257

Bianca Maria Rinaldi

The Invention of the Chinese Garden: From Western Perception

to the Construction of a Global Identity

cination with Chinese garden aesthetics and design principles – that had greatly influenced the development of Western garden art dur-ing the eighteenth century – and the increasing presence of imagined Chinese gardens on mass-produced crockery with the willow pattern as the most iconic motif. A blue and white earthenware or porcelain design created in England around 1790 on the basis of the decora-tions on porcelains imported from China, the willow pattern became extremely popular in early nineteenth-century England, following the persisting interest for chinoiserie among the aristocracy. It was a Vic-torian chinoiserie for mass production that was widely available and accessible to different social classes. The willow pattern simplified the complex compositions of the gardens of China into a few essential ele-ments – pavilions, a bridge, a twisting fence, an expanse of water, and a weeping willow tree – and contributed to shaping nineteenth-century popular attitude toward Chinese garden design.6

This paper proposes a discussion on the process that engendered, in the West, the invention of a compositional formula that represented “the Chinese Garden”, from the nineteenth century onward. Without focusing on the widely known influence of chinoiserie in the construc-tion of a Western idea of the exotic,7 it will discuss nineteenth-cen-tury Western travellers’ accounts of the gardens of China. Support-ing the simplified visual image proposed by the willow pattern, verbal accounts contributed to the creation of a stereotyped idea of Chi-nese gardens based on the repetition of a few iconic elements. In more recent years, this popular image of an ideal “Chinese garden”, deep-seated in Western consciousness, has inspired, as Craig Clunas has noted, the design of Chinese-style gardens built outside China.8

The Fabrication of a Stereotype

In 1797, British diplomat George Leonard Staunton (1737–1801) published An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, the narrative of the famous and unsuccessful British diplomatic mission to the Qing court led by Lord George Macartney in 1792–94, undertaken with the specific aim of expanding British trade in China. In it, Staunton, who was entrusted with the writing of the official account of the mission, summarized

On November 15 1844, the wealthy Qing official known to the West-erners as Pontinqua hosted an elaborated banquet in European style in his residence in suburban Guangzhou (Canton) to entertain foreign visitors. Among his guests was French merchant Auguste Haussmann (1815–74), a member of the diplomatic mission led by Théodose de Lagrené who was sent to China after the First Opium War (1839–42) to negotiate trading rights and privileges with the Qing imperial gov-ernment. Haussmann, who travelled through China with the Lagrené mission from 1844 to 1846, offered a description of the event, which took place in the main hall at the centre of the garden.1 While he devoted a lengthy account to the dramatic performance that preceded the banquet, he spent just a few words on Pontinqua’s “vast and curi-ous garden”. It consisted of “mounds, heaps of rocks arranged to form grottos, small bridges projected over streams and ponds, where the lotus, much in demand in Chinese cooking, unfolds its broad leaves. A variety of paths are intertwined in every direction. At intervals, you see small pavilions covered with creepers”.2 British lawyer George Wingrove Cooke (1814–65), who was in China on the outbreak of the Second Opium War (1857–60) as a special correspondent for The Times, offered an even more concise description of the same gar-den as “sixty acres of fishponds, pavilions, bridges, and aviaries, with painted barges, pretty flowers, cool stones seats, and every prepara-tion for summer indolence – the whole dominated by a white pagoda, whence you have a complete view”.3 (Fig. 1)

Haussmann’s and Cooke’s descriptions are emblematic of a syn-thesis approach to Chinese gardens that characterizes nineteenth-cen-tury accounts written by Western travellers visiting or residing in Qing China for diplomatic or commercial purposes. After almost two cen-turies of ever more detailed descriptions by few direct observers of the gardens of China, that had contributed to an increasing European familiarity with Chinese garden design,4 from the last decade of the eighteenth century Western accounts tended to a textual synopsis of the Chinese garden that resulted in a gradual simplification of its spa-tial composition rendered into its basic elements.5

Simplistic interpretations were encouraged by two distinct and parallel phenomena that occurred in the last decades of the eigh-teenth century: the progressive decline of European prolonged fas-

259

Fig. 1: John Thomson, Garden, Canton, about 1866. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

