POETRY, PROSE AND CRAFT OF GARDENS
Tongji University Journal, Issue No. 4, 1979
The classical Chinese garden is known as "literatus garden" for its rich stock of scholastic garden-making heritage. The Fragrant Hill Hotel, built two year ago in the garden of the same name in suburban Beijing's Western Hills, is a brainchild of the celebrated American Chinese architect Ieoh Ming Pei (1917- ). It is acclaimed as an "elegant building of scholastic quality" because in it, architecture meshes perfectly with the garden's scenery. In my opinion, it is "elegant, clean, spic and span, tidy, and refreshing to a turn." Both descriptions are of the same meaning, pointing to the fact that no talk about the Chinese garden is complete without classic Chinese poetry and prose. But how about painting? The Chinese painting we see today stems from the Southern Song (1127-1279) literatus painting, a synthesis in which "there is painting in poetry, and poetry in painting." Poetry and prose, therefore, are at the root of Chinese painting as well. Herein lies the cardinal principle governing the Chinese craft of gardens.
After the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589), scholar-officials grew more and more infatuated with landscape as they sought to shun the clamour of the troubling world by abandoning themselves to mountains and waters and investing their sentiments in picturesque scenes and sights. They took action, and coupled it with poetry and prose. Gardens emerged in time to meet the demand, which evolved into a tradition during the Sui-Tang period (581-907) that was to be handed down through the Song and the Yuan to the Ming and the Qing. Bai Juyi (772-846) built a thatched hut for himself on Mount Lushan, and his "Notes on the Thatched Hut on Mount Lushan" is still read and reread to this day. Li Gefei's A Record of the Celebrated Gardens of Luoyang is as elegantly worded as the gardens under his writing brush are ornately adorned. Indeed, gardens are conceived in literature, and their names are spread through literature as well. In this mutually supplementary relationship, gardens are tangible embodiments of literature, and literature gives tangible expression to gardens—in a sense, the Chinese garden and literature share the one and same identity.
The merit or demerit of a garden depends on its owner's cultural attainment. Many celebrated gardens across the land were owned by literati-painters, and naturally the conceptions of such gardens are originated in verse and prose. Apart from a garden's owner, his hangers-on, including men of letters, painters, musicians and rockery crafters, offered their fair share of counsel and designs. When a garden was completed, a coterie of celebrities and friends would gather in drinking parties to compose poetry and comment on the new garden's strengths and weaknesses, after which the garden would go through revisions and reconstructions accordingly. It took four rounds of revisions for Zhang Lian (1587-1673) to complete the Garden of Suburban Delights he was making for the renowned painter Wang Shimin (1592-1680), an example which shows a celebrated garden is not completed at one stretch. Such a practice was even more pronounced in the late Ming (1368-1644). I once argued that poetry and prose, calligraphy and painting, and traditional opera are different forms of the same thoughts or feelings. But what is the mainstream of such thoughts or feelings? It is the thoughts or feelings shared by literati-officials. The gardens made by literati-officials, most of whom were proficient in poetry and prose and could paint and sing, were inevitably rooted in their shared ideals or feelings, with elegance as the chief mode of expression. Full of allusions to poetry and prose, their gardens achieve oneness with literature by means of inscribed boards and vertical couplets, as well as records and colophons on classical paintings. That is why whenever a visitor steps into such a garden, he feels as if he were visiting the realms of poetry and painting. If he is highly attained in literature, he may improvise a poem on the spot; if he is a painter, he may depict the garden's scenery with freewheeling brush strokes in the late Ming tradition. All this I believe has happened to every educated visitor to such a garden.
The Peony Pavilion composed by the great romantic playwright Tang Xianzu (1550-1616)1 is not just opera—it is literature on gardens, too, as well as a manual on how to appreciate the spiritual essence of the Chinese garden. In the scene "The Interrupted Dream," for example:
Streaking the dawn, close-curled at dusk, rosy clouds frame emerald pavilion; fine threads of rain, petals borne on breeze, gilded pleasure boats in waves of mist…. The green hillside bleeds with the cuckoo's tears of red azalea; shreds of mist lazy as wine fumes thread the sweetbriar.
The effect of empathy is at its best in these breath-taking lines, which stirs up the desire for sightseeing in a subtle and skilful way. A garden invariably gives expression to the emotion man has invested in it. Literature is born of feelings, so is the classical Chinese garden.
Qian Yong (1759-1844) says in his A Collection of Anecdotes in the Lü Garden,
Laying out a garden is like composing a piece of poetry or prose. Twists and turns should be made sagaciously, beginnings should be echoed in endings, and superfluous padding and complexity are most dreaded. Only thus can the final results be deemed good.
This passage, indeed, hits the nail on the head. It means that making a garden is no different from writing a composition. From poetry or prose one derives inspirations for garden design, whereas a garden can set a visitor in the mood to compose verse or prose. Both creative writing and garden-making call for conceptions. Therefore, to lay out a garden is to conceive it in the first place.
Expression must be given to any envisioned setting, which is foremost in Chinese aesthetics. The same envisioned setting can be expressed in different artistic ways. Poetry, lyrics, Yuan dramas, paintings and music have their respective settings, whereas an adroit garden-maker recreates such a setting through rich and varied combinations of rocks, water, flowers, trees, ponds, halls, pavilions and terraces, until his garden culminates in poetic passion and picturesque enchantment. When one finds himself in such a setting, he would feel like traversing the realms of poetry and painting. The reason why the Chinese garden, "though man-made, looks like a god-send," can become a school in its own right is precisely because it is born of inspirations from poetry and prose.
