Mapping Chengde: The Qing Landscape Enterprise

MAPPING CHENGDE The Qing Landscape Enterprise Philippe For êt

MAPPING CHENGDE

MAPPING The Qing

CHENGDE Landscape Enterprise Philippe Forêt

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

© 2000 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 05 04 03 02 01 00

5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Forêt, Philippe, 1957– Mapping Chengde : the Qing landscape enterprise / Philippe Forêt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–8248–1980–2 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0–8248–2293–5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Chengde (China)—History. 2. Civilization—China—Chengde. 3. China—History—Chi’ng dynasty, 1644–1912. I. Title. DS796.C49 F67 2000 951'.52—dc21

99–088190

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

Book design by Kenneth Miyamoto Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

In memory of Paul Wheatley

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Author’s Notes

Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Appendix Appendix Appendix Appendix Appendix

1 2 3 4 5

xiii

Introduction The Great Qing at Home Hamlet and Imperial Residence Garden and Mountain Rhetoric The Jehol Frontier Capitals and Models Representations of Chengde Chengde Studies

1 13 27 54 80 100 116 139

Place Name Concordance Qing Dynasty Emperors Waiba miao Temples The Kangxi Emperor’s Vistas Chronology of Chengde

153 154 155 156 157

Notes

163

Glossary

183

Bibliography

187

Index

203

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have visited every building on the hills and have explored the pinedecked valleys. Water, stones, mountain mists and flowers make a fairy land. Truly it is like a dwelling in the moon, far from the earth. The Qianlong Emperor, upon arriving at Chengde, 1756.1

It is my wish that Mapping Chengde: The Qing Landscape Enterprise will contribute to preserving a fairy land that remained emotionally abandoned during most of its existence and, since its restoration some twenty years ago, has suffered from hasty conservation techniques, mass tourism, and to a less perilous degree academic misunderstanding. Working on Chengde over the past years, I have often thought of a conversation I had in a train from Beijing to Guangzhou ten years ago. My hard berth carriage companions, on learning how impressed I had been by the beauty of the temples of Chengde, laughed and told me that they too were back from the Qing summer capital. They then proudly showed me little gilded statues of the Buddha that they had stolen there and would be selling in Hong Kong. I hope that this book will add a sense of urgency to our growing awareness of cultural landscape as a nonrenewable resource and may somehow help to keep the remaining statues in their wall niches. I owe a debt to the many scholars who encouraged me during my field research and the writing of this book. My heartfelt thanks go to John Iverson (University of Missouri) for his permanent support and valuable comments on the notions of glory in the writing of history during the eighteenth century. I would like to acknowledge my colleagues in Chengde studies: Ruth Dunnell (Kenyon College), Mark Elliott (University of California, Santa Barbara), and James Millward (Georgetown University). I met Mark and Jim first in Beijing in 1990 and later in Ann Arbor during the National Endowment for the Humanities 1994 Summer Institute on “Reading the Manchu Summer Palace at Chengde.” The month I spent at the University of Michigan was very productive and I am happy to acknowledge the faculty and the participants of the Summer Institute: Anne Chayet, Ruth Dunnell, James Hevia, Donald Lopez, and Evelyn Rawski. Thanks to James Wescoat 1. Sven Hedin, Jehol: City of Emperors (New York: Dutton and Company, 1933), p. 189.

ix

x

Acknowledgments

(University of Colorado, Boulder) and James Duncan (Syracuse University), a workshop presentation that I gave on the gardens of Chengde became an article published in Ecumene: A Journal of Environment, Culture, and Meaning. My former professors at the University of Chicago, Michael Conzen, Norton Ginsburg, Marvin Mikesell, and Paul Wheatley, have offered their ideas and guidance throughout the years. Christopher Winters allowed me extensive use of the resources of the map collection of the University of Chicago Joseph Regenstein Library. In Washington, D.C., I benefited immensely from my meetings with Milo Beach and John Dixon Hunt, who had invited me to spend a summer as a research fellow at the Sackler Museum of the Smithsonian Institution and at Dumbarton Oaks. Susan Naquin (Princeton University) and Guy Alitto’s (University of Chicago) reviews of my dissertation helped me to pay attention to historians’ concerns. In Paris, Redouane Djamouri (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) never failed to share with me his prodigious erudition on China. Augustin Berque invited me to attend his seminars on landscape at the Centre de Recherches sur le Japon Contemporain, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; he introduced me to theoretical work on environmental perception in Japan. My discussions with Paul Claval (Institut de Géographie of de La Sorbonne) and Anne Chayet (Instituts d’Extrême-Orient) were sources of inspiration. I became a member at large of Paul Claval’s Laboratoire Espace et Cultures, whose journal Géographie et Cultures has set the pace in French landscape studies. Paul Claval and Florence Blanchon (Centre de Recherches sur l’Extrême Orient de La Sorbonne) published early versions of my developing arguments on the geomancy of Qing gardens and cities in Géographie et Cultures and Asies. Pierre-Étienne Will (Collège de France) allowed me to participate in the activities of the research group he chairs on the history of science and technology in East Asia. I must thank the librarians of the Château de Vincennes for allowing me access to their eighteenth-century card catalogs and to a number of maps of the Qing empire far beyond the limit normally set by service regulations. Mareile Flitsch (Freie Universität Berlin) very kindly invited me to join a stimulating week-long conference in Berlin-Glienicke, “Aspects of North China’s Peasant Culture,” during which I read a paper on mapping the cultural ecology of Qing Jehol based on the maps I had found in Vincennes. At Peking University, Hou Renzhi was kind enough to endorse my research project and to write the letters of introduction I needed to meet city officials in Chengde and Mulan. Zhao Zhongshu (Peking University) gave generously of his time during our field trips in northern Hebei and when collecting relevant library materials in Beijing in 1990 and 1991. I would like to thank the Manchu and Mongol officials who very warmly welcomed me in Weichang township, even if the purpose of my research in this remote part of Hebei had become obscure to everyone, me included, by the end of our banquet. I would like to thank Hugh Shapiro (University of Nevada, Reno) and Karin Wentz (World

Acknowledgments

xi

Bank) for their participation in several field trips to Chengde, as well as Zhao Hua and his cheerful staff at the Weichang Tourism Administration for driving me around Mulan in all weather and road conditions. I express my gratitude to Inamoto Yonosuke who kindly invited me to stay as a Foreign Researcher at the Institute of Social Science of Tokyo University. The draft of my doctoral dissertation was written in the congenial atmosphere of the institute during the 1991–1992 Japanese academic year. A few months after I left Tokyo, I submitted to the Committee on Geographical Studies of the University of Chicago a short dissertation with a long title, “Making an Imperial Landscape in Chengde, Jehol: The Manchu Landscape Enterprise.” I mailed the first draft of the manuscript to the University of Hawai‘i Press in April 1994 and, not surprisingly, was asked to revise it extensively. I revised the dissertation for publication during the year I spent as a research fellow of the Department of Geography of the University of California at Berkeley. During my revisions I benefited from the advice of Ronald Knapp (State University of New York, College at New Paltz), whom I had met in Berlin, and from the comments of two anonymous reviewers. As I was waiting for the readers’ final reports, I continued doing research on two topics related to Chengde, the Swedish copy of the Potala temple and the portraits of the Qianlong emperor as Mañjusrï. Gregory Schopen (University of Texas, Austin) invited me to participate in the symposium he organized on the ambiguity of Avalokiteshvara, during which I claimed that in depicting himself as Mañjusrï, the Qianlong emperor produced a space for ambiguity in order to effectively rule the constituencies of his empire. I am grateful to Håkan Wahlquist for granting me access to the fabulous resources of the Sven Hedin collections in Stockholm. Conversations I had with the obliging scholars of the Folkens museum etnografiska during the summers of 1996, 1997, and 1998 yielded new and provocative information on Qianlong’s Buddhism that I was able to include in my ultimate revision of the book manuscript. In 1998 Stan Fung (University of Adelaide) invited me to write an essay on Chinese gardens. I took this opportunity to develop new ideas on the intended response to Bishu shanzhuang and submitted “The Intended Perception of the Imperial Gardens of Chengde in 1780” to Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. In my previous work on Chengde, I had neglected to consider the model visitor’s perspective that the Manchu emperors had in mind when they directed the construction and representation of the gardens of their hill station. To a degree, this paper on the representation intended by the Qianlong emperor and the disappearance of certain features (pivotal mountain temple, walls, people, frontier) was the development of several points I have made in the “Garden and Mountain Rhetoric” chapter of this book. For having shared their ideas with me, I would like to thank Stan Fung and an anonymous reviewer of the Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes.

xii

Acknowledgments

Financial and administrative support for this research project came from American, Asian, and European sources. I am glad to acknowledge the Canon Foundation in Europe, the Chinese Department of Education, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the CiriacyWantrup Fellowship program of the University of California at Berkeley, the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China, Dumbarton Oaks, the French Department of Education, the French Department of Foreign Affairs, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the Sven Hedin Foundation, and the University of Chicago. Without the assistance of these institutions and agencies, I could never have completed this study on Chengde. I want to extend my appreciation to the bannermen, peasants, lumbermen, and poachers of Jehol, without whom nothing would have occurred at the mountainous frontier of China and Central Asia, and to the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors of the Great Qing dynasty who selected for generations of scholars a suitable topic for publications on culture, nature, architecture, and dreams in their private residence. I hope that my work will not disappoint my friends and colleagues who shared their time, resources, and knowledge of the Qing empire with me. I would like to thank Hope De Simone and John Iverson for their help in editing successive drafts of the manuscript and for their rigorous and insightful contributions to this book. I might not have finished this book if Corinne Pernet (University of Oklahoma) had not helped me with the proofreading and indexing of it; I remain indebted to her for her moral and intellectual support. Santiago de Chile, May 26, 1999

AUTHOR’S NOTES

For clarity and consistency, several conventions have governed the use of city names, geographical terms, personal names, and the choice of a system of transcription in this book. I have followed a phonetic convention employed by the Chinese geographer Zhao Songqiao concerning geographical terms for mountains, seas, rivers, and lakes.1 I have extended this convention to include Chinese administrative nomenclature and Chinese settlement and building terminology. A name with only one Chinese character has its following Chinese term repeated in its English translation; however, the last character of polysyllabic names is translated but not repeated, according to convention. For instance, he [river] has been kept as part of the name in monosyllabic river names: the Rehe, Baihe, and Luanhe rivers; whereas he has been omitted in multisyllabic names: the Xiliao river. Notable exceptions to this rule are: Bishu shanzhuang (the name of the Qing hill station of Chengde); the three Great Wall gates of Gubeikou, Jinshanling, and Shanhaiguan; Waiba miao (the collective name of the Buddhist outer temples that the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors sponsored in Chengde); Wanshuyuan (the name of the prairie district inside Bishu shanzhuang, where the Mongol camp was located); and Yuanmingyuan and Yiheyuan (the names of the two Qing summer residences in Haidian, a suburb of the winter capital of Beijing). Literally Bishu shanzhuang means “Mountain Hamlet for the Escape from the Summer Heat”; Waiba miao, “Eight Outer Temples”; Wanshuyuan, “Garden of Ten Thousand Trees”; Yuanmingyuan, “Garden of Perfect Brightness”; and Yiheyuan, “Garden of Ease and Harmony.” Nomenclature has often led to confusion in the study of Chinese geography; it has also offered perplexing problems of identification in materials on China and in Chinese materials on Central Asia. Not only have boundaries shifted and place names changed, 1. Zhao Songqiao, Geography of China: Environment, Resources, Population, and Development, pp. xvii–xix.

xiii

xiv

Author’s Notes

usually with every new dynasty, but cities and territories have sometimes shared the same administrative denomination, with the same name conferred on two geographically distinct entities. Such has been the case with Chengde: Chengde xian was a county established near Mukden in 1664; its name was changed from Fengtian Chengde to Shenyang xian in 1913. Chengde xian was also the name of a county in a different province, established in 1913 to replace the Chengde fu prefecture formed in 1778 in what was then the province of Zhili. This later Chengde was the summer capital of the Qing dynasty (1636–1912). I use the name Chengde only to indicate the city of Chengde, which includes the summer residence of Bishu shanzhuang and the religious complex of the Waiba miao temples north of the city. In its limited sense, this Chengde excludes the rural area of Chengde xian [Chengde county] that is governed from present-day Chengde shi [Chengde city]. To avoid any confusion between the city of Chengde and the extramural territory (city shi, district diqu, prefecture fu) of Chengde, I have used the name Jehol exclusively to designate the area that came under Qing Chengde’s jurisdiction and later corresponded to the province of Jehol, Rehe sheng. My reason for choosing Chengde rather than Jehol when discussing the Qing summer capital is that the conventional use of Jehol by European scholars (Otto Franke, Sven Hedin, and Anne Chayet) does not agree with the Chinese conventional use of Chengde for the city name and Rehe for the province name. Chengde has also been known in Chinese and European historical records as Chengde fu, Chengtehfu, Gé-hol, Geho, Geho-eul, Gehol, Je ho, Je ho eul, Jee-ho, Je-hol, Jehol, Rehe shangying, Rehe xinggong, Tchen-teu-fou, Tch’eng-te shih, Tchhing te fou, Zehol, and Zhe-hol. Other transcriptions of the names Chengde and Jehol may exist. I thus follow the norm in Chinese materials established since Qianlong gave the new name of Chengde to his summer capital of Rehe. The Manchu name for Rehe is Zeho (with an inverted circumflex accent over the Z), and for Chengde, Cengde. I have decided to retain the use of the name Jehol, but to restrict it to the geographical region between the Great Wall and the Xiliao river. The alternative to resurrecting Jehol would have been the correct rendering of Rehe by Rehe. The exclusive use of Rehe for Jehol would have created difficulties, as in Chinese materials Rehe is a river, a city, a prefecture, and a province. Jehol was the English adaptation of rehe through its approximation [Geho-eul] in French. Historically part of Inner Mongolia, Qing Jehol extended from the Ming-built Great Wall in Hebei in the south, to the Qing-built Willow Palisade in Liaoning in the east, and to the Xiliao river in the north. During the eighteenth century, most of Jehol became administratively and ethnically part of the province of Zhili, now the province of Hebei. In this book, the Jehol boundary corresponds to the Zhili northern boundary indicated by the map of the province of Zhili in the Tongzhi Atlas of the Qing Empire and to the northern limits of Jehol province after its annexation to Man-

Author’s Notes

xv

choukuo in 1933. During the Republican period (1912–1949), the Balin Banners’ territory lying north of the Xiliao river was first added and then removed again from Jehol, which was then an administrative entity distinct from Hebei province. Fengning, Luanping, Chengde fu, Pingquan, Jianchang, Chaoyang, and Chifeng [Ulanhad] were the major urban centers of Jehol. In the mid-1950s the central government enlarged Beijing, Hebei, Liaoning, and Inner Mongolia by annexing parts of the Jehol province. Reference sources for the maps of Jehol have therefore been Jehol as shown in the Tongzhi Atlas, the Chengde Gazetteer, and the map of Zhili in Zhongguo lishi dituji, Qing shiqi, with further information drawn from the Asian and European maps listed in the bibliography.2 I have employed the name Mulan instead of the name Weichang. Weichang indicates the city and county xian of Weichang; Mulan remains the name of the imperial hunting ground, now included in the county of Weichang. The pinyin transcription mulan could be misleading, as the Manchu pronunciation of that area name is “muran.” “Muran” is the call Manchu and Mongol hunters uttered to fool deer, and mulan is its pinyin transliteration. As for weichang, it means “hunting circle” in Chinese. Weichang is thus not a translation into Chinese of the meaning of “muran” in Manchu, whereas mulan is the transcription in Chinese of its sound in Manchu. I have retained the now familiar spelling Beijing and not its traditional romanization Peking. In 1644, after the fall of the Ming dynasty, the Qing dynasty transferred its capital from Mukden [Shengjing] to Beijing. Beijing was also called Jingshi [Capital City]. As it was also the seat of the prefecture fu of Shuntian, Shuntian fu was Beijing’s other name during the Qing dynasty. The Manchu dynasty kept an auxiliary capital at Mukden, with jurisdiction over Manchuria. Like Beijing, Mukden has had several names: Shengjing, Fengtian, and now Shenyang. The fourth largest city in China, Shenyang is the capital city of Liaoning province. The use of the Manchu name of Mukden for Shenyang during the Qing period seems appropriate, as it was the name retained by geographers until 1945. The names Shengjing for Mukden and Jingshi for Beijing might have seemed more appropriate to some Qing scholars, but these choices would not have followed the usual norm for place names. Qing emperors had several titles and names in the Manchu, Chinese, Mongol, and 2. Tongzhi Atlas is the short title for Da Qing zhen sheng quantu, published in 1862. The Chengde Gazetteer was originally compiled for the Qianlong emperor by Qian Daxin and Ji Yun and titled Qinding Rehe zhi. In 1830, it was enlarged and reedited by prefect Hai Zhong and titled Rehe tongzhi. In 1888, the Chengde Gazetteer was further enlarged under the title [Qinding] Rehe [tong] zhi. See also Rehe zhi, a 1967 reprint, and Hai Zhong and Lin Congshang, eds., Chengde fu zhi, a 1968 reprint of the Chengde Gazetteer. Chengde Gazetteer is the English transliteration used for all of these editions in the text. Tan Qixiang, ed., Zhongguo lishi dituji, The Historical Atlas of China, Volume 8: Qing shiqi, The Qing Dynasty Period, map 7–8: “Zhili” (1820).

xvi

Author’s Notes

Tibetan languages. They are best known by their Chinese reign names nianhao in the Qing calendar. I have thus used only reign names; therefore, the Qianlong emperor instead of emperor Gaozong and Kangxi instead of Shengzu. Appendix 2: Qing Dynasty Emperors provides the Manchu emperors’ complete titles in Chinese. (For a complete genealogical table of the family names and titles of the Aisin-Gioro imperial family, in both Manchu and Chinese languages, see Liu Xiaomin and Yang Jun, eds. Jianming Man-Han cidian [Concise Manchu-Chinese Dictionary], Appendix 16, pp. 462–469). Only the Kangxi, Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Xianfeng emperors used Chengde as their seasonal capital. Appendix 4 gives information on the landscape elements, distribution, complexity, frequency, and spatial division of the hill station vistas that the Kangxi emperor conceived. The information is based on the plates published in Li Yimeng, ed., Bishu shanzhuang sanshiliu jing [The Thirty-Six Vistas of Bishu shanzhuang]. In his monograph on Chengde, Beschreibung des Jehol-Gebietes in der Provinz Chihli, Otto Franke has provided an annotated translation of the names of these landscape vistas designed by the Kangxi emperor (see Appendix 3A, “Die 36 von K’ang-hsi benannten Gebäude, Anlagen etc. mit viersilbigen Namen,” pp. 91–94). For an approximate translation into English of the plate names, see Hebei meishu chubanshe, ed. Chengde fengguang, pp. 8–9. No study has yet been undertaken on the landscape vista names and poems in the Manchu edition of the Kangxi emperor’s poems on the summer residence (Qing Shengzu [Kangxi emperor], Han-i araha Alan-i tokso de halhün be jailaha gi bithe, or in Chinese Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi). The name Manchuria indicates exclusively a geographical area and not a political entity. Manchuria is not a word in Chinese or in Manchu. The geographical term Manchuria is used here out of convenience, even if it is loaded with the imperialist overtones of the 1930s: Manchuria; or Land of the Manchus, a healthy, fertile, billowy country with a fine, temperate climate, vast riches and a promising future, is rapidly being developed and modernized by the capable and progressive Japanese.3

This term refers to the area now covered by Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang and the northeastern part of Inner Mongolia. Today the Liaoning province includes southeastern Jehol, and the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia includes northern Jehol. During the Qing dynasty, Southern Manchuria was first called Shengjing and later Fengtian; the area became the Liaoning province in 1929. The Manchoukuo government (1932–1945) divided Manchuria into five, and later eighteen provinces, one of which was Jehol. Zhili 3. Philip Terry, Terry’s Guide to the Japanese Empire (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927), p. 756.

Author’s Notes

xvii

and Fengtian indicate references to Qing dynasty materials on these two provinces. Hebei and Liaoning, the present names of the same two provinces, indicate general references to materials from the Republican (1912–1949) and Communist (1949–present) periods. A second common source of confusion in American and European scholarship about Asia has grown from the many competing systems for the transcription of Asian languages into the Latin alphabet. For Chinese materials and Central Asian materials translated into Chinese, I have adopted the pinyin romanization spelled in the Xiandai Hanyu cidian dictionary with its complement, the Xiandai Hanyu cidian bubian.4 It has, unfortunately, not been possible to show the four tonal diacritical marks of modern Chinese. I have transliterated into the pinyin system all titles, personal names, and place names (except Jehol and with the reservations detailed earlier) that are in the Chinese materials I have quoted. I have also indicated within square brackets the pinyin romanization in the quotations that may have become familiar in other and older transliteration systems, for example, Ch’eng-teh [Chengde], Kara-kotton [Kalahetun]). Chinese translation and the pinyin transliteration of Mongol geographical names have been generally used: for example, the city of Chifeng for Ulanhad, and the Xiliao [Xilamulun] river for the Xar Moron river. The pinyin transcription of Mongol names as spelled in original sources is also shown in brackets: Bärin [Balin] territory. Non-pinyin transcriptions of Mongol and Manchu names are not in italics. Tibetan titles and place names have usually been transcribed using the scholarly correct transcriptions except for the most familiar forms: Lhasa instead of lHa-sa and Panchen Lama instead of Pan-chen bLama. For Sanskrit names, I have followed the transcription system provided by William Soothill and Lewis Hodous in their Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms. As for transcriptions from Japanese, the vowel value is normally marked with an accent above long vowels. In Chinese and Japanese original works, the authors’ family names come first, followed by their given names. Unlike most Chinese scholars, Japanese scholars have tended to put their family names last in publications that have been translated into English. I have not been able to correct conflicting spellings found in materials written in Asian languages other than Chinese. I would like to apologize to scholars proficient in the languages of the Qing empire, Manchu, Mongol, and Tibetan, who may be annoyed by the vagaries and the absence of diacritics in my transcriptions. I have resisted using English renderings that would seem quaint and exotic. The emperors deliberately selected place names that had many references in literary and religious registers and are difficult to translate with precision. The Glossary may be consulted for meanings and transliterations of Chinese terms. The Mongol or Manchu provenance 4. Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan yuyan yanjiusuo cidian, ed., Xiandai Hanyu cidian and Xiandai Hanyu cidian bubian.

xviii

Author’s Notes

of non-Chinese terms is indicated in brackets. For more Chinese transcriptions of Manchu and Mongol geographical terms, please refer to Walter Fuchs, Der Jesuiten-Atlas der Kanghsi Zeit, “19. Transcriptions-fragen” and “20. Einige Mandjurisch-Mongolische Geographische Bezeichnungen,” pp. 86–92; and Lucien Gibert, Dictionnaire historique et géographique de la Mandchourie, “Liste des termes les plus usités en géographie et de ceux qui entrent le plus fréquemment dans la composition des noms de lieux,” pp. x–xvi. For Tibetan names, personal names, place names, building, and temple names related to Chengde, consult Anne Chayet’s list (in pinyin transcription), Les temples de Jehol et leurs modèles tibétains, pp. 179–189. For a glossary of Chinese terms related to landscape architecture, see Ronald G. Knapp, China’s Vernacular Architecture: House Form and Culture, pp. 179–183. I have included in the book thirty figures that serve to represent actual and conceptual facets of the Qing landscape. Together, they contribute to providing the final interpretation of “Tianyu xian cheng” vista plate 18 of Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi (Figure 20). Several of the figures cannot pretend to be maps, either because they are diagrams or because the paintings do not have a constant scale. I have chosen all the selected figures from Qing materials: the plates of the Chengde Gazetteer, those of the Kangxi emperor’s Album of Imperial Poems [Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi], and the two 1780 landscape paintings kept at the Library of Congress, the Tai wan dili tu and the Rehe xinggong quantu maps. Without these paintings, maps, and plates I would not have been provided with the visual materials that I needed to develop a geographical analysis that sets forth a literal mapping of the Qing landscape enterprise. I visited and photographed Chengde several times, and I hope that the photographs I am adding to the book will help the reader to compare the hill station of the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors to Bishu shanzhuang today, a few years before the celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Chengde. These illustrations are adding information to the research previously conducted in China by Hou Renzhi for his historical atlas Beijing lishi dituji and by the architects of Qinghua and Tianjin Universities for their Chengde gu jianzhu.5 Other sources used in my deconstruction of the Qing gardens have included sheet M4 of Mgr. Alphonse Favier’s Carte du Pé-Tchi-li, and “Karte zu Dr. Otto Franke’s Beschreibung des Jehol-Gebietes in der Provinz Chihli.”6 For the analysis of the landscape of Jehol, I have relied on the Japanese survey campaign that Shigeyasu Tokunaga led in the 1930s.7 5. Tianjin daxue jianzhuxi and chengde shi wenwuyu, eds., Chengde gu jianzhu. 6. Favier’s map is part of his unpublished atlas, Carte du Pé-Tchi-Li, avec tableau d’assemblage et légende. Otto Franke, Beschreibung des Jehol-Gebietes in der Provinz Chihli. Detail-Studien in Chinesischer Landes- und Volkskunde. 7. Tada Fumio, Geography of Jehol. Report of the First Scientific Expedition to Manchukuo, under the Leadership of Shigeyasu Tokunaga, June–October 1933.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Wonderful in all its beauty Dreams the Jehol [Rehe] River strand. May great spirits ever bless thee, Boundary of our fosterland.1

Anecdotal questions have led me to fundamental issues concerning the social creation of landscape, the relationship between space and power, and the study of spatial metaphors within a specific civilization. After the fabulous resources of China became available to the Qing emperors, why did they choose to locate their seasonal capital in an impoverished frontier area? For centuries the rituals of court life had been staged in Beijing inside one of the most formidable complexes of ceremonial palaces in the world. Why did these emperors call their new summer residence a mountain hamlet and design it to look like a village of pavilions? At a time when their army standards were being flown from the shores of Lake Balkhash to the coasts of Vietnam, why were the Qing emperors attracted by the lukewarm spring of the diminutive Rehe river? Why did they feel the need to lead their troops into allied Mongolia, north of the Great Wall, almost every summer and fall? Mapping Chengde: The Qing Landscape Enterprise questions our accepted view of the oriental world by analyzing the remarkable visions held by two city builders who were emperors. The aim of this book is to deepen our understanding of cultural landscape by discussing late imperial China and the historiography of the geographical literature related to the Qing empire. The general theme of Mapping Chengde, however, is universal and will be familiar to many readers: landscape as monument, or more precisely, the power of imagining landscape as a medium for public persuasion. This approach goes beyond our routine acceptance of place as a setting and landscape as a text. This work on the dreams fed by the spring of Chengde is therefore part of a broader current of reflection that has investigated such diverse topics as the planning of Stalinist Moscow, the sacred landscape of Inca architecture, and the naïveté of map readers. It touches on several theoretical issues amply developed by scholars in the humanities and social sciences as it presents the Qing cultural context in which the notions of hybridity, spectacle, and colonial studies 1

2

Mapping Chengde

acquire a specific meaning. The goal of this project has been to add to the new work done in landscape studies by providing a geographical narrative on a specific place whose significance is discussed in Eastern terms. Cultural landscape is the central concept of Mapping Chengde, and this concept is examined through architectural and cartographical representations of a site that was designed to form the pivot of the Qing empire. This discussion of imperial landscape is therefore also a discussion of map reading that reveals two monarchs’ perspectives on how landscape should be addressed. The main thesis of Mapping Chengde is simply that the geography of the Qing empire during the eighteenth century was intimately intertwined with Tibetan Buddhism, that this relationship was a fundamental part of the continued expansion of the Manchu state in Inner Asia, and that the degree of this intimacy becomes surprisingly apparent in an examination of the iconography of the summer residence. The purpose of this book, however, is not the abstract study of state formation but the actual imprinting of imperial

Figure 1. Main gate of Bishu shangzhuang. Philippe Forêt.