260 261

the distinctive features of the gardens of China. Describing the com-plex nearby the imperial park of Yuanming yuan, “Garden of Perfect Brightness”, on the outskirts of Beijing, where the British ambassa-dor was lodged, Staunton stated that it “contained a garden laid out in serpentine walks, a rivulet winding round an island, a grove of var-ious trees interspersed with patches of grass ground, and diversi-fied with artificial inequalities, and rocks rudely heaped upon each other”.9 In his account of his experience of China published in 1797, Johann Christian Hüttner (1765?–1847), who joined the Macartney embassy as the tutor of Staunton’s son, briefly outlined Chinese gar-den design as a repertory of typical elements that he believed could be perceived in almost every garden. According to him, the “Chinese, in their gardens, prefer artificial rocks, little hills, groups of wild trees, water, houses built in the shade”.10 (Fig. 2)

From the late eighteenth century, Western travellers’ perception of the gardens of China shifted from an attention to the sophisticated

spatial composition that had characterized earlier descriptions to an appeal to a more direct visual image. In their accounts, Chinese garden aesthetic was associated with recurring design elements that seemed to convey a sort of shared image of Chineseness. Even the few West-ern travellers who were able to visit various gardens that were different in style and size, such as the imperial parks in Beijing and in Chengde and the gardens of the wealthy merchants on the southeastern coast of China, did not remark on their clear differences but rather empha-sized uniformity in design. French diplomat Chrétien Louis Joseph de Guignes (1759–1845), who joined the Dutch Embassy to the Qing court led by Isaac Titsingh and André Everard van Braam Houckgeest in 1794–95, was able to visit several parks and gardens around Bei-jing, Yangzhou, and Guangzhou. However, in his travel account pub-lished a few years later, he stated that the Chinese, in composing their gardens, were “constantly attached to the same ideas”,11 expressed by ponds, meandering streams, “winding paths, trees scattered and threw

Opposite page:Fig. 2: John Thomson, Three Chinese ministers sitting in a garden, 1869, Wellcome Library, London.

Fig. 3: Thomas Daniell and William Daniell, Chinese Lady, in: Thomas Daniell and William Daniell, A Picturesque Voyage to India by the Way of China, London 1810, 59. WKR 14.1.5, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Next pages:Fig. 4: John Thomson: The Abbot at the Temple of Five Hundred Gods, Canton (Guangzhou), 1869. Wellcome Library, London.

262 263

264 265

haphazardly, wooded hills or barren ones, deep valleys and narrow passes… Rocks scattered as though by accident”.12 Fifty years later, Western comments on Chinese garden design continue to maintain an attitude to simplification. Laurence Oliphant (1829–88), who was in China during the Second Opium War as private secretary to James Bruce, eighth Earl of Elgin, in 1859, after having visited part of Yuan-ming yuan and the gardens of the suburban residences of Qing offi-cials in Guangzhou, concluded that all Chinese gardens had the same quality.13 His list of ingredients of Chinese garden design included “tangles thickets, and shady walks, and little islands in the middle of ponds, approached by rustic bridges, and surrounded by ornamental rock-work; summer-houses and cool grottoes”.14 To Western eyes, the confirmation of a Chinese homogeneity in the recurrence of a reper-tory of elements was more important than stylistic differences.

The idea that the Chinese garden was an unchanging typology and its resemblance to the chinoiserie visual imagery were reinforced in the first half of the nineteenth century, when Western accounts became ever more catalogues of the most prominent design ele-ments. In 1849, British physician Julius Berncastle (?–1870) visited the gardens of Howqua, the senior Hong merchants in Guangzhou. Describing them in his travel journal, Berncastle reduced the complex

arrangement of Chinese gardens to an essential vocabulary of “artifi-cial lakes and rivers, with light bridges across them, leading to caverns, kiosks, pagodas, grottoes, and imitation precipices, with a path lead-ing to the summit: fruit-trees, flowers, and porcelain ornaments of all descriptions, too numerous to examine separately”, which made the garden comparable to those landscape sceneries “represented in Chi-nese paintings, familiar to everybody”.15 (Fig. 3)

