Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  Though increasingly strict laws are intended to address these concerns, they are inconsistently enforced, and many Chinese express skepticism, believing, for example, that much of what is touted as organic is not so. A preponderance of wealthy Chinese consume imported fresh foods they believe are less likely to be compromised—the market for imported fruit alone is nearly $10 billion. Some organic farms inside China have been set up exclusively for the politically connected and will not sell to common people.

  At the same time, the incursion of Western fast-food restaurants means that many people are overeating unhealthily. While the consumption of salt has always been extremely high, Chinese people are eating more and more fats, and while rice sales have gone down, intake of corn products has skyrocketed. Purchasing of packed, processed foods is higher than in the United States and brings in nearly $250 billion a year. Obesity is rising sharply, and about 12 percent of Chinese have diabetes, giving China the world’s largest diabetic population.

  CHINA

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  Outward Opulence for Inner Peace: The Qianlong Garden of Retirement

  World Monuments: 50 Irreplaceable Sites to Discover, Explore, and Champion, 2015

  I spent time in the Qianlong Garden and the Juanqinzhai, in Beijing, during my 2005 food trip to China. I had made frequent visits to the Forbidden City, but never to this refined and intimate area of it. I had studied Chinese art history in college and was interested in the period during which this garden was conceived and built; I had studied architectural conservation, too. I had become a trustee of the World Monuments Fund and had sought to learn more about the challenges of preserving the garden structures. As WMF’s fiftieth anniversary approached, I was asked to write an essay about one of its historic preservation projects, and I selected the Qianlong Garden.

  Preservation issues are of concern worldwide, but in China, the erasure of the past to make way for a supposedly better present and future has been pursued with a particularly troubling gusto. I am all for a better present and future, but I don’t believe that destroying the past is a good means of getting there.

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  The central axis of the Forbidden City was designed to impress and intimidate; the Juanqinzhai (Jwen-t(ch)in-JAI), or Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service, built by the Qianlong Emperor in the 1770s for his retirement, is intended to coddle and caress. Clandestine though it may have been to the masses, the Forbidden City was public to its privileged visitors, an architectural rendition of the emperor’s immutable being; the Juanqinzhai promises an almost lonely privacy. Most great monuments are for civic consumption, but the Qianlong Emperor built the Juanqinzhai and surrounding garden for himself, envisioning a lodge that would allow him to live according to his habits but free from his responsibilities. However, nothing about the Juanqinzhai is modest; a refined discretion nuances its opulence. If the Forbidden City is a grand sculpture, this is a jeweled object. As a linchpin uniting heaven, man, and earth, the emperor enacted a formal, immutable self, but the Juanqinzhai acknowledges the passage of time; for all its sumptuousness, it humanizes those who enter it.

  When I first went to China in 1982, the streets of Beijing still consisted mainly of hutongs, long alleys of traditional courtyard houses. Down those narrow byways, anxious people in Mao suits bicycled at lackadaisical speed, keeping a deliberate distance from foreigners. The city was dusty and decaying. Luxury, that corrupting anticommunist idea, was essentially nonexistent. In the Qing dynasty, the area that now constitutes Tiananmen Square consisted of a walled, north-south corridor surrounded by government buildings. In the 1950s, inspired by Moscow’s Red Square, authorities bulldozed those buildings to create the empty expanse of Tiananmen as we now know it. The square turned barren, brutally austere, and insufferably grandiose, a place where the pomp of the Communist state could be paraded before a meekly awestruck populace. In the middle of this dilapidation incongruously rose the Forbidden City, long revered as the ultimate stronghold of power, where the most prosperous rulers in the world had once held their hidden court. Of course, Buckingham Palace is rather grander than the houses across the street from it, and the Louvre puts the rue de Rivoli to shame. But I have never, before or since, encountered so immediate and stark a contrast as that between the Forbidden City and Deng Xiaoping’s Beijing.

  The Forbidden City was built in just fourteen years through the efforts of a million workers and is the largest unified complex of wooden buildings in the world. The wood is rare and precious, and every yellow (the imperial color) ceramic roof tile glorifies the emperor. The Forbidden City was the seat of government for six hundred years, for twenty-four emperors in the Ming and Qing dynasties. When our astutely political chaperone showed us through in 1982, he attempted to condescend to the values it embodied, but he couldn’t entirely eliminate the wonder in his voice as he described the life that had once unfolded there. In the outer court, we felt the aloofness of the imperial rulers of China; nothing about these buildings was designed to offer comfort. In the inner court, even the emperor’s apartments proved to be forbidding manifestations of imperial station. The whole setup reflected the inherited wealth and exploitative prerogatives of aristocracy that the country had officially rejected. Our minder was more comfortable with the militarism of the Great Wall than with these palatial quarters, but he recognized that the buildings’ conceptual grace and superb proportions represented the apogee of something brilliantly Chinese—that they constituted part of his cultural heritage.

  At that time, we neither saw nor heard of the Qianlong Emperor’s retirement gardens, the landscape at the far end of which the Juanqinzhai stands. The site was too intimate for the burgeoning crowds of tourists, and no one in China then had the skills requisite for its conservation, but the decades of its neglect also suggest an element of purposeful disregard. Although the Communists accused the Qing dynasty of exploitation, those emperors had represented total authority, a legacy that Mao and his successors gamely sustained. The pavilions of the retirement garden signify lavish materialism and rarefied intellect and were thus utterly anathema to Maoism. The larger Forbidden City remained at the heart of Chinese command, and the sizable portrait of Mao that still hangs over its entrance gate was a potent sign of his enduring authority. In contrast, the retirement garden was a luxurious place of repose for an emperor to pamper himself with solitude after giving up power—and the latter-day rulers of China were not interested in a life after power. Nor were champions of collective action interested in the meditative sequestration of an individual.

  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 179
6, 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 Juanqinzha
i, 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.