Introduction

3

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 significance and persistence of Buddhist beliefs can be appreciated with difficulty in the visual materials about the architecture of the Qing summer capital, since the maps, paintings, and engravings produced during eighty years of construction use ambiguity in shaping the perception of an environment of gardens and temples. This 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. One crucial concern for the Qing emperors was the promotion of the Manchus as a nation, and as a result, the hills of Jehol became implicated in the exaltation of ethnic identity. For this reason changes brought to the site of Chengde are ana-

Figure 2. Northeastern gate of Bishu shanzhuang. Left of residential wall: the hill station. Right of wall: a tilled field. Philippe Forêt.

4

Mapping Chengde

lyzed within the regional context of a geographical environment. The remains of Qing monuments, stelaes, hunting lodges, temples, and roads testify to the creation, extension, and decline of the Chengde prefecture and, with it, the Qing dynasty. The aesthetic power of the scenery vistas of the imperial gardens, landscape paintings of the summer residence, maps of the local gazetteer, and portraits of the emperor hunting in Mulan or resting in Chengde did not rest exclusively in the enchantment captured by these displays of a perfected place. The political power of the thirty-six plates of the Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi lay in their august authors’ ominous diversion away from the true motives and goals of the Qing enterprise. These visual materials hide a story of the brutal conquest of Central Asia and a subtle plot to seduce the Tibetan church as they expose the imperial will to appropriate the cosmos itself. The creation of a landscape for supremacy is disguised in the illustrations of the Chengde album of which only episodes are made apparent to us. No Qing courtier would have challenged the factual depictions of landscape commissioned by the emperor himself, and no scholar today can know how the combination of these highly selective views were combined to work to the emperor’s satisfaction. When reviewing the iconography of Chengde maps, readers have to make sense out of statements of architectural uncertainty and religious confusion, which may be difficult, since neither Kangxi or Qianlong added notes of caution to the landscape they built for display. This book accepts the risky assumption that even the ignorance and inattention apparent in the portrayals of the summer residence were intentionally included, as the emperors were the authors and editors in control of materials produced on Chengde. The noteworthy inaccuracies of Chengde iconography are indeed very informative, as they depict the political, religious, and geomantic ideals that the summer capital was built to incarnate. Fieldwork during repeated visits to Beijing, Chengde, Weichang, Zunhua, Shenyang, and Xinbin has supplemented the critical examination of the poetic, architectural, iconographic, and cartographic sources on the environment of Chengde. Most of this explanatory work has been based on the visual materials edited by the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors; on their own prefaces, vista names, and poems; and on the letters sent by Catholic missionaries employed at their courts. Architectural and religious aspects of the residence of Chengde have been included in this geographical work because these are central characteristics of the built landscape of the site. The primary sources supporting the book’s argument are for the most part subtle, as archival materials have included little on the Qing emperors’ private domains or on their subjective experiences with a metaphorical environment. Indeed, the embellishments of voluminous Chinese assertions have obscured the true character of Kangxi and Qianlong and have created historiographical emperors. These official texts on model emperorship usually portray neither the emperor as maker of his own legend nor the conception that the monarch had of himself. Focus-

Introduction

5

ing on the internal contradictions, distortions, and suggestions of visual representations commissioned by Kangxi and Qianlong has helped to reveal the spatial imprint of the Qing political order on the ceremonial center of Chengde and to give a personal poignancy to the heroic complexity of the imperial role. The architecture of this ritual order would not have been so evident in the carefully censored materials stored in Qing archival collections. The approach of Mapping Chengde is original, as the book makes use of Qing

Figure 3. Chengde Prefecture. Source: Rehe zhi, “Chengde fu tu” map.

6

Mapping Chengde

maps, miniatures, and paintings to provide information on the conflicts between self and nature, center and periphery, and between ethnic groups and the frontier environment. It discusses the roles played by geomancy, Buddhism, Confucianism, and government in directing urban development in Chengde and environmental preservation in Mulan. It also investigates the representation of space in iconography, as this representation is related to the Qing state values about the environment, revealing the ideological ways in which spatial notions are recorded. The survival of architectural heritage has emerged as a recent concern on the Asian continent only after the often gratuitous destruction of a large number of sites and structures. The new perception of a need to protect the rich legacy of Asian values is related to the disturbing disappearance of the physical environment of ancient Asia, which is succumbing to the deadly combination of climatic degradation, wartime devastation, public apathy, and rampant development.2 Traditional vernacular architecture has not been able to resist global changes in the economy and the rapid passage from poverty to wealth that modernization has implied in Japan and Taiwan, for instance. The temples that have come to symbolize the civilizations of Afghanistan, Tibet, and Cambodia have suffered tremendously during the second half of this century. Efforts to protect the architectural legacy of the colonial period have often been limited by the indifference or hostility of the government officials of newly independent countries, such as Korea and Singapore. Nationalism is very present in the calls for governmental action, as Indian scholars have argued that the Venice Charter is a European model inapproriate for Asia and that it has discouraged reconstruction and transformation of patrimony in an Asian context. The charter provides guidelines that as a model would not be appropriate to Asia. Rarely supported by local public opinion, conservationists and environmentalists have had little influence on the tour operators and developers interested in selling and packaging a prestigious cultural landscape. By adding prominent sites such as Ayutthaya (1991) and Chengde (1994) to the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, scholars and policy-makers have hoped that the international recognition of such locales would result in a higher degree of protection and access to joint expertise in conservation. The adoption of master plans similar to the zoning system of Borobodur is seen by officials as the technical solution for the management of protected cultural landscapes. The bureaucratic definition of core areas and historic property, however, cannot replace the collective understanding of the importance of cultural landscape in the enjoyment of daily life. Unfortunately, the only working agreement on the value of the architectural past that seems to exist is the one that has bound Asian looters and art dealers to the private collectors of North America and Europe. In proposing the entry of Chengde to the World Heritage Committee, the Chinese delegation insisted on the high artistic and architectural achievements that the Qing build-

Introduction

7

ings represented. Kangxi’s and Qianlong’s political message carried by the landscape of the hill station was restated in the delegation’s description of the site: Chengde was built “to appease and unite the minority peoples living in China’s border regions.” 3 China nominated Chengde as a cultural property, and it was agreed that the site fulfilled the criteria established by World Heritage Committee: Exhibit an important interchange of human values, over a span of time or within a cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture, monumental arts or town-planning and landscape design; and be an outstanding example of a type of building or architectural ensemble or landscape which illustrates (a) significant stage(s) in human history.

The UNESCO Convention that established the World Heritage List in 1972 stated that its purpose was to safeguard cultural and natural properties considered to be of out-

Figure 4. The mountains of Chengde Prefecture. Philippe Forêt.

8

Mapping Chengde

standing universal value.4 As of December 1994, the World Heritage Committee had named fourteen sites in China. At the 1994 meeting in Phuket, Thailand, the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO decided to add to its list four new sites in the People’s Republic of China: the Mountain Resort and its Outlying Temples of Chengde, the Potala Palace of Lhasa, the Temple of Confucius in Qufu, and the Daoist building complex of the Wudang mountains.5 These sites have obviously had tremendous religious significance for the major religions of China, and one might assume that religion was the criterion for selection; but the true underlying criterion was ultimately related to the Manchu political enterprise.6 The valorization of the Qing palace and temple ensemble is essential for adequate preservation of the site of Chengde. The imperial residence occupies 5.64 million square meters, or about one-third of the present Chengde urban area. Bishu shanzhuang is twice the size of the Beijing Summer Palace of Yiheyuan and is as large as the former residence of Yuanmingyuan in the Beijing suburb of Haidian. The Qing hill station offers

Figure 5. City of Chengde. Source: Rehe zhi, untitled map.

Introduction

9

to its many visitors the largest complex of imperial palaces and gardens in China. The Chinese State Council is planning to spend several million yuan every year during the tenyear maintenance project of the Qing hill station. Supervised by the State Administrative Bureau of Museums and Archeological Materials, the campaign of restoration and maintenance of imperial Chengde may indirectly lead to greater understanding of the ways in which Qing landscape enterprise acted as a force in adapting cultural, religious, and political tools of colonial domination. I toured the Bishu shanzhuang gardens for the first time on a dusty day of fall 1983 and walked for a better view of the temples on top of the wall that surrounds the summer residence. I was then too overwhelmed by the mere accumulation of freshly painted buildings to imagine that Chengde could be more than an overcrowded public park. When I returned to Chengde during winter break, the cold was intense, tourists were absent, the sky was steel blue, ice coated the trees of Bishu shanzhuang, and the magic spell of the summer residence was enhanced by rice alcohol that I was avidly drinking to keep myself warm. Perhaps because my East German camera stopped functioning and my pictures were ruined, I kept a memory of this magic place far more vivid and intact than I would otherwise have expected. During the short spring of Beijing, I went back to Chengde to take the pictures I thought I had missed and then realized how much there was to discover by retracing my steps, including the impossibility of seizing ever again on film that moment of suspended stillness I had enjoyed four months earlier. It then became apparent to me that to retrieve my impressions I would have to read the writings of perceptive travelers and erudite scholars on the Manchu hill station. I was disappointed by Chinese architecture historians’ inability to conceptualize from a landscape the cultural terms of the relationship that existed between building and site. The prejudices of European travelers about the gardens, castles, and temples of their own culture prevented them from seeing the site on its own terms. When, several years later, I returned to Chengde, after having invested myself with the sacred mission to save the summer residence from further misrepresentation, I naively believed that the examination of Qing materials on Chengde would help me to clarify the landscaped ideology of the Qing court. I was wrong, and the reading of Qianlong’s self-inflated poetry kept me confused until, looking by chance at an oblique view map of Bishu shanzhuang that had faced my desk for months, I suddenly realized that a straight alignment connected three landmarks of Chengde, running directly from Qingchui peak down to the temples of Pule and Jinshan. I followed that axis and it gradually led me to the several layers of a sacred landscape highly visible in Chengde. Fundamental in the progression of my reasoning was the pivotal location of a holy mountain, in essence the Sumeru of the Qing building enterprise, able to transcend all these layers, ritual and geomantic, Buddhist and aesthetic. Crucial for my analysis was the reemployment of concepts about place and climate and the blend-

10

Mapping Chengde

ing of the spiritual in the natural that had little to do with Versailles linear geometry. The ceremonial sites of executive power displayed strikingly different configurations of buildings and gardens, but at the same time I was struck by similarities between the Qing and European monarchies. One particular instance of technical collaboration between the Qianlong emperor and King Louis XV forced me to reconsider the representation of glory in landscape engravings and to conclude that the Qing dynasty was just as modern as the Bourbons when it came to manipulating landscape scenery and its viewers in a purely propagandistic fashion. The relationship of the absolutism of nation-states to landscape seems to follow the same pattern all over the modern world if we concede differences in cultural interpretations, under the forms of architecture, iconography, and scholarship. This generous statement is not meant as an affront to those who claim that the French classical garden is the only one to have succeeded in portraying the exquisite proportions

Figure 6. The Chengde oasis. Philippe Forêt.

Introduction

11

of power; it is especially relevant today, since Jehol peasants’ perception of themselves as bound to a nurturing land has been replaced by the perspective of forced submission of nature that was first articulated by Manchu emperors and now by the developers of “multi-nucleated metropolitan regions.” 7 Writing about continental drift and geopolitics, Mark Monmonier has demonstrated the theoretical power of maps in establishing scientific and political legitimacy. My interpretation of the Qing summer residence involves another occurrence of “cartocontroversy” in which the iconography of landscape enterprise fueled a debate located at the crossroad of historical, political, religious, and subjective geography. Mapping Chengde reconstructs the campaign launched by Kangxi and Qianlong for global domination and its manifestation in a modern reconstruction of the Buddhist supercontinent. What I mean here is that we find in Chengde the residence of a bodhisattva and that this bod-

Figure 7. Bishu shanzhuang. Source: Rehe zhi, “Bishu shanzhuang zong tu” map.

12

Mapping Chengde

hisattva is none other than the emperor himself. The meaning I have discovered in Chengde maps and other pictorial materials implicitly relates to an ancient landscape paradigm and to the notion of a Qing residence conceived for the exploration of metageographical space. This idea invites observation and refinement across disciplinary boundaries or “contacts.” 8 The material of the book has been organized according to a concentric logic, which as it unfolds retraces the steps of the Qing reasoning about landscape. The rationale for choosing this logic is that it parallels that which directed the configuration of the landscape archetype expressed in the Bishu shanzhuang gardens. This introductory chapter consists of several invitations to tour a divided city. In the following chapters, Chengde will be presented as a military outpost, a ceremonial center, a hill station for the imperial clan, an icon of Manchu identity, the summer capital of the Qing dynasty, a materialization of dynastic policy, a stage for contemplation, a protected site with paramount significance for universal culture, and a miniature of the cosmos, not to mention a topic for scholarly inquiry. Because Mapping Chengde is the first monograph in English on the Qing summer capital, its last chapter is devoted to a review of the literature in the field. Publications in other languages (Chinese, French, German, and Japanese) have provided a comprehensive background on historical Jehol and Chengde. Instead of duplicating the work of scholars such as Otto Franke and Anne Chayet, this book attempts to describe what the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors believed they saw from the mountain kiosks of their residence. Mapping Chengde stares at the familiar scenery vistas of imperial gardens to uncover a composition of landscape metaphors borrowed from disparate sources. After identifying the pivotal area of Chengde, the text analyzes the interaction of a series of rings constituting in a microcosmic way the geopolitical world of the Qing dynasty. Each chapter has its own cartographic scale for the study of the religious, regional, imperial, and global zones of Chengde. Not only Outer Mongolia but also France and England were included by the Qianlong emperor in the preordained geometry of imperial power, as French and British kings, envoys, and missionaries contributed materials to the celebration of Chengde. The chapters always refer to the centrality of Chengde, since from a unique location inside the garden walls, the emperor controlled resources, directed military campaigns, entertained dew-drinking immortals, and excited the fervor of tribute bearers. As a whole, these chapters review the suggestive cartography that belies the platitudes used by the Manchu monarchs to justify their policy as they were vigorously expanding Qing territory.

CHAPTER 2

The Great Qing at Home In Xanadu did Kubla Kan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred River, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.1

A New Imperial Capital The Manchu dynasty styled itself the “Great Qing,” Da Qing.2 The Qing empire (1636– 1912) was certainly “great” in terms of extension, population, and affluence. Curiously, state affairs of the largest empire in Asia were periodically handled in the modest palaces of Bishu shanzhuang, on the prairie of the summer residence, and during hunting parties in Mulan. Seven out of the ten Qing emperors regularly left the Forbidden City and the summer palace of Beijing for several months, passing through the Great Wall of China at the Gubeikou gate and enduring the rigors of travel to the oasis of Chengde and to the wilderness of Mulan beyond. Between 1703 and 1722 and between 1741 and 1795, the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors spent three to four months almost every year in Jehol. They either traveled to the Mulan natural reserve or stayed at their Chengde residence of Bishu shanzhuang, usually from May to October.3 Charmed by its lakes, woods, spring, and prairie, travelers have often compared the summer residence of Chengde to a smiling oasis surrounded by the severe hills of Jehol. Located not far from the ruins of the Mongol Yuan summer capital of Shangdu (Coleridge’s Xanadu), the built landscape of Chengde has inspired court poets and painters. Coleridge, of course, had not visited the city of Shangdu, which was a field of ruins when he wrote his famous poem. He instead fell asleep while reading Marco Polo’s narrative and saw in his dream Khubilai’s summer residence. His 1797 description of the Yuan capital evoked Lord Macartney’s embassy reports on the Qing residences of Beijing and Chengde as well as the historical continuity between the Mongol, Manchu, and Chinese architectural enterprises. 13

14

Mapping Chengde

Applied to the founding, enlargement, and maintenance of the Qing summer capital of Chengde, the term enterprise makes precise reference to Frederic Wakeman’s analysis of “Great Enterprise,” a Confucian term that describes a dynasty’s effort to gain and hold the “Mandate of Heaven” by ruling the “Under Heaven.” Buddhism has given a meaning to “Great Enterprise” that differs from the Confucianist definition but is no less important: the Buddha’s Great Enterprise is to appear in order to change illusion into enlightenment for the sake of a great cause.4 In this respect, the construction of the austere gray palaces and the more flamboyant purple temples of Chengde would have been a Buddhist undertaking subordinate to the Confucianist “Great Enterprise” of the Qing dynasty in China and at the same time a Confucianist undertaking subordinate to the Buddhist “Great Enterprise” of the Qing dynasty in Central Asia. In submitting Mongolia, Tibet, and Turkestan to his rule administered from Chengde, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–1795) made clear his intention to pursue dynastic policy only in Central Asia and not to enlarge the frontier domains he had inherited from the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662–1722) and the Yongzheng emperor (r. 1723–1735).5 Qianlong stated that he punished the troublesome Mongol rebels of Turkestan because he considered himself a monarch with responsibilities toward his Manchu ancestors. He chose to remain vague on the true motives and ambitions of Qing policy in Central Asia, but the palaces, gardens, and temples he built in Chengde completed his understatement on the political and religious meanings of the Manchu “Great Enterprise.” Thanks to the successful integration of Mongols into the Manchu Banners’ military administration, the Qing dynasty combined Jehol and Manchuria into a regional power that eventually became continental when it came to dominate China and Central Asia.6 The Shunzhi (r. 1644–1661) and Kangxi emperors’ hunting expeditions into Jehol and their repeated sojourns in the Mongol city of Kalahetun should therefore be understood as elements of a general policy that emphasized the continuum of the North China frontier in order to firmly establish Manchu power south and west of it.7 When in 1644 the Qing dynasty established its empire on both sides of the Great Wall, it began to modify the landscape of the region of Jehol, which the Chinese Ming dynasty (1368–1644) had emptied of its local population. After the quelling of the Three Feudatories’ rebellion in southern China (1681), the Manchu state still felt the need to prove in a civilized way that it was a well-established polity in Inner Asia and Inner China. Inner Asia includes Inner and Outer Mongolia, Eastern and Western Turkestan, and Tibet. Inner China includes the provinces of China proper and excludes the modern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, Tibet, Hainan, and Taiwan. Before 1703, Chengde resembled the other imperial lodges that the Kangxi emperor had established in Jehol.8 Between 1703 and 1792 the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors transformed the temporary resting house of Chengde into the summer capital of the dynasty in order to concretize ethnic, spiritual, and territorial claims to legitimacy.

The Great Qing at Home

15

Before the founding of Chengde, the Manchu monarchs had located their capitals (Liaoyang, Mukden, Beijing) in cities rebuilt by the former Ming dynasty and conquered by the Qing Banners.9 To add to the legitimacy of its empire-building enterprise, the recently established Manchu dynasty adopted principles drawn from Chinese and Tibetan traditions and applied these principles to a space that had no previous cultural imprint. Constraints for the building of the Qing summer capital in a frontier area were many. Inspiration and codification of the created landscape of the Qing summer residence were drawn from the aesthetic rules governing southern China pleasure gardens, from Chinese attitudes toward nature, from the canons of Lamaist temple architecture, from the censorship of Confucianism, and, most important, from the need for daily policing of a multiethnic empire as large as a continent. The particularities of the location, the novel use of designs and traditions borrowed from other cultures, and concomitant changes in landscape understanding contributed to the creation of a new cultural landscape in Chengde and Jehol. Both the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors organized in Chengde a territory intended to display a system of symbolic landmarks that would contribute to justifying the newly established rule of the Qing dynasty in Tibet and Mongolia. The Manchu court proclaimed a reordering of the empire by suppressing in Jehol the previous impress of the Chinese-Mongol frontier cultural landscape and by launching a vast program to construct there a truly Qing ceremonial center.10 In Chengde a composite landscape expressed the ultimate goal of Qing geographical policy: absolute domination of the “Under Heaven.” The newly created landscape of Chengde integrated visual symbols that made reference to significant places in the Qing empire that were located in China, Mongolia, and Tibet. The spatial fiction established by this created landscape guided for one century the conflict between sedentary Inner China and nomadic Inner Asia. The territory of metaphors created at Chengde contributed to the symbolic control that the expanding empire sought to exert on the cultural landscapes of South China and Central Asia. The Manchu emperors abolished the objectivity of Chinese and Mongol environments by superimposing borrowed landscapes that together came to form the genuine Qing landscape. As a consequence of the creation of this landscape, several relationships were defined or revised: the relationship between Chengde and the cultural universe of East and Central Asia; that between Chengde, Jehol, and the northern Qing frontier; and that between Beijing, Chengde, and the hunting grounds of Mulan on the Emperor’s Road.

The Bearer of Manchu Virtues The Kangxi emperor originally called Chengde “Rehe shangying,” “Upper Camp on the Rehe River,” the hunting lodge that was located close to the major Luanhe river valley. A warm spring feeds a short tributary of the Wulie river that does not freeze in winter, hence

16

Mapping Chengde

its name Rehe, which means “Warm River.” A few hot springs are found forty-six kilometers upstream in the Wulie valley near a place aptly named Tangquan, “Hot Springs.” Rehe shangying, Kangxi’s naming of the summer residence, reflects a degree of personal ambiguity about the status of Chengde. A ying is normally a temporary camp of tents. However, the earliest contemporary paintings of this ying show the buildings and gardens of a mountain villa. This mountain villa appears as a hunting lodge similar to the one of Kalahetun, and would therefore be a xinggong and not a ying. By calling Chengde an upper ying, the emperor implied moreover that lower and middle ying camps existed further down the Wulie [Rehe] river, as if the hill station was a camp undistinguishable from other camps. The true political and architectural significances of Chengde are thus not indicated by the name granted by Kangxi to the hill station. Kangxi named Chengde “Rehe,” but the city of Rehe was renamed “Chengde” by Yongzheng in 1733 and renamed again “Rehe” by Qianlong in 1742. It is only after 1778 that the name Chengde became constantly used in Chinese records. The Qianlong emperor renamed his summer capital “Chengde” the year he ordered the construction of the Confucian temple of Wenmiao. We may presume that there is more than a coincidence between these two events, and that the name of Chengde, “Virtue Bearer,” was eventually retained for the imperial summer capital precisely because of its Confucian meaning. The first character of Chengde, cheng, literally means “to receive,” “continue,” and “support.” Confucius opened the Analects chapter on government by saying: “Who uses de [virtue] to govern is like the north polar star which keeps its place and toward which all the stars turn respectfully.” 11 Speaking about government officials, the Master stated later: “Who has no constancy in his de [virtue] will receive cheng [disgrace].”12 The Qianlong emperor agreed with Confucius’ definition of virtue as a quality engendered by Heaven to fulfill a superior role and expected Chengde to assist in propagating his superior body’s quality. The Manchu word erdemu, meaning “capability, virtue, power,” was routinely used to translate the Chinese character de, “virtue.” On receiving Lord Macartney’s embassy, Qianlong wrote that Manchu virtue extended from the Mongol camp of the hill station to the entire world as even distant European monarchs wished to be included in his lordship.13 The location chosen for the Qing empire’s summer capital was unlikely from a Chinese point of view. Jehol was even farther from the economic and cultural center of China than was Beijing. The region was located outside the protection of the Great Wall of China, near the eastern end of the border area of East and Central Asia, and in an uninhabited corner of mountainous southeast Mongolia. In fact, this location is marginal only in relation to Jiangnan, the cultural core of Inner China. The Jiangnan area was centered around the prosperous cities of Suzhou, Wuxi, Yangzhou, and Hangzhou.14 Chinese garden architecture was developed by the wealthy families of merchants and officials who

The Great Qing at Home

17

lived near the rich and populous Yangzi delta. Jiangnan models embodied the Chinese landscape-making tradition with famous pleasure gardens designed by officials and scholars. Landscape vantage points like the Ten Vistas of the Xihu lake, west of Hangzhou, and architecture like that of the Jichang, Wangshi, and Zhuozheng gardens in Suzhou have illustrated this tradition of construction of a naturalized environment. Such examples often served as poetic and iconographical models for the construction of Qing residences in Beijing and Chengde. From the Manchu point of view, on the other hand, the location of the summer capital in Jehol was strategic and made excellent sense. Jehol occupies the precise meeting point of the environments of China, Manchuria, and Mongolia. The tradition of hunting in Jehol that the Kangxi emperor began in the later decades of the seventeenth century was an important element of a general policy that downplayed the geographic importance of the North China frontier as a zone of division, as it led the way to the ritual reenactment of the establishment of Manchu power south and west of the region. The subsequent political submission of Jehol resulted in the formal integration of the frontier area into the central province of Zhili (present Hebei) and in the effective extension of the Chinese cultural landscape north of the Great Wall for the first time in twenty centuries. The location of a summer capital beyond the Great Wall violated the architectural and political precedents set by Chinese dynasties (Han, Tang, Song, Ming) but was in accordance with and in fact purposefully followed the state-building traditions of the non-Chinese dynasties (Liao, Jin, Yuan) that had ruled on both sides of the Great Wall. The Kangxi emperor directed the construction of two successive residences in Jehol: the Kalahetun and Chengde palaces, which later became the summer capital of the Qing dynasty. Climatic and financial considerations remained minor in comparison with political considerations regarding the extension of the Qing dynasty rule in Inner Asia. The reasons advanced for the location of a summer capital in Jehol were detailed by an Italian missionary invited to the Manchu court: To avoid the heat of summer, which is always excessive in Beijing, the Emperor Kang-hy [Kangxi] had been accustomed to make excursions, by land and water, to the south of China. But as the diversion caused an expense which was extremely burdensome to his subjects, he had built himself a country residence at Je-hol [Chengde], in Tartary, where he now usually resided from the beginning of May till the end of September, with an escort of about thirty thousand men, besides a great multitude of people who resorted thither for the love of gain or pleasure.15