The simplistic perception of the Chinese garden as a container of standard elements prompted a comparison between the garden’s arrangement and the generic representation of garden-like settings on widely popular blue and white china produced in England, in imita-tion of antique Chinese porcelain. British lawyer and diplomat Henry Charles Sirr (1807–72), who arrived in Hong Kong in 1844, com-mented on the repetitive compositions of Chinese gardens and com-pared them to the typical design of the willow pattern plates.16 Brit-ish diplomat Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford (1837–1916), who served in the British mission at Beijing between 1865 and 1866, offered a similar comparison between the different scenes in the Chinese gar-den and those painted on patterned porcelain. In a letter written from Hong Kong in 1865, he offered a description of the garden of Pontin-qua in Guangzhou and noted that it consisted of “Terraces, summer-

Fig. 5: Garten des Himmlischen Friedens in Bethmann Park, Frankfurt am Main, Photography by Bianca Maria Rinaldi. Fig. 6: Bonsai Garden, Singapore, Photography by Bianca Maria Rinaldi.

houses, stairs, drawbridges, carp-ponds, rock-work and flowers (that) are thrown together most fantastically, exactly like the gardens that the ladies and gentlemen on tea-cups and plates walk about in”.17 (Fig. 4) The comparison between gardens and the patterns on mass-produced plates contributed to reinforce Western perception of the Chinese gar-den as an unchanging typology composed of a fixed set of elements. Moreover, such descriptions proposed the scenes depicted on popular domestic china as real representations of Chinese gardens, validating an image that was, in fact, a Western invention.18

The Chinese garden was perceived more as a compendium of exoticism than a real compositional typology. The stereotyped read-ing applied to the gardens of China can be assimilated to the vast phe-nomenon of European representation of the “otherness” that has been called Orientalism and that reduced foreign cultures to generic and oversimplified formulae, thus emphasizing their radical differ-ence from Western identity and culture.19 In the reading proposed by Western travellers during the nineteenth century, the Chinese garden emerged as a stylistic “otherness”: it was considered the typical exam-ple of a bizarre and playful environment; its twisting bridges, pavil-ions with swooping roofs, and rocks of fantastic shapes represented the prototype of a commonly shared idea of a Chinese exoticism.

Exoticism for the Masses

The simplified Western perception of Chinese gardens, expressed by a few invariable and repeated elements, has not become obsolete in contemporary times. The globalization has supported it, encour-aging the evocative dimension that such a simplification of design entails. Freed from its original complexity of meanings and spatial arrangements, the Chinese garden has become the expression of a new, or rather persisting, exoticism; an exoticism for the masses, popular and accessible, easily readable, and suitable for a broad pub-lic consumption in multicultural metropolises. Paradoxically, that over-simplified model invented in the past as a product of chinoiserie and supported by nineteenth-century Western travellers’ accounts, has assumed a relevant symbolic role for Chinese immigrant com-munities who had promoted the creation of Chinese-style gardens in a variety of geographical contexts distant from China.20 With both a nostalgic approach and the intention to appeal to a popu-lar taste and a well-established Western imagination, the synthetized icon of the Chinese garden has been presented as a representation of a “national” and “traditional” style, as a cultural artefact that has been used to construct, strengthen, and promote Chinese cultural

266 267

diately recognizable image of Chineseness, these gardens recall sty-listic elements and traditional forms of vernacular Chinese models and reinvent them in a simplified form.24

This strategy is rooted in twentieth-century garden culture, when both a design approach based on simplification and the evo-cation of historic gardens’ compositional forms through their reduc-tion to some basic elements were not uncommon sets of practice. In the early twentieth-century, for instance, the Renaissance Gar-den epitomized the Italian Garden. In the wake of the 1931 Mostra del Giardino Italiano in Florence, the Italian Renaissance Garden inspired the creation of several private gardens in Italy whose spatial arrangements reduced the main characteristic of that historic gar-den typology to tight geometries and clipped hedges of evergreens. A similar approach, but imbued with a more encyclopaedic attitude,

characterized “Selam”, the garden created by French philanthropist and traveller Albert Kahn in 1895 in Boulogne-Billancourt, in sub-urban Paris. “Selam” was a collection of historic garden types ren-dered through simplified forms and iconic elements. It included a French Garden designed by Henri and Achille Duchêne, whose lay-out condensed the controlled geometry of the jardins à la française into a sequence of large regular compartments. It comprised also an English Garden represented by a rolling meadow, clumps of trees, a serpentine stream, and a small irregular body of water dominated by a rocky waterfall. Following the contemporary vogue for Japonisme, Kahn’s “Selam” further included a Japanese traditional village, with a pagoda, a tea house and two traditional houses emerging from a varied landscape of bonsai and acers.25 Just as the ambitious pho-tographic project Les Archives de la Planète Kahn initiated aimed at

identity. Proposed as “authentic” and “original”,21 Chinese-style gar-dens have been used to support the construction of strategies of cul-

power of diasporic Chinese communities throughout the world and the increasing economic and political power of the People’s Repub-lic of China”.23

