Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (54 page)

I returned on numerous occasions to the Forbidden City, but I didn’t learn of the existence of the retirement garden until 1999. The buildings there, including the nine-bay Juanqinzhai, had been ignored so utterly as to have suffered little looting or destruction. The Qianlong Emperor had delivered a sort of early preservation edict, commanding that the garden be maintained in perpetuity as a retreat for retired emperors, but since no other emperors retired, it became the beneficiary of benign neglect for the remaining decades of the Qing dynasty. Over six hundred years, the princes’ residences and concubines’ quarters were rebuilt numerous times—but not the Juanqinzhai. This is the only spot that has the complete vision of one emperor. A dowager empress lived there for a little while, and some members of the court had birthday parties there. Pu Yi, the last emperor, added a painting to the complex. Otherwise, it stood empty, then was locked up in 1924 and used only as storage space by Palace Museum staff focused on the public areas of the Forbidden City. When it was unlocked in 1999, as the Palace Museum began to prepare itself for the Olympic bid, it was a time capsule—one of the few survivors of the attack on history that was China’s twentieth century. It was weathered, faded, and a bit decayed, but it retained its integrity, and conserving it would require little of the guesswork that has plagued interventions at other historic Chinese buildings.

The Qianlong Emperor, the sixth ruler of the Manchu Qing dynasty, ruled officially from 1735 to 1796, though he effectively reigned until 1799. He was noted for his brilliance as a child, anointed over his brothers for his sobriety of demeanor, his learning in literature and philosophy, and his ease in human relations. He was a man of towering ambition, China’s equivalent to Louis XIV, Catherine the Great, or Emperor Franz Josef. He expanded China’s borders and became the wealthiest man in the world; at the height of his rule, China held a positive balance of trade with the West. The author of
more than forty thousand poems, he was an impeccable connoisseur with wit, elegance, and artistic talent on his side. But he also oversaw the burning of books and the torture and execution of writers whose work displeased him. Qianlong styled himself in later life as “the old man of the ten perfect victories”—and indeed he had consolidated Qing rule and increased the size of China by a third; at his death, his country’s population had grown more than 20 percent.

Qianlong was the grandson of the Kangxi Emperor, the longest-serving ruler in Chinese history. As a matter of respect, Qianlong was determined not to overshadow his grandfather’s reign, and with this in mind he envisioned retirement—the first emperor to contemplate such a step. For a meaningful disengagement from the machinery of state, he wanted a garden, which he envisioned as a marvelous landscape of sculpted rocks and pavilions. He undertook the project when he was in his early sixties, though he would not consider retirement until he reached eighty-five, one year short of his grandfather’s dominion. The design and construction of his own quarters there, the Juanqinzhai, occupied the emperor from 1771 to 1774; its decoration took another two years. During this period, he handed off most matters of state, allowing corruption to infiltrate his court. After Qianlong’s death, his son-in-law Hashen was forced to commit suicide because he had accumulated so much illicit wealth. Qianlong’s sixty-year rule was the most stable in the world, which allowed for great prosperity, but also engendered cultural stagnation. China was bypassed by modernity and the early glimmers of industrialization. In the period following Qianlong’s rule, foreigners came into China, and overspending on wars and putting down rebellions impoverished the court.

The Juanqinzhai project manifests Qianlong’s blend of finesse, brilliance, and decadent laxity; he built this precious sanctuary as an artistic diversion and never spent a night in it. Though he entered his so-called retirement in 1796, he effectively reigned until his death three years later, refusing to move out of the emperor’s quarters or relinquish his authority.

The retirement garden reproduces the basic imperial processional structure. Its main buildings evoke the primary edifices of the larger
complex, with similar public courtyards preceding private ones. Its almost 2 acres were meant to encapsulate the overall structure of the 180-acre Forbidden City. It was also intended as an outsize version of a scholar’s garden, adapting subtle landscape principles from the southern gardens of Suzhou, Yangzhou, and Hangzhou for grand purposes. It would not be a classic scholar’s rockery, nor a locus of imperial magnificence; it would blend the contemplative poetry of one with the stately ambition of the other. For Europeans, mountains represent the terrifying sublime, but for the Chinese, they represent paradise, the geography of the enlightened. The garden evokes such a geography.