Kangxi’s reasons for first spending his summers in the south and later in Chengde appear problematic to explain the court’s seasonal moves. Summer heat would have been as unpleasant in the hot and muggy lower Yangzi area, known as one of the ovens of China,

18

Mapping Chengde

as it was in Beijing. Moreover, the cost of building a summer capital in the cooler Jehol mountains would probably have been higher than the cost of traveling south along the Great Canal. Having a residence in Jehol implied the transfer of considerable resources within the empire from Inner China to the Han-Mongol frontier area: human resources from Zhili and monetary and architectural resources from Jiangnan. The large size of the Chengde site allowed the materialization of the ideal of an open garden containing other gardens.16 Behind enclosing walls screened by pine trees, such inner gardens offered secluded places of shaded retreat kept green and fresh by the Saihu lakes. Microclimatic conditions go far toward explaining the attraction of the Bishu shanzhuang’s lovely gardens during the heavy summer of the North China plain. From the mountain kiosks of the Bishu shanzhuang residence, Qing monarchs contemplated their empire by observing a microcosmos that acted as a synecdoche for the entirety of their domains. The decision to build a Manchu capital on Mongol lands was envisioned by the Shunzhi emperor, realized by the Kangxi emperor, and enlarged by the Qianlong emperor. In their enterprise, the Qing emperors unified China and Central Asia by overriding the previous impress of the Chinese-Mongol frontier cultural landscape in Jehol and by substituting at the summer capital of Chengde a composite landscape that expressed the goals of the Manchu polity: domination of the “Under Heaven.”17 Chengde was the urban fulfillment of the “Great Enterprise” that aimed at establishing the legitimacy of Manchu power in East and Central Asia. Consequently, the independence of places like Beijing, Wutai Mountain, Lhasa, and Zhenjiang was undermined, for their landscape architectures had lost their uniqueness. Key symbolic elements of ceremonial landscapes, pleasure landscapes, natural landscapes, urban landscapes, agricultural landscapes, and religious landscapes were appropriated and taken to the summer capital by Qing military expeditions or during the emperors’ personal tours of inspection. Thus, the summer capital formed a composite landscape that reproduced the map of the Manchu empire. The transformation of Jehol from geographical area into political region was, moreover, a direct consequence of the establishment of the Qing dynasty summer residence in Chengde. Before its promotion to a first-rank prefecture, Chengde was a third-, second- and again third-rank prefecture.18 The small and unwalled city quickly became a prefecture administering a number of subprefectures and counties. Covering all of Jehol during the Qing dynasty, the previous Chengde prefecture of Zhili also corresponds to the two areas of the present Chengde city and Chengde district that have constituted the northeastern part of Hebei province for the past forty years.19 The design of the imperial landscape of Chengde drew upon sophisticated conceptions of nature and culture recorded in maps, architecture, paintings, and literature. The gardens of Chengde were carefully designed to prevent simplistic analysis by making simultaneous use of several geographical scales and registers of meaning.20 The hill sta-

The Great Qing at Home

19

tion gardens expressed implicit political claims of suzerainty over China and Central Asia through aesthetic codes: the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors were anxious to recreate in Chengde famous scenes drawn from Jiangnan gardens that had been conceived by Song painters and designed by Ming literati. Other explicit concerns were metaphysical, since the Manchu emperors willingly adopted the cosmogony of their Chinese subjects: their legends, myths, geomantic principles, and attitudes toward nature, thus contributed to the shaping of Chengde gardens. The Manchu success in resolving for a short while the long conflict between the landscape models of Inner China and those of Inner Asia depended on abolishing the local specificity of both landscapes by blending them into the composite Qing landscape. Under the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors’ supervision, the landscape of Chengde gained independence from its history as anchored in the Jehol area and from its location in a frontier area that had been disputed by China and Mongolia. The consequences of this rupture in the relationship that tied the site of Chengde to the region of Jehol were dramatic and are still felt today. Political submission of the Chengde natural landscape and its subsequent transformation into an all-encompassing ideological landscape granted a spatial expression to the Qing enterprise. The significance of Chengde increased considerably: what had been the humble camp of Rehe shangying became the summer capital of the Qing empire. The disjunction between imperial landscape and its environment led to the control and transformation of landscape resources in Chengde and Jehol. It also led to symbolic representations of urban and regional landscape kept captive by two Qing emperors using iconographical, cartographic, architectural, and poetical means to depict the Manchu enterprise. It finally directed the duplication of vantage points in a context of historical repetition, because the construction of the Qing dynasty summer capital was linked to previous landscape enterprises of non-Chinese dynasties. The analysis of the Qing landscape of Chengde cannot be limited to the examination of the natural and human geography of Jehol because the landscape of the hill station was not determined by its local conditions. Qing Chengde had a voluntarist landscape: the emperor decided how to display the landscape vistas he himself had selected, where to locate them and to what effect, and what their total number would be and why. In 1711 the Kangxi emperor completed the construction of thirty-six vantage points inside the summer residence. The future Qianlong emperor was born the same year and later wondered aloud about the meaning for the dynasty of these two events, architectural and familial: “What cause and effect lies in that coincidence is incomprehensible.” 21 Qianlong multiplied Kangxi’s number of vistas by two, from thirty-six to seventy-two. In selecting this number, Qianlong no doubt sought to strengthen the link evoked by Kangxi between Jehol and Jiangnan, since seventy-two is also the number of peaks encompassed by the sacred Huangshan mountain. This mountain, the most prominent in the southwest of

20

Mapping Chengde

the Jiangnan region, has a tormented topography that was a constant source of artistic inspiration. The number seventy-two, common to Huangshan and Bishu shanzhuang, extended to the Qianlong emperor’s residence some of the mountain’s sacredness.

Manchu Identity With frequent statements on the early date of the sinicization of the Manchu court, which is supposed to have begun well before the capture of Beijing, Chinese historiographers and nationalistic historians have generated confusion concerning the multiethnic nature of the Qing empire. They have wanted to cast the Qing monarchs as sinicized rulers of post-Ming China in order to stress the perpetuation of a sinocentered political order between 1644 and 1912.22 It should be recalled that the Qing empire was a non-Chinese political entity. The last dynasty to rule China was a dynasty of foreigners that began as a chiefdom in the mountainous border area of Liaoning and Korea, east of the Ming Great Wall. Aisin Gioro Bukuliyongshun, the legendary ancestor of the Aisin Gioro imperial clan, was born near the highest peak of the Changbai mountains. After Kangxi learned its exact location in Jilin, he ordered the offering of sacrifices to the mountain twice a year and forbade entrance into the primeval forest. Under the able leadership of Nurhaci and Hung Taiji, a federation of Tungusic tribes grew to form a new nation. Calling itself Qing after 1636, it had an invincible military organization, the Eight Banners system, that regrouped companies to which each Manchu family permanently belonged.23 After its invasion of China proper in 1644 and the progressive establishment of its control of Mongolia, Tibet, Turkestan, and Taiwan, the Manchu dynasty ruled what became the wealthiest, largest, and most populous empire in eighteenth-century Asia. Its power was based on the combination of a military administration by Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese martial Banners and a civil administration by Manchu and Mongol nobles who had co-opted Chinese officials to supervise together the chiefly Chinese bureaucracy. The Qing emperors were clearly aware of the significance of their ethnic identity and alliance with Mongol nobility for the safety of the Manchu dynasty. They often married the daughters of prominent families from Manchuria and Mongolia to respect the maxim that Shunzhi had laid down: “In the south, establish no kings; in the north, interrupt no alliances.” 24 The dynasty maintained a constant policy of protecting the Manchu language of the imperial clan and preserving the prestige of Mongol culture and Tibetan religion. The greatest sinophile among Qing monarchs, Qianlong was nonetheless a prolific writer in Manchu who glorified the Qing foundation myth in his Ode to Mukden.25 He demanded that Chinese not be used for communication with Manchu garrisons and ordered the compilation of referential works for Manchu shamanic rituals and clan genealogies. Manchu, referred to as Qingwen in Chinese, was the fundamental language

The Great Qing at Home

21

of the Qing court, and its significance increased during the eighteenth century when the documentary language became a cultural emblem, a marker of ethnicity, and an artifact of the universalism of the Qianlong emperor’s reign.26 Tributary communications, shamanic rituals, and diplomatic negotiations were conducted in Manchu: Ritual communications could take place in Manchu: the Harvard-Yenching materials contain a Manchu memorial from a Ryükyüan king [Liuqiu wang shangmu, 1756] who stood high among the vassals the Ch’ing dynasty had inherited from its predecessor. 27

Manchu, of course, was the primary language of the commanders of the Eight Banners and the officials in charge of colonial affairs. Although edicts, regulations, and memorials were routinely translated into Chinese, Manchu, and Mongol, only the Manchu language had the function of granting confidentiality to intelligence reports, palace memorials, and family letters. For this reason, Qing emperors personally edited the translation of Manchu documents into Chinese and sought to prevent the teaching of Manchu to Europeans. The Manchu emperors’ simultaneous responsibilities as emperors of the Chinese subjects, khans of the Manchu-Mongol populations, and bodhisattva for the Tibetan and Mongol Buddhist believers assumed an urban expression. The Qing dynasty elaborated and maintained a system of three “capital cities” also called “central” or “universal cities” [ging hecen or gemun hecen]: one in Manchuria (Mukden), one in China proper (Beijing), and one in Inner Mongolia (Chengde). During the second half of the Qianlong era, the Chengde capital was also meant to serve as an alternative religious capital for Tibet, as the Manchu emperor wanted to use the Waiba miao temples as venues for effective control of the Tibetan Buddhist clergy. Similar political concerns for centrality and universality marked the architecture of the three capitals, although the religious ostentation characteristic of Chengde was absent in the landscape of Beijing, and Beijing’s ceremonial monumentality was missing in the Chengde palace district. The difference between Beijing and Chengde can be cast in positive terms: the dynastic enterprise expressed itself in Beijing through ceremonial restraint and in Chengde through religious ostentation. Imperial duties as understood by the Kangxi, Qianlong, and Jiaqing emperors included the seasonal migration of the court between Beijing and Chengde, huge hunting parties in Mulan, military expeditions in southern China and in Central Asia, pilgrimages to sacred mountains, and sumptuous tours of inspection along the Grand Canal. Two outstanding literary products glorified the northern origins of the dynasty in Manchu and Chinese: Kangxi’s album of poems on Chengde and Qianlong’s ode to Mukden. In Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang, or Han-i draha Alin-i tokso de halhün be jailaha gi bithe, the Kangxi emperor celebrated the scenes of his summer capital; in his glorification

22

Mapping Chengde

of the Qing oldest capital, Shengjing fu or Mukden i fujurun bithe, the Qianlong emperor placed Manchu “among the classic cultural institutions of the world.” 28 The institutionalization of Manchu literature, the sponsorship of Tibetan Buddhism, and the control of Chinese scholarly activities (by having scholars focus on the compilation of dynastic histories and extensive encyclopedias such as the “Four Treasuries,” or Siku quanshu, project) completed the intellectual monuments of the Qing “Great Enterprise.” Manchu and Chinese were the two official languages of the imperial administration that normally used Manchu to communicate with non-Chinese speakers. Three other languages were officially recognized: Mongol, Tibetan, and Uigûr. The Kangxi and Qianlong emperors had the Tibetan Buddhist canon and its commentaries translated into Mongol for distribution in Mongolia. Multilingual stelae, which often have one face written in Manchu and Chinese and the other in Mongol and Tibetan, are scattered throughout Chengde and Mulan. A large majority of the population of the Manchu empire was Chinese, spoke only Chinese or Chinese-related dialects, and lived in Inner China, south of the Great Wall. The Manchu dynasty attempted to enforce a policy of linguistic, racial, and spatial segregation that aimed at preserving the martial character and ethnic cohesion of the Qing Banners while limiting Chinese colonization of Manchu and Mongol lands. To safeguard the stability of the North China frontier, the Qing had closed the dynasty’s territorial base north and east of the Great Wall to Chinese immigration.29 Chinese were normally not allowed to reside, marry, or buy land in Manchuria and Mongolia. This policy failed; perhaps nowhere was its failure so early and complete as in Jehol. The Han colonization of Jehol that started in 1703 marks the effective beginning of the present cycle of China’s colonization of Inner Mongolia, Eastern Turkestan, and Tibet. The study of the Manchu imperial landscape through the objective materialization of the environmental concepts held by Qing monarchs, however, remains delicate because this landscape had a political and symbolic character that has been much more critical than the ethnic features that shaped the cultural landscape of the empire. The Manchuness of Chengde was a manifestation of the Qing intention to remind Chinese and nonChinese subjects of the distinct regional heritage of the Manchu dynasty. This Manchuness also arose from the Qing dynasty’s will to impose strict control on territory, religion, and society in Central Asia. Chengde provided a landscaped environment for the ceremonial conduct of state affairs on both sides of the Great Wall. As a seasonal capital, Chengde combined Chinese and non-Chinese components in the architecture of its landscape, and these components were clearly identifiable as such to the nobles, officials, and priests summoned to the court. Visitors entering Bishu shanzhuang through the Lizheng gate or walking along the Wulie bank on their way to the Waiba miao temples would have observed a striking number of architectural references to suzerainty. Placed prominently in the imperial landscape of Chengde, these references took advantage of the

The Great Qing at Home

23

mountainous circuit that surrounds the capital in order to transcend the natural landscape of Chengde and reflect the geography of the cultural landscapes of the Qing empire. Although it played on spectators’ subjectivity, Qing landscape nonetheless retained an objective existence, firmly anchored in time and space. The Manchuness of the imperial landscape created in Chengde and Jehol resided in the spectacle of a space entirely conceived for the exercise of power. This spectacle was no less apparent in the painting scrolls of the Mulan hunting expeditions than in the oblique views describing the ceremonies held in the gardens of the summer capital.30 The impress of Manchu authority on the Chengde landscape is visible in contemporary iconography, such as the Tai wan dili tu map and the Rehe xinggong quantu map. The Qing rulers’ global conception of space granted external cohesion to a landscape deprived of internal coherence. Their cohesive vision enabled the secondary landscape to reconcile the diverse components imported into the summer capital and its territory. The built environment of Chengde would have been perceived as the juxtaposition of closed physicocultural systems, or what eighteenthcentury philosophers called “climate,” which corresponds to the notion of fengtu. The Chinese notion of climate has a broader meaning than “local climate,” since it takes the sense of “local conditions of the physical and human environment.” The geographical provenance of the residence’s microclimates was evident enough that visitors to the court would have recognized Bishu shanzhuang as the reduced version of their own landscape inside the Qing empire. These microclimates, however, acquired a meaning they did not have in their previous environments: they became nothing other than the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors’ fixed images of their supremacy.

Chengde Spectacle The adept modeling of the primary landscape and interpretation of the secondary landscape transformed Chengde into the legitimate seasonal center of the Qing empire. The construction of Chengde expressed in a manifest way the Manchu ambition to dominate the cultural, physical, and metaphysical geographies of Eastern and Central Asia. The two prominent monarchs of the Qing dynasty, the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, shaped in person the landscape created at Chengde. From this summer capital, Qing emperors developed an imperial landscape largely liberated from the natural constraints of Jehol. The interpretation of this built environment was modified through refined tools of landscape rhetoric. The presence of architectural replicas, literary metaphors, metaphysical references, historical allusions, and techniques of spatial manipulation modeled on the landscape of southern China in turn served to influence visitors’ perception of the landscape of Chengde and Jehol. The Manchu summer capital integrated visual symbols that legitimated the dynasty’s claims to the heritage of significant places located outside Qing

24

Mapping Chengde

Jehol. Site and area were adapted to express landscape values imported into the frontier area of Jehol. As a medium, the imperial landscape of Chengde formed a coherent channel of communication from the Manchu monarchs to Chinese and non-Chinese subjects. Its summer residences in Beijing and Chengde alone are sufficiently rich to establish that the Qing court led a life of spectacles and to imply that the notion of spectacle was essential to the Manchu enterprise. The court’s ceremonial feasts and the rituals of its daily life guaranteed harmony between Heaven and human society, between rulers and ruled. Between September 8 and 21, 1793, the Qianlong emperor gave six feasts in Chengde, ordered seven temple sacrifices, conferred various rewards twice, held three receptions, issued twenty-three imperial instructions, and composed a poem about Lord Macartney’s embassy.31 As an average example of court activities, this remarkable succession of events in the imperial landscape clearly fulfills the definition of “Society of the Spectacle” that theoreticians of the Situationist International movement developed in the 1960s: The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.32

Seen from this theoretical perspective, imperial landscape served conceptually as the changing background of a theater stage. Techniques for transforming landscape into spectacle that had already been developed by the Chinese gentry of the Jiangnan region were applied in the layout of vantage points at the hill station. Qing emperors chose to employ these techniques because they were well suited for the spectacular administration of their empire and not because of the Chineseness of most of these techniques. A theoretical question arises concerning the spectacle of architectural metaphors and the political message that the emperor wanted to express through his landscape. Does an internal continuity exist in the spatial progression of the Chengde landscape from the urban landscape in the south and the residential landscape at the center to the religious landscape in the north? Further, does Chengde represent a rupture from the internal coherence displayed by other imperial sites of Inner China? These sites enclosed in their palaces and gardens both ceremonial centers and places of leisure. Like Chinese emperors before them, Manchu monarchs designed themes in their gardens to affirm two of their important roles: holders of the “Celestial Mandate” and princes in the kingdom of belles lettres. The Qianlong emperor is credited with more than 42,000 poems, and he wrote verses, read, or painted every afternoon. Qianlong’s bold claim to excellence in poetry was engraved on the Gulige stela, along the main road of the Bishu shanzhuang mountain district: “In the middle of the Chengde mountains, we consider that we have

The Great Qing at Home

25

surpassed the Tang and Song dynasty poets.”33 Chengde’s landscape display of these two imperial roles did not reflect the internal coherence that these roles have had in the Chinese tradition of landscape architecture. The Chengde landscape, conceptually a synthesis of landscapes and physically a segregation of landscapes, instead proved its Manchuness by reinterpreting previous dynasties’ landscape precedents and by integrating Chinese and non-Chinese factors of landscape creation. Jehol primary landscape, the settlements of Bannermen’s colonies, the opening of roads, the construction of Buddhist temples, and the formation of Chinese urban and rural environments all contributed to the elaboration of the Manchu imperial landscape. Unlike Chinese dynastic capital cities such as Beijing, Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Chang’an, Chengde represented an idea that Manchu and Mongol officials supported without reservations: the idea that the emperor can express the universality of his rule through a landscape incorporating non-Chinese as well as Chinese modalities. Both the Kangxi and the Qianlong emperors gave names to the outer temples that reflected the dynasty’s overall concern for the universal reign of Manchu peace.34 In the Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi, the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors publicized the vistas of the summer residence. Each vista engraving received a title, an introduction, a poem, and scholarly annotations. The Manchu and Chinese versions of the album were given as gifts to the relatives and vassals of the Qing court. The album became more widely accessible when the poems and vistas were added to the chapters of the Chengde Gazetteer. The Kangxi and Qianlong emperors thus ordered the multiplication of visual elements (stelae, pavilions, vistas, temples) that referred to landscape archetypes of China and Central Asia. In doing so, they summoned to the defense of their enterprise arguments that were nearly specious. The reference landscape for the Potala temple of Chengde, for example, was the Tibetan Potala in Lhasa, and not the Chinese Potala of Putuo island, off Ningpo near the Zhejiang coast. The Qianlong emperor used Chinese respect for historical precedents to justify the choice of a non-Chinese architectural model: the Lhasa model was older. His will was to incorporate symbols from the sites most celebrated by the several cultures of the Manchu empire, with the result that Chengde secondary landscape generated many historical and geographical references that were not strictly Chinese, either in their spatial materialization or in the way they were understood by contemporary spectators. Chinese geomancers objected in vain to the construction of the Sheli pagoda of the Yongyou temple, and the nine floor pagoda collapsed. The stubborn emperor ordered its reconstruction in 1764. According to a local legend, geomancers later approved the emperor’s choice of its location only after reassessing the topomantic situation of the still standing pagoda in the landscape of Chengde. This pagoda is one example among many of justifying dramatic changes in the initial landscape by rereading the altered site.

26

Mapping Chengde

The Chengde summer residence exemplified the Qing landscape ideal: a metaphorical stage for separate landscape vistas that would evoke models of imperial landscape. To endorse these models in a credible way, such a stage could only be built in a place lacking a landscape identifiable as proper to itself. The landscape proper to Chengde is defined as the sum of local Jehol idiosyncratic landscapes that did not convey the universal message of Qing supremacy. By the end of the seventeenth century, Jehol had lost its proper landscape. The area was severely depopulated, either because the construction of homes and roads had been declared forbidden on its grounds, which was particularly the case for hunting reserves, or because its population had been deported by the Ming dynasty or drafted by the Qing dynasty into its Banners. The Kangxi emperor was attracted to the site of Chengde precisely because of the absence he noticed there of a preexistent cultural landscape. The creation of an imperial landscape that Chinese and Mongols would consider as truly Qing was easier at Chengde than it had been at historic Kalahetun, the first site of the Manchu dynasty summer capital in Jehol. Kangxi’s explanation for moving the Qing summer residence from Kalahetun to Chengde could not have been based solely on considerations of distance and convenience, since Chengde was farther than Kalahetun from Beijing. The emperor’s desire to live in the wilderness of the Wulie river may instead have been due to his long quest in Jehol for a place devoid of an anterior landscape. He may have found such a place at the hunting lodge of Rehe shangying, where he decided to have a mountain hamlet built.35

CHAPTER 3

Hamlet and Imperial Residence After he returned, all he found to say about Chengde was that it was more or less a third rank city, that had nothing beautiful except for the emperor’s palace.1

The Emperor’s Road to Virtue Two points should be stressed when studying the Qing Emperor’s Road to Chengde: its novelty, since the previous road through Jehol had adopted a different course, and its relative impracticability as a steep route only usable in an age of ready manpower. It seems that Rehe dao was the only name that the Qing dynasty gave to the network of roads and post stations that extended into Jehol from Gubeikou to Mulan. Hans Hüttner, a member of the English diplomatic party, gave the name Emperor’s Road to the road from Yuanmingyuan to Bishu shanzhuang that Lord Macartney’s embassy took in September 1793 when the Qianlong emperor summoned it to Chengde: The Emperor’s Road from Beijing to Jehol is 418 li long, or 22 German miles, and is fully repaired twice a year. . . . That Emperor’s Road is as clean and as smooth as the floor in one of our drawing rooms.2

The emergence of urban and military centers in Jehol had always depended on a reliable communication network between capital city and frontier cities. The Liao dynasty (916–1125) was apparently the first to open a regular road with post cities from Nanjing to the metropolis of Zhongjing through the Gubeikou pass and the Luanhe river valley. The Jin (1115–1234) and Yuan (1271–1368) dynasties kept in service the same road into Jehol. It went through a few cities of the Shangdu circuit, such as Xing’an, which, due to the road, was prosperous to a certain degree at the time. In the late seventeenth century, the Qing dynasty opened a new road that went directly from Gubeikou to Luanping and there crossed the Wulie river, taking a shortcut and reaching Chengde sixteen kilometers further east. The otherwise remarkably precise Kangxi Atlas shows Mongol settlements but does not feature roads in Jehol. Chengde is featured in the atlas under the name Rehe cheng and is the only city included in Jehol.3 27

28

Mapping Chengde

In three decades, the Kangxi emperor built in Jehol a network of post cities and hunting lodges that connected Beijing, Chengde, and Mulan. Roads went deep into Mongolia and Manchuria until they reached Russian Siberia in the northwest and the Tartar Sea in the northeast. In 1724, when the Kangxi era ended, Chengde (then called Rehe) had become the administrative capital of Inner Mongolia. In 1795, when the Qianlong emperor abdicated, Chengde was the primary capital of Qing Central Asia as well as the secondary capital of Qing China. Only two days were needed to voyage between the two imperial capitals, and, in spite of the enormous distances involved, communication facilities linked them to the seats of Manchu government in Inner Asia: Mukden, Urga, Uliassutai, and Ili. The Yellow Church had built in Urga the important monastery of Da-Khüriye, where the Jebtstundamba Khutukhtu resided under the supervision of a Manchu amban resident who administered Outer Mongolia. In response to the Qianlong

Figure 8. The Emperor’s Road, Bishu shanzhuang Mountain District. Philippe Forêt.

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

29

emperor’s questions on the surveyors’ travel speed, Father Benoît complimented the emperor for the efficiency of the road network in the frontier area. Such good order had been established on the roads leading to his newly conquered lands that traveling through the deserts of Central Asia had become as safe and comfortable as anywhere else in the empire.4 Chengde was then the center of a complex of three roads in Jehol: one running from Chengde to Beijing through Gubeikou, Liangjianfang, and Kalahetun; one from Chengde to Tangquan, with the return journey conducted by boat on the Wulie river; and one from Chengde to the two entrances (Sandaoying and Tangsanying) of Mulan, with stops at the lodges of Lanqiying and Boluohetun. Boats along the Yixun river carried travelers back to Chengde. After 1820, when the Qing Emperor’s Road to Chengde was no longer maintained, the nineteen hunting lodges could apparently not be preserved from decay. The purple building located in the basin at the eastern entrance to the Mulan

Figure 9. The Rehe spring, Bishu shanzhuang Lake District. Philippe Forêt.

30

Mapping Chengde

hunting reserve, about ten kilometers north of Tangsanying, may be the only lodge extant today in Jehol. Only the outside walls of the Qing palace still stand. Neighboring villagers, ordered to build a meeting hall, perceived an urgent need to appropriate construction materials from the palace and destroyed its inside buildings in the early 1960s. The old pine trees surrounding the palace have not been cut down and the darkness of their foliage adds to the melancholy of the ruined palace. Modern transportation planners have neglected the Emperor’s Road to Chengde because it follows the steepest, if most direct, route and requires considerable maintenance. Part of it is now a dirt road with many fords and bridges that are difficult to negotiate. Travelers on this road in the 1930s found that transportation through the mountain passes of Jehol was unpleasant: the rocky defiles of the Emperor’s Road were narrow, and cautious driving was required in order not to break a spring or an axle.5 Thirty kilometers

Figure 10. Rehe quan, the spring of the Rehe river. Tadashi Sekino.

