Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

It is never easy to form a human portrait of a Chinese emperor. The godlike aspect of these men enters the public record, and the personal is usually so well hidden from view that it can be difficult to know whether it existed. The Qianlong Garden helps. In it, one begins to sense that this emperor was a person, and not just the supreme instrument of an absolute power structure. He had his own interests and personality and desires—spiritual or otherwise. Qianlong was in many ways a romantic; his first wife died at forty, but he wrote her letters in the form of poems until he died.

Received opinion in the West has often suggested that Chinese aesthetics reached an apex in the late Song and early Ming dynasties, declined through the early Qing, and then reached a nadir post-Qianlong. The quality of the craftsmanship at the Juanqinzhai sometimes exceeds the quality of the taste, as opulence upstages subtlety. Many Western connoisseurs prefer Chinese monochrome and minimalism, and some feel that even work from the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor, Qianlong’s father, is more refined than this. But Qianlong represents the full efflorescence of Qing taste, and many contemporary Chinese revel in riotous pattern and golden enamel, preferring such exuberance to austere discipline. “If Qianlong were alive today,” one scholar said, “he would be wearing Versace.” At a time when Westerners are “discovering” Victorian architecture and midcentury modernism, Qing monuments should be valued before they are past saving.

In 1998, I went to see the Garden of the Palace of Established Happiness in the Forbidden City, which was then being rebuilt in part under the aegis of the delightfully named Happy Harun. That garden, roughly contemporaneous with the Juanqinzhai, had burned down in 1923 and was being reconstructed on the basis of images and the surviving plinths of buildings. One of the workers there described how the Chinese minister of culture had come to visit the work and had said, “All the wooden structures are beautiful, but the stone is in terrible condition and should be replaced.” The worker explained that the stone was what survived of the original buildings, and that it was being conserved accordingly. The minister of culture said, “Would you wear a new suit with old shoes?”

That attitude meant that the restoration teams for the Juanqinzhai had their work cut out for them: shifting the sensibility of reconstruction to one of conservation. To complicate matters further, the techniques used in the Juanqinzhai were so refined as to be beyond the skills of living craftsmen. For example, the building made some use of a stiffened, lacquered gauze for which the technique is lost (though the same technique was used in Han dynasty shoes and Song dynasty hats); we can reproduce its appearance, but not the thing itself. The World Monuments Fund introduced the protocols through which scientific technique and microscopy could help determine most of the original processes used to achieve an effect or finish; this allowed for those processes, often involving many layers of ornament, to be reproduced with precision. The conservation of the Juanqinzhai has had to blend Eastern and Western concepts, aesthetics, techniques, and materials, as the original building and grounds did. Long-lost crafts had to be reinvented and relearned, then squared with modern technologies. It took science to understand the vanished techniques and science to reconceive them, though the execution was a matter of extraordinary finesse.

In upscaling miniature techniques, Qianlong’s craftsmen had devised new sublayers to support them. Conservators accustomed to working on small objects had to figure out how to expand restoration practices they developed for snuffboxes and other small works of art to be viable on large architectural surfaces. The governors of southern provinces were contacted in a quest to locate skilled artisans, who came from Anhui, west of Nanjing, and Zhejiang, south of Shanghai. The conservators working on the project felt that the paper used in the restoration should be of Chinese manufacture, so an expert papermaker from England came to train Chinese workers in a technique originally invented in China. All of the work had to be done within the walls of the Forbidden City to avoid the risk of sending out an original and getting back a masterful copy. Partly on the basis of experience its faculty gained on this international collaboration, Tsinghua University’s Cultural Heritage Conservation Center now offers a postgraduate degree in Architectural Conservation for Wood Structures and Historic Interiors and Furniture. This is the first advanced degree available in the conservation of historic Chinese interiors and wood furniture.