This is a winter garden, intended for use during the months when the emperor remained in the Forbidden City. The complex is divided into four courtyards on a north-south axis. This arrangement ensures that the visitor does not experience the space as long and narrow, but rather as a sequence of near squares. Narrow gates—the complex is entered via a curved path through a slit between two rockeries—provide a human scale. To its twenty-seven structures, the emperor gave names that signaled his hopes for the place: one enters through the Gate of Spreading Auspiciousness and passes through, among others, the Hall of Fulfilling Original Wishes (one of the tallest buildings in the Forbidden City), the Building of Extending Delight, the Belvedere of Viewing Achievements, and the Supreme Chamber of Cultivating Harmony. The emperor himself not only named such buildings, but also was the primary designer of the garden. The Lodge of Bamboo Fragrance is conceived as a book; its ornament is entirely calligraphy. Many of the original furnishings were made of rootwood, a costly technique valued by emperors but intended to show disregard for human refinement in favor of the Buddhist ideal of unalloyed nature.

The divide in China between court intrigue and the life of scholars, which is central to any study of the country’s culture, had been recorded since the Warring States period (475 to 221 BC) and was refined into an often deliberately awkward aesthetic for those outside the court during the Northern Song dynasty (AD 960 to 1127). Though scholar-painters, often banished for their criticisms of the government, produced paintings and poems in miserable exile, it
was widely accepted that their work was of greater consequence than the showy, decorative work of the court. Indeed, paintings and calligraphy by many of the scholars who had been ejected from the capital later entered the Imperial Collection. Literati aesthetics define Qianlong’s garden project, informed by his travels to inspect the southern territories of his realm. The rockeries, plantings, and waterways at the retirement garden, all constructed on a flat piece of land, evoke the mountain landscapes of southern China as portrayed in Song and Ming paintings. The meandering nature of the classical scholar’s garden had succumbed in the Ming period to the symmetries of northern taste. In the Qianlong garden, Suzhou’s surprising vistas and winding paths have been brought into Manchu discipline, but some of that easy wandering has been reengaged in a concise, synthetic form.

The life envisioned for the Juanqinzhai was solitary, as befits the literati ideal of contemplation; the elegant building bespeaks cultivated seclusion. “Exhausted from diligent service,” Qianlong wrote, “I will cultivate myself, rejecting worldly noise.” The richly ornamented theater that occupies much of the interior has only one seat. But despite this literati conception, the construction of the Juanqinzhai reflects Qianlong’s ebullient profligacy; even the building’s framing timbers are polished hardwoods. The eastern five of the Juanqinzhai’s nine bays contain the emperor’s living quarters, ranged over two levels, and include sleeping and sitting platforms in sixteen separate spaces. This flank features an entire wall of
zitan
, the purple sandalwood beloved of emperors, then exceedingly rare and now nearly extinct. Large jade cartouches are set into screens. Double-sided embroidery, that rare Suzhou art, was employed in the fabrication of 173 translucent interior windows. On the lower face of the wall are scenes of deer amid woods. The background consists of patterned
zitan
marquetry, over which a foreground of carved inner-bamboo skin (
tiehuang
) is applied. The upper story shows a scene of peacocks, magpies, and phoenixes realized with the same methods and materials. Other parts of the screen are ornamented with bamboo-thread marquetry, a labor-intensive means of achieving a variegated, patterned background for surface-mounted ornamentation. These techniques,
usually employed for small decorative objects, here are translated onto vast surfaces—the only known instance of such architectural application. The lacquer work in the building is likewise of unique complexity and scale. Porcelain wall insets show the sophistication of a precious vase; wall panels are inlaid in azurite, jade, jasper, and other semiprecious stones. The handmade wallpaper is impressed with mica and then printed in malachite. The interior includes one of the largest cloisonné objects ever produced, a hanging pair of couplets in the emperor’s own hand. Qianlong was involved every step of the way. The archives record his request that a particular doorknob be replaced with cloisonné, as indeed it was.