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

31

farther west and parallel to the Emperor’s Road, workers have recently enlarged and resurfaced a road from Gubeikou to Chengde through Luanping. This road accommodates the increasingly heavy traffic of long-distance trucks and tourist-packed buses. The Jingtong train line that links Beijing to Chifeng now follows the course of the NanjingGubeikou-Zhongjing route of the Liao dynasty. The road stops at Luanping and at Longhua but not at Chengde or Weichang. Trains from Beijing via the Xinglong valley can reach Chengde but not Mulan. In 1991 eight trains circulated daily between Beijing and Chengde, and the 256 kilometers (159 miles) of the journey on the express train took 4 hours and 28 minutes. A second railroad line, the Jingcheng line, enters the Chengde station (originally designed by the Japanese) after meandering shamelessly through the geomantic land of the former Zunhua prefecture.6 The train that inaugurated Chengde station did not come from Beijing and Hebei province but from Chaoyang and Liaoning province. The Qing seal was impressed on the landscape through the construction of the Emperor’s Road, a direct if expensive transportation link from Beijing to the center of the North China frontier. The spatial continuum from Beijing to Chengde and Mulan received such an emphasis from the building of the Emperor’s Road in Jehol that the frontier continuum was eclipsed. This internal solidarity, the Manchurian-Jehol continuum, existed before the building of the Qing seasonal capital. The solidarity of the periphery became apparent again after the dynasty abandoned the site and ceased sponsoring a costly enterprise that extended from Beijing into Jehol, returning Jehol to the frontier continuum of which it had been a part. Manchuria, unlike Inner China, has not historically perceived Jehol as a frontier area. Communication between Manchuria and Jehol has been more consistent than communication between Jehol and Inner China, in part because the Manchurian image of the Jehol environment has been culturally close to the Manchurian image of its own environment. The less peripheral nature of Jehol from the Manchurian perspective results from the geographical continuum between Jehol and the other areas of the North China frontier: similar relief, climate, and ethnic heterogeneity. The Kangxi emperor gave the name of Bishu shanzhuang to his summer residence in 1708, when the first stage of the construction of the Rehe palace was completed. Built in 1710, the gate of the Zhenggong palace received a dedicatory plaque the following year, indicating the name of the summer residence and featuring the emperor’s calligraphy. Shortly after the completion of the Kangxi emperor’s building program, Father Ripa described the residence in the following terms: Various habitations, more or less large according to their use, are erected here and there in different spots about the grounds, one for his Majesty; behind this, one for his concubines, who lodge three to four in each room; another for his mother, others for his queens and others for the eunuchs. There is also a Miao, or temple of idols,

32

Mapping Chengde which is constantly attended by a great number of Taou-she [Dao shi] or priests of the devil, who are all eunuchs dressed in yellow. It is to this Miao that the Emperor goes with his ladies to make sacrifices and adorations during his stay in Je-hol.7

Close supervision of the construction of the many villas, gardens, and temples required frequent visits by the emperor, and the result must have been sufficiently agreeable to encourage frequent occupation of the hill station. Kangxi stopped forty-eight times at the hill station during the last part (1708–1722) of his reign; suggestions that he was getting too old for hunting met with his opposition.8 The Yongzheng emperor, in contrast to his father, personally disliked hunting and never went to Chengde or Mulan. Instead of residing in the hill station, Yongzheng sojourned to the imperial villa of Tangshan where the Kangxi emperor rested when traveling to Mulan. Located only thirty kilometers away from Beijing and south of the Great

Figure 11. The lake fed by the Rehe spring, Lake District. Philippe Forêt.

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

33

Wall, the two hills of Tangshan have abundant hot springs that used to fill the two large marble bath tanks of the resort.9 The vigorous campaigns the Yongzheng emperor waged in Qinghai proved that he was not without political ambitions focused on the MongolTibetan frontier area. Yongzheng may have had doubts concerning the efficiency of landscape statements for the imposition of Manchu policy in Central Asia, and he did not seek to exploit the symbolic potential of the landscape of Jehol. His son, the Qianlong emperor, was a much more frequent visitor to Jehol: he went to Chengde and Mulan once every two years between 1741 and 1751 and every year from 1751 to 1795, except when he was mourning the death of his mother. He was eighty-five years old when he participated in his last expedition to Mulan. The city of Chengde gained considerable religious and political significance when the second phase of his ambitious building program began. Qianlong transformed Kangxi’s mountain hamlet but maintained the illusion that the monarch was leading a secluded life in the Bishu shanzhuang gardens, protected by the surrounding mountains and away from the vanity of this “world of dust.” New temples (ten of the twelve Waiba miao temples and the city temple of Wenmiao) and the addition of palaces, pavilions, temples, pagodas, and vistas inside Qianlong’s country retreat promoted the political status of the summer residence.10 Because the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors located most of the vistas in the islands or next to the canals that formed the lake district or along the eastern border of the mountain district, most of them look from the lake district toward the mountainous center of the residence and therefore away from the religious landscape that surrounds Bishu shanzhuang. Qingchui peak is the only topographical feature foreign to the summer residence that appears in the vistas of the Album of Imperial Poems.11 The landscape miniatures of the album succeed so well in negating the outside world that the peak appears to be inside the residence and not beyond its walls. By borrowing this distant landmark, the plates give the impression that the residence has no boundary. The Emperor’s Road network in Jehol incorporated in an obvious manner the road network within Chengde. The Bishu shanzhuang section of the Emperor’s Road is of particular aesthetic interest because it combined the natural landscape experiences inside the hill district with the cultural landscape experiences in the islands of the lake district.12 The road thus constitutes an axis for rotation between several landscape entities inside and outside the hill station: the Lizheng gate opens onto urban Chengde and its Chinese urban landscape; the Xibei gate opens onto the outer temples and its mostly Tibetan religious landscape. Because it provides a vast array of landscape experiences, the most significant road in Chengde is the road lying inside Bishu shanzhuang and not inside the city itself. Wide, well paved, and more than three kilometers long, this internal road links two gates of the summer residence, the Lizheng and Xibei gates. The emperor’s decision to develop a paved road of such magnitude within his gardens must be seen as linked to the val-

34

Mapping Chengde

orization of the vistas visible from it. The Emperor’s Road of the hill station leaves the Zhenggong palace at the northern Xiuyun gate, which is in the palace district.13 The road then skirts the western banks of the Ruyi and Neihu lakes and passes Zhuyuan temple on the right and Wenjin library on the left. After following the boundary between the lake and hill districts, it finally enters the hill district at the Songyun valley entrance. Admission into the hill district is gained through the fortified Kuanguan gate. The remaining two kilometers to the Xibei gate consist of a slow, steady climb along a straight creek and under imposing pine trees.14 A few paths leave the road and lead to mountain villas and kiosks that remain hidden in the woods. The encircling Jehol mountains, visible from all the landscape districts of the hill station, form the common landscape background; they represent the “untouched” natural landscape of the North China frontier area, an outside landscape district whose barrenness valorizes the vegetation inside the summer residence districts.15

Figure 12. Southern entrance to the Saihu lake archipelago, Lake District. Philippe Forêt.

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

35

The Summer Residence Space inside and outside the hill station is organized to underline the centrality of the summer capital. Mapping the re-creation of the Qing empire inside Bishu shanzhuang led me to a comparison of the palace district with the palace complex of the Beijing Forbidden City, the lake district with scholars’ gardens in Jiangnan, the prairie district with the woods of Mongolia, the hill district with the frontier, and the summer residence as a totality with the Qing empire as a whole. Three types of environments can be distinguished immediately in the summer residence: the commoners’ landscape of Chengde and Jehol,

Figure 13. The Bishu shanzhuang Lake District seen from the Mountain District: Prairie district (foreground); Jinshan temple (center); Jehol mountains (top). Philippe Forêt.

36

Mapping Chengde

the elite landscape of Bishu shanzhuang and the lodges on the Emperor’s Road to Mulan, and the religious landscape of the Waiba miao temples. All four districts of Bishu shanzhuang (the palace, lake, prairie, and mountain districts) belong to the elite landscape. Through the Songyun valley road, the Xibei gate connects the elite landscape to the religious landscape of the outer temples. To the northwest of the hill station, the bodhisattva Mañjusrï’s temple faces Xibei gate; to the northeast stands first the Potala temple and then the Sumeru temple. South of the hill station, the Lizheng gate connects the Zhenggong palace to Chengde city. Metaphorically, the Lizheng gate also connects Chengde to Beijing in historical and architectural terms. Lizheng was the name of the main southern gate of the Mongol capital Dadu before becoming the name of the main southern gate of the Manchu summer capital. The location of the Lizheng gate of Beijing during the Mongol dynasty was approximately where Qianmen gate is now standing, at the southern end of Tian’an men Square. The architecture of the Lizheng gate has also been compared to that of Zhengyang men, the main southern gate of Beijing inner city. The erection of the Lizheng gate officially and publicly transformed Qianlong’s summer residence into a Qing /Yuan capital, as it reproduced the Lizheng gate at the entrance of the former imperial cities. Two features should be noted concerning the landscape design of the Qing emperors’ summer residences of Beijing and Chengde. The first is that Yuanmingyuan is absent of equivalents to the prairie and mountain districts of Bishu shanzhuang. The gardens of the Beijing summer residence do not enclose the natural hills, valleys and prairies of Bishu shanzhuang, although Yuanmingyuan abounds in man-made hills and Yuanmingyuan landscape vistas are able to “borrow” the Xiangshan mountain background ten kilometers away. The second feature is a general lack of interest shown by Chinese writers in the hilly and wooded areas of Bishu shanzhuang. This tradition continues in recent Chinese descriptive literature on Chengde. Chinese landscape architects have considered the prairie and mountain districts of the hill station to be attractive only as a background that enhances the beauty of the palace and lake districts: The charm of South China landscapes is combined with the ruggedness of the north. . . . The palaces and the lakes are the major attractions; the plains and the hills have lost most of their original charm.16

A comparison between Bishu shanzhuang and Yuanmingyuan reveals the distinctive contribution made by the topography of Chengde to the formation of the Manchu landscape. The Kangxi emperor began the construction of Yuanmingyuan, the “Garden of Perfect Splendor,” in 1709. In the main artificial lake of the garden, nine islands represented the nine political divisions of the Xia dynasty as described in the classical work Yugong.17 Following the aesthetic precedent set by Bishu shanzhuang, the landscaping of Yuan-

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

37

mingyuan was based on the famous scholars’ gardens of Jiangnan. In 1772 Qianlong completed Kangxi’s summer residence in Beijing by adding two gardens: Changchunyuan, the “Garden of Eternal Spring,” and Yichunyuan, the “Garden of Blossoming Spring.” During the emperors’ sojourns in Yuanmingyuan, the administration of the empire was conducted from two main halls located south of the Jiuzhou islands. South of the residence, buildings in Haidian housed delegations of court agencies and the six ministries and officials summoned to the court. The inclusion within the walls of Bishu shanzhuang of mountains and prairies occupying not less than 80 percent of the summer residence grounds provided the space needed to serve not only as capital of an empire but also as place of transition for the existential experience of landscape. The mountains of the hill station conferred to Chengde the spatial means needed for conceptual transformation from political capital of an empire to place of transition between physical and metaphysical empires. In Chengde the

Figure 14. The Prairie District with its Mongol camp, with Qingchui peak beyond. Philippe Forêt.

38

Mapping Chengde

smoothness of the Jiangnan landscape of the lake district is married to the vigor of the northern frontier landscape of the mountain district. Celebrating these two landscapes in aesthetic or political terms, Chinese scholars have consistently misunderstood the geographical meaning added by the northern landscape. In other words, the elements at the hill station that scholars have most appreciated and effectively studied have been the landscape elements of Yuanmingyuan duplicated at Bishu shanzhuang and not the landscape elements of the frontier that predated Chengde. The existence of the mountain district, and not its cohabitation with the lake and palace districts (also present in Yuanmingyuan), is, however, the principle feature that made the hill station a remarkable place for landscape transition. A tremendous interest in the mountains of the summer residence marked the Manchu perspective. The Kangxi emperor valued them so much that every album plate of Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi depicts mountains, and these mountains are made to look higher than in reality.18 A lake appears in only 64 percent, a plain in 33 per-

Figure 15. Wanshuyuan prairie and Yongyou temple. Tadashi Sekino.

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

39

cent, and an island in 14 percent of the vantage points that the album plates depict. This proportion reveals aesthetic priorities that the actual locations of the vistas did not support, since the places chosen for their scenery are, in their majority, in the lake district and outside the mountain district.19 The landscape paintings and engravings of Bishu shanzhuang have caused confusion between the Kangxi emperor’s taste for natural mountains and Chinese scholars’ taste for artificial mountains. It can be argued that the Manchu emperor desired this confusion. Due to the Qianlong emperor’s attentive and lavish patronage, the hill station of Chengde prefecture became several capitals in one: the administrative center of Jehol and Mongolia, an alternative religious capital for Tibetan Buddhism, and a new cultural core for garden art and for Chinese and Manchu belles lettres. The building program of these three capitals in one was not completed before 1792, three years before the Qianlong emperor abdicated. During the following Jiaqing era, new pavilions were put up, but after the emperor’s accidental death in the hill station in 1820, the Qing court stopped organizing expeditions to Jehol and allowed Chengde buildings to deteriorate. Also designed by the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, the Yuanmingyuan gardens in the Beijing suburb of Haidian became the only summer residence of the Qing court after 1820. The oldest Qing villa of Yuanmingyuan was the Kangxi emperor’s Changchunyuan residence built on the ruined grounds of a mansion that had belonged to a relative of the Ming Wanli emperor (1572–1620).20 The Yuanmingyuan and Yiheyuan imperial residences of Haidian were connected to Beijing by boats that traveled on the Kunming lake and Changhe canal until they reached Baishi bridge, near the Xizhi gate of Beijing walls. A twelve-kilometer cruise to Haidian was certainly more comfortable than palanquin or horseback riding for more than eight hundred kilometers in the wild Jehol mountains. Strong political motives led earlier Qing emperors to journey to Jehol. When these motives weakened, the topography and climate of the hill station of Chengde were no longer attractive. Water was one of the most important physical features of the site of Chengde, as it was able to take many useful forms. Water was rainfall for the fields, a spring for the residence lake, a river for transportation and irrigation, mist for poetical inspiration, and yin for the local geomancy. Running from north to south, the Wulie river flows to the east of the summer residence and of the city before joining the Luanhe river some twelve kilometers south of Chengde. The Kangxi emperor built a dam to protect Chengde from floods, since after summer rains the Wulie river often deserved its name and became dangerously wide. Wulie river floods once destroyed parts of the Kangxi emperor’s palaces.21 The Rehe spring and Rehe river have presented no such danger to the city. The name “Rehe” has been used for both the spring that flows into the lakes of the hill station22 and the small river that flows from the residence lakes into the Wulie river, itself a tributary of the Luanhe river. Records have often confused the short Rehe river with the much

40

Mapping Chengde

mightier Wulie river, also called Rehe in eighteenth-century sources. Summer monsoon rains dramatically increase the volume of water carried by the Luanhe river and its tributaries, the Yixun, Wulie, Laoniu, Baihe, and Liuhe rivers near Chengde.23 Yearly rainfall is 570 millimeters and may have been greater during the eighteenth century, although no direct evidence indicates the magnitude of climatic change in Jehol. The Wulie valley is surrounded by hills that are related to two mountain ranges: the Yanshan mountains to the south and west and the Xin’an mountains to the north. Strange geological formations around Chengde attracted first monks and now tourists; Qingchui peak is the most remarkable of these.24 The basin of Chengde itself is encircled by hills rough enough to look like mountains, with altitudes varying from 400 to 600 meters.25 This mountainous circle offers natural protection that may explain why no fortified wall has ever surrounded the Qing summer capital, although the landscape components of Chengde (summer residence, villas, temples, city proper) are all individually walled:

Figure 16. Restored villa in the Mountain District. Philippe Forêt.

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

41

Chengte, better known as Jehol and now the capital of Jehol Province, Manchoukuo, is a natural fortress surrounded on all sides by a range of mountains, steep, craggy and treeless. Hence no attempt has ever been made to build a wall—a rare instance among the towns originally laid out by the Chinese [sic].26

A second explanation for the absence of city walls may be related to the insignificance of Chengde itself, which the emperor may perhaps have perceived as a suburb dependent on the imperial residence, not unlike Haidian, the suburb south of Yuanmingyuan. The Chengde hills are lower than the hills bordering the Emperor’s Road from Gubeikou to Chengde and from Chengde to Mulan. With its narrow valley openings and a central basin jointly occupied by Bishu shanzhuang and Chengde, the site morphology of the Qing summer capital is reminiscent of the hunting circles of Mulan.27 The city lies at an average altitude of between 320 and 350 meters, the northwestern part of Chengde being higher than the southeastern part of the city. Located north of the city and pre-

Figure 17. Ruins of a villa garden in the Mountain District. Philippe Forêt.

42

Mapping Chengde

venting urban development in that direction, the hill station occupies an area of 560 hectares (1,384 acres), an area comparable to that of the residence of Yuanmingyuan. Bishu shanzhuang follows the same relief pattern as both Chengde and Beijing, with a lower area in the southeast and a higher area in the northwest. Bisected by two valleys (Songyun and Lishu), the mountain district dominates in a spectacular way the lake district of the summer residence. Low altitude and the protection afforded by hills serve to moderate the harshness of the Jehol continental climate in Chengde. Chengde’s yearly mean temperature is 8.8°C. The number of days with frost does not exceed 210 per year, which is a comparatively low figure for Mongolia. Winter winds are less powerful than in Mulan, and the temperature is not so cold: the January average temperature is minus 9.3°C in Chengde, compared with minus 13.2°C in Mulan. Summer in Chengde is slightly less humid and hot than in Beijing: July average is 24.4°C in Chengde, compared with 25.8°C in Beijing. The man-made Saihu lakes may have created a microclimate that was at least less humid, if not cooler, than that in the Yuanmingyuan residence near Beijing. Licent reports that mist filled the Wulie valley opposite the summer residence.28 It is possible that Kangxi designed the artificial lakes and hills of Bishu shanzhuang with the goal of funneling breezes through the mountains, over the lake, and toward his residence. Names given to landscape vistas do suggest that the emperor enjoyed a fresh breeze from the lakes.29 Chinese scholars conducting formal analyses of Chengde have traditionally divided the Bishu shanzhuang summer residence into four districts and isolated the landscape of the summer residence from surrounding Chengde and Jehol, whose landscape they usually ignore. The theoretical justification of such morphological division has never been detailed. In this chapter, the same division into four areas is respected because it provides a convenient framework for a simple description of the hill station, even if it remains thoroughly inadequate for analysis of the microcosmic and macrocosmic geographies of the Qing summer capital. Descriptions of the four districts are always given in the following sequential order: the palace district, the lake district, the prairie district, and finally the hill district. Scholars have typically noted the spatial analogy between the summer capital and empire, as each of the hill station districts refers to landscape entities in the empire. The imperial landscape of Bishu shanzhuang would seem to be the sum of four otherwise independent, self-sufficient, and self-coherent spatial entities organized in this succession. This consensual view appears to be insufficient for landscape analysis, as it does not establish a case for a comprehensive view of progression in landscape representation. This four-step division, however, suggests a linear progression that advances along the Emperor’s Road, which is the only axis of the summer residence that connects all the landscape districts. The progression moves from Lizheng gate in the southeast to Xibei gate in the northwest and from a low-lying, water-rich, flat and open environment to a more elevated, naturally wooded, mountainous, and secluded environment. It moves

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

43

at the same time from a culturally rich environment of numerous buildings and vistas to an ecologically rich environment of many tree and plant species. Chinese researchers have not discussed this linear progression that leads into the wildest part of the hill station. In its conception, this axis is not entirely different from the circuit of landscape experiences designed by the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, since a number of vistas are located along the Emperor’s Road of the hill station. Circuit and axis meet tangentially on the west coast of Ruyi Lake.

The Hill Station Districts The palaces are located in the southeast portion of the summer residence; a strong wall, gates, and a guarded esplanade separate them from the city. Five compounds of enclosed buildings face the city and constitute the palace district: the Zhenggong palace, Wanhe songfeng villa, Qinggong palace, Songhe residence, and Donggong palace. Fire later destroyed the last two palaces. The arrangement of buildings is relatively formal and symmetrical, with successive courtyards and halls leading from south to north and from public areas to the emperor’s private apartments. The Wanhe songfeng villa is the oldest palatial complex; its building architecture was modeled after the Xiequyuan villa of the Yuanmingyuan summer residence. Looking north from the ridge where it stands, the main hall of the Wanhe songfeng villa commands a general view of the lake district landscape.30 The simple layout of Zhenggong, the main palace of the summer residence, is made up of a succession of nine courtyards separated from one another by halls and gates. The emperor carried out his duties in the front halls but lived in the back hall, the ninth hall, as the ninth heaven is the highest of all the celestial levels. Entrance to the Zhenggong palace is effected from the south, through a series of three gates that lead to two important halls, the Danbo jingcheng and Yanbo zhishuang halls.31 The first of the three gates is the massive Lizheng gate, which the Qianlong emperor erected in 1754.32 Lizheng men, the “Gate of Splendor and Propriety,” is the only gate of the summer residence that had its name inscribed in all the languages of the Qing empire: Manchu, Mongol, Chinese, Uigûr, and Tibetan. The other gate signboards used Chinese, including that of the Zhenggong gate on which the Kangxi emperor wrote “Bishu shanzhuang,” not without miswriting the bi character.33 Built in 1710 by Kangxi, the front hall was used for formal occasions such as the reception of vassal dignitaries and the emperors’ birthdays. Important guests such as the Sixth Panchen Erdeni and the Mongol Torgüt khan were honored in the Shizi chamber. The palace district was a modest and much smaller architectural duplication of the Beijing Forbidden City. Designed for the conduct of official affairs, Zhenggong palace architecture expressed the rural plainness sought in a mountain hamlet of unpainted buildings surrounded by paved courtyards and a few stern pine trees.34 This plainness has

44

Mapping Chengde

been connected by Chinese scholars to the ideal of self-restraint advocated in Confucianism. It might better be related to the primary attraction of Chengde, which was the simple life that the Kangxi, Qianlong, and Jiaqing emperors enjoyed there. They found in their mountain hamlet a renewal of the traditional Manchu virtues strongly advocated by the Kangxi emperor: simplicity, frugality, and martial living conditions. The Qianlong emperor’s description of the austere Mukden Ancestor Temple manifested a similar concern for plain virtues.35 The Manchurian temple gates matched the simplicity of the building architecture; the inner and outer walls were made of earth, and common lamps were used to light the rooms. The major aesthetic attraction of the hill station for the Qing emperors was the landscape of the lake district. It was the focus of Qing architectural activities in spite of its relatively small size. The lakes’ water area covers less than 10 percent of the summer residence’s 560 hectares, but its 55 hectares represent six times the size of the palace district. Cartographic distortion seen in Qing paintings of the hill station emphasized the major aesthetic contribution of the lake district and its privileged relationship with the palace district. By contracting the mountain district, the “Bishu shanzhuang zong tu” map (in Rehe zhi) distributed the hill station buildings throughout the summer residence in an equalizing manner that did not reflect the true size of the respective areas within the residence. Qing painters did not see a contradiction in diminishing the size of the mountain district and depicting artificial mountains higher than in reality. Most of the vantage points conceived by Kangxi and Qianlong emperors for the enjoyment of the summer residence landscape vistas took advantage of the landscape resources offered by the lake district. Bishu shanzhuang’s pavilions, kiosks, rockeries, and bridges were closely modeled after those of Jiangnan gardens, and the vantage points of the lake district were inspired by vistas typical of the lower Yangzi region between Nanjing and Hangzhou. Scale does not remain constant in these oblique views of the summer residence but is subjected to manipulation. The techniques of landscape architecture dramatized that which is aesthetically significant, the naturalized landscape of the lake district, while that which has little artistic value, the natural landscape of the mountain district, is minimized by the paintings.36 Sixty-four percent of the Kangxi landscape vistas employed one of the Saihu lakes as an element of plate representation; the Album of Imperial Poems puts a lake in the foreground of 45 percent of the plates; the depiction of a villa standing by a lake is found in 36 percent of the plates.37 Out of the seventy-two locations of landscape scenery depiction in the Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi, only ten were located in the hill district; sixtytwo vantage points were concentrated in the lake district or its vicinity.38 Saihu, literally “Frontier Lakes,” was the collective name for all the hill station lakes. Qing iconography of the Saihu lakes in paintings has generally exaggerated the actual size of the lake dis-

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

45

trict—twenty percent of the summer residence grounds—in order to amplify the Jiangnan heritage of the hill station by depicting the inner island gardens and buildings in a luxuriously detailed way. There are eight Saihu lakes: Banyue lake north of the Wanshuyuan prairie district; Neihu lake at the foot of Zhuyuan temple and north of Ruyi lake; Ruyi lake west of Ruyi island; Chenghu lake between Wanshuyuan prairie; Ruyi island and Jinshan mountain; Shanghu lake and Xiahu lake, both south of Ruyi island; Jinghu lake; and the southernmost Yinhu lake. The same symbolic reasoning that transforms the islands of Bishu shanzhuang into continents turns the eight lakes into the Eight Seas. Kangxi’s point in designing and naming Ruyi island was evidently to connect the geographical center of the lake district to a number of parallel symbolic registers. The name, function, and shape of the island have meanings in several registers. Ruyi island is the most important island of the Saihu archipelago on several accounts: it is centrally located, it is the largest, and its many courtyards housed major official and private activities. Ruyi zhou would mean “As You Please Island.” Its name comes from having been designed to look like the letter S, the form of a ruyi scepter, which originally was a short sword. Symbol of success, the ruyi scepter was often presented to officials to honor them, and indeed Qianlong offered such a scepter to Lord Macartney. The shape of the ruyi scepter has had a religious significance because it suggests a lotus petal, and Buddhas are often depicted sitting on a lotus. Capable of responding to every wish, the pearl of ruyi, or Cintämani, is the philosopher’s stone. A ruyi scepter is also supposed to be shaped like a medicinal fungus.39 In practical terms, the function of Ruyi island was to duplicate in a rural setting the formal setting needed for many of the rituals that were performed in the Zhenggong palaces. To receive their Mongol guests, the Manchu emperors utilized the large facilities of Yanxun shanguan house.40 Plays were performed in a nearby theater to entertain the court and its guests. Ruyi island’s southernmost building is the Wushu qingliang hall, a cool, bright, and spacious retreat from hot summer mornings. The layout of the lake district, therefore, formed lakes and islands in an archipelago marked by gardens and buildings that were copied from the wealthy cities of Jiangnan. The Kangxi emperor, furthermore, placed the highest point of the lake district next to the Rehe spring. A recess of Chenghu lake hides Rehe spring, three hundred meters north of the Jinshan mountain. The tallest structure in the lake district is Shangdi ge, or Jinshan ting, a pagoda erected on the Jinshan mountain, itself a small island east of Ruyi island. Emperors conducted ritual ceremonies to two supreme Daoist deities at the Jinshan pagoda. At the foot of the island, the Tianyu xiancheng hall spreads its corridor in a semicircle that leads to an embankment.41 Pagoda and hall were copied from the building architecture of the Jinshan temple founded in 1021 in Zhenjiang. Pictures from the 1930s reveal a severely damaged pagoda that had lost its walls and doors and a hall that had been taken down. East of the Jinshan mountain, a fish farm was built during the 1960s.

