yue zhuang

Sir William Temple, an English statesman and humanist, wrote “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus” in 1685, taking a neo-epicurean approach to happiness and temperance. In accord with Pierre Gassendi’s epicureanism, “happiness” is characterised as freedom from disturbance and pain in mind and body, whereas “temperance” means following nature (Providence and one’s physio-psychological constitution). For Temple, cultivating fruit trees in his garden was analogous to the threefold cultivation of temperance as a virtue in the humoral body (as food), the mind (as freedom from the passions), and the body-economic (as circulating goods) in order to attain happiness. A regimen that was supposed to cure the malaise of Restoration amidst a crisis of unbridled passions, this threefold cultivation of temperance underlines Temple’s reception of China and Confucianism wherein happiness and temperance are highlighted.  Thus Temple’s “gardens of happiness” represent not only a reinterpretation of classical ideas, but also his dialogue with China.

This chapter examines Soane’s architectural language and imagination in relation to first principles through the detailed consideration of an unpublished manuscript on his house-museum entitled Crude Hints towards an History of my House in L[incoln’s] I[nn] Fields (1812). Underpinning the Crude Hints manuscript is the theme of the subterranean forces of fire and water, a geological concept of first principles that was central to the romanticist narrative of the earth. Analysing images in Crude Hints such as “the vanishing staircase” and “the chaos of fragments” shows how they represent respectively broken classical signification and destroyed signifiers. As a mirror of the house-museum, the manuscript illustrates that Soane’s effort to “return” to the origins of architectural language continues a critical line of modern architecture traceable to the sixteenth century avant-garde, in which art can constantly renew itself only by destroying itself.

Italian missionary Matteo Ripa is often noted by art historians as the painter who introduced copperplate engravings to the Qing court, where he produced a set of copperplate landscape engravings, Thirty-six Views of Jehol (1712–14). Ripa, ironically, was often mistaken as a Jesuit, whereas in reality the Jesuits were Ripa’s arch enemies. As Michele Fatica and Yue Zhuang remind us in Chapter 4, sent from Propaganda Fide, Ripa’s China mission was to reassert the papal ban on the Chinese rites against Jesuit practice, a mission he could not reveal at court, being constrained by the tensions around the Rites Controversy. The conflicts between Ripa and the Jesuits, which were detailed in Ripa’s original diary (Giornale) but removed by the priest-editors of Storia (1832) and consequently absent in Fortunato Prandi’s widely read, and often quoted, English abridged translation, Memoirs of Father Ripa (1844), were the constraining force in Ripa’s creation of the Views of Jehol. Retrieving these historical conflicts and complexities surrounding the making of the landscape engravings, Fatica and Zhuang suggest that the distinctive visual incongruities of Ripa’s images from the Chinese woodcuts were not merely technical adaptations. Rather, they demonstrate a political and ideological battle surrounding the
Rites Controversy—a battle in which the missionary Ripa was entangled. Restoring Ripa and his engravings to their own historical contexts alerts us as to how editors of missionary literature manufactured presentations of
the past. The restoration illustrates how the transfer of landscape ideas and images could be far from an innocent process, but rather a process affected by contingent, personal and political conditions.

Yue Zhuang’s reading of Sir William Chambers’ A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772) in relation to Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime, reveals the royal architect’s conception of “Chinese gardens”—an articulation of his landscape theory—to have been integrated with the then British discourses on emotions, constitutional liberty and public improvement. Based upon Burke’s sublime and the European classical rhetoric tradition, Chambers’ landscape theory aimed to cultivate the moral emotions of fear and pride among the British citizens. Instead of a mere mask for visual elements and their associative values, such as China’s sociopolitical stability based on Confucian moral cultivation, provide referents for him to promote landscape gardening as a means of moral reform. Chambers’ evocation of Burke’s sublime, together with the Chinese landscapes of concealment, cultivated moral fear and awe which sought to restrain the mechanical reasoning of contemporary British politics and the sense of unbridled liberty in English urban radicalism. On the other hand, the magnificence of Chinese infrastructure landscapes (roads, bridges, rivers and canals)— which Chambers largely drew from the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Du Halde’s A Description of the Empire of China (1738–41)—were rendered in terms of another Burkean sublime, the sublime of grandeur. With both visual and associative values from the fields of progressive commerce, technology and landscape urbanism in China, Chambers’ Chinese imagery stimulated the passion of pride among British artists to encourage them to emulate and surpass the Chinese. Chambers’ innovative landscape theory—an intertwining of ideas from the classical, the oriental and the Scottish Enlightenment—may be read as a demonstration of a Chinese modernity appropriated into Britain’s empire-building.

This paper examines oriental landscape scenes of “luxury” and of “the surprising” as described by Sir William Chambers (1726–1796) in his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), and analyses them in relation to Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime and the beautiful. I argue that Chambers’ depiction of these landscape scenes was motivated by a commitment to the importance of maintaining martial virtues in commercial and civil societies. The Dissertation puts forward the role of the surprising scenes for maintaining military vigour in coexistence with the landscape of luxury. For Chambers, landscape is a site for shaping citizens’ sensations and virtues. Chambers articulated his sensationalist landscape, which was deeply influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment discourses of physiology, virtue, and commerce theory, through the disguise of a Chinese garden. The Dissertation provides an important example of how discourses on the building of Britain’s identity operated through allegory within the framework of cultural interaction between Asia and Europe during the early modern period.

The exchange of landscape practice between China and Europe from 1500–1800 is an important chapter in art history. While the material forms of the outcome of this exchange, like jardin anglo-chinois and Européenerie are well documented, this book moves further to examine the role of the exchange in identity formation in early modern China and Europe.

        Proposing the new paradigm of “entangled landscapes”, drawing from the concept of “entangled histories”, this book looks at landscape design, cartography, literature, philosophy and material culture of the period. Challenging simplistic, binary treatments of the movements of “influences” between China and Europe, Entangled Landscapes reveals how landscape exchanges entailed complex processes of appropriation, crossover and transformation, through which Chinese and European identities were formed.

        Exploring these complex processes via three themes—empire building, mediators’ constraints, and aesthetic negotiations, this work breaks new ground in landscape and East-West studies. Interdisciplinary and revisionist in its thrust, it will also benefit scholars of history, human geography and postcolonial studies.