The Juanqinzhai is notable for its embrace of foreign influences. Qianlong imported enormous mirrors, which would have been an unspeakable conceit in eighteenth-century China. While the cabinets in the Juanqinzhai are ornately Chinese, their asymmetry shows Japanese influence. The exterior windows are glazed with European glass, and the use of glass in the throne has a kind of occidenterie parallel to the distorted version of China evident in Western chinoiserie. The four western bays of the Juanqinzhai, which contain the theater with its stage and throne, boast latticework that has been faux-painted on hardwood to resemble the more ephemeral, less durable speckled bamboo. The walls and ceiling are covered in spectacular trompe l’oeil paintings that make use of the foreshortening and single-point perspective developed in Renaissance Italy. They were heavily influenced by the work of Giuseppe Castiglione, a Jesuit painter, missionary, and imperial adviser who lived in China from 1715 until his death in 1766 and was known by the Chinese as Lang Shining. The murals may incorporate elements painted by Castiglione, though the Juanqinzhai project was undertaken after he died. The ceiling is particularly seductive, with its depiction of a bamboo trellis groaning under the weight of a spectacular wisteria in full bloom—a joyful symbol of many generations of offspring. The wall murals represent a garden, extending the outside aesthetic to the interior. Here, painted peonies would have continued to bloom, skies to remain summer blue through the long, cold Beijing winters. The murals were painted on silk, using Chinese pigment in a Western
style applied in keeping with a Chinese aesthetic. The Chinese influence on Western art during this period has been much pondered, but this entangled reciprocity, though less frequent and perhaps less profound, also warrants notice.

Qianlong liked the fantasy of being a hermit in the mountains. The Juanqinzhai clearly reflects the ambivalent nature of such fantasies. He saw no discontinuity between being the richest man in the world and leading an ascetic life. He claimed to want to be known as “the man with nothing to do”—but he never pursued such leisure. It is a sign of imperial decadence at every level to pour enormous resources into keeping choice awake for the sake of choice itself, rather than because you want to make such choices. The pleasure of this garden of contemplation was its construction rather than its inhabitance; he built it to impress himself. Yet the content of the garden suggests a deep commitment to Buddhist precepts. Confucian thought suggests that in order to rule, an emperor had to be an enlightened being, and the garden complex expresses the aspiration to enlightenment, a place where Qianlong could seek the humbleness of his human consciousness, apart from his status as emperor. He appears to have felt that his Buddhist goals were his ultimate ones.

The Manchu Qing subscribed to Tibetan Buddhism rather than the Chan Buddhism that had been more popular in China. The Manchus were allies with the Mongolians in the seventeenth century, and the Dalai Lama conferred a living Buddha status on the Manchu rulers in the mid-1600s. Tibetan Buddhism is more orthodox, as far from Chan Buddhism as Catholicism is from Protestantism. It is focused on compassion toward others, rather than on an inward journey to find enlightenment within the self. Qianlong had been brought up alongside a living Buddha, a Mongolian named Rolpai Dorje, who came to live in the court and was educated with Qianlong. He became the Qianlong Emperor’s Buddhist mentor, teacher, and guide. Identified as a descendant of the bodhisattva Manjusri, Qianlong made extended visits throughout his life to the holy sites at Mount Wutai, where a lock of Manjusri’s hair was said to reside. Qianlong may have escalated into decadence in his later years, but he also aspired to mental cultivation, and the garden is full of spots
for meditation and contemplation. The vision behind it, though expensive, is extremely spiritual. Qianlong meditated daily; he built many temples; he had many Buddhist images created. The notion of opulent Buddhism may sound oxymoronic to some Western ears, but it is the guiding principle here. The Tibetan aesthetic is evident in the garden.

Westerners have often perceived the decoration of the buildings and the structure of the garden as separate things, the natural and the man-made, the inner self of thought separated from outward action. These Cartesian dualities do not parse in Qianlong’s sensibility; the interiors of the Juanqinzhai are all made with views of what lies outside them, and there is no such thing as “house” or “garden”—only a single complex. Man, being made by nature, makes only a further show of nature.

It is never easy to form a human portrait of a Chinese emperor. The godlike aspect of these men enters the public record, and the personal is usually so well hidden from view that it can be difficult to know whether it existed. The Qianlong Garden helps. In it, one begins to sense that this emperor was a person, and not just the supreme instrument of an absolute power structure. He had his own interests and personality and desires—spiritual or otherwise. Qianlong was in many ways a romantic; his first wife died at forty, but he wrote her letters in the form of poems until he died.