Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The divide in China between court intrigue and the life of scholars, which is central to any study of the country’s culture, had been recorded since the Warring States period (475 to 221 BC) and was refined into an often deliberately awkward aesthetic for those outside the court during the Northern Song dynasty (AD 960 to 1127). Though scholar-painters, often banished for their criticisms of the government, produced paintings and poems in miserable exile, it was widely accepted that their work was of greater consequence than the showy, decorative work of the court. Indeed, paintings and calligraphy by many of the scholars who had been ejected from the capital later entered the Imperial Collection. Literati aesthetics define Qianlong’s garden project, informed by his travels to inspect the southern territories of his realm. The rockeries, plantings, and waterways at the retirement garden, all constructed on a flat piece of land, evoke the mountain landscapes of southern China as portrayed in Song and Ming paintings. The meandering nature of the classical scholar’s garden had succumbed in the Ming period to the symmetries of northern taste. In the Qianlong garden, Suzhou’s surprising vistas and winding paths have been brought into Manchu discipline, but some of that easy wandering has been reengaged in a concise, synthetic form.

The life envisioned for the Juanqinzhai was solitary, as befits the literati ideal of contemplation; the elegant building bespeaks cultivated seclusion. “Exhausted from diligent service,” Qianlong wrote, “I will cultivate myself, rejecting worldly noise.” The richly ornamented theater that occupies much of the interior has only one seat. But despite this literati conception, the construction of the Juanqinzhai reflects Qianlong’s ebullient profligacy; even the building’s framing timbers are polished hardwoods. The eastern five of the Juanqinzhai’s nine bays contain the emperor’s living quarters, ranged over two levels, and include sleeping and sitting platforms in sixteen separate spaces. This flank features an entire wall of zitan, the purple sandalwood beloved of emperors, then exceedingly rare and now nearly extinct. Large jade cartouches are set into screens. Double-sided embroidery, that rare Suzhou art, was employed in the fabrication of 173 translucent interior windows. On the lower face of the wall are scenes of deer amid woods. The background consists of patterned zitan marquetry, over which a foreground of carved inner-bamboo skin (tiehuang) is applied. The upper story shows a scene of peacocks, magpies, and phoenixes realized with the same methods and materials. Other parts of the screen are ornamented with bamboo-thread marquetry, a labor-intensive means of achieving a variegated, patterned background for surface-mounted ornamentation. These techniques, usually employed for small decorative objects, here are translated onto vast surfaces—the only known instance of such architectural application. The lacquer work in the building is likewise of unique complexity and scale. Porcelain wall insets show the sophistication of a precious vase; wall panels are inlaid in azurite, jade, jasper, and other semiprecious stones. The handmade wallpaper is impressed with mica and then printed in malachite. The interior includes one of the largest cloisonné objects ever produced, a hanging pair of couplets in the emperor’s own hand. Qianlong was involved every step of the way. The archives record his request that a particular doorknob be replaced with cloisonné, as indeed it was.