In 1972 the “Suzhou Garden”, probably one the first Chinese-style gardens in South-east Asia, was constructed within the Siong Lim Temple complex in Singapore. In 1981 the more iconic Ming Xuan, “Ming Lounge”, within the Astor Court at The Metropol-itan Museum of Art in New York City, was opened to the public. Since then, a long series of Chinese-style gardens has flourished in Europe, the United States, Canada, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. (Fig. 5) Common to Chinese-style gardens is a design red-olent of the past; their compositional strategy is based on a form of Neo-Historicism that aims at recovering China’s original roots and at recollecting traditions. With the intention of creating an imme-

Fig. 7: Liu Fang yuan, Garden of Flowing Fragrance, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California. Photography by Bianca Maria Rinaldi.

tural representation and self-affirmation. For Chinese immigrants to the United States and other countries, the creation of gardens that reflected Chinese design tradition has been seen as a manifesto of cultural identity and heritage, as a mode of social advancement, and a form of integration in a multicultural society.22

The creation of Chinese style-gardens outside China is a global phenomenon dating back to the late 1970s. It is related to the renewed interest in Chinese culture in the West that resulted from the improved relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China and the reopening of the country to foreign trav-ellers. It is also related, as Duncan Campbell has noted, to “the glo-balization of Chinese culture incumbent on the growth in size and

268 269

of Chinese-style gardens whose synthesis of typical elements and details – that include pavilions, rocks, moon doors, zigzag bridges, and winding bodies of water – conforms to a familiar, long lasting, Western idea of Chinese gardens.

presenting a documentation of different cultures, everyday life, and buildings in different parts of the world, the “Selam” gardens aimed at presenting a catalogue of the world’s most renowned examples of garden art.

The models of reference for Chinese-style gardens built outside China are mainly famous gardens in Suzhou, in the Jiangnan prov-ince.26 Originally built during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) but largely altered over time and even reconstructed in the mid-twenti-eth century, these gardens are reinterpreted through a range of cita-tions and more or less faithful replications of elements and composi-tions. The design of Astor Court at the MET Museum, for instance, is based closely on the spatial arrangement of a small courtyard in the western section of Wangshi yuan, “Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets”, in Suzhou, as it appears today.27 Likewise, the Bon-sai Garden in Singapore, completed in 1992, features an artificial mountain topped by a belvedere pavilion overlooking the central body of water that recalls a similar composition in Liu yuan, “Lin-gering Garden”, also in Suzhou. (Fig. 6) Zhuozheng yuan, “Garden of the Humble Administrator”, the largest garden in Suzhou, offered a range of references for the design of specific structures within the Liu Fang yuan, “Garden of Flowing Fragrance”, at the Huntington in San Marino, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area: the Waveless Boat Pavilion stretching over water recently added to the Californian gar-den as a viewing area evokes the architectural forms of the “Fragrant Isle”, Xiangzhou, a boat-shaped pavilion sited on the shores of the reflecting pool in the central section of Zhuozheng yuan; while the small structure called Terrace of the Jade Mirror replicates a square pavilion with four moon-shaped door openings also in the central part of Zhuozheng yuan. Even the more complex and extensive gar-dens, such as the same Liu Fang yuan at the Huntington, are charac-terized by a synthesis of the formal vocabulary. Completed in 2008 and currently being expanded, Liu Fang yuan presents a collection of the archetypal elements and structures lined on the rocky shores of the central irregular reflecting pool: moon doors, several build-ings grouped around a paved courtyard, a covered walkway, a variety of isolated pavilions, rocky islands connected by arched and zigzag bridges, a winding river, a rock grotto with a waterfall.28 (Fig. 7)