46

Mapping Chengde

In unintended ways, the remains of its tanks and dikes and the prosperity of its aquatic vegetation participate in the southern China landscape of the lake district today. The hill station park administration restored the Jinshan mountain superstructures in the early 1980s. As large as the lake district, the prairie district received little attention from Chinese cartographers and painters employed by the Qing court, presumably because the aspect of the wooded plain was not Chinese enough to retain their aesthetic attention. The Kangxi emperor evidently did not share his Chinese subjects’ lack of interest, since the “Garden of the Ten Thousand Trees” was designed as early as 1703. He ordered the planting of various trees to form a prairie district that spread north of Chenghu lake and the Jiangnan district. This aspect of the district made distinct reference to the wooded natural environment of Mongolia. The Qianlong emperor added to Wanshuyuan three extensions of the lake district that encircled the prairie district: the Wenjin library in the west of Shimadai, the Chunhao xuan villa in the east, and the Sheli pagoda in the northeast (now under restoration). In short, Chinese landmarks evoking the cultural landscape of Jiangnan surrounded the Mongol-looking prairie district, itself a large island. Completed in 1774, the library was modeled on the Tianyi pavilion of Ningbo, in Zhejiang. As one of the seven book depositories of the Qing empire and the recipient of the Siku quanshu encyclopedia, the library granted a scholarly significance to the Qing summer capital. The Sheli pagoda is the only structure that remains of the Buddhist temple of Yongyou, built by Qianlong on the two models of Bao’en temple in Nanjing and Liuhe pagoda in Hangzhou. The four stelaes of Yongyou si were translated by Otto Franke, and the text that explains in four languages the rationale of the temple foundation reveals some of Qianlong’s contradictions about his private life, his religious beliefs, and his public functions between 1751 and 1764 (the dates of the first and second erections of the pagoda of Yongyou si): When, as a boy, I was allowed to come here with my imperial ancestor [Kangxi], I wandered about, peaceful and happy; it was no time of rest and yet there was rest. . . . I have built in my summer residence next to the Garden of Ten Thousand Trees [Wanshuyuan], a sanctuary that shall bear the name “Eternal Protection” [Yongyou]. . . . It shall be a sign that Säkyamuni’s Gridhraküta and Vajräsana [two holy places near Bihar, India] rejoice in the protection of the Heavenly Dragon [Qing emperor]. . . . Coming generations shall see from this stele that in honorable war actions I have followed the examples of my forefathers and spread fear and veneration, and not that the constant propagation of Buddhist teachings has been my highest concern.42

The prairie district, too, had a political and ceremonial function. The Qing creation of a Mongol campsite was consistent with the two effects desired for the Wanshuyuan landscape: flexibility in time and space.43 Yurts and low fences were erected for parties,

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

47

concerts, and receptions and were removed when these activities ended. The district was then restored to a “natural” landscape. A Qing map of the Wanshuyuan Mongol camp shows the emperor’s throne and a table at the center of a gigantic tent; on its eastern and western sides stand parallel ranks of Buddhist priests, Mongol nobles, and Qing officials. Two groups of musicians, imperial sons-in-law, lower ranking Qing officials, Mongol nobles, and the representatives of the Court of Colonial Affairs and Ministry of Rites are placed outside the tent.44 To the west of the Mongol camp, the Qing court organized horse trials and archery contests in the field of Shimadai, as described by Father Attiret. After having nominated this Jesuit missionary to the mandarinate, Qianlong ordered him to go to the Wanshuyuan garden to sketch the site and the places that were to be used as the background for the painting that represented the activities of the party held July 5, 1754.45 The missionary noted that most of the games consisted in wrestling fights, horse races, and military exercises, except for the theater play and fireworks.46 As indicated by Father Attiret’s painting, the prairie also accommodated precisely arranged banquets that the Manchu emperors offered to Jüngar and other Mongol tributaries.47 On September 14, 1793, the British ambassador and his retinue were admitted into this tent to present in a jewel-encrusted box George III’s letter to the Qianlong emperor. William Alexander, a painter attached to Lord Macartney’s embassy, depicted diplomatic activities in Wanshuyuan although he did not witness the reception of the tribute bearers in front of the imperial yurt.48 In the 1930s fewer than fifty trees, mostly pine trees deprived of their lower branches, were still standing in Wanshuyuan. A fairly sparse forest of elms and willows sheltering David’s deer is what remains today of the forest that originally covered the fifty-seven hectares of the Wanshuyuan prairie. The prairie district has been converted to new commercial uses that reveal the Chinese domestication of Mongol culture. A compound of thirty-one air-conditioned tents has been permanently erected by the tourist department of Chengde on the grounds of Wanshuyuan. Now a disco bar with attendants clad in “authentic” Mongol dress, the imperial tent has resumed the amusement function of the former Mongol camp: Sadly, this area is now disfigured by rows of ugly, utilitarian buildings and where tents were once set up by the emperors to enjoy open-air entertaining, there is now the most grotesque ‘yurtel’, or compound of yurts in which visitors can stay overnight. Pop music blasts out of speakers around the compound and a great central yurt is used as a dance hall! 49

The tacky addition of the Deng Xiaoping era to the district architecture is moderated by the Stalinist style of monumental hotels and low administrative buildings in Wanshuyuan. Park employees’ red-brick dormitories are aligned in rows near a deer nursery. Trees were

48

Mapping Chengde

cut down to make room for the construction of workers’ buildings and two hotels for visiting party and government officials of the Maoist era. Near Chenghu lake, south of a triumphant Soviet-styled hotel, melon and flower fields are farmed where vegetables for the imperial table once grew. The humble vegetable garden may have suffered little from the neglect and destruction of the hill station’s patrimony by successive political regimes in China. Court poetry and paintings did not precisely record either the function or the ecology of Bishu shanzhuang’s wooded hills. The largest of its four spatial components, the mountain district, occupies the western half of the summer residence; its hills become steeper in the north where they face the Shizi gully. Lord Macartney’s relation of the tour he was offered of the “western garden” unknowingly described the two kinds of aesthetic impressions, “momentary” and “total,” that the mountain district was expected to provoke: From the great irregularity of the ground and the various heights to which we ascended we had opportunities of catching many magnificent points of view by detached glances, but after wandering for several hours (and yet never wearied with wandering) we at last reached a covered pavilion open on all sides, and situated on a summit so elevated as perfectly to command the whole surrounding country to a vast extent. The radius of the horizon, I should suppose, to be at least twenty miles from the central spot where we stood, and certainly so rich, so various, so beautiful, so sublime a prospect my eyes had never beheld. I saw everything before me as on an illuminated map, palaces, pagodas, towns, villages, farm houses, plains and valleys watered by innumerable streams, hills waving with woods and meadows covered with cattle of the most beautiful marks and colours. All seemed to be nearly at my feet and that a step would convey me within reach of them.50

The “finest forest scenes in the world” that the British ambassador described in his journal did not survive the fall of the Qing dynasty. Aerial photographs taken by Tadashi Sekino in the 1930s show a landscape of devastation: with the exception of pine trees, all the trees had been cut down or looked as if they were dying. Short grass covered all the intensely eroded slopes. Nearly all the villas, rest lodges, and temples that once dotted the summer residence mountain have been destroyed. There were once forty-four sites, with pavilions, lookout kiosks, and inner gardens. Qing miniature illustrations and photographs of the 1930s have preserved their appearance, at that time in a sad state of disrepair. The Japanese army later razed some constructions, like the Zhuyuan temple destroyed in 1945. Maple, oak, and pear trees have been planted since the 1970s, almost exclusively in the central and northern parts of the summer residence’s mountain district; ancient pine trees are now registered for better protection. Although the southern part of the hill district has not yet been reforested, the hill station administration has succeeded in restor-

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

49

ing part of the former beauty of the mountain landscape that had suffered from deforestation. Today so little has been preserved of the villas and temples that building foundations are almost impossible to find in the lush vegetation of the mountain district. A few hilltop villas and kiosks were restored during the 1980s, notably the Yiwang villa and both the kiosks of Chuifeng luo zhao and Si mian yun shan. From their commanding position, the kiosks offer splendid views of the lake district and the landscape outside Bishu shanzhuang: peasant farms and fields, Qingchui peak, and the panorama of Jehol mountains. Tourists’ explorations of the hill station’s four landscape districts usually end in the kiosks that top the easternmost ridge crest of the summer residence, above Wanshuyuan. From there the lower city of Chengde disappears as it merges with the barren hills of the frontier. The wooded imperial residence stands out as a small green island lost among gray hills that are backed by the high and austere mountains of Jehol. They stretch to the horizon, southward to the Yanshan mountain, northward to the Mongol plateau.51

The Display of the Outer Temples A remarkable religious complex erected under Qianlong’s direction stands east and north of the imperial resort, separated from it by the Wulie river and by the usually dry river bed of the smaller Shizi river. Several geographical configurations are suggested by the locations of Chengde temples. Four cultures and empires met under the round sky of the Buddhist capital, and it would be tempting to give each a quadrant of the basin: Chinese empire in the southeast of the summer residence, Tibetan empire in the southwest, Mongol empire in the northwest, and Manchu empire in the northeast. But the locations of these temples do not support this geographical division, whereas their styles celebrate for the Manchu patrons of Mongol believers the fusion of Chinese and Tibetan architectural traditions. To explore the logical connection between site and religious spectacle, I would like to introduce the idea of a mandala configuration in Chengde. As a magic figure, a mandala can form a circular altar on which Buddhas and bodhisattvas are placed. As a religious concept, a mandala organizes each of the ten worlds of being so as to fulfill the operation of the law. The construction of the Waiba miao temples enhanced the Buddhist status of Chengde as well as the emperor’s status as a Buddhist deity. As the object of the cult that Living Buddhas enjoy, the emperor could effectively control religious affairs in Mongolia and Tibet.52 In Chengde the Qianlong emperor proclaimed that he was a reincarnation of Mañjusrï. Qianlong ordered several paintings of himself as the reincarnation of the Sagacious Mañjusrï bodhisattva, the savior of all living forms and the personification of the Buddha’s intellect. The chief disciple of the Buddha, Mañjusrï is often represented holding a sword or a book and sitting on a lion, since he is the stern guardian of wisdom.53

50

Mapping Chengde

The Manchu emperors were called reincarnations of Mañjusrï in Mongol and Tibetan materials, such as the biography of the lCan-skya Janggiya Qutugtu, in which the Kangxi emperor is referred to as Mañjusrï, the sublime Kangxi.54 The building of the Mañjusrï temple north of Bishu shanzhuang was closely related to the Qing dynasty’s respect for the Wutai mountain. The first character of this other name, qing, is the same as the Qing dynasty name. Furthermore, Kangxi gave the name qingliang to the Wushu qingliang vista in the Bishu shanzhuang gardens.55 The Qing court believed that the name Manchu [manju] had originated in the bodhisattva’s name, Mañjusrï. No cartographic evidence pertaining to the temple terraces proves that the Qianlong emperor planned to reproduce in Chengde the strict geometry of a mandala. The highly visible temple terraces may explain the name Tai wan dili tu given to a Qing map of Chengde. The title of this map means “Map of the Geography of the Bay of Terraces.” Tai here are the terraces of the outer temples as well as the terraces of the fields cultivated on the eastern bank of the Wulie river. Calling the basin of Chengde “Bay of Terraces” reinforces the fusion of the religious and profane elements that participated in the landscape spectacle that the emperors enjoyed seeing around the hill station and in their paintings of Bishu shanzhuang. The map title also invites the observer to compare the Bay of Terraces with the Mountain of Five Terraces, in other words, to compare Chengde with Wutai shan.56 The hill station has its own terrace: Yuetai, the “Moon Terrace,” is located at the foot of Jinshan temple. From Ruyi island, the emperors could contemplate the moon rising behind the pagoda of Jinshan and the peak of Qingchui. The Kangxi and Qianlong emperors made a total of eleven pilgrimages to the Wutai mountain temples, as they wanted to foster the Mañjusrï-emperor association. The Mañjusrï bodhisattva resided in Wutai shan, a mountain that all Chinese and Mongol Buddhists considered sacred. Wutai mountain is also known as the clear and cool mountain of Qingliang shan, which stands east of the central Kunlun mountain. According to Avatamsaka, the Qingliang mountain is the bodhisattva Mañjusrï’s residence and Wutai shan is another name for the same mountain. The five flat terraces of the mountain complex have a crescent-shaped configuration and have no vegetation as they rise above the tree line. The Qingliang name alludes to the mountain’s frigid climate; visitors have recorded midsummer snowfalls. Located on the mountain’s highest terrace, the northern terrace, Mañjusrï’s statue has attracted crowds of pilgrims since the fourth century c.e. Before its annexation by Buddhist believers, Wutai shan was a Daoist center. In 1761 Qianlong visited the Mañjusrï sanctuary erected where legend held that the bodhisattva had personally appeared. He ordered copies of the Mañjusrï’s statue of this Wutai shan sanctuary, and two temples were built to shelter the statue replicas, one west of Yuanmingyuan and the other one north of Bishu shanzhuang.57 Chengde served a broader role in the organization of the Qing religious empire. The

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

51

Kangxi emperor had already built two temples in 1713, the Puren and Pushan temples, both of them in the Chinese style although constructed to serve Mongol religious needs. He had also built the Huizong temple in Dolön to celebrate Qing victories in Outer Mongolia. After the mid-eighteenth century, the Qianlong emperor decided to grant his summer capital the status of religious metropolis of Central Asia and reinforce his proximity to Mañjusrï. Ten major temples were erected between 1755 and 1780 on the eastern terrace of the Wulie valley and the northern slope of the Shizi valley. With the exception of the Mañjusrï, Luohan, and Guangyuan temples, all of them incorporated elements of Tibetan landscape architecture. Built in 1764, the Anyuan, or Ili, temple is said to have been modeled after the Jüngar Guerzha temple of Kulja, a city destroyed in 1756 when eastern Turkestan was conquered; it is difficult to evaluate the actual source of the temple’s architecture. The Pule temple was built in 1766, a few years before the Potala temple (1771), the Mañjusrï temple (1774), and the Sumeru temple (1780) were completed. The most important temple in terms of sheer volume is the Potala: it occupies twenty-two hectares, or ten times the average size of a Chengde temple. Its huge and purple Dahong terrace can be seen from the distant Pule temple. An extant painting within it records the Qianlong emperor’s meeting with the Torgüt khan Wobaxi at the Potala inner temple of Wanfa guiyi.58 In diplomatic terms the Sumeru temple may be the most significant of all Waiba miao temples, as the Panchen Lama resided there when he visited the Qianlong emperor in 1780.59 Several Waiba miao temples, such as the Pule temple, had no permanent religious communities and were under the responsibility of the Imperial Household Court. The largely Mongol clergy of eight other temples was managed by the Court of Colonial Affairs, which had permanent offices in Beijing for Lama administration. One linear feature in Chengde bears emphasis, as its perception is no longer as evident as it was when the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors conceived it. I derive the concept of “axis” from Raymond Christinger’s normative notions of temporal and spatial “gates” in mythical geography. Between the known and unknown realms stand features of the real world, such as sacred rivers and mountains, that religion constitutes as gates for the entrance into the sacred world. I call “axis of landscape transition” the road that leads to these gates and allows passage to mythical space through the architectural reproduction of a ritual environment. Both Chinese and Tibetans share the idea of division of the cosmos into separate spatial levels, or what I call here “landscape layers,” and hence speculate on the possibility of ascending the hierarchy of these levels. There are usually seven or nine layers between the depths of the Sino-Tibetan Earth and the heights of the SinoTibetan Heaven.60 A straight axis runs from Qingchui peak to Jinshan temple through the very center of the main hall of Pule temple. Qingchui peak is much more than a strange needle-shaped rock configuration. The peak invites comparison with the sacred Sumeru mountain, since

52

Mapping Chengde

it is shaped like a pillar and associated with a lake (more precisely, with the eight lakes of Bishu shanzhuang from which the temple on Jinshan island emerges). As a pillar at the center of Heaven and Earth, Qingchui /Sumeru touches the Polar star and forms the axis around which the world rotates. The problem of the location of the peak on the eastern margin of the basin and not at the center of Chengde was solved by the construction, in the middle of Bishu shanzhuang gardens, of a substitute to Qingchui, which is Jinshan, and with the creation of an axis between the natural and artificial peaks. Because of its position on this axis and the mandala architecture of its back section, Pule si is the most critical structure of the outer temples for analysis of the spectacle of Chengde as a site for landscape transition. The Pule temple mandala may have been intended to compensate for the Waiba miao temples’ cosmologically defective orientation, as these temples were not arranged on the four quadrants of the imperial residence square. To complete the foundation of the temples that would bring peace and happiness to his Mongol subjects, Qianlong selected in 1766 a terrace above the western bank of the Wulie river, between the Puren and Anyuan temples, to be the site of the Pule temple: There was still a high and large space when I looked south of Qingchui Peak from the temples [Puning si and Anyuan miao]. Western Mongols [Dameng] all embrace Tibetan Buddhism [Huangjiao]. Since they follow their Buddhist faith and their customs do not change, I have added this temple [Pule si] to complete my elder’s construction of temples [the Kangxi emperor’s building of Puren and Pushan temples].61

Built for Outer Mongolian tribes, the Pule temple is described as a Tibetan-style mandala built on three square platforms. The mandala is protected by a circular pavilion, the Xuguang hall, covered by a conical yellow tiled roof, which Chinese scholars have compared to the conical and double eaved hall of Tiantan altar in Beijing, restored by the Qianlong emperor. The Pule temple is dedicated to Samvara, the divinity of intellect.62 Placed on a second mandala, the statue of Samvara stands in sexual unison with Vajravarahi, symbolizing the union of wisdom and compassion. Samvara represents “compassion for all beings” and Vajravarahi “transcendent wisdom;” the union of the two tantric statues makes manifest the Buddha’s spiritual attainment. The two-body statue of Samvara also symbolizes the fusion of the yin-yang principles.63 Samvara’s three heads look toward the Qingchui peak, while Vajravarahi looks toward the Jinshan mountain and the hill station.64 Samvara’s tridimensional mandala conception obeyed the Tibetan and Chinese cosmogonies that have traditionally associated a rounded sky with a square earth. More than religious, the temple’s role was to symbolize transition and unification in the Chengde imperial landscape. A symbol of Outer Mongolia’s union with the Manchu empire can be seen in the golden dragon above Samvara’s mandala, since the dragon emblematically represents the emperor and the dragon’s position above the mandala sig-

Hamlet and Imperial Residence

53

nifies the emperor’s suzerainty. Qianlong had received the Samvara’s initiation from his spiritual preceptor lCan-skya qutugtu Rol-pa’i rdo-rje. The same preceptor later assisted him in orienting the Pule temple and in reinforcing the spiritual power of the site of Chengde.65 At Chengde the proper religious orientation was forbidden by the topography of the basin and was probably never even envisioned by Qing emperors. Only the Mañjusrï temple is appropriately positioned north of Bishu shanzhuang. The absence of a general plan does not, however, imply the absence of Tibetan or Chinese topomantic principles applied to the selection of the site or to the construction layout of each temple.66 Anne Chayet has listed the demands of Tibetan site selection, which are largely compatible with Chinese criteria. To summarize her list, the site must include a mountain in the back, hills in the front, and rivers on both sides that meet in a centrally located valley. Determining the auspicious site must take into account the “Four Pillars of Earth” and the “Four Guardians,” who are symbolized by specific topographical features, and the natural imperfections of the site must be corrected.67 Sekino Tadashi also observed the ways in which the construction sites of the Sumeru and Potala temples were adapted to local topography. The most striking difference between Beijing and Chengde according to Sekino was the failure to respect rules of symmetry in the layout of the inner buildings of Chengde. This lack of symmetry indicates the limits of Chinese influence in the architecture of the outer temples.68 Qing policy succeeded in controlling the Tibetan Buddhist clergy and its Mongol believers partly by sponsoring temple construction in Chengde. Landscape metaphors were not as complete as they might have been, since the Waiba miao stars occupied only the northeast of Bishu shanzhuang’s religious canopy. Geomantic demands were not so absolute that they could not be violated in favor of the Qianlong emperor’s concerns about a spatial representation that would exalt the dependency of the Tibetan church. Kangxi era temples were oriented southward, with entrances parallel to the eastern Bishu shanzhuang wall; Qianlong era temples were all located on terraced promontories, with entrances facing the hill station wall. The temples have been compared to the stars that surround the moon. Such a disposition around the lunar Bishu shanzhuang would symbolize the support given by the frontier populations to the central government of the Qing empire. Given Mañjusrï’s personal significance for the Qing emperors, the comparison of the hill station to the moon acquires a particular religious sense if one remembers that moonlight, yueguang, is the Chinese transliteration for Candraprabha, one of the three “honored ones” at the Mañjusrï court. During two of his previous reincarnations, the Buddha himself was called “Moonlight king” and “Moonlight prince,” Yueguang wang and Yueguang taizi.69

CHAPTER 4

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric The sacred mountains contain fine soaring peaks and fields of wilderness with special markers where strange animals roar and dragons rise to heaven, and the spots where wind and rain are generated, rainbows stored and cranes beautifully dressed. These are the places where divine immortals keep moving in and out. . . . The steep cliffs fall one thousand leagues into the bottom and the lone peak soars to ten thousand leagues high. . . . Its rugged mass is forever solid, together with the Heaven and Earth. Its great energy is eternally potent, in the span from the ancient to the future.1

Walking on the Garden Circuit A systemic approach uncovers the meanings of Chengde landscape within its cultural context by focusing on the concept of place wholeness and by extending the notion of the Emperor’s Road to the definition of landscape transition axes. The enumerative approach hitherto employed by scholars to describe Chengde gardens has here been discarded because following the residence paths in the Bishu shanzhuang gardens cannot lead to a discussion of the meaning of place and the importance of cultural context. This approach does not respect the plate-by-plate tour of Chengde gardens proposed in the vistas of the Album of Imperial Poems. Nothing in the Kangxi emperor’s compilation suggested a spatial division of Chengde gardens into autonomous entities. Claiming such a division would invite misinterpretation of Chengde’s landscape. 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. The garden scenes of the summer residence were composed to offer alternating views of landscape for an observer as he moved through time. The hill station garden vistas were indeed designed to be nothing more than instants of totality on a circuit of landscape transition. Leisure gardens and parks have always been a component in the planning of Chinese imperial cities. These green districts were preferably designed north of the gray city and adjacent to the purple and yellow palace area. Jingshan park in Beijing was erected just north of the Forbidden City. Built in the northwest of Beijing, the Yuanmingyuan residence developed its gardens behind the emperor’s main audience hall, which faced the southern entrance.2 The Qing dynasty maintained game reserves near its three capitals for hunting game or confining exotic animals; such was the role of the Xiangshan mountain 54

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

55

west of Yuanmingyuan and the Wanshuyuan prairie inside Bishu shanzhuang. Like other capital cities in China, Chengde had imperial gardens inside the summer residence walls as well as outside the city. Architectural historians too often have limited their studies to verifying that imperial gardens completed the planning of imperial Chengde. Work on the religious complex of Waiba miao has focused on the architecture and history of the buildings themselves and not on their gardens. The garden component was one item in a long list that included other architectural components such as palace city, administrative city, palace halls and courtyards, altars, temples and other ritual buildings, market area, and royal necropolis.3 A component of that list, Chengde gardens nonetheless have several characteristics that conferred to Bishu shanzhuang particular significance for the Manchuness of the imperial landscape.

Figure 18. Vista plate 12 of the Bishu shanzhuang gardens, entitled “Chuifeng luo zhao,” “Sunset on Qingchui Peak.” Source: Qing Gaozong and Qing Shengzu, Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi.

56

Mapping Chengde

In most of their work on Chengde gardens, scholars have devoted themselves to the study of the hill station gardens alone. The court gardens of the summer residence have elicited the strongest interest because researchers have generally assumed that gardens located outside the summer residence had no importance for the Manchu landscape spectacle. Scholars have also assumed that they could analyze court gardens without referring to the local morphology, the architectural context, or the cultural notions of spatiality that directed their design. Research conducted on the lake district gardens of the summer residence has not included the landscape of the surrounding districts. Perhaps because of his Japanese cultural background, the historian of religion Sekino has been the only scholar to appreciate the quality of wholeness intrinsic to the inclusion of buildings and gardens inside the summer residence. A characteristic feature of traditional landscape architecture in China, this wholeness resulted from a desire for confusion between natural landscape and naturalized landscape, a confusion implicit, for instance, in Tadashi Sekino’s description of Bishu shanzhuang gardens.4 The neglected Chengde gardens are nevertheless significant, since a complete depiction of the created landscape of the Qing summer capital cannot be achieved without a description of the gardens outside the lake district. More important, these gardens were designed to serve as a metaphorical passage between landscape layers, from reduction of the imperial landscape to enlargement of the Buddhist landscape. These two accounts of landscape-making refer to two geographical orders, one objective, an exhaustive description of the outside world, the other subjective and a negation of the first order, a passage outside the illusions of the physical world. The numerous kinds of gardens in Chengde were redolent with many meanings for the Qing emperors and their guests. A depiction of each garden based on pictorial records confirms a crude classification based on their locations. Before dividing and regrouping the gardens of the summer capital, two remarks seem appropriate. Because a basic unity links all the various gardens, none of them can escape the Chinese concept of climate.5 Through the Chinese concept of climate, common membership to a single place unifies the elaborate gardens of Ruyi island and the terraced fields south of Puren temple. The Tai wan dili tu map underlines that unity. Both of these gardens belong to the same world of samsära, even if several physical delineations exist between Ruyi island in the west and Puren temple in the east: a lake, a mountain, artificial hills, a screen of trees, the residence wall, a second screen of trees, a dike, the Wulie river, and terraces. It should be added that the world of everyday experience in Chengde did not conflict with the metaphors expressed in its gardens.6 The Chengde gardens were all transcendent and immanent representations of the world, of course more so for the emperor, who contemplated the toiling peasants of Chengde from his mountain kiosks of Bishu shanzhuang, than for the peasants themselves.7 Examination of Qing iconographic materials shows that the Kangxi emperor divided

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

57

the gardens of Chengde into geographical sectors that formed four quadrants around the pivot of Jinshan mountain. This division into a court center, an urban south, a rural southeast, a religious north and east, and a natural west was implemented from the very founding of the Qing summer capital. Spatial segregation between the garden types is quite elaborate. First, 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. Further, the court gardens are themselves replicas of commoners’ gardens, the result being that these gardens negate the reality of the outside world, with a complete blurring between what is inside and what is outside. The imperial gardens become the gardens of the empire itself.

