seems to be the Pavilion of Lotus-Scented Breeze from Four Sides, and the Red Bridge should be the Zigzagging Bridge. Judging from its location, the Pure Luster Loft should be the Mountain-in-View Loft. Yun Ge's description of the roofed walkway beyond the creek basically tallies with the view of the Willow-Shaded Winding Walkway of today. Yun Ge was actually writing about what he personally saw in this renowned garden from a painter's point of view. If those engaged in garden restoration can gain from his descriptions some insight into the garden's conception, they must belong in the erudite category. "How many people can really catch this song?" in the words of the famed monk-painter Guanxiu (823-912)9, but what can we do about it! It is hard to preserve a garden, and even harder to repair it. If you are repairing a garden, you have got to pull off a surprise. I would like to conclude this essay by reiterating the importance of garden history research. Many years ago, the late Ye Gongchuo (1881-1968) wrote me a couplet that says,
Famous Gardens of Luoyang, Painted Pleasure
Boats of Yangzhou;
Old Tales of Wulin [Hangzhou], Archives of
the Imperial Capital.
In it he lists, by way of exhorting me, the titles of four books on gardens and places of historical interest. Reviewing this couplet again today, I have the feeling that what I have written down in this essay was probably not a waste of time.