Replica was a common practice in Chinese garden tradition and substantiated the role of the gardens of China as collections of land-scapes. During the Ming and early Qing dynasties, compositions in both private gardens and imperial parks in the Beijing area alluded to celebrated gardens and scenic spots from the southern provinces of the empire. Even at that time, the garden style of the Jiangnan region played the most influential role thanks to the increasing pres-ence in the capital city of the empire of officials and literati from the southern province of Jiangnan, who built their own gardens, and the involvement of garden designers from the same province in the design of imperial parks.29 Qianlong (r. 1735–96 CE), the Qing dynasty’s fourth emperor, included in his parks faithful evocations of natural sceneries and gardens from the southern provinces of the empire he had seen during his tours of inspection. He had an evoca-tion of the Anlan yuan, “Tranquil Wave Garden”, the garden of the prominent Chen family in the city of Haining, built in Yuanming yuan on the outskirts of Beijing. He had also replicas of Shizi lin, “Lion Grove”, a celebrated garden in Suzhou, designed within his imperial park Changchun yuan, “Garden of Eternal Spring”, which

was built in 1747 as part of Yuanming yuan, and within the vast imperial summer residence Bishu shanzhuang, “Mountain Hamlet to Escape the Summer Heat”, which was constructed from 1703 in Chengde near the northern border of the empire. The natural land-scape of Xihu, “West Lake”, a large lake surrounded by wooded hills on the western outskirts of Hangzhou, in southern China, inspired the general composition of the imperial park Qingyi yuan, “Garden of Clear Ripples”, built between 1750 and 1764 west of the Yuan-ming yuan. The compositional arrangement of the small Huishan yuan, “Garden of the Benevolent Mountain” (currently known as Xiequ yuan, “Garden of Harmonious Pleasure”), within Qingyi yuan, was a recreation of another celebrated garden of southern China: Jichang yuan, “Garden Conferring Pleasure”, in the city of Wuxi, whose spatial arrangement was evoked through an irregular pool surrounded by a garland of pavilions and viewing terraces.30

While northern China imperial replicas of specific gardens and scenic spots, as noted by Jun Jia, aimed at evoking the general atmo-sphere and the spatial and topographic arrangement of the models and were built according to the aesthetic and design principles of the epoch,31 the design strategy behind Chinese-style gardens out-side China follows what we might call a “pattern books approach”. They are not exact copies of any specific garden and their design is based on the replications of a range of buildings, structures, and ele-ments selected from real gardens in Suzhou that are combined to offer a great variety of plausible design solutions. Because of their limited size and the cultural and geographical context in which there are designed, only rarely Chinese-style gardens attempt at recreating the sophisticated spatial strategy of actual gardens in China, which is based on the gradual unfoldment of the garden’s episodes. The vis-itor’s visual and spatial experience of the garden is simplified and the garden can often be perceived in almost its entirety from differ-ent viewing areas, leaving the visual seduction of the garden, essen-tial to Chinese garden aesthetic, mainly to the plain presentation of an exotic landscape rather than to a gradual revelation of the gar-den space.

The adoption of the gardens in Suzhou as sources of inspiration for the design of Chinese-style gardens was supported by the inter-national fame these gardens enjoy as cultural sites. Nine gardens in Suzhou are inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List as “Clas-sical Gardens of Suzhou”.32 They became the obvious formal model to follow as the inscription in the List assesses their value as expres-sions of China’s cultural uniqueness and ancient civilization, thus contributing to the construction of an ideal heritage and a mythical tradition that is essential for strategies of representation. The popu-lar acknowledgement of the gardens of Suzhou as emblems of Chi-nese stylistic tradition was also validated by Western scholarly stud-ies. From the early twentieth century onward, monographs on the subject have given, somehow uncritically, a prominent role to the gardens of the Jiangnan region to illustrate Chinese garden design. They contributed to the transformation the gardens of Suzhou into an idealized form that proposed the Chinese garden as a changeless and largely homogeneous entity.33

The use of the Suzhou gardens as exemplary models for Chi-nese-style gardens reveals the intention to appeal to Western imag-ination. The broad and general category of the “Classical Gardens of Suzhou” has reduced the rich Chinese garden culture to a pop-

ular brand that has replaced, in the collective imagination of exotic design, the oversimplified image of garden-like settings on chinoi-serie domestic objects. The famous gardens in Suzhou have offered the lexicon for the limited and reproducible iconographic program

Notes

1 Concerning the banquets organized by Chinese merchants in honor of foreign traders and visitors, see May-bo Ching: Chopsticks or Cutlery? How Canton Hong Merchants Entertained Foreign Guests in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, in: Narratives of Free Trade: The Commercial Cultures of Early US-China Relations, ed. Kendall Johnson, Hong Kong 2012, pp. 99–116.