Figure 19. Chuifeng luo zhao vista. Tadashi Sekino.

58

Mapping Chengde

Because inside gardens were replicas of the outside gardens, the internal duplication of elements found outside the hill station constituted a rhetorical method that implied the negation of the outside by an all-inclusive extension of the inside. In his gardens, the emperor was everywhere. The hill station gardens stood at the center of the Chengde complex. South of Bishu shanzhuang were the walled gardens of Chengde’s urban compounds. Monks strolled through religious gardens in the north and east of the residence; farmers tended their fields on a terrace in the southeast of the residence. Judging from their spatial positions in the Tai wan dili tu map, the Chengde gardens can be grouped into three functional categories: commoners’ gardens in the city itself and in its vicinity and peasants’ gardens behind the first ring of Chengde mountains; court gardens built

Figure 20. Vista plate 18 of the Bishu shanzhuang gardens, entitled “Tianyu xian cheng,” “Endless Joy in the Cosmos.” Source: Qing Gaozong and Qing Shengzu, Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi.

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

59

inside the Bishu shanzhuang residence, with further subdivision into palace courtyard gardens, lake gardens, prairie gardens, and mountain villa gardens; and religious gardens, enclosed by temple outer walls. These categories can be subdivided into urban ornamental gardens and peasants’ fields, orchards, and vegetable gardens. The gardens of the imperial residence are functionally heterogeneous, unlike the homogeneous gardens of the other types. Closer examination of the hill station gardens indeed reveals that the summer residence possessed gardens of the two other categories—religious gardens and mundane gardens—inside its enclosure. But how religious or mundane were they? The imperial residence enclosed at least twelve temples, of which the most prominent were the Jinshan and Zhuyuan temples and the pagoda of Sheli. Curiously, the number of temples inside Bishu shanzhuang matches the number (twelve) of the temples outside the summer residence that belong to the outer religious complex. On the Tai wan dili tu map, both the pagoda of Sheli in the Yongyou temple and the artificial mountain of Jinshan temple stand out in the lake district. On the Rehe xinggong quantu map, however, the pagoda of Jinshan has been erased from the summit of Jinshan mountain.8 The incorporation into the geographical center of Chengde gardens of court gardens and gardens belonging to the mundane and religious quadrants added force to the Manchu claim of including in the summer residence the pivot of the world, a column through which microcosmos and macrocosmos communicated. Inside and outside the walls of the residence, maps describe temple gardens, orchards and vegetable gardens, scholars’ gardens, urban gardens, and finally the gardens of Jehol in the primary landscape of the frontier area. Court gardens are distinguished from mundane and religious gardens only in that, whatever their functions, they were located behind the walls of the summer residence and therefore belonged to the emperor’s private domain. Were the hill station walls so efficient, though, in cutting Chengde into two domains, a court and a commoners’ domain? The swift and public punishment of trangressors by Qianlong’s guards reinforced the height of the residence walls and ensured the inviolability of the imperial domain: One morning I passed by the Kuang-pi ssu-piao p’ai-lou [Guangbi sibiao arch] where thousands of people had gathered. The marketplace was crowded and heaven and earth resounded with boisterous laughter. Suddenly I saw a man beaten to death and lying in the street. I folded my fan, hastened my pace and wanted to pass by when one of our servants rushed up to me and shouted: “There is something strange to be seen!” I asked him from a distance: “What’s the matter?” He said: “Somebody stole peaches from the palace. He was beaten by the guards, he collapsed and fell to the ground.” I vented my disgust, ill-at-ease and without any further look I went away. 9

Hunting lodges projected the model of the summer residence gardens deep into Jehol and insisted on the continuum between space inside and outside Bishu shanzhuang, in other words, on the continuum between the landscape in the Manchu summer capital and

60

Mapping Chengde

the local landscape in these outposts of the Qing dynasty enterprise. Outside Chengde, modest equivalents to the mountain villas gardens of Bishu shanzhuang existed in the analogical gardens of the lodges on the Emperor’s Road. The Qing court gardens of the prefecture of Chengde were not all situated within Bishu shanzhuang: court gardens were designed inside the walls of the hunting lodges on the Emperor’s Road. These gardens contributed to a continuum of garden landscape architecture that supported the fiction that Chengde extended indefinitely into the empire: the emperor and his immediate entourage traveling from Chengde would repeatedly have seen the same garden that they had left. Qing gazetteer illustrations allow the assumption that the front segments of these Jehol gardens were conceived in a Confucian style, geometric and austere. Normally lodges had only Jehol scenery as back gardens; the only exception was the Kalahetun palace, whose gardens prefigured those at the hill station.10 Gazetteer plates often show complexes of symmetrical buildings containing three successive courtyards, partitioned

Figure 21. Vista plate 32 of the Bishu shanzhuang gardens, entitled “Jing shui yun cen,” “Mirrorlike Lake and Cloudlike Peak.” Source: Qing Gaozong and Qing Shengzu, Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi.

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

61

with inner walls and galleries. In the front courtyard a few trees were planted on each side of the main entrance axis. Courtyard trees seem to belong to the same species that grew outside the palace, although bamboo, which perhaps is not native to Jehol, grew inside the courtyards. If they existed, rock gardens would have been located inside the third courtyard, unfortunately not depicted in the plates.11 By referring to the cultural landscape of Chengde, although at a less exalted level, lodge gardens repeated the landscape synthesis of Chengde at the site where they were built. Where is the place of the metaphysical domain that dominated Chengde and Bishu shanzhuang from the encircling hills of Jehol? In their common suggestion of landscape continuum, the gardens of the palace of Bishu shanzhuang and those of the Waiba miao temples both negated the objective existence of the Jehol landscape. Continuity in the case of religious gardens extended from samsära to nirvâna. Not all the religious buildings were included in the outer temple complex, as can be seen from the place names with tem-

Figure 22. Jing shui yun cen vista. Tadashi Sekino.

62

Mapping Chengde

ple endings located around the city and noted in Alphonse Favier’s Carte du Pé-Tchi-li. Furthermore, not all the Chengde or the hill station temples were Buddhist, and the imperial offices in charge of the Waiba miao temples did not administer all the Buddhist temples. Jinshan temple, for instance, was Daoist. At least one temple in the city was Confucian: Qianlong dedicated the Wenmiao temple to public education.12 This temple was built directly south of the summer residence Bifeng gate, in the growing administrative area of the city. Before its disappearance, Tadashi Sekino took pictures of its half-ruined gate and main hall.13 Situated in the interstices of the Chengde religious belt, between imperially sponsored temples, minor temples undoubtedly enjoyed the exclusive patronage of the Chengde population. Called “Laoye miao,” several of these temples may have been Daoist.14 They were later destroyed, but Qianlong-era maps have preserved their names and locations. Whether Confucian, Buddhist, or Daoist, these temples had gardens that probably did not display the mixture of Chinese and Tibetan landscape architecture so characteristic of the outer temples. These lesser temples, much more important for the local population than the spectacular Waiba miao temples, reestablish Chengde as a real city of modest importance. City gardens occupy limited space at the bottom of the Tai wan dili tu map and “Bishu shanzhuang yu Waiba miao quantu” map.15 If these gardens figure more prominently in the Rehe xinggong quantu map, it is because this map represents only public buildings: temples, court offices, and barracks. Trees and hills fill the space where there were in fact the low houses of the prefecture town. The city had no public park, but private gardens were half-hidden in the enclosed back courtyards of the most important houses. Treetops above their walls suggest that these gardens were apparently similar in architecture to contemporary Chinese gardens south of the Great Wall. Ideal landscape and urban garden archetypes were frequent topics of discussion and representation in Qing literature and art. In the prosperous southern cities along the Grand Canal, gardens formed the subject of an abundant iconography in which landscape vistas were both the cause and consequence of landscape paintings and poetry about landscape views. A passage from the famous novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, in which Xiqun’s project of painting the Daguan garden is debated, reveals the aesthetic principles of landscape creation: Now if you are going to paint this garden, unless you have ‘hills and valleys’ inside you, how can you expect to accomplish it? This garden is, you may say, like a painting: it has mountains, rocks and trees, towers, pavilions, and dwellings with specific degrees of distance and density, not too great, not too little, but precisely as it is.16

This discussion of Xiqun’s painting offers insight into the cultural context and aesthetic constraints that simultaneously produced pleasure gardens and their portrayals: maps,

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

63

paintings, miniatures, and poems. Unlike the Daguan garden of the Dream of the Red Chamber, the Chengde urban gardens existed outside literary fiction, even if they were neglected by Qing court painters. The Manchu emperors’ gardens of the lake district of Bishu shanzhuang may be considered servile imitations of the private garden architecture cultivated by the Chinese gentry of Jiangnan. The wealthy salt merchants and bankers of Yangzhou, Changzhou, and Suzhou indulged themselves in prestigious ways by patronizing in their gardens art and book connoisseurs. They had developed their professional skills in hardscrabble Shanxi before moving to the cities of the Grand Canal. Like the imperial family, these nouveaux riches came from the northern frontier region. The opposition between the court gardens designed by the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors and the urban gardens designed by officials and merchants in Chengde and along the Great Canal was therefore not absolute. The main differences were found not in design or ideals but in scale and means of representation. The owners of Chengde urban gardens did not com-

Figure 23. The restored Jinshan temple. Philippe Forêt.

64

Mapping Chengde

mit the imprudence of creating maps and landscape paintings showing such private gardens that might have competed in symbols with imperial gardens. The Kangxi and Qianlong emperors used the rhetorical tools of reduction and transcendence in the creation and perception of the Chengde gardens. To 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. To assist in the subjectification of the hill station, the Manchu emperors planned the construction of formal gardens of the palace complexes at the extreme south of the residence, private

Figure 24. Yuetai, the Moon Terrace of Jinshan temple. Philippe Forêt.

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

65

gardens of the mountain villas that sit on the “gentle hill,” and a natural environment of prairie and forest north of the lakes. Most of the summer residence actually consists of a steep and large rounded hill covered mainly with evergreen trees, its summits topped by pavilions and its ravines concealing rest houses. Qing depictions have preserved, not without distortions, the appearance of the gardens built within the walls of the mountain villas. These gardens were similar to the now-extinct gardens of the road stations where the court stopped on its journey between Beijing and Mulan. The Qing emperors’ private gardens mixed together illustrations, poems, and villas and conveyed information that helps in the reconstruction of the gardens of the Chengde area and eventually the reconstruction of the landscape continuum that the Qing dynasty imposed on Jehol. 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: In China what they want almost everywhere is the reign of a beautiful disorder, an anti-symmetry. Everything follows this principle: it is a pastoral and natural countryside that they want to represent: a solitude and not a well-ordered palace according to all the rules of symmetry and proportions.17

The gardens of Chengde offered more diversity than has been recorded by visitors of the eighteenth century or scholars of the twentieth century. Outside the imperial residence, the Outer Temples have received the attention of architecture historians. Perhaps overwhelmed by the massive structures of the temples, they have omitted mentioning the religious gardens inside the complexes. The private urban gardens of Chengde have likewise never been studied, and Hou Renzhi’s study on the urbanism of Qing Chengde does not even record them. The agricultural gardens of the Chengde prefecture have not been the subject of research; relevant data, however, may be obtained from Japanese reports of the 1930s. Observers have been impressed by the seventy-two landscape vistas designed by the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, mainly in the southeastern part of Bishu shanzhuang. Their variety has not only prevented researchers from examining other gardens in Chengde but has also prevented them from reconstituting a coherent image of the garden architecture of Bishu shanzhuang. 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. Father Ripa’s description of Chengde was the first to display confusion in describing the landscape sequence of the site: A hill rises gently from the plain, its sides studded with buildings destined for the emperor’s followers, and a copious spring of water, after winding round a variety of

66

Mapping Chengde delightful slopes, forms a noble lake containing a remarkable variety of fish. To an admirable disposition of the ground, nature has here added the charms of a luxuriant vegetation. Throughout the vast extent of those regions of Tartary a tree is rarely seen. At Je-hol however, the plain, the slopes, and the hill are thickly covered with foliage; and the filberts, corianders, pears, and apples, though growing wild, have so delicious a flavour that they are served on the Emperor’s table.18

Ripa’s shortcoming is to credit nature for a lake and fruit trees that did not exist before 1703. His description, focused on the South China landscape of the hill station, shows how “a noble lake” can magnify the scale of garden vistas that occupy only a fraction of the residence grounds. The spectacle of the hill station gardens engendered a number of poems that served to complete the aestheticism of the summer residence. The Kangxi emperor selected thirty-six vistas and pavilions, to each of which he gave a four-character name. These names served as titles for the thirty-six poems he wrote in 1711. The peaceful vistas of his summer residence assisted Kangxi in understanding human nature and reinforced his Confucian love for the people.19 Accompanied by plates of the vantage points, the Kangxi emperor’s poems were published by the Qianlong emperor in separate Manchu and Chinese versions.20 When Qianlong toured his grandfather’s circuit of vantage points in 1741, he was so moved by the landscape scenery that he wrote a second series of poems using the same rhyme pattern. Fifteen years later, he selected in his turn thirty-six places inside Bishu shanzhuang as a background for his own series of poems. Out of deference to the Kangxi emperor, he gave his vistas names of only three syllables.21 Two painters at Kangxi’s court, Zhang Zongcang and Shen Yinghui, also celebrated the summer residence vistas in their oblique landscape paintings. The Qianlong emperor’s interest in gardens was directly linked to his pretension of acting as a scholar who was equally gifted in poetry, calligraphy, bibliophilia, and landscape architecture. His open pavilions were the locale of poetic discussion of nature, inspired by mist and springs, bamboo and pines, cliffs and vistas. The Qianlong emperor himself amply justified the use of scholars’ gardens for the purpose of re-creating in the imperial gardens of Beijing or Chengde the emotions aroused by the Jiangnan landscape. Rationale for the construction of the Yuanmingyuan court gardens was detailed by Qianlong in justifying his huge investment: serve the people, follow historical precedents, act with restraint. As a tender youth I [Qianlong] received the [Yuanmingyuan] palaces and gardens of the former emperors [Kangxi and Yongzheng]. I have been in constant fear lest I might bring shame upon myself and disgrace to my ancestors. Therefore, when I came to the throne and my officials proposed that I build other gardens, I refused. After three years of mourning I still lived in the old garden of my Imperial Father.

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

67

Every emperor and ruler, when he has retired from audience and has finished his public duties, must have a garden where he may stroll and look about and relax his heart. If he has a suitable place to do this, it will refresh his mind and regulate his emotions, but if not, he will become engrossed in sensual pleasure and lose his will power.22

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. Scholars such as Anne Chayet have elaborated the thesis that Bishu shanzhuang served as a microcosmic representation of the geography of the Manchu empire. To do so, they have examined the modalities of interaction between a South China-type landscape in the south of the imperial residence and a Mongol-type landscape in the north, and between the religious landscape in the east and the natural frontier landscape of the west. In their research, however, they have failed to include the mundane and religious landscapes that surround Bishu shanzhuang in the larger context of the simultaneous environmental interaction between Jehol and Chengde. The garden features of the prefecture of Chengde were derived from the region of Jehol, while those of Bishu shanzhuang recalled the cities of Jiangnan, and those of the Waiba miao temples referred to a metaphysical order and to a distinct Tibetan landscape architecture. The garden complexes dotting the landscape of Chengde participated in defining the many facets of a relationship that combined at a single site landmarks of the Manchu empire such as Suzhou, Beijing, Mukden, and Lhasa. Court paintings and daily records of the monarchs’ activities have demonstrated that the gardens of Chengde provided one of the most desired settings for the conduct of administrative and religious affairs in an empire that counted not only Chinese literati, merchants, and peasants but also Turk herdsmen, Manchu and Mongol Bannermen, and Tibetan monks. The Manchu court gardens of Yuanmingyuan and Bishu shanzhuang stood outside

68

Mapping Chengde

Beijing, the conquered Chinese capital, and opposite Chengde, the growing Chinese urban center in Jehol. Analyzing the gardens of the Mughal emperors, James Wescoat noted that a conquering dynasty would find gardens built outside city walls a better focus of political fidelity and control than conquered cities. The order introduced in these gardens furthermore reduced the perceived complexity of the foreign cultural landscape.23 As part of the Manchu dynastic enterprise, garden construction in Bishu shanzhuang and in Yuanmingyuan was an architectural undertaking replete with political symbols. The Kangxi and Qianlong emperors organized gardens following the same landscape policy they had implemented in the territorial organization of their conquests in China and Central Asia. The order they imposed at a much smaller scale mirrored that which they imposed at a larger scale in Jehol and in the Qing empire.

Ascending the Pivot of the World Like the Yuanmingyuan gardens, the hill station gardens were carefully laid out to serve as an arena for the affairs and ceremonies of the multicultural empire. What does spatial order in Bishu shanzhuang reveal about the Manchu perception of the complexity of cultural landscape in the Qing empire? The lake district of Bishu shanzhuang contains a total of eight lakes that isolate an archipelago of nine islands covered with man-made mountains. Only visible from Jinshan temple or from the mountain kiosks of the summer residence, this disposition nevertheless is reminiscent of two paradigms, Daoist and Buddhist. The significance of the figure nine for the nine islands of the hill station has to do with the numerological meaning of the character for “to reunite.” Nine is moreover the emperor’s ritual number, regardless of the actual sum of things imperial. Nine also assumes a qualitative value linked to the system of yin-yang polarity. The emperor has a yang function when he exercises his power and a yin function when he listens to his ministers’ advice. Finally, nine refers to cosmic change and regulation. In his explanation of the title Jiu bian [Nine Arguments], Wang Yi, a famous librarian at the Han court, wrote: The Nine Arguments are by the Great Officer of Ch’u, Sung Yü. Pien [Bian] is “to change.” It refers to elucidating the Tao and its Te [De, “virtue”] in order to persuade the king to change. Nine is the Yang number, the fundamental principle of the Tao. Thus: Heaven has the Nine Stars to regulate the North Star. Earth has the Nine Regions in order to establish the Ten Thousand States.24

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. The central mountain of the nine continents is Sumeru, which is no less than:

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

69

The central mountain of every world, wonderful height, wonderful brilliancy, etc.; at the top is Indra’s heaven, or heavens, below them are four devalokas; around eight circles of mountains and between them the eight seas, the whole forming nine mountains and eight seas.25

The concentric ranges around Sumeru are called Qi Jinshan, or the “Seven Jinshan Mountains.”26 The existence of a central mountain inside the summer residence would confirm that the symbolic composition of “Eight Seas in Nine Mountains” served as a model for the design of the Bishu shanzhuang lake district. More because it is the highest summit of the gardens than because of its location, Jinshan mountain is the best candidate for a metaphorical identification to Sumeru.27 It has already been noted that a central location for centrality was not necessarily a required condition in landscape architecture, since an architectural focus could be moved from a geometrical center to respond to cultural land-

Figure 25. Southern side of the Pule temple mandala. Tadashi Sekino.

Figure 26. The alignment of Pule temple and Qingchui peak. Philippe Forêt.

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

71

scape needs. In the opening sentence of the Album of Imperial Poems, the Kangxi emperor emphasized the Sumeru-like function of Jinshan mountain: Jinshan Mountain [Manchu: Altahatu] produces a [geomantic] vein, [from which] warm currents divide a spring [Rehe spring]. The pool is rocky, the vegetation luxuriant, the [Wulie] river wide, and the prairie fertile. No disaster may hurt fields and cottages.28

Jinshan, the name that Kangxi deliberately selected for the pivot of his gardens, has strongly positive connotations in numerous registers. This choice makes clear that the emperor wanted to enrich the Jinshan pagoda of Bishu shanzhuang with a large number of historical, geographical, and legendary references. Jinshan, “Golden Mountain,” is a very usual name for temples.29 Located on the eastern side of the Chenghu lake, the island of Jinshan has since its completion in 1708 possessed a replica of the Jinshan temple in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu province.30 The pagoda of Shangdi lou, Chengde’s replica of the Cishou pagoda of Zhenjiang’s Jinshan, is lower than its design model, having only three floors instead of seven. Its open wooden structure is also lighter. From their temple buildings, both Jinshan islands offered to the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors an all-embracing view of the surrounding, mostly aquatic, landscape. According to the White Snake legend, Fairy Baishe was imprisoned in a cave by an evil monk who without her consent had separated her from her husband. The rockeries of both Jinshan mountains concealed Monk Fahai caves in order to underline the filiation between Chengde and Zhenjiang temples. Both islands, in Chengde and in Zhenjiang, have hot springs in their immediate vicinities. The Kangxi emperor knew of other Jinshan occurrences. Jinshan is also the name of a mountain range north of the source of the eastern Liaohe river, near the city of Liaoyuan, northeast of Mukden. The Jinshan mountain of Manchuria is near the Soyolji mountain, the counterpart in Jilin of Mulan in Jehol. Both mountains were visited during the Kangxi emperor’s hunting expeditions in Manchuria. It is very possible that the emperor had toured both the Zhenjiang temple and the Manchurian mountain before ordering the construction of a new Jinshan that would be both a temple and a mountain in his summer residence. During the Ming dynasty, a Jinshan temple stood near the pass of Jinshan and the hill of Yuquan, northwest of Beijing.31 Jinshan refers to the name in Chinese of the Altai mountains, as jin is the translation of the Tujue word altai for “gold.” The toponym Jinshan alludes not only to geographical but also to historical continuity, since Jin by itself evokes the earliest name of the Manchu state, called Da Jin and Hou Jin between 1616 and 1636, and the name of the Jin dynasty that ruled Manchuria and North China before being crushed by Mongol troops in 1234. A Great Wall gate called Sima tai lies one hundred kilometers south of Chengde, east of the Gubeikou gate and

Figure 27. Qingchui peak seen from the Puning temple. Tadashi Sekino.

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

73

near the mountain of Jinshan ling. Four Jinshan mountains—the stone-built island of the hill station, a natural island of the Yangzi river, a Great Wall gate, and a summit in Manchuria—assumed a particular significance for Kangxi. The Kangxi emperor’s Jinshan mountain proclaimed the universality of the ecumenical Qing empire in an elaborate way. Access to the Jinshan of Bishu shanzhuang was either by boat from Ruyi island to a large rounded embankment or from the continent along a narrow path that winds around rockeries. Might the first of these means of access symbolize the travels along the Grand Canal to Jiangnan—the Chinese core—and the second one, expeditions into the Changbai mountains—the Manchu hearth? On entering and leaving Bishu shanzhuang, Qing emperors ascended to the Shangdi lou, a circular pagoda on top of the Jinshan mountain, to offer sacrifices to Heaven. Two supreme Daoist deities were enshrined in the pagoda: the Dayu and Zhenwu emperors. Even the octagonal architecture of the Jinshan temple may be associated with the Sumeru sacred mountain, since constructions on the top of Sumeru are traditionally supposed to be round.32 The two structures at the summit of Jinshan are the hall of Tianyu xian cheng, “Hall of Universal Joy,” and the pagoda of Shangdi ge, “Supreme Emperor Pavilion,” which is also known as Jinshan ting, or the “Golden Mountain Pavilion.” In the Tianyu xian cheng vista, Kangxi had represented the superstructures built around and on the summit of the artificial Jinshan island. The plate shows how the island with its pagoda served as a spatial support for landscape transition. The comparative significance of the mountain and temple may be debatable, since details of contemporary maps of the summer residence disagree with each other: the mountain disappears under the accumulation of religious superstructures in the Tai wan dili tu map, whereas the mountain does not have a single building on it in the Rehe xinggong guan tu map. This would imply that Kangxi wanted to suggest in Jinshan a resemblance to the Jiu shan ba hai landscape archetype rather than a perfect identification with the Sumeru mountain, thus ensuring that the Jinshan metaphor as a cosmic pillar would never be more than a metaphor. It may also mean that he designed Jinshan to serve as a place for fusion of Chinese-inspired landscape vistas into the Qing landscape, replete with poems in Chinese and Manchu, a Daoist temple built on a Buddhist mountain, and a landmark of Jiangnan with a Manchurian peak. Although a Daoist temple crowned Jinshan mountain, the construction model for the pagoda was the Buddhist temple of Jinshan in Zhenjiang. The buildings of Bishu shanzhuang’s Jinshan temple were extensively damaged soon after the fall of the dynasty, which may indicate that former Qing subjects perceived the pagoda and hall as a metaphor carrying a religious and political message of which they disapproved.33 The alignment of the Jinshan mountain with Qingchui peak, east of the hill station, has already been noted. Jinshan was erected to form the highest mountain inside the gar-

Figure 28. The Potala temple of Chengde. Philippe Forêt.

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

75

dens of the summer residence, just as Qingchui peak was the highest summit of the Chengde basin. Jinshan mountain and Qingchui peak formed the poles of an axis that the Kangxi emperor conceived as early as 1708. In his short discussion of the Jinshan pagoda, Otto Franke described it as one of the most beautiful vantage points of the hill station. From the pagoda, broad views reveal the layout of the residence garden district and the isolation of Jinshan by lakes.34 Several important features of Jinshan mountain need discussion on the basis of two plates that represent the Jinshan vistas conceived by Kangxi. These two vista plates are numbered 18 and 32 in the Album of Imperial Poems, illustrative of Kangxi’s two poems, “Tianyu xian cheng” and “Jing shui yun cen,” respectively. The connection between Jinshan and Qingchui is not made explicit in the illustrations of the Album of Imperial Poems; the island is not depicted when the peak appears in vista plate 12, “Chuifeng luo zhao,” and vista plate 21, “Qingfeng lü yu.” Otto Franke would have mentioned this

Figure 29. Ruins of the Mañjusrï temple. Philippe Forêt.

