ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON CLASSICAL CHINESE GARDENS

Journal of Chinese Architecture and Urbanism, 2021

As an important category of the classical garden system of China, private gardens in Beijing have a long and prosperous history. Based on the author's previous studies, this article explores the topic further through textural research of twenty-six important gardens built in Beijing during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, with the aim to extent the former analysis and provide additional information on garden layout and design.

Landscape architecture and art

The image of China perceived by the Europeans in the 17th to 18th century was based on the travelogues of the travellers and missionaries. Despite the fact that the first descriptions did not include any pictures of the world, people and landscapes described, the far exotic country with its history and tangible heritage became very popular. This article deals with Chinese pavilions (pagodas, teahouses) built in the early European landscape gardens before 1750 without any architectural plans, using only sketches based on descriptions and travelogues, since in the first half of the 18th century, no relevant technical guidance was available yet. The structures reviewed started to be used frequently in European gardens and public parks from 1750’s, having an inevitable influence on the garden pavilions built from the second half of the 18th century, and indirectly to the image and character of some influential gardens in European context. Moreover, through their craggy appearance, the C...

This paper discusses experiments in rule-governed, though chance-based approaches to the design of contemporary Chinese-styled gardens inspired, in part, by contemporary minimalist landscape architectural design tactics. The results are compared both with other versions of rule-based understandings of the design of traditional Chinese scholar gardens and with such gardens, themselves. While inherent contradictions in the rule-governed approaches are exposed, their utility is demonstrated through discussion of a first and then a later version of the design of the Gridded Garden.

2011

Aims In these Guidelines, I am trying to make sure that I have covered most of the matters that I think ought to be covered to complete a fairly thorough sketch design for a Chinese-style scholar garden of the type to be found in the Jiangnan cities Nanjing, Shanghai, Suzhou (especially), Shanghai, Yangzhou and Wuxi – given that the reader has first studied the Principles, Ambitions and Models for gardens described in the previous Chapter.

Neither art, nor philosophy, nor politics, gardens have been relegated to the status of a specialised, even minor, subject somewhat apart from the key themes of mainstream historical analysis. This chapter aims to correct that bias and demonstrate that the study of gardens can offer insights into all these areas and even suggest an alternative perspective that challenges the accepted understanding of the Early Modern period. It will question the widely held view that English taste became more sinophobic in the course of the eighteenth century as radical democratic sensibilities emerged. Rather than seeing the English response to Chinese gardens as an alien idea, superficially understood and badly executed, it will be suggested that it is more productive to understand the process as a series of related and interlinked responses to the expansion and greater integration of the global market in both England and China.

Corvinus University of Budapest eBooks, 2012

Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes: An International Quarterly, 19:3-4, 343-363, 1999

Imperial gardens have formed a particularly rich medium for the geographical analysis of interactions of culture and place. Imperial gardens are elite gardens that often were designed according to a political strategy that aims at inspiring the deference, admiration and obedience of an audience of peers and vassals. Functionally speaking, the imperial gardens of the eighteenth-century courts were conceived to fulfill the monarchs' agendas as they attempted to impress their subjects. This paper is intended as a contribution to the understanding of the limits of making a homology between all imperial gardens across eighteenth-century Eurasia, the comparability of which is assumed to be valid from a functional viewpoint. To analyse the relationship between imperial garden design and the political spectacle displayed by the Qing court, the ways in which visual depictions of gardens as cultural constructions have contributed to the representation of the environment as perceived by the Qing are examined. In the application of the methodology developed by recent scholarship for the study of garden history, I try to make use of contributions in landscape studies, cultural geography and cartography to reveal the Qing ideology of garden representation. I discuss the function of gardens in the expansion of the Qing Empire and use as a case study the gardens of Chengde.

In the realm of ideas, cross-culturally there are those who take or borrow and those who offer or give. There are those who act with knowledge of actualities and sources and those to whom it doesn’t occur to care. And, there are those who tailor ideas to be used according to views they construct of their audience or clients. All positions in the matrix of possibilities suggested in these oppositions have been occupied over the history of Chinese-style gardens and garden ideas outside China. The ignorant, the knowledgeable and the cunning have each been active both as borrowers and as donors. Concentrating on the development of now publicly-accessible gardens, this paper considers first the history of Chinese-style garden ideas – initially in Japan and South-East Asia, then in Western Europe and, after a considerable hiatus (just before which the favour was briefly returned), now all over the world. But, that history is balanced with consideration of the future: through focusing on three of the problems with wider dissemination and further development of Chinese-style garden ideas – their architectural quality, Chinese taste in rocks, and the already deep entanglement of Japanese-style garden ideas with Modernist landscape aesthetics.