2 Auguste Haussmann: Voyage en Chine, Cochinchine, Inde et Malaisie, vol. 1, Paris 1847, p. 264.

3 George Wingrove Cooke: China being “The Times” Special Correspondence from China in the Years 1857–58, London 1858, pp. 370–371.

4 Bianca Maria Rinaldi: Ideas of Chinese Gardens: Western Accounts, 1300–1860, Philadelphia, PA 2016.

5 According to Craig Clunas, this approach characterizes both “nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts on ‘the Chinese garden’.” Craig Clunas: Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China, Durham, NC 1996, p. 204.

6 On the willow pattern and its role in late eighteenth- and nineteenth century West-ern perception of Chinese gardens, my sources were: John R. Haddad: Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay: Constructing China with Ceramics, 1780–1920, in: Winterthur Portfolio 41, 1 (Spring 2007): pp. 53–80; Elizabeth Hope Chang: Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-century Britain, Stanford, CA 2010, pp. 71–97; Francesca D’Antonio: The Willow Pattern: Dunham Massey, East India Company at Home (February 2013), pp. 4–8, http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/eicah/files/2014/06/Willow-Pattern-PDF-Final-19.08.14.pdf. On the willow pattern see also Catherine Lanone: ‘Toujours la porcelaine’: George Meredith and the Willow Pattern, Miranda [online] 7 (2012), http://miranda.revues.org/4450.

7 Dawn Jacobson: Chinoiserie, London 1993; David Porter: The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge 2010, especially chapters 3 and 5.

8 Clunas 1996 (see note 5), p. 204. On the influence of the willow patten plate on Chinese–style gardens built outside China with the example of the “Willow Pat-tern Garden” in Hawera, New Zealand see, James Beattie: China on a plate: a wil-low pattern garden realized, in: Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 36, 1 (2016), pp. 17–31. A minimalistic “Willow Pattern Garden” has been designed as part of the Thrigby Hall Wildlife Gardens in Norfolk, UK.

9 George L. Staunton: An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, vol. 2, London 1797, p. 126. In his account, Staunton included also more detailed descriptions of the imperial parks in sub-urban Beijing and Chengde. The part of this article on late eighteenth- and nine-teenth-century Western travellers’ descriptions of Chinese gardens is based on and elaborated from my book Ideas of Chinese Gardens (see note 4).

10 The quote is taken from the French translation of Hüttner’s travel account, pub-lished in 1798: Johann Christian Hüttner: Voyage à la Chine par J. C. Hüttner, traduit par T.F. Winckler, Paris 1798, p. 41.

11 Chrétien Louis Joseph de Guignes: Jardins, in: Voyages à Péking, Manille et l’île de France, faits dans l’intervalle des années 1784 à 1801, vol. 2, Paris 1808, pp. 191–192.

12 Ibid., pp. 190–191. 13 Laurence Oliphant: Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan in

the Years 1857, ’58, ’59, vol. 1, Edinburgh and London 1859, p. 181.14 Ibid., p. 161.15 Julius Berncastle: A Voyage to China: Including a Visit to the Bombay Presidency;

the Mahratta Country; the Cave Temples of Western India, Singapore, the Straits of Malacca and Sunda, and the Cape of Good Hope, vol. 2, London 1850, p. 170.

16 Henry Charles Sirr: China and the Chinese: Their Religion, Character, Customs,

and Manufactures, vol. 1, London 1849, p. 326. In his reports of the British mil-itary mission to China during the Second Opium War, George Wingrove Cooke evoked the willow pattern several times to convey a variety of images: the architec-ture of the temples in the city of Amoy, the “zigzag wooden bridges” in the tea gar-dens in Shanghai, and even the aspect of Chinese people he encountered in Pen-ang. Wingrove (see note 3), pp. 88, 223 and 5.

