The Language of Cultural Memory in Chinese Gardens
Stanislaus Fung
The University of New South Wales, Sydney

In the history of Chinese gardens, a relatively small number of famous events and situations, mostly dating from before the 13th century AD and recorded in writing, occupy an exemplary status in traditional discourse. These yielded a series of commonplaces, aphoristic sayings and famous narratives for subsequent ages. Later writers would often draw on this growing tradition by the use of gnomic expressions formed by compacting longer narratives, and allusions. In gardens themselves, the names of buildings and of various "scenic spots" or "perspectives" (jing), and the poetic couplets often displayed around doorways and architectural interiors, draw substantially on this traditional corpus. The textual elements of gardens are an integral aspect of them. In modern scholarship, the explicaton of Chinese garden design is therefore understood to involve, as an essential element, the elucidation of the literary references incorporated in gardens. Cultural memory has come to be understood as fixed and decipherable meanings that can be revealed by historical and literary scholarship. In this paper, three sources of different kinds will be discussed in order to develop an alternative and more complex understanding of the role of cultural memory in Chinese gardens.

(1) a traditional Chinese encyclopedia. Drawing on the Gu jin he bi shi lei bi yao (Compendium of Things from the Past and Present Organized by Functional Similarity), I shall discuss its section on commonplaces relating to gardens and buildings as what the anthropologist, Stephen A. Tyler, might call "discourse ready-mades".

(2) a book of aphorisms. The tradition of commonplaces maintains the memory of gardens as exemplary particulars but, over time and by repeated application to new and different scenarios, the specificity of reference of these commonplaces became generalized. I propose to focus on the Zui Gu Tang Jian Sao (The Sweep of the Sword from the Hall for Getting Drunk on Antiquity), a collection of aphorisms that "cut to the quick," and show how, in the absence of design principles abstracted from historical particulars, the memory of gardens from an exemplary past can acquire a futural significance: tradition is figured as the prospective appearance of the past.

(3) narratives on individual gardens. A series of texts relating to the Garden of the Unsuccessful Politician in present-day Suzhou and "Footnotes on Allegory Mountain," a long essay written by Qi Biaojia about his own garden (which is no longer extant) are my main sources here. They offer a sense of how cultural memory is exercised as an open-ended to-and-fro movement between "here" and various "elsewheres" and between "now" and various "thens." Scenery is not a priori "out there" but emerges in this movement.

Stanislaus Fung is Director of the Centre for Asian Environments in the Faculty of the Built Environment, The University of New South Wales, Sydney. His recent essays can be found in Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (edited by James Corner; Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), in Perspectives on Garden Histories (edited by Michel Conan; Dumbarton Oaks, 1999) and in Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes. He is one of the eight Consulting Editors of "Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture," a book series of the University of Pennsylvania Press.