Fruitful Sites

Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China

Craig Clunas

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780231587
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Gardens are sites that can be at one and the same time admired works of art and valuable pieces of real estate. As the first account in English to be wholly based on contemporary Chinese sources, this beautifully illustrated book grounds the practices of garden-making in Ming Dynasty China (1369–1644) firmly in the social and cultural history of the day.Who owned gardens? Who visited them? How were they represented in words, in paintings and in visual culture generally, and what meanings did these representations hold at different levels of Chinese society? Drawing on a wide range of recent work in cultural theory, Craig Clunas provides for the first time a historical and materialist account of Chinese garden culture, and replaces broad generalizations and orientalist fantasy with a convincing picture of the garden's role in social life.

1 The Fruitful Garden

SUZHOU IN THE MIDDLE-MING

Some time early in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, a wealthy textiles merchant named Wu Yong (1399–1475) laid out within the walls of his home city of Suzhou an extensive property to which he gave the name ‘Eastern Estate’ (Dong zhuang). For much of the late imperial period, Suzhou, just west of modern Shanghai, was the most populous non-capital city of the empire, housing half a million people by the sixteenth century within an area of at least 14.8 square kilometres.¹ It was a byword for both the production of luxury goods (silks being the most important) and for their consumption by a rich and cultured elite, with a more than usually high proportion of either expectant or retired government officials.

It was in no sense a static urban landscape. Suzhou had been the power base of one of the unsuccessful contenders for power as the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) crumbled, and the city had been sacked in October 1367 after enduring a ten-month siege. Large numbers of its elite families were forcibly transported to other parts of the empire, and a new elite loyal to the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–98), was installed. Suzhou experienced a major flood in 1440, and serious famine in 1454.² However, by the end of the fifteenth century, and in particular during the reign of the Hongzhi emperor (1488–1505), there was a sense among contemporaries that Suzhou was regaining some of its former glory.³ Despite the recovery of urban life, in 1500 it was a city where a considerable amount of productive horticultural land remained within its walls, as was absolutely standard among major Chinese cities at this time.⁴ But Suzhou was to start to lose its population from its intra-mural area during the sixteenth century, as the elite abandoned its eastern half (administratively part of Changzhou county) to workers in the textiles industry, moving themselves and their families to the western (Wu county) side, or outside the city walls altogether to suburbs stretching north-west along the canal connecting Suzhou to the resort spot of Tiger Hill (Hu qiu).⁵

When Wu Yong was laying out his property, these social and demographic changes lay in the future. An account of the Eastern Estate written by the high official and famous literary figure Li Dongyang (1447–1516; DMB 877–81⁶) gives us some sense of the major dispositions of the landscape it contained:

The land of Su is rich in water-courses. The Eastern Estate of Old Sir Wu within the Fu Gate lies upon [one of] these, with the Chestnut Moat to its east and the West Stream girdling it to the west. Two creeks touch it at the sides, both of which can be reached by boat. Entering from the Bench Bridge you encounter the Rice Plot. Turning and going south, there lies the Mulberry Orchard, going west again is the Fruit Orchard, then to the south is the Vegetable Patch, to the east the Clothes-shaking Terrace, to the south-west the Breaking Cassia Bridge. Entering from the Punt Bank is the Wheat Mound. Entering from the Lotus Flower Bend is the Bamboo Field, laid out in a chequer-board pattern. The whole covers 60 mu.⁷ There is a hall called the Hall of the Continuation of Antiquity, a hermitage called the Hermitage of Artless Cultivation, and a studio called the Studio of Rest from Ploughing. He also made a pavilion on the Southern Pond, called the Pavilion for the Appreciation of Delight. With the finishing of the pavilion the affairs of the estate were first completed, with the whole thing being named Eastern Estate, from which he took his secondary name (hao) of ‘Old Man of the Eastern Estate’ (Dong zhuang weng).⁸

As the text goes on to make clear, the nine acres of the Eastern Estate form a veritable model of rural self-sufficiency, where philosophical ideals of nurturing an antique simplicity and a rustic clumsiness are combined with a complete inventory of the types of land management necessary for the support of an idealized family of kin and servants: rice, vegetables, fruit, and mulberry trees for silkworm-rearing. It further stresses that this property, unlike so many others in the region, remained in the hands of the same family through Suzhou’s turbulent fourteenth century and early fifteenth. Thus the maintenance of property within the Wu family over this violent political transition was a matter worthy of record.

‘From the end of the Yuan through to the beginning of our dynasty, eight- or nine-tenths of the neighbours died or migrated, and the Wu alone remained.’ Li Dongyang goes on to cite a long statement made to him by Wu Kuan (1436–1504; DMB 1487–9), the son of Wu Yong, creator of the Eastern Estate, in which Wu Kuan praises his father for ‘following the Way (dao) and fearing the laws’, and for ‘preserving his property’ (bao qi ye). He continues with an encomium on the notion of ‘property’ (ye), which is all the more to the point in that what he is describing either is, or is very shortly about to become, his own property. Li Dongyang’s prose ‘Record’ (ji) of the estate is dated 1475, the year in which Wu Yong died. The property would then have been divided equally among his three sons, Wu Kuan being the middle one. It was perfectly possible (though as we shall see, far from inevitable) for sons to keep a property together physically, particularly if it involved a highly visible piece of urban real estate like the Eastern Estate. In view of the stress on the relationship between continuity of property and continuity of family that is contained in the text, it seems plausible that this is what happened in this individual case.