17 Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford: The Attache at Peking, London 1900, p. 30. 18 Chang (see note 3), pp. 72, 76–81. 19 Edward W. Said: Orientalism, New York 1978. 20 On Chinese-style gardens I have relied on: “Chinese gardens abroad”, in The

Oxford Companion to the Garden, ed. Patrick Taylor, Oxford 2006; Bianca Maria Rinaldi: The Chinese Garden-Garden Types for Contemporary Landscape Archi-tecture, Basel 2011, pp. 109–116. On Chinese-style gardens see, Gan Weiling and Wang Zemin: Cultural Envoy: Chinese Gardens Built Overseas, Beijing 2000. On Chinese-style gardens in New Zealand and, in particular, the Dunedin Chinese Garden and the New Plymouth Chinese Garden, see, James Beattie: Growing Chi-nese Influences in New Zealand: Chinese Gardens, Identity and Meaning, in: New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 9, 1 (2007), pp. 38–61, especially 44–58. For a recent discussion of Chinese-style gardens in North-America see, Han Li: From the Astor Court to Liu Fang Yuan: Exhibiting ‘Chinese-ness’ in America, in: Jour-nal of Curatorial Studies 4, 2 (2015), pp. 284–307.

21 Publications about single Chinese-style gardens built outside China emphasize the gardens’ authentic design based on the adoption of real stylistic models of ref-erence, on the use of materials and structures from China, and on the fact that Chi-nese designers and craftsmen are entrusted with the realization of the gardens. See, i.e., Alfreda Murck and Wen Fong: A Chinese Garden Court: The Astor Court at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1980; Laurie Sowd: The Making of Liu Fang Yuan, in: Another World Lies Beyond: Creating Liu Fang Yuan, Hun-tington’s Chinese Garden, ed. T. June Li, San Marino, CA 2009, pp. 29–39. On the concept of authenticity, see John Dixon Hunt’s article in this issue of Die Garten-kunst.

22 Jing Cui: Cultural Representation and Chinese Gardens abroad: an Exploratory Study of Dunedin Chinese Garden, New Zealand, Master Thesis, Auckland Uni-versity of Technology, 2013. On the significance on Chinese-style gardens for local communities in New Zealand, see Beattie 2007 (see note 20), pp. 56–58.

23 Duncan Campbell: Transplanted Gardens: Aspects of the Design of the Garden of Beneficence, Wellington, New Zealand, in: Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscape 31, 2 (2011), p. 160.

24 For a different design approach, see Duncan Campbell’s discussion of the Garden of Beneficence in Wellington: Campbell 2011 (see note 23), pp. 160–166.

25 On Albert Kahn’s gardens see Jean-Pierre Le Dantec: Le sauvage et le régulier. Art des jardins en paysagisme en France au XXe siècle, Paris 2002, pp. 73–77.

26 Beattie 2007 (see note 20) pp. 40–42; Duncan Campbell: Transplanted Peculi-arity: the Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets, in: New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 9, 1 (2007), p. 18. Exceptions are the Yuhwa yuan in Singapore, built in 1975, and the Chinese Garden in Zurich, opened to the public in 1994, whose models of reference are the imperial parks in the Beijing area.

27 On the Astor Court see, Murck and Fong 1980 (see note 20).28 On Liu Fang yuan see, Another World Lies Beyond 2009 (see note 21). 29 Jun Jia: Les jardins du Jiangnan dans l’art paysager à Pékin, pendant les Ming et

Qing, in: Le jardin du lettré: Synthèse des arts en Chine, ed. Gilles Baud-Berthier, Sophie Couëtoux, and CheBing Chiu, Besançon 2004, pp. 171–172.

30 For this part on the influence of the gardens of the Jiangnan region on the Qing

270

imperial parks I am indebted to: Jia 2004 (see note 29), pp. 171–180; Bruce Gor-don Doar: Aquiring Gardens, in: China Heritage Quarterly 9 (2007) http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=009_gardens.inc&issue=009, accessed March 15, 2016).