Comparative Civilizations Review, 1992

The year 1692 saw in London the production of an opera entided The Fairy Queen, which contained a Chinese interlude: While the stage is darkened a single entry is danced. Then a symphony is played; after the scene is suddenly illuminated, and discovers a transparent prospect of a Chinese garden, the architecture, the trees, the plants, the fruit, the birds, the beasts, quite different from what we have in this part of the world. It is terminated by an arch, through which is seen other arches with close arbors, and a row of trees to the end of the view. Over it is a hanging garden, which rises by several ascents to the top of the house; it is bounded on either side with pleasant bowers, various trees, and numbers of strange birds flying in the air, on the top of the platform is a fountain, throwing up water, which falls into a large basin (Honour 77). This setting is interesting to us in several ways. The designer was no doubt a zealous experimentalist in what he thought to be an exotic form of beauty. He sincerely believed that what he brought to the stage would be a charming presentation contributing tremendously to the success of the play. Indeed, both the "Chinese garden" and the opera itself were favorably received by the audience. However, the designer's knowledge of China hardly exceeded some obscure and unsubstantial conceptions. Knowing virtually nothing of the fauna and flora of that remote country, he could not commit himself to any definitive descriptions of the plants, the birds and the beasts in his "Chinese garden," and had to seek refuge in such vague and ambiguous epithets as "strange" and "different." In the passage quoted above, the only image one can visualize is probably the fountain, which, ironically, is typical not of a Chinese garden but of a European one. Of course, to accuse the designer of a willful misrepresentation of the Chinese art of gardening would be beside the point, for the *I would like to thank Professor Eugene Eoyang of Indiana University for his many helpful criticisms and suggestions throughout the writing of this article.

Perspectives on Garden Histories, 1999

as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this essay. Chinese and Japanese proper names are given in the traditional order: surnames first. Chinese names, terms, and titles are transliterated in standard pinyin. Where a modern Chinese author's name is known in a different form of transliteration, I have followed the author's preferred form and given the pinyin version in brackets where possible. 1 The study of Chinese garden designers, or more correctly, designers of rockeries, is a conspicuous case in point. See my "Guide to Secondary Sources on Chinese Gardens," Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, forthcoming, section 1.5. 2 The idea is taken from G. Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt, Minneapolis, 1993, 10-11. 206 Stanislaus Fung admixture of history and historiography. This essay emphasizes a sense of new prospects in the study of Chinese gardens by juxtaposing traditional sources and modern writings. The citation of modern studies of Chinese gardens and the discussion of traditional Chinese sources in a common space of examples has the effect of blurring the historical study of Chinese gardens and the modern historiography of Chinese gardens. This is because emerging possibilities for further research are often discovered in considering modern historiography in retrospect; this sense of possibilities can also inform our understanding of the significance of certain traditional writings, and a new understanding of the traditional writings can then offer a new understanding of the nature and specific assumptions of modern works of scholarship. In the midst of what one might call a feedback to and fro, one is often assaying a new thought on a given topic as much as reporting on established scholarship on that topic. With these strategic remarks in mind, I would like to begin by offering readers unfamiliar with the study of Chinese gardens a simple sketch of three waves of scholarship that can be thought of as bursts of scholarly activity, focusing on works that offered comprehensive surveys of Chinese garden history. Starting in the 1930s with the early systematizing work of the Japanese scholar Oka Oji, Shina tei'en ron (On the gardens of China), and Sugimura Yûzo's Chûgoku no niwa (Gardens of China), we have the first attempts at the comprehensive narrative of historical developments and trends in Chinese garden history. 3 Japanese interest in Chinese gardens has had a long history, and after the reforms of the Meiji period, it certainly became a significant source of influence for Chinese academic developments. 4 Oka Oji's work is the most comprehensive chronological work on Chinese gardens of its time, but due to the limited circulation of Japanese books in China for several decades after its publication, it would be misleading to suggest that later Chinese research built on its findings. 5 In what might be considered a second wave, starting only in the mid-1980s, the early Japanese studies were superseded by Chinese works of comparable scope and detail. Zhang Jiaji's Zhongguo zaoyuan shi (History of Chinese gardens) and Zhou Index