76

Mapping Chengde

axial feature in his study of the cultural landscape of Chengde if either vista plate 18 or vista plate 32 had included Qingchui peak. Six decades after the erection of Jinshan, the Qianlong emperor decided again to emphasize the crucial significance of the orientation toward the peak when he ordered the construction of the Pule temple mandala. In his dedicatory inscription to Pule temple, Qianlong stated that this temple was exactly aligned with Qingchui peak to form an axis.35 Between the peak and the temple, Qianlong’s axis merged with Kangxi’s axis, which continued westward to Jinshan mountain and Ruyi island. On the modern Bishu shanzhuang he Waiba miao quantu map, a linear alignment from east to west does connect the following points: the foot of Qingchui peak,

Figure 30. The Qianlong emperor’s seal. Philippe Forêt.

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

77

the mandala of Pule temple, the Yuetai terrace of Jinshan pagoda, the Xiling chenxia, or “Early Dew of Western Mountain” pavilion, on Ruyi island. A second feature of note is the location of Ruyi island on the opposite side of Jinshan mountain, across Chenghu lake. Vista plate 18 shows how Ruyi island faces the halfmoon terrace of Jinshan mountain. The crescent of Yuetai terrace has a Buddhist meaning that predicts domination of China and Mongolia. The political meaning of the moon metaphor is revealed in one of the Buddha’s predictions: the Buddha told Yueguang’er that he would be reincarnated as a king when all China and Mongolia were converted to Buddhism. This optimistic prediction was the consequence of Yueguang’er’s pleading for the Buddha’s protection from his heretic father’s persecutions.36 Vista plate 32 figures a boat at the northern end of Yuetai terrace and suggests that a crossing took place from Ruyi to Jinshan, from the island in the west to the mountain in the east. The metaphor of the Jinshan-Ruyi couple derives partly from the political meaning, implied in the shape and name of the island, of Ruyi as the monarch’s scepter. A third feature concerns a different kind of passage, from the Bishu shanzhuang residence through Jinshan mountain toward a celestial universe and toward landmarks of Jiangnan. The Kangxi emperor explains this feature in two of his poems on the scenery viewed from the Jinshan mountain. The title given to vista plate 18 suggests the idea of passage, since “Tianyu xian cheng” may also be translated as “In the sky and cosmos [it passes] entirely unimpeded.” 37 Since the two names Tianyu xian cheng and Pule share the same meaning, “universal joy,” they both imply that Qianlong conceived the passage from Jinshan mountain through Pule temple to Qingchui peak as an axis for joy, which is of one of the three ways of accessing Buddhahood. The Kangxi emperor wrote an introduction to his poem on the Tianyu xian cheng vista that insisted on these two characteristics of distance from Jinshan mountain and passage through the mountain: In the middle of the lakes stands a peak; its summit has a terrace with three buildings on it; to the north is the god’s pavilion; its top is connected to the clouds; its bottom is adjacent to water. It looks as if the climb to Miaogao peak, the hazy clouds of Beigu, and the wind and moon of Haimen are all encompassed [from Jinshan] in one look.38

Kangxi rephrased the notions of distance and isolation in the first two lines that followed the introduction: With rosy clouds as its background, the storied pavilion [of Jinshan] should be a hermit home [bu ju].39 The human world is far away from this magnificent place.

Less enigmatic, vista plate 32’s title “Jing shui yun cen” may be translated as “Lake [as smooth as] a mirror, hill [as high as] the clouds.”40 Jing is mirror; jing may also refer

78

Mapping Chengde

to Buddha’s response to prayers. Shui means “water” and here has the meaning of hu, “lake.” I suspect that “Jing shui yun cen” may allude to Liu Songyuan’s Ling ling chun wang poem: “Yun duan Goulou cen,” or “Clouds break off at Goulou Peak [Hengshan mountain].” Jinghu lake lies south of the Jinshan mountain, exactly behind the Jinshan pagoda on vista plate 32, but it is probable that these mirrorlike waters are those of the Chenghu lake, the “Limpid Lake,” that surrounds Jinshan mountain. The hill of the plate title here designates the island of Jinshan mountain and not the other imposing man-made mountains depicted to the east, which are much higher in the illustration than they are in reality.41 The Chengde gardens were meant to create a wholeness in a place, where the subjective and the objective would be merged, where intention would be fused with realization, and where landscape would be reduced to garden. Jinshan mountain exemplified this wholeness because it was the meeting place of three axes of landscape transition. In the interpretation of these gardens, we see how axes, landforms, and location were in agreement with the orientation criteria of the topomantic landscape. The mapping of the three axes of landscape transition that passed unimpeded through Jinshan mountain reveals how precise symbolic features accommodated political and religious spatial organizations. A horizontal north-south axis connected the Jinshan of natural Manchuria to the Jinshan of naturalized Jiangnan. Located in the north, the Manchurian Jinshan occupied the honorific place where it received yang influences; the Chinese Jinshan occupied a subordinate southern place and was placed under yin influences. A horizontal west-east axis connected Ruyi island, symbol of the sovereign’s rule, to the Jinshan pagoda, to the Pule temple, and beyond the mandala of the temple to Qingchui peak, itself a possible symbol of the Kunlun or Sumeru mountain. Ruyi island is located in the yin western position, whereas Qingchui peak lies in the yang eastern position. A vertical axis through the round Jinshan pagoda allowed cosmic energy to circulate freely between the hill station lake gardens and celestial universe, between the yin of Earth and the yang of Heaven.42 A fourth axis running southeast to northwest, the oblique Emperor’s Road did not transit through the Jinshan pagoda but conceptually extended the axis of landscape transition from Bishu shanzhuang across Chengde and Jehol. In the hill station gardens, all opposition between court landscape and mundane landscape, between sacred landscape and profane landscape, between frontier landscape and Inner China landscape, and between cultural landscape and natural landscape were reconciled to form under imperial supervision the essential Qing landscape, the new cultural hearth of a new dynasty. Inside the summer residence, this reconciliation culminated at the site of the Jinshan mountain, which dominated the geography of Chengde gardens. The significance of Chengde gardens, therefore, does not reside in the juxtaposition in Jehol of landscape architectural models developed elsewhere in the cultural cores of the

Garden and Mountain Rhetoric

79

Qing empire but in the synthesis achieved in the Qing summer capital between cultural and natural environments as a spectacular aspect of the Manchu “Great Enterprise.” Chengde gardens are particularly attractive because of the harmony that results from the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors’ balanced treatment of natural landscape. In transforming a primary landscape into a secondary landscape, both imperial architects acknowledged the strong contribution of relief to the hill station but moderated its male vigor with the introduction of female lakes at the foot of the mountain district. To this geomantic treatment, the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors added a series of architectural metaphors that constituted successive layers of landscape understanding. The objective stratum that formed the palace, garden, prairie, and mountain quarters of the imperial residence, the microcosmic stratum that was an enlarged multidimensional map of the Manchu empire, and a macrocosmic stratum with elements suggesting the representation of a Buddhist cosmos combine to form these geographical layers.

CHAPTER 5

The Jehol Frontier I rode by starlight, crossing west of the river on patrol. Nothing but desert lies before one’s eyes. This is another world: hundred of leagues of broken columns of rising smoke, mountains bare of foliage, lands that yield no grain. Along the roadway, they are none but barbarians who surround us back and front.1

Sinicizing the Northern Frontier The conceptualization of natural and social forces has strongly associated landscape and culture within the Chinese civilization. The landscapes of China exhibit common features that are related to the activities of the sedentary, agrarian, and dense communities that occupy the huge area that extends from Liaoning to Guangdong. The intense exploitation of natural resources; the enjoyment of popular literature and canonical texts, garden architecture, and landscape painting; the coexistence of Buddhist and Daoist religions, Confucian censorship, and geomantic beliefs are among the many elements that have distinguished populous China from neighboring civilizations. The drier areas of Central Asia, the frigid Qinghai desert, the Himalayan mountains, and the high plateau of Mongolia have isolated China, but not enough to prevent an active circulation of techniques, artifacts, ideas, plants, diseases, and peoples connected by the peninsulas of Eurasia from Malaysia to Europe. The geographical limits of Chinese civilization have rarely coincided with political boundaries, but rather with a cultural landscape that has dramatically transformed the original aspect of the environment and, more important, the physiognomy of its valleys, basins, and deltas. The transition from the natural landscape of these waterrich flatlands to a cultural landscape of channels, dikes, and ponds has obviously required a heavy and continuous investment in labor. Changes of such a magnitude would have been impossible without a large peasantry and an efficient administration, both sharing an appreciation of landscape resources and a desire to live in harmony with the universe.2 Intensified multicropping has compensated for a shortage of arable lands, but pressure to grow more food on limited land has resulted in degraded fields that are barely able to support an enormous population. The environment of China has been humanized in an intensive fashion. Little is left of the original exuberant animal and plant life: rhinoceroses, crocodiles, and tortoises 80

The Jehol Frontier

81

vanished ages ago. Chinese sedentary societies first occupied precise parts of the subcontinent: the Wei valley, the plateau of Yunnan, and the coastal plains of Fujian. The wealth of the biota in these areas was considerable; untouched ecosystems of southern China ranked among the most diverse living assemblies of Asia.3 These regions now share features strongly linked to agriculture: intense exploitation of alluvial plains, rhythms of work based on the growing cycles of rice and millet, limited husbandry, dense villages of houses at least partly built of vegetable materials. Like other East Asian peoples, Chinese peasants have felt fear or indifference toward mountains, regardless of whether their native forests have been preserved, and mountains remained outside their ecumenes: “The mountain is a world apart, with its masters, its guards, its friends, its outsiders—and also its rites of passage.” 4 High summer temperatures, monsoon rainfall season, availability of a large supply of water, and a functional (but not aesthetic) rejection of topographic relief have fostered a traditional perception of landscape common to all of agricultural China. The latitudinal range covered by the wet rice fields of sedentary China is remarkable, as is the variety of local natural landscapes unified by these wet fields, from the Sungari river to the Xijiang river and from the landlocked basin of Sichuan to the Yellow Sea. A seemingly unbroken history of civilization and a slow-paced expansion of its ethnic landscape outside its core areas have characterized agricultural China. The progression of wet paddy agriculture northward was slow. Rice began to be cultivated in the Beijing plain only during the Kangxi era. Many common species have disappeared since that time, indicating dramatic ecological changes in northern and northeastern China: One example is David’s deer (Elaphurus davidianuus), which was widely distributed on the North China Plain and the lower Changjiang valley during the Pleistocene and early Holocene. As forests were cleared and swamps dried up, deer populations were gradually eliminated. In 1900, they disappeared entirely from China.5

The numbers of rice and carp species, however, have increased. Quite a large number of crop and cash plants have done very well, from sorghum to opium. The introduction of new or altered species needed for the maintenance of a dense and increasing human population has therefore complemented the continual processes of destruction and reconstruction of the natural landscape. The frontier area of the Chinese civilization has experienced similar transformation of its ecological system. The term frontier has historically referred to the outer edge of Chinese agricultural and military settlements in northern China and not to a political boundary. The expansion south or north of the area depended largely on the vagaries of Chinese court policy toward Central Asia and on conflictual pressures applied by Chinese peasants and Mongol nomads. The frontier landscape thus received several imprints reflecting the dynamic presence of two civilizations on the same landscape. The frontier

82

Mapping Chengde

regions are contiguous and are characterized by similar heterogeneous ethnic compositions. Manchuria was created by the combination of a Manchu-inhabited region, a Mongol-inhabited region, and a Chinese-inhabited region. In Jehol the proportion of Chinese inhabitants may have been smaller and that of Mongol residents larger, but territory was divided among the same three ethnic groups; the division may have been most pronounced in southwest Jehol. Finally, during the first part of the seventeenth century, Jehol and Manchuria displayed solidarity in their hostility toward Chinese power based in the North China plain. The establishment and extension into China of the frontier dynasties may have required some degree of sinicization of the conquering peoples. The frontier of China proper has been marked for centuries by the Great Wall; the landscape of Central Asia has traditionally begun beyond its gates. The most remarkable physical result of effective Chinese central authority on the frontier landscape in modern times was the erection of the Great Wall by the Ming dynasty. Lattimore remarked that nothing was more static in conception than the Great Wall.6 In reality, the Wall was intended to stabilize a mobile frontier area that caused frequent sorrow to Chinese emperors. The Great Wall also served as a traditional boundary for the division between farming and pastoral activities. North of the wall, nomadic peoples sparsely inhabited “another world” where lush grasslands grew. A sixth-century c.e. folk saying poetically described this landscape: “The sky is blue and white, the earth is flat and vast; the grasses bow before the sweeping winds, and innumerable sheep and cattle are seen.” 7 The fringe zone along the Great Wall that lies between Manchuria, China proper, and Inner Mongolia defines the northern China frontier area. About three hundred kilometers deep and twenty-four hundred kilometers long, it extends from the Great Wall of China into Mongolia and from the Willow Palisade into Manchuria. Inside this long belt, historical Jehol cannot be separated easily from neighboring frontier subareas because its very lack of homogeneity has made it similar to the other parts of the frontier in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. A large Mongol-inhabited area and a much smaller Chinese-inhabited area composed Jehol at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Jehol was ethnically integrated with Mongol Manchuria.8 Jehol’s geographical position has been so remarkable that at several times in history the region was able to claim to be simultaneously the center of the northern China frontier and the center of a more or less sinicized empire. At the junction point of Manchurian and the Inner Mongolian sectors of the frontier, Jehol has always been the area closest to the North China plain and to the strategic Shanhaiguan corridor that leads into the Manchurian plain. From its strategic location, Jehol commanded communication between the Manchurian and Mongolian “wings” of the frontier area and between Zhili and Fengtian, the two northernmost provinces of China. The significance of Jehol for the empires that straddled the Chinese-Mongol frontier explains the region’s intricate administrative history before the establishment of Qing rule. Archaeological excavations have confirmed historical records that non-Chinese eth-

The Jehol Frontier

83

nic groups such as the Rong and Hu have inhabited the Jehol area since at least the Chinese Qin dynasty (221–202 b.c.e.). During the following twenty centuries, various Chinese (especially the Wei, Sui, Tang, and Ming dynasties) and non-Chinese (Xiongnu, Liao, Yuan, Jin, and Qing) empires occupied the region of Chengde. It was then administratively organized into prefectures or commanderies.9 Under the Liao dynasty, the territory of Jehol comprised several counties dependent on the Dading prefecture and on the Xinghuang prefecture in the Zhongjing circuit and dependent on the Linhuang prefecture in the Shangjing circuit. Liao emperors hunted in the Mulan area. Under the Jin dynasty, Jehol was divided between the Dating and the Xingzhong prefectures dependent on the Beijing circuit and the Huanzhou county dependent on the Xijing circuit. The Yuan dynasty attached the three circuits of Daning, Shangdu, and Quanning to Jehol. Khubilai khan founded a city in 1256 that was located north of the Luanhe river, some forty kilometers northwest of Dolön, in what is now Zhenglan Banner (Xulun Hoh, Inner Mongolia). The city received the name of Shangdu in 1264 to form with Dadu the two seasonal Yuan metropoles. In 1269 Shangdu became the Yuan dynasty’s summer capital, which Marco Polo called Chandu: There is at this place a very fine marble Palace, the rooms of which are all gilt and painted with figures of men and beasts and birds, and with a variety of trees and flowers, all executed with such exquisite art that you regard them with delight and astonishment. Round this palace a wall is built, enclosing a compass of 16 miles, and inside the Park there are fountains and rivers and brooks and beautiful meadows. . . . Moreover [at a spot in the Park where there is a charming wood] he has another Palace built of canes. . . . The Lord abides at this Park of his, dwelling sometimes in the Marble Palace and sometimes in the Cane Palace for three months of the year, to wit, June, July, and August; preferring this residence because it is by no means hot; in fact it is a very cool place.10

Khubilai’s city became so famous that it gave its name, Shangdu, to the Luanhe river.11 Lama miao, the local Chinese name for Shangdu, is a free translation of the Mongol name Chao-naima-sumeh, or “One Hundred and Eight Temples.” The flourishing Yuan summer capital later became a deserted site overgrown with rank weeds and the imperial park a dreary and desolate mound. Under the Ming dynasty, the Jehol area was a dependency of the Beiping prefecture and was administered by garrisons that were brought south of the Yanshan mountains in 1403, leaving the country north of the Great Wall to Tuoyan Mongols, later to Chaha’er, Kalaqin, Wengniutuo, and other Mongol groups.12 The rising Qing dynasty scored a major diplomatic victory when southern Mongol khans recognized the supremacy of the Manchu khan and gave him the imperial title of Bogdo khan. The allegiance of the Jehol Mongol Leagues was very welcome to the Manchu emperors. To transform their raids

84

Mapping Chengde

into Ming China into permanent occupation, Qing emperors first needed to dominate the Zhuosuotu Mongols, whose country was located in the Jehol southern mountains.13 Kangxi had a series of lodges erected in the Yanshan mountains, of which two became the summer residences of the dynasty. Like the Shunzhi emperor, who was tired of the unbearably hot and humid climate of Beijing in summer, the Kangxi emperor resolved to have a city and palace in Jehol where he would “escape the heat of summer.”14 As early as 1677, the Kangxi emperor built a small pleasure palace at Kalahetun (Luanping county), where he spent the summer months. That ancient city was destroyed by the Ming dynasty when its army expelled Mongols from Jehol and then retired behind the protection of the restored Great Wall. Several edifices other than Kangxi’s palace were erected there, some by the emperor for his retinue and some by Chinese merchants. The emperor came to enjoy more and more the coolness and woods of the mountains of Jehol. The Wulie valley, which he passed very often in his hunting expeditions, appeared to him a particularly favorable place for a summer residence of a greater importance than Kalahetun.15 Although it was abandoned by the Kangxi Emperor after 1703, Kalahetun still had a considerable population when Father Ripa passed through it in 1711.16 By that time the first phase of construction of the hill station of Chengde was complete. Political and strategic thinking, with rich geographical content, has dominated Qing historians’ discussion of the contribution of the northern frontier and Jehol to the consolidation of the state: Research on the history and geography of China’s frontiers, exploring the true essence of their development and change, and summing up the lessons of this historical experience—this is not only a necessity for the development of this field, but at the same time bears great significance for protecting sovereignty over national territory; handling relations with neighboring countries and strenghtening the unity of domestic nationalities.17

Like the southern China frontier area (Xikang, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, and Taiwan), the Qing northern frontier area was relatively unsettled before 1703. Both northern and southern frontier areas were ethnically heterogeneous and administratively unstable. A single critical characteristic, that of mobility, differentiates these two frontier domains of China. The northern zone was much more stagnant as a frontier line and much more dangerous as a frontier area; the southern area was marked by more dynamism in terms of commercialization and industrialization, geographical fragmentation, and ethnic composition. Chinese immigration and urbanization in the potentially wealthy southern border zone were of far lesser political, diplomatic, and military importance than in the northern frontier. The potential for rebellion in the south of China was not as threatening as the possibility of invasion from the north. In the history of China and Central Asia, com-

The Jehol Frontier

85

peting dynasties that originally held only the northern border area destroyed dynasties that governed Inner China and the southern border area. From their own quite recent experience as a conquering dynasty, the Qing emperors knew to what extent their fate depended on the frontier area in general and on Jehol in particular. Imperial policy therefore had a direct influence on the landscape of the frontier, since the Qing dynasty used Jehol to convey its policy in Central Asia. Qing control of the northern China frontier area necessitated a new spatial division between Jehol ethnic groups, a new distinction between dynamic and static zones inside Jehol, the emergence of Jehol as a distinct region, and the building of a road network that connected the summer capital to its subordinate cities. The eventual result for Jehol was the double transition from natural to cultural landscape and from Chinese-Mongol landscape to Qing landscape. The latter transformation in turn involved the transition of Jehol from the status of frontier area to that of directly controlled core area.18 The rationale for dealing carefully with Jehol included the ecological usefulness of the region as a training ground for the military. The Qing central government maintained grazing land for its Banners’ horses immediately north and south of Jehol, and the hunting expeditions it organized through Jehol constituted training exercises in logistics. Owen Lattimore has forcefully summarized military considerations of the Qing enterprise in Jehol: The Shanhaikuan passage is easily cut by military action and easily outflanked by armies holding the Jehol hills and passes. It was for this reason that the Manchus confirmed the Chinese character of the small Chinese pale in Southern Jehol, set apart the [Mulan] Hunting Park in order to separate the Kharchin and Chahar Mongols from each other by a wilderness, and built a summer Capital at Ch’engte (Complete Virtue) or Jehol City [Chengde]. It was advisable to keep a close check on the Mongols of Jehol, and to interpose a Chinese population between them and the actual line of the Great Wall. Full Manchu control of communication between Manchuria and China was essential. The extension of Chinese settlements to the north was equally opposed by the Manchus, because if the Chinese were to push through the mountains and reach the open country in Northern Jehol, they would upset the Mongol balance of power and the control over China established by the original Manchu-Mongol alliance.19

Qing policy in Inner and Outer Mongolia created a de facto classification of the frontier area into dynamic regions and static regions. Both types were equally valuable for the dynasty, but for different reasons. The dynamic areas were well connected to Beijing and Chengde, and they supported a growing population of taxpayers. The static regions were restricted nature areas that supported wildlife and horse populations that the Manchu Banners would later employ in military and hunting campaigns. Thus, two dynamic regions of the North China frontier witnessed dramatic ethnic changes and concomitant

86

Mapping Chengde

modifications in their cultural landscapes. Imperial design for these areas was related to military concerns. In central Turkestan, Xibo Manchu were assigned to guard the faraway Ili valley after Qing troops had exterminated the Jüngar population. No less important was the revitalization of the northern China frontier area that revolved around Chengde. From Beijing through Gubeikou, the Emperor’s Road linked together the privileged zones of the Qing enterprise, Chengde, and Mulan. The summer residence of Chengde was located in the most dynamic region of landscape transition in the northern China frontier area.20 The Kangxi emperor emphasized that his landscape enterprise benefited the common people because it encouraged agriculture in the largely uninhabited area: I urge farming the southern acres [of Chengde], hoping that abundant harvests and profusion will fill square and round baskets.21

Static regions existed where imperial policy designated domains to be kept uninhabited, without roads or settlements.22 These regions included grazing lands, hunting reserves, and the imperial sepultures of Dongling and Xiling surrounded by geomantic land.23 Placed under military protection, the locations of these static regions straddling the Great Wall and Willow Palisade had crucial strategic value. The Daling pastures were positioned at the northern end of the Shanhaiguan corridor, south of the Willow Palisade. Also at the northern end of the Shanhaiguan corridor but north of the Willow Palisade, the Yangxi pastures separated Jehol from the two Kalaqin Banners of the Zhelimu League.24 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the small garrisons of the two imperial necropoles of Dongling and Xiling along the Great Wall were effective enough to prevent colonization of the land left fallow by imperial orders. Qing cartographers left blank spaces corresponding to areas declared static by imperial order and omitted noting roads that were not open for travel. Blank spaces added to the protection of the geomantically forbidden area that extended north of the Dongling imperial sepultures.25 These imperial orders were not always strictly obeyed by the peasants who wanted to migrate north of Zunhua to exploit the resources of the Yanshan mountains. They founded settlements with telling names, such as Nanbeikan zi, “South and North Bumps Village.” The Prussian cartographers who mapped Zhili in 1907 were aware of the existence of a restricted zone but not of its taboo since they did depict it. They represented the clandestine road flanked with clandestine villages that directly linked the two counties of Miyun and Zunhua by crossing the geomantic zone of Dongling between the Great Wall gates of Qiangzi and Huangyu.26 Qing geomantic maps of the necropolis always portrayed the area north of Dongling in ways that stressed the alignment of the major mountain of Jehol with the imperial tomb hills and central alley and did not pay atten-

The Jehol Frontier

87

tion to clandestine immigration in the forbidden area.27 The trees of the tomb compounds were cut down when the dynasty fell, and Manchu Bannermen were no longer in a position to protect the mausoleum from marauding peasants: The Tung Ling [Dongling necropolis] possessed up to about ten years ago [1920] a most beautiful pine forest which was hundreds of years old. Some of the trees had a circumference which could be barely spanned by two men.28

Just like the forbidden Dongling area, the hunting ground of Mulan was officially a static region but actually experienced clandestine reorganization and eventually became part of the dynamic front of Chinese colonization. Surrounded by a palisade, the Mulan reserve was guarded in 1753 by eight hundred Manchu and Mongol Bannermen distributed in eight camps. Mulan was not the only natural reserve of the Qing dynasty, as three other large hunting grounds were located in Manchuria: Shengjing, Jilin, and Heilongjiang.29 The Qianlong emperor stated in the Ode to Mukden that hunting and fighting were indeed the only forms of entertainment suitable for Manchus. For the emperor, the hunt was a representation of war.30 In his introduction to a poem on tea composed by Qianlong, Father Amiot wrote that the Qing monarch led the life of a Tartar horde leader during the Mulan hunting parties. Numbering more than ten thousand, all the hunters and the emperor himself stayed in Mongol tents. Qianlong’s adoption of this nomadic lifestyle for a few weeks prior to his return to Chengde and Beijing was meant to reassert the non-Chinese origins of Qing rule. The extension of Chinese provincial rule north of the Great Wall has a short but complex history. Owen Lattimore has observed that the term Jehol was coined only recently: it has figured for only three centuries in the records of a civilization that has had forty centuries of history. The Jehol region is almost as large as the territory governed in 1820 by the Chengde prefecture, which included the two Banners of Balin.31 Fluctuations of Jehol boundaries followed the political changes implemented by the Qing and Republican central government in controlling the Chinese-Mongol frontier area. The most debatable of all limits in the northern China frontier may well have been the northern border of Jehol, which also marked the northward progress of Chinese colonization. Kangxi’s successor, the Yongzheng emperor, established in 1723 the prefecture of Rehe, which was then replaced in 1733 by the county of Chengde. Unlike other prefectures, Chengde was administered by a military commander and not by a civil prefect, maybe because the city had a permanent garrison.32 The ancient administrative rank, reestablished in 1742, was replaced by the prefecture of Chengde, attached to the province of Zhili.33 Each prefecture had counties under its authority, but often important counties with prefectural rank were placed directly under provincial jurisdiction: Zunhua zhou, for example, where the

88

Mapping Chengde

Dongling sepultures of the Qing dynasty were located, was under Zhili’s administration.34 Home to imperial capitals in Beijing and Chengde, and a provincial capital in Baoding, the province of Zhili by 1905 contained nine prefectures and six autonomous counties. A lasting result of the Qing policy in the northern China frontier area may have been the growing importance of territory in the definition of ethnic identity. The replacement during the Qing dynasty of the static Great Wall by a mobile front of Chinese peasants progressing northward has resulted in the present cycle of sinicization of the Central Asian landscape and peoples: Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, the Chinese began to penetrate into this district [of Inner Mongolia]. At that period, the whole landscape was still one of rude grandeur; the mountains were covered with fine forests, and the Mongol tents whitened the valleys, amid rich pasturages. For a very moderate sum the Chinese obtained permission to cultivate the desert, and as cultivation advanced, the Mongols were obliged to retreat, conducting their flocks and herds elsewhere. From that time forth, the aspect of the country became entirely changed. All the trees were grubbed up, the forests disappeared from the hills, the prairies were cleared by means of fire, and the new cultivators set busily to work in exhausting the fecundity of the soil.35

In order to control this progression, Manchu emperors relied on the assignment of definite and precise frontiers to each Mongol League and Wing and to each Chinese prefecture and county. The Willow Palisade that marked the eastern limit of Jehol was the Qing device for dividing China’s northeast into three domains: Chinese Fengtian south of the Palisade, Manchu Jilin reserve north of it, and west of it the Mongol lands of Jehol.36 A fourth domain consisted of imperial lands, such as necropoles and hunting grounds, to which access was restricted. Mongol Bannermen camps watched the gates of the Mulan hunting ground to prevent intrusion from any group; the Mulan hunting ground was kept outside the jurisdiction of the Chengde prefecture.37 The new administrative units created by the Qing dynasty superseded the previous Mongol concept of tribal following, which had no territorial meaning in the Chinese sense.38 The recent creation of more autonomous Manchu and Mongol prefectures in the Hebei and Liaoning provinces is certainly proof of the persistence of population diversity in Jehol; it also illustrates the resilience and adaptability of minority cultures located so close to the largest ethnic group in world population. The peaceful coexistence of three major ethnic groups was presumably not greatly affected by repeated enactments and repeals of regulations to enforce racial segregation. An administrative document reported: The Mongols, not contented with the nomadic life, get Chinese to cultivate for them. This has been going on for years, and they have lived at peace with each other for a

The Jehol Frontier

89

long time. Moreover, the rentals which the Mongols get are a benefit for them economically.39

Since the eighteenth century, most Manchu villagers in Jehol have lived in the Chinese zone, which originally extended from Chengde to Chaoyang and connected the Great Wall and the Willow Palisade. Further north, Manchu and Mongol populations have shared the Mulan Weichang area. Although the Jehol population is now largely sinicized and standard Chinese is used extensively in the Hebei and Liaoning parts of Jehol, the Manchu and Mongol communities have kept a sense of their distinct ethnic identities.

