Chengde, or Jehol, is a city in Hubei province in China. It used to be the summer residence for the emperors of the Qing dynasty. This place, along with ancient traditional Chinese philosphy of landscaping, had contributed to the gardening principles of the Qing Landscape Enterprise.
reference:
“Qing conceptions about space and time, representation of landscape, and practice of sovereignty are crucial issues in this discussion of imperial imaginary.”
The purpose of this book, however, is not the abstract study of state formation but the actual imprinting of imperial authority on a natural environment
Qing conceptions about space and time, representation of landscape, and practice of sovereignty are crucial issues in this discussion of imperial imaginary.
The book argues that the landscaping of ambivalence was a technique employed by the emperors in order to construct a spectacle of domination and submission. This spectacle was organized around a pagoda built on the top of a circular island surrounded by lakes, and a linear connection established between that pagoda and a similar-looking peak east of the imperial residence.
Garden and Mountain Rhetoric
The texts, annotations, vista titles, and landscape miniatures of the Album of Imperial Poems introduced a succession of garden vistas in time, not a sequence of garden vistas in space.
Examination of Qing iconographic materials shows that the Kangxi emperor divided the gardens of Chengde into geographical sectors that formed four quadrants around the pivot of Jinshan mountain.
First, the court landscape is separated from commoners’ landscape by a massive wall, as emphasized in the Tai wan dili tu map. Within the emperors’ own depictions of this court landscape, however, this wall is never visible: the thirty-six vistas of the Album of Imperial Poems depict court gardens without the wall that encircled the residence.
The Kangxi and Qianlong emperors used the rhetorical tools of reduction and transcendence in the creation and perception of the Chengde gardens.mTo bring out the supremacy of imperial power, their gardens had direct implications for the layered geography of the Qing dynasty summer capital. Textual and iconographic evidence on the layout of the cultural landscape has shown that Chengde gardens were largely conceived as a rendition of the pleasure gardens of southern China or the religious architecture of Tibet. The Bishu shanzhuang vistas modified the objective configuration of the basin to create a new subjective geography of the place by transforming the perception of natural topography of the site and adding superstructures such as the Jinshan mountain.
The gardens of Chengde were pointedly designed to prevent objective analysis by playing simultaneously on several geographical scales and on several registers of meaning. Such gardens created what European observers perceived as aesthetic disorder:
Confusion between natural and naturalized landscape has been remarkably constant because it has stemmed from the persistency of the inability to sequentially differentiate primary from secondary landscapes. Most observers have confused the two ages of Chengde landscape and have mistaken the cultural landscape for the natural landscape.
Beyond their disorderly appearance, the gardens of Chengde reveal an order imposed on the natural landscape by an all-encompassing conception of power. The patterns that spatially organized these gardens manifested three characteristics. First, the garden vistas and villa compounds refused to be reduced to one another to form a coherent landscape and were designed to deceive the observer, using techniques that played with distance and composition. Second, the ultimate rationale of these gardens resided in the architectural semiology of their political message and not in their morphological layouts or functional types. Qing illustrations, indeed, betrayed an underlying concern for the dislocation of the spatial unity of the place. Finally, the hill station gardens were modeled on architectural styles from throughout the Manchu empire. In short, the cultural geography of the imperial landscape of Chengde was instrumental in separating the gardens, as cultural expressions, from their physical settings and geographical locations. Similarly and at a different scale, the Manchu geography deported, isolated, and enclosed features from celebrated places in the empire. (67)
Ascending the Pivot of the World
The Buddhist landscape archetype is called Jiu shan ba hai. It corresponds to nine cakraväla, which are concentric mountain ranges that are separated by eight seas, together forming the universe.
… Sumeru sacred mountain…
Tai wan dili tu ma
Rehe xinggong guan tu map
Jiu shan ba hai landscape archetype
Cosmos and Geomancy
The standard opposition between image and form that characterizes classical European thought is replaced in traditional Asian thought by repeated metaphorical duplication of the universe. Models of the universe built within gardens serve to reconcile the opposition between image and form in the Chinese landscape because such models represent microcosmic interpretations of parallel universes.3 (100)
vd: Fan Li’s capital city
I [Fan Li] have constructed a town that touches the gate of Heaven and I have connected the ch’i [qi] with the earth. I have built a K’un-lun, a sacred mountain [yue] to work in favor [?] the seizing of power by Yüeh.5
China’s most seminal cosmogony is less geographically descriptive. It can be summarized as the combination and recombination of two all-inclusive principles (yin, female or negative, and yang, male or positive) that have generated all things in the universe. Unlike the European dualistic system that has opposed two absolute entities, good and evil, the yin-yang dualism of China was based on an equal, dynamic, and mutual harmony thought to exist beyond the physical world. This cosmogony has had far-reaching implications: instead of harnessing the forces of nature, the Chinese individual should ideally conduct himself as a sage who accepts the universe as he finds it and thus gains the true happiness of contentment in simplicity.6 Landscape has been conceived as a juxtaposition of places, each with a particular climate, located in a unifying universe that links man with the opposed and complementary forces of Earth and Heaven.
Because each site has its own topomantic value and its own climate, the geomancer needed to know how to deal locally with the manifestations of universal energy. We find here the empirical origin of the important Chinese geographical conception of the wholeness of each place. Application of this concept has resulted in a preference for analogical over analytical reasoning, partly because the isolation of units from the whole required for analysis has not been considered an appropriate means to improved understanding of the wholeness of the locale. (102)
The European visitors of the hill station who had read Charles Montesquieu accepted a definition of “climate” according to which physical climate determined human physiology, the nature of government, the moral features common to a given population, and national character. That French definition was very close to the Chinese understanding of fengtu climate.
David Hume’s readers, however, did not believe in geographical determinism but accepted an equally facile definition of the Chinese character, which was the simple opposite of the English character.
Places are rarely geomantically perfect and often require alterations to be deemed truly auspicious: the digging of a new water channel, the moving of a boulder, the making of an artificial hill, or the planting of trees and bamboo. These changes can create a desirable degree of harmonization between the yin-yang principles or succeed in freeing and controlling cosmic energy.