31 Jia 2004 (see note 29), p. 175.32 Four gardens – Wangshi yuan, “Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets”, Liu

yuan, “Lingering Garden”, Zhuozheng yuan, “Garden of the Humble Administra-tor”, Huanxiu shanzhuang, “Mountain Villa with Embracing Beauty” – have been included in the List since 1997; while five more gardens – Canglang ting, “Surg-

ing Waves Pavilion”, Yipu, “Gardens of Cultivation”, Ou yuan, “Couple’s Garden Retreat”, Shizi lin, “Lion Grove” – have been registered since 2000.

33 As shown by Alison Hardie, Craig Clunas and James Beattie. Alison Hardie: Intro-duction, in: Maggie Keswick: The Chinese Garden: History, Art and Architecture, London 2003, pp. 8–9; Clunas 1996 (see note 5), pp. 203–205, see also pp. 12–13 for Clunas’s discussion of the process that, in the twentieth century, engendered in the West the idea of the Chinese garden as a unchanging typology; Beattie 2007 (see note 20), p. 41.

Bianca Maria RinaldiDie Erfindung des chinesischen Gartens: Von der westlichen Perzeption zur Konstruktion einer globalen Identität

In der Regel geben westliche Autoren, die im 19. Jahrhundert ins China der Qing-Zeit reisten oder dort längere Zeit lebten, in ihren Berichten die Merkmale chinesischer Gärten vergleichsweise grob wieder. Einige wenige direkte Beobachter hatten zwar über zwei Jahr-hunderte hinweg bereits immer detailliertere Beschreibungen zu chi-nesischen Gärten geliefert, wodurch in Europa bereits einige Kennt-nisse über chinesischen Gartenbau vorhanden waren. Ab Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts neigten die westlichen Beschreibungen chinesischer Gärten dann jedoch dazu, die räumliche Komposition der Gärten immer vereinfachter zu beschreiben und auf nur einige wenige grund-legende Gestaltungselemente zurückzuführen.

Zwei Entwicklungen Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts trugen zum Ent-stehen dieser vereinfachten Darstellungen bei: Die bis dato lang anhal-tende Faszination für chinesische Gärten sowie ihre ästhetischen und gestalterischen Grundlagen verflachte zunehmend, obwohl der Einfluss auf die Entwicklung westlicher Gärten im 18. Jahrhundert durchaus beachtlich gewesen war. Hinzu kam, dass chinesische Gär-ten als Motiv massenhaft importierter Porzellanwaren im Westen visuell immer präsenter wurden, wobei das Trauerweiden-Muster die am weitesten verbreitete Variante darstellte. Dieses Muster reduzierte jedoch die komplexe Anlage chinesischer Gärten auf einige wenige zentrale Elemente, wie Pavillons, eine Brücke, gewundene Zäune, Wasser oder eine Trauerweide.

Der Aufsatz diskutiert diesen Prozess der inhaltlichen Verkür-zung, der im Westen das Entstehen einer kompositorischen Formel zur Folge hatte, die ab dem 19. Jahrhundert die Darstellungen des „chinesischen Gartens“ domminierte. Westliche Reiseberichte aus diesem Jahrhundert stehen im Mittelpunkt der Analyse, während der bereits bekannte Einfluss der Chinoiserie auf die westliche Konstruk-tion des Exotischen nicht erneut zentral aufgegriffen wird. Diese Rei-seberichte, die sich auf die Erwähnung einiger weniger ikonischer Elemente beschränkten, unterstützen das stereotype Bild des chinesi-schen Gartens, das auch die Trauerweiden-Muster vermittelten.

In jüngerer Zeit hat dieses weit verbreitete westliche Bild eines ide-alen chinesischen Gartens auch die Gestaltung einer Reihe von Gär-ten in chinesischem Stil außerhalb Chinas inspiriert. Das stark sim-plifizierte Modell nimmt heute eine wichtige symbolische Funktion für chinesische Diaspora-Gemeinschaften ein, die in verschiedensten Regionen der Welt die Anlage chinesischen Gärten vorantreiben. In diesen Kontexten bedient das überkommene Bild des chinesischen Gartens zum einen eine verklärende Nostalgie und versucht zum anderen den Publikumsgeschmack zu treffen, der durch die etablier-ten westlichen Phantasien geprägt ist. Die Gärten sollen einen „nati-onalen“ und „traditionellen“ Stil zum Ausdruck bringen, der die kul-turelle Identität Chinas repräsentiert, stärkt und in der Welt bekannt macht.