There is, however, an irony embedded in Li Dongyang’s account that lies at the heart of the object of this present book. Not only was this synecdoche of rural self-sufficiency physically embedded in one of the most populous cities of the empire, it was embedded in a city which at that very period was beginning to lose the ability to feed itself from the agriculture of its immediate hinterland, and was rather dependent on the products of its manufactures (the real source of Wu Yong’s wealth) to support its huge population. The profits made from the silks and other manufactures of the city enabled grain to be purchased from distant areas of the empire, as, for the first time, Suzhou entered a situation where, ‘dependent on its markets rather than its fields’, it ‘could afford to regard nature as an object of aesthetic appreciation’.⁹ The Eastern Estate was not a real rural estate, but one of the sights of Suzhou for members of the elite who passed through, taking advantage of the city’s reputation as a centre of cultural production and luxury consumption: ‘Those court scholars who travelled with Wu Kuan heard of the Aged Sire’s virtue, and wrote many poems on the Eastern Estate, which augmented the estate’s fame.’

The source from which I have taken the account of the Eastern Estate by Li Dongyang is a gazetteer, a type of local history combining information on the administrative geography, famous sights, typical products and notable inhabitants of a given region. The particular gazetteer in question, the Gusu zhi of 1506, was initially compiled by the very Wu Kuan whose contacts in the higher reaches of the bureaucracy ensured the property’s fame (though Wu himself died in 1504, and the finished book appeared under the editorship of an even more important member of the Suzhou elite, Wang Ao (1450–1524; DMB 1343–7). Thus it is not entirely surprising that the account of the Eastern Estate is given added prominence within this text by its positioning at the very end of the book’s thirty-second chapter, entitled Yuan chi (‘Gardens and Ponds’). Such a text is not an innocent primary source for the study of Ming dynasty Suzhou (which is the way gazetteers are sometimes read), but a prescriptive text with its own agenda, in this case arguably an agenda for establishing certain families and certain networks of connections as hegemonic within the social landscape of the city. There were gardens in the area that are not mentioned in the text.¹⁰ There were also prominent cultural figures for whom no garden is listed. The Eastern Estate is presented to us as the culmination of a long tradition of the creation of ‘Gardens and Ponds’ in the Suzhou area, and indeed it bears the name of a much earlier Eastern Estate, the property of the son of Yuan Liao, Prince of Guangling, a magnate active in the area in the fourth century AD.

What is also presented to us is the claim that Wu Yong’s actions in building an urban property of this kind are in some sense a novelty. Conventional accounts in Western secondary literature typically see the practice of garden culture as a constant of ‘traditional China’, but there is a clear sense in contemporary sources of a rhythm of building and decay, of periods when fewer major gardens were constructed and of others when they were relatively more numerous. This was the case with regard particularly to urban garden sites in Suzhou between the twelfth century and the mid-fifteenth, at least in the picture presented by the gazetteer of 1506. It lists fifty-two sites in the chapter on ‘Gardens and Ponds’, dating from the Eastern Jin dynasty (AD 317–420) down to the Eastern Estate. Each of these sites is accompanied by a varying number of literary citations of prose and verse, enabling us to construct a rough league-table of the fame they enjoyed in the mid-Ming period (remembering that this is as likely to be a factor of the fame of the authors involved, as it is of the sites themselves).¹¹ The famous gardens are associated primarily with the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and their fame is not matched by those of sites created in the subsequent two hundred and fifty years.

One famous urban site of the Song dynasty, the ‘Pleasure Patch’, was described in the gazetteer as being partially rebuilt in the period 1426–35 by a major figure of the Suzhou elite, Du Qiong (1396–1474; DMB 1321–2), whose father had been one of the victims of the forced population migration initiated by the Ming founder. The garden had been laid out and named in the Song period by Zhu Changwen (1039–98) on the site of a yet more ancient property, the Golden Valley Garden of the Qian family.¹² However, there were only four completely new gardens worthy of inclusion in the gazetteer that had been laid out in Suzhou prefecture in the period from the creation of the dynasty in 1368 to the time of publication, 1506:

The Xia Family Garden was in Kunshan, and was the place of recreation of Xia Chang [1388–1470; DMB 525–6], Chief Minister of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, on his retirement.

Little Dongting was created by Assistant Censor Liu Jue [1410–72; MRZJ 836] on his return from his post in Shanxi. At his old dwelling outside the Qi gate he piled up stones to make a mountain. There were ten ‘views’ (jing), with names such as the ‘Moustache Fingering Pavilion’ (Nian zi ting) and the ‘Lotus Flower Island’ (Ou hua zhou). Xu Youzhen [1407–72; DMB 612–5] wrote a preface on it.

The ‘Thoughts Hermitage’ (Si an) is a suburban garden outside the Guo gate at Kunshan, built by the Censor-in-Chief Master Wu. When Zhou Chen [1381–1453; MRZJ 318] was Grand Coordinator he wrote a poem on it.

The fourth, and final, site to be mentioned in the gazetteer is the Eastern Estate itself. Only one of these four properties was therefore within the walls of Suzhou, with another on the city’s outskirts, while the other two were, respectively, inside and outside the walls of Kunshan, a smaller and administratively subordinate city to the east. The prose and verse works that mention these four sites allow us to compile a list of twelve men recorded by the gazetteer as being involved in the practice of garden culture in fifteenth-century Suzhou, either as owners or celebrators.

What is striking about this group is the number of connections that bind it together into a cohesive in-group, linked together in numerous ways. Eight of its twelve members had major official careers, almost all of them with Peking connections in the most prestigious parts of the bureaucracy, such as the Hanlin Academy or the Censorate. Furthermore, eight of the twelve (though not the same eight) had major reputations as artists, eit...