Colonizing Jehol The boundary between Inner Mongolia and Jehol does not display the dramatic landscape changes that can be seen in south Jehol. Leaving no room for large plains, the mountainous Yanshan massif occupies the southwest of Jehol, where Chengde is located. Southeast Jehol, on the other hand, is an area of low hills with wide plains that accommodate the Daling river and its tributaries. In spite of their relatively low altitudes, the steep mountains of southern Jehol have not failed to impress travelers. Hills bring some diversity to the flat North China plain just before arriving at Gubeikou from Beijing. On the Jehol side of Gubeikou gate, the Emperor’s Road ran through valleys and defiles, so that the road appeared to Father Ripa as walled on both sides.40 Father Ripa was surprised at the vigorous appearance of the summits around Chengde; he noted that they looked like the waves of a boundless sea.41 Father Van Obbergen described the Jehol sea of summits with admiration.42 Different topographic and climatic conditions have produced three natural landforms in Jehol: the plateau, the hill slopes, and the river valleys. The mountains of present northern Hebei, those of western Liaoning, and the last hills that mark the southeastern edge of the Mongol plateau form the main features of the topography of Jehol. With its dissected mountains projecting their bare figures against a cloudless sky, the bioregion of Jehol often has a skeletal aspect, which is most apparent during the long winter months. The region includes, from south to north, the Yanshan mountain range, the western Liaoning hills, the narrow valleys of the Beihe and Luanhe rivers, and finally the broad valleys of the Xiliao river and its tributaries. The Luanhe, Daling, and Laoha river basins cover the three physical domains of Jehol: the southwestern, southeastern, and northern regions. Before reaching the western coast of the gulf of Bohai, the Luanhe, Beihe, and Xiliao rivers and their numerous tributaries cut deep gorges into the hard quartzite ranges that run in a general northeast to southwest direction. These passes have allowed cultural contact between the populations of Jehol and the three surrounding topographical regions. The northern region is a flat plateau without the deep

90

Mapping Chengde

valleys characteristic of the meridional topography. As a physical region, the northern Hebei mountains are markedly distinct from their three much flatter neighboring areas: the North China plain, the Manchurian basin, and the Mongol plateau. Human occupancy has affected the natural environment of Jehol in distinctive ways. The emergence of regional differentiation has resulted in three styles of housing architecture in Jehol, mapped in a monograph by the geographer Tada Fumio. The geology of the Jehol area is complex, with gneiss and granite in the southwest, basalt covered by thick loess in the north, and loess again in the southwest. The presence of loess has been important for the human geography of Jehol because Chinese immigrants from loess country (from Shanxi province especially) knew how to dig houses adapted to the rigorous winters of Jehol. The agricultural soils of the Jehol valleys are alluvial; they may have received loess deposits. The coastal corridor of Jehol, which historically has always been part of Liaoning, has sandy soils that become swampy around the mouths of rivers. Inland, Mongolian plateau soils are more alkaline. Erosion has occasionally been severe in Jehol due to the disappearance of forests over the past three centuries. Its difficult terrain, soils, and climate have not prevented the penetration of Jehol by a society based on intensive agricultural practices and water control. The climate of the two southern regions of Jehol is cold, sunny, and dry in winter, warm and humid in summer. The number of frostfree days is generally about 140 a year. During the hot summer, monsoon winds bring large amounts of precipitation mainly in the southern and eastern mountains of the region. The shortness of the growing season and the unpredictability of rainfall have prevented Jehol from becoming a highly productive agricultural area like central Hebei or central Liaoning. Dry farming and paddy field cultivation are, of course, eminently susceptible to drought. Nearly all the rains occur during the summer months, but their distribution and amount are highly variable from year to year. Rainfall, 600 millimeters in an average year, is high enough to support dry farming agriculture in southern Jehol. Annual rainfall in the north is less than 300 millimeters, enough to maintain the sparse vegetation of steppes and deserts. The physical environment of subhumid Jehol is especially vulnerable to long-term changes in rainfall. Compared to the nineteenth century, the mean annual rainfall of this century has been lower.43 Agriculture was introduced by Chinese farmers into Jehol when climatic conditions were better than they are now. The climate of northern Jehol is even more continental than that of southern Jehol, with high temperature variations of 70˚C between January and July. The continental features characteristic of Jehol may have been exacerbated in earlier historical times. A direct connection may have existed between long-term climate changes and the success of the Chinese peasantry in colonizing Jehol. Agriculture may have found a more favorable climate during the eighteenth century than during the colder seventeenth century.44 Weather

The Jehol Frontier

91

conditions were probably more severe for agriculture in Jehol before Chengde was founded, since 1703 came near the end of the Maunder minimum period that lasted from 1645 to 1715, during which time temperatures fell to the lowest level since c.e. 1000. A succession of cold summers likely caused more difficulties for agriculture than did irregular summer rainfall.45 High summer temperatures are crucial for a successful growing season, and Jehol farmers could expect temperatures as high as 35˚C in June.46 Unsurprisingly, altitude and continentality have resulted in a wide diurnal temperature variation. Father Ripa complained that the morning cold was so intense in the Jehol mountains that he had to wear furs and that soon after sunrise the heat became unbearable.47 The composition of natural vegetation and the distribution of animal species obviously vary with altitude, exposure, and rainfall. Jehol is no exception to the dominant regional pattern in China: the southern and eastern parts of any region have always had more abundant vegetation than the drier northwestern parts. Forests and tall prairies once graced the hills and valleys of most of Jehol. The wild animals of southern Jehol (tigers, deer, bears), who were the reason for early imperial hunting parties and hence at the origin of the political good fortune of Chengde, disappeared when their habitats were transformed into eroded fields and treeless hills. Northern Jehol was home to horses and camels. Cattle and cattle products were sent from there to Beijing, across the Great Wall. Father De Preter wrote about the Jehol forests in a 1917 letter to Émile Licent. He mentioned the Dushan forest, larger than the forest situated north of the Dongling tombs, from which significant quantities of charcoal were exported to the Yongping prefecture, south of the Great Wall. He noted bears and red-legged cranes in the Dushan forest and foxes, deer, wild goats, and snakes north of Mulan. The Erzhou forest had hares and grouse in the same area of Jehol. Further north, in Balin, rare argalis had been spotted. Leopards were plentiful in the south and west of Jehol.48 The Jehol forests were a source of sensorial enjoyment for travelers riding through them because of their abundant animal life as well as their prosperous vegetation: There are forests of oak and poplar and beech, and wild pears and peaches, apples and apricots. Riding by, one can pick the little plums known as ulana, pale red like sharp cherries, and in Jehol there are cherries both white and red and the large sour cherries, perfect in color and taste; or one can eat the hazelnuts fresh fallen from the trees and mountain walnuts roasted over an open fire.49

Thick forests originally covered the mountains and hills of southern and eastern Jehol. Chinese settlers who needed wood for fuel and as building material depleted the rich fauna these forests harbored. Deforestation began in the eighteenth century and by the beginning of the twentieth century primitive forests had almost disappeared except on the summits of the most isolated mountains, such as the Wuling mountains, or on the

92

Mapping Chengde

steeper slopes that delineate the Mongolian plateau. Witnessing the transition from forested landscape to agricultural landscape in the Manchurian mountains, George Cressey commented: Prior to the fall of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, these were splendid forest areas. Since that time, the timber has been ruthlessly destroyed. . . . This destructive process is still going on, and the writer has seen valley after valley where ten thousand spirals of smoke marked burning timber. This destruction is bad enough, but there is no lasting gain, for the rough hill sides are too steep for permanent cultivation. Many pockets of soil are only sufficient for raising half a dozen of kaoliang and will be washed away after a few years.50

With the progression of Chinese agriculture inland, new plant and tree species were introduced into the hills of Jehol. Introduced trees have been planted around villages as wind breakers. In the frontier area of Hebei and Inner Mongolia, state farms have supervised large and monotonous forests composed of few tree species, all planted at the beginning of the 1960s. Today Chengde is no longer famous for its virgin forests but for its orchards producing prized almonds, walnuts, hawthorns, and ferns. Banli chestnuts, which in Chinese have kept their Mongol name, hushiha, are the pride of Luanping county. One-third of chestnut production in China comes from the Chengde region.51 In ethnic terms, Jehol stretches from a mostly Chinese-inhabited zone to a mostly Mongol-inhabited zone, the two zones being roughly divided by the Qilaotu mountain range running northwest to southeast through the region. The formation of two ethnic zones in Jehol began before the founding of Chengde with the regular sojourns of the Kangxi emperor’s Manchu court and army beyond the Yanshan mountains; the traveling court was followed by a primarily Chinese retinue of courtiers, itself followed by Chinese immigrants. For two centuries, Chinese immigration from central Zhili pressed northward, bypassed uninhabited southeastern Jehol, and followed the Emperor’s Road to the Mulan hunting ground. Traveling south of the Qilaotu mountains in southwestern Jehol, Father Ripa did not observe a single Mongol habitation between Gubeikou and Chengde but only Chinese inns built to accommodate travelers on their way to the summer capital and back. Every fifteen miles he encountered walled lodges. Unlike xingying camps, which were temporary tent camps, xinggong lodges were permanent structures to house the emperor and his spouses and concubines when the Qing court was traveling from Beijing to Mulan. Mulan had no permanent station, only rigorously arranged tent camps that were similar in conception to less elaborate Qing military camps.52 The refusal to admit ethnic interpenetration that can be deducted from the provincial maps of imperial atlases was a remarkable feature of the Qing dynasty’s vision of Jehol. This vision was probably dictated by the central administration’s strong desire to keep

The Jehol Frontier

93

ethnic groups apart and to limit Chinese colonization of Mongol lands to southern Jehol only. The sinicization of the Jehol landscape was initially provoked by the hunting expeditions led by the Qing emperors north of the Great Wall. Father Gerbillon reported as early as 1688 that Chinese emigrants had built hamlets and teahouses because of the profit they gained from the many travelers who circulated between Beijing and Mulan during the emperor’s hunting season.53 Chinese colonists entered Jehol as settlers, tenants, peasants, and merchants who eventually impoverished Mongol agricultural communities. The Qing administration repeatedly failed in its attempts to exchange lands in order to keep Mongol and Chinese communities separate, partly because Chinese settlers on Mongol lands constituted a new taxable population that was welcome by the government.54 Manifestations of internal contradictions in imperial policy and evidence of divergence between the perception and extension of the frontier area can be found by comparing cartographic surveys conducted during the Kangxi, Qianlong, and Tongzhi periods. The Qing cartography of Inner Mongolia reveals the deliberate ambiguity of Manchu ethnic policy. Very revealing is the fact that Qing maps of Chinese prefectures or counties of the provinces of Zhili and Shanxi overlap with Mongol territories shown in other maps of the Tongzhi Atlas as belonging to the Leagues or Banners of Inner Mongolia.55 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maps show cartographers’ difficulties in accepting this partition of Jehol between ethnic groups. At the beginning of the landscape transition, the Kangxi Atlas displayed the Great Wall as the northern limit of Zhili; north of the Great Wall, place names were no longer Chinese but Mongol, giving an impression of perfect Chinese and Mongol homogeneity. Early eighteenth-century cartographers did not give a northern border to Jehol, but the compilers of the Chengde Gazetteer later repaired this absence. Likewise, the Da Qing wannian yitong dili quantu map [General Map of the Eternally Unified Geography of the Great Qing] pushed Zhili boundaries northward past Chengde. The distinct cartographic symbols of a Chinese city hierarchy suggested that a Chinese population lived there, sheltered by a softly curved boundary quite different from the linear boundaries that marked Mongol lands. Internal contradictions become apparent in comparing two maps of the same atlas: the “Zhili quantu” [General Map of Zhili] map and the “Menggu quantu” [General Map of Mongolia] map of the Tongzhi Atlas.56 The exact meaning and size of the northern frontier area were not the same for all its inhabitants. For Chinese settlers, the zone began north of the Great Wall and west and north of the Willow Palisade; their claims to residence beyond these limits were progressively accepted by a reluctant central administration.57 For the Qing administrators, the frontier had two sections: an inner section, with a settled population in Shengjing and Jehol, and an outer section, peopled by tribute-bearers, actual and prospective. The outer zone, furthermore, was expanding, as more Mongol tribes sought to enjoy the Qing emperor’s protection. In both zones, the Court of Colonial Affairs delineated internal

94

Mapping Chengde

boundaries, settled claims, controlled population movements, appointed the local hierarchy, and regulated finances through levies, tributes, taxes, and allowances. The frontier Banner population was kept on military rolls, as was the Banner population of Inner China. Tax rolls and periodic censuses monitored the civil population. Mongols very probably did not consider that they were living in what their Chinese tenants or neighbors perceived as a frontier area. From the perspective of eighteenth-century Mongols, the frontier region consisted of the enclaves north of the Great Wall, around Chengde and Chaoyang, which were almost entirely inhabited by Chinese settlers. Located north and east of the Chinese area in Jehol, the diminishing Qalq’a Mongol area of the eighteenth century included all the territory of the Zhuosuotu League and the southern half of the Zhaowuda League. As the Qianlong emperor’s construction program of the summer capital was nearing completion, the city gained more importance with several promotions of its administrative rank.58 Chinese demographic growth appears to have been rapid during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and increased population size accounted for the administrative normalization of southern Jehol. The Chengde prefecture’s Chinese civil population was 477,404 in 1782; that figure increased to 883,879 in 1827. This demographic expansion was followed by an extension in size and number of the prefectures and counties beyond the Great Wall that administered the Chinese population. Immigrants from Zhili, Fengtian, Shanxi, and even Shandong did not escape census and taxation for very long. Zhili was reorganized in 1778 to encompass Jehol and hence include Chengde, which at 84,000 square kilometers was by far the largest prefecture in the province.59 By 1820 the Chinese administration of the Chengde prefecture extended north of the Liaohe river and overlapped Mongol territories in southwest and central Jehol.60 Between 1750 and 1876, progress of Chinese agriculture in Inner Mongolia was limited to the areas around Chengde, Chifeng, and Hohhot, but Chinese farmland along the southeastern border of the Inner Mongolian plateau increased rapidly after 1876.61 As is often the case in frontier areas, the Jehol ethnic zones were not entirely homogeneous, and during the eighteenth century they became less so, as evidenced by the presence of Manchu villages in the Chinese pale around Chengde and Chinese villages on Mongol lands near Chifeng. Permanent Mongol settlements in northern Jehol adapted features of Chinese architectural style.62 Chinese settlers came from several provinces, each with specific cultural traditions. The rural architecture of the Shanxi, Zhili, Fengtian, and Shandong provinces found room to expand into Jehol wherever agriculture was possible, but the newcomers’ communities often remained distinct from each other. Even a seasoned observer like Émile Licent did not notice the few details that have traditionally differentiated Manchu farms from the neighboring Chinese houses, such as outside chimney pipes and the placement of the reception room in the western part of the house.

The Jehol Frontier

95

Hence, he relied on interviews with local people and not on direct observation of architectural styles. In his survey of the vicinity of Chengde, Father Licent reported that his innkeeper told him that almost half of the communities in the valleys of the Wulie basin were Manchu.63 The desire of each community of Jehol to remain separate has resulted in a mosaic of cultural landscapes that made the ethnic provenance of architectural styles particularly difficult to identify. During the nineteenth century, Chinese immigrants into Jehol established other roads that did not converge at Chengde. This demonstrates that the centrality of the hill station’s position was produced by administrative design only. A second transportation network developed independently of the Emperor’s Road: the commoners’ road avoided Chengde but allowed communication between the prefectures of Chifeng in central Jehol and Pingchuang, Jianchang, Chaoyang in southeast Jehol. The commoners’ road network began at gates other than Gubeikou, like Xifeng in Zunhua county (Zhili) and Qiuguan in Jinzhou prefecture (Shengjing), and went through the regionally important cities and minor settlements of Jehol. West of Chengde, a road from Gubeikou to Luanping, Fengning, and the ancient city of Dolön followed the upper course of the Luanhe river into Inner Mongolia.64 Eventually, with the opening of the Mulan hunting ground to Chinese settlers and the lifting of Qing antiimmigration policy, the Emperor’s Road and commoners’ road networks merged and effectively dislodged Chengde from its privileged position. The commercial history of the region further indicates that the cities of Luanping and Chaoyang were better located for trade than was Chengde. Only slowly did the Qing summer capital develop an independent economy based mainly on local mining of gold, silver, iron, and copper. Jehol products exported around 1900 to Beijing and intramural Zhili were few: Gubeikou produced some gold, Mulan the timber of fallen imperial forests, Dolön had horse hair, Chifeng more gold and some coal, Chaoyang wool, Shanhaiguan red ocher. In contrast to the silk and paper industries of prefectures south of the Great wall, such as Yongping, the total value of Jehol nonmanufactured products was small. On maps published in the People’s Republic of China, Jehol is not shown because the region today overlaps several administrative entities. Located in three provinces (Hebei, Liaoning, and Inner Mongolia), these units, if combined with the seven-county district of Chengde and with the city of Chengde, would reconstitute the territory of former Jehol.65 North of Hebei, in Inner Mongolia, the city of Chifeng and a section of the Zhelimu League were also part of Jehol. Because of their ethnic homogeneity, two areas of Inner Mongolia cannot be considered part of Qing Jehol: the regions north of the Xiliao river and Tongliao city in the northeast. Further east, in Liaoning province, the region of Jehol was completed by the territories of Chaoyang city surrounded by the Mongol autonomous counties of Fuxin and Kalaqin Left Wing. Two other enclaves in Hebei belonged

96

Mapping Chengde

geographically to Qing Jehol: the Manchu autonomous county of Qinglong north of the Great Wall and the valleys of the Heihe and Baihe rivers east of the Great Wall. Finally, the valley of Yanghe, now within the municipality boundaries of Beijing, was formerly administered by the prefecture of Chengde, county of Luanping, and was, therefore, part of Qing Jehol.

Chengde since 1820 The role of China’s northern frontier was alternatively the defense and the propagation of the virtue of the emperor among the peoples of the steppe. The political necessity that compelled the Qing court prior to 1820 to reside north of the Great Wall every summer was seriously weakened when later rebellions and foreign wars occurred primarily in southern China. The importance of the northern frontier decreased after Chengde was abandoned by the Daoguang court. It was believed that the site became inauspicious when, in September 1820, lightning killed the Jiaqing emperor: Tao-Kouang [Daoguang], son and successor of Kia-King [ Jiaqing], being persuaded that a fatality impends over the exercise of the chase, since his accession to the throne has never set foot in Gé-ho-Eul [Chengde], which may be regarded as the Versailles of the Chinese potentates. The forest, however, and the animals which inhabit it, have been no gainers by the circumstance. Despite the penalty of perpetual exile decreed against all who shall be found, with arms in their hands, in the forest, it is always half-full of poachers and wood-cutters. Gamekeepers, indeed, are stationed at intervals through the forest; but they seem there merely for the purpose of enjoying a monopoly of the sale of game and wood. They let anyone steal either, provided they themselves get the larger share of the booty.66

Illegal immigrants, not all of them poachers, accelerated the sinicization process of Jehol during the nineteenth century. The mining and agricultural activities of the immigrant population radically transformed the wooded aspect of the Jehol landscape. The Qing emperors did not foresee the creation of a second axis of landscape transition by poor Chinese peasants who entered Jehol through the Willow Palisade gates overlooking the Daling he valley in Liaoning. Mulan was opened to settlers willing to buy lots in the former imperial forest, and the county of Weichang was formed in 1863 to administer the increasing Chinese population. Fields replaced forests even before an imperial edict finally opened the hunting reserve to agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century. Chengde had by then become a simple prefectural seat not so different from the cities of Pingchuang, Jianchang, Chaoyang, or Chifeng in its attempt to survive through the crude exploitation of Jehol natural resources.67 The city of Chengde retained a large military garrison that probably was a burden for the local economy. More than two centuries after the founding of Chengde, Shigeyasu Tokunaga’s scientific expedition isolated and mapped

The Jehol Frontier

97

six architectural styles that were brought to Jehol and adapted by the Chinese and Mongol populations. As surveyed in the 1930s, the landscape architecture of Jehol displayed a lack of cultural unity that was largely a consequence of dichotomy within the human occupancy of the region, either imperially sponsored or spontaneous, since the eighteenth century.68 The sinicization of the Qing court followed a course analogous to that of the sinicization of the cultural landscape of Jehol, and this phenomenon of acculturation will illustrate how modification of spatial perception can be related to the failed Manchu quest for sustainable ethnic identity. Sinicization in these two regional contexts was, however, due to different causes. Sinicization in Jehol came about because of Chinese demographic pressure, sinicization in Beijing because of psychological changes at the Qing court. Installed by Kangxi, the principle of regular expeditions in Jehol was abandoned by the Daoguang emperor (1821–1850) and his successors, whose sensorial experience of landscape generally remained limited to the palaces of Beijing and gardens of Haidian. These later emperors hence had severely impoverished knowledge of the outside environment. The architectural metaphors of the imperial residences in Beijing may have seemed like the reality of landscape to the last Qing emperors. After the Xianfeng emperor’s suspicious death in 1861 at Bishu shanzhuang, Cixi Taihou (1835–1908) became the empire’s regent during the Guangxu era (1875–1908). She wielded considerable power. Cixi gave the name of Yiheyuan to the garden of Qingyiyuan that Qianlong had designed on the model of the site of Hangzhou. Cixi first restored this garden in 1894 on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday. It was by then impossible for the Qing court to sojourn in the gardens of Yuanmingyuan, Changchunyuan, and Wanchunyuan, as these had been devastated by British and French troops in 1860. Cixi rehabilitated Qianlong’s construction project in Beijing: to landscape Wanshou mountain and to include Kunming lake in a huge hydraulic network that brought water to the city. Except on the northern slope of the Wanshou mountain, where the Zhihuihai temple stands, Tibetan landscape themes were absent from Cixi’s restoration of the Yiheyuan residence in 1894. The Cixi empress dowager exhausted half of the funds intended for the construction of an imperial navy in restoring the Yiheyuan residence and building a marble boat on the northern shore of Kunming lake. This firmly anchored boat served as a metaphor for victory of the Qing navy that did not otherwise exist outside the protected waters of Kunming lake. For many Chinese historians, the elaborately carved Qingyanfang boat has come to symbolize the empress dowager’s disastrous rule of the empire. Looking at her residence from the stained glass windows of the upper deck of the “Boat for Pure Banquets,” Cixi failed to see the distinction between landscape of metaphors and reality of landscape. Following a new rebellion that started in Wuchang, the last Manchu emperor abdicated in February 1912, putting a formal end to a two thousand-year-old political system. The Qing empire disintegrated into war-torn Republican China, Russified Outer Mongo-

98

Mapping Chengde

lia, Japanized Manchuria, restive Eastern Turkestan, and autonomous Tibet (until the 1950 Chinese military expedition). Nominally under the newly established Republic of China, the military administration of the frontier province of Jehol was largely corrupt and incompetent. Left by the central government without adequate salary for their troops, the generals who governed Chengde found that stealing from imperial property was a profitable compensation: He [General Tang Yulin] was of medium stature, powerfully built and had coarse features. His behavior lacked all culture. The temples of Jehol from the time of the great Manchu Emperors had probably been robbed of most of their treasures of ecclesiastical art by his predecessors, but a few things had not yet been stolen and sold to Japanese agents or curio dealers from Peking. During our stay [summer 1930] at Jehol we daily saw loaded lorries which at the command of T’ang Yü-lin, it was said, removed idols and other objects from the temples, to Mukden.69

Abusive officials, helpless monks, and needy peasants were unable or unwilling to protect the Qing summer residence from warlords’ depredations: One fine day a force of seventy soldiers arrived at the Hsin-kung [Sumeru temple], with order from higher up to quarter themselves in the galleries round the temple courtyard. They ruthlessly smashed up the woodwork to use it as fuel. The chief lama complained to the governor. An enquiry was held and the culprits were actually punished. Afterwards they hunted up the lama who had reported them and beat him so mercilessly that he was confined to his bed for four months.70

The impact of landscape policy on the natural environment may be measured through the phases of deforestation and reforestation. Thanks to centralized communist policy, this impact has recently taken the form of forest belts and screens of trees planted to provide timber and control erosion. During the 1960s