Spatiality and spirituality are stressed in poetry and prose, whereas in landscape gardening, padding is most dreaded. Thus,
Rain drops dry up overnight in the first sun rays; round lotus leaves rise one after another over a limpid water surface in the wind.
This suggestive description of a garden scene, being sublimely spatial and spiritual, pertains to literature as well. The Chinese garden scenery can stir up unbounded passion that, in its turn, conjures up equally unbounded scenery, so much so that the scholar who comes to drink and versify in it is so bewitched that the garden's scenery and the passion inspired by it are totally compounded in his heart. In this way of landscape gardening, the principle of enmeshing scenery with human passion is followed. As the Carving a Dragon at the Core of Literature calls for "making compositions out of passion," I would like to suggest, "Let scenery be wrought out of passion." Passion yields literature, so can it yield scenery, for literature and scenery stem from the same root.
No gardens born of poetry- or prose-induced passion can dispense with a study or studio on their premises, for they are actually venues where people go to read books, recite poems, or practice painting and calligraphy. This is why there is the Verandah for Seeing Pines and Reading Paintings in the Master-of-Fishnets Garden, the Studio to Get "Rope" and Draw "Water" from "Ancient Well"2 in the Lingering Garden, and the Green Vine Studio in Shaoxing. The purposes of these studios are implied in their names, but there are also unnamed ones that serve the same purposes. Therefore, literary and drinking gatherings of men of letters became special forms of garden visits. Such gatherings that happened in Beijing's Garden to Amuse Myself3 and Nanjing's Accommodation Garden4 during the Qing are still the talk of the town today for their famous poems and essays, not to mention the countless literary works improvised by garden visitors. In the Accommodation Garden there is a poetry corridor where poems contributed by visitors are engraved on walls.
Reading late-Ming vignettes makes one feel like roaming a garden. Many of them are no less than accounts on the craft of gardens, as their authors were often owners of famous gardens or participants in landscape gardening. This explains why the literati gardens were most developed and artistically attained and why famous garden-makers could emerge one after another from the mid-Ming to the early Qing. Ji Cheng's The Craft of Gardens summarizes the theory and practice of landscape gardening during this period, but, with a text elegantly written and teeming with literary parallelisms and antitheses, it does not sound merely like an artisan's work manual. I suspect it had been polished by some scholars. One Man's Account ("Furniture and Curios") also makes elegant and graceful reading because its author, Li Yu (1611-1680), was himself a celebrated writer and dramatist, not to mention Wen Zhenheng (1585-1645) and his Treatise on Superfluous Things. The Wens made a name for themselves through calligraphy, painting, poetry, prose, and the Herbal Garden in their possession, later known as the Garden of Cultivation5, is still there for all to see in Suzhou. Ancient notes on gardens were often written by men of letters out to describe garden prospects, vent their feelings, and celebrate the rockeries and streams. It is known to all that the inscribed horizontal boards were made precisely to deepen visitors' impressions of the scenes and sights in such a garden.
The Chinese garden cannot do without a music chamber that is often housed in a waterside building, and the Hall of Thirty-Six Pairs of Mandarin Ducks in the Humble Administrator's Garden and the Hat-Ribbon Washing Belvedere in the Master-of-Fishnets Garden are among the legendary ones. When the Peking and Kunqu Opera superstar Yu Zhenfei (1902-1993)6 and his father Yu Zonghai (1847-1930)7 were residing in Zhang Lüqian's8 Additional Garden (the western part of the Humble Administrator's Garden of today) during the Guangxu reign (1875-1908) of the Qing, he often gathered with local Kunqu Opera fans to sing arias or perform selected opera scenes. As drama and opera are pertinent with the garden, I once said that Yu Zhenfei's operatic accomplishments must have a great deal to do with his involvement in literature and traditional gardens. It was probably because of my appreciation of the venerable Zhenfei's accomplishments that he invited me to write a colophon on one of his father's calligraphic works.
A garden must be "tailored" to a particular conception, just like a piece of creative writing must be tailored to a certain literary genre. Because of this affinity between creative writing and garden-making, a garden's literary connection can always be inferred from its scenic settings. This is why I liken the gardens of Suzhou to different styles of Song-dynasty lyrical poems: the Master-of-Fishnets Garden to the refreshing and innovative lyrical verse of Yan Jidao (1030-1106); the Lingering Garden, which wouldn't be the same were its fabulous buildings dismantled, to Wu Wenying's9 lyrical poems; the central part of the Humble Administrator's Garden, whose spatial and spiritual resonance is reminiscent of traceless drifting clouds and wild cranes, to the lyrical poems of Jiang Kui (1154-1221) and the like; the Dark Blue Waves Pavilion to the stylized poetry of the Song; and the Garden of Brotherly Indulgence to the lyrical poems of the Qing. If a landscape garden-maker is not well-founded in poetry and prose, where on earth can he draw inspiration for his job?
On no account should literary genres be muddled up. Be it poems, lyrics, songs or rhapsodies, they should be selected in accord with a writer's passion and mood. Genres are independent of each other. Which feeling or content is proper for which genre is predetermined. Short lyrics should never be lengthened into slow-tempered, drawn-out ballad. By the same token, suburban gardens, city gardens, flat-land gardens, and small foothill gardens each follow their own patterns, so that all the pavilions, terraces, lofts and belvederes should be laid out commensurably. If all this is done accordingly, a garden will not be scorned for being indecent or nondescript, to say the least.
In short, the Chinese garden and literature are so intricately entangled they can hardly be separated. In my opinion, studies of Chinese gardens should begin by tracing them to their roots in Chinese poetry and prose. Only thus can many problems be readily addressed. Profundity is out of the question if one studies gardens just for the gardens' sake. Superficial though my viewpoints are, I present them here anyway and beg for advice and correction from experts at home and abroad.