Pavilions of delight in a picturesque show of power

Craig Clunas disclaims that this is a book about gardens, rather he states that he is giving an account of discourses about the idea of a garden. Given the sensual and haptic experience that most of us happily undergo in gardens, this cerebral approach could prove problematic to readers not familiar with new art history and cultural theory. Fruitful Sites is a book which is "about" Chinese gardens while at times dismantling the reasons for their existence. The title indicates the semantic exactitudes that preoccupy Clunas. He is concerned to discontinue the "traditional" view of these spaces as "the sanctuary of the introvert" and instead examines patterns of ownership, stressing throughout an essentially materialistic dialectic.

He states, not where we might expect in the introduction but in the conclusion, that what he has offered "is an account of writing about gardens, and writing in early modern China was controlled by male members of the elite." This emphasis throughout on Ming texts is both the book's strength and its weakness. Since a prevailing mode in Chinese garden culture was literary and concerned with ideas about the picturesque, his emphasis on the contemporary literary text can be viewed as an appropriate one.

Several transformations in land tenure are described as taking place during the period under consideration. Clunas registers a fundamental shift during the 16th century, when the yuan or enclosure changed from being a place of productive real estate to a locus of aesthetic display. He meticulously records contemporary accounts of the Eastern Estate, in Suzhou, pointing out that its productive areas (rice, mulberries, fruit and so on) also housed a Pavilion for the Appreciation of Delight. The garden site became no longer a place of trees but a place of rockery and pavilions.

The aesthetic decisions made on these sites are characteristically presented by Clunas in terms of "power relations". This is evident in his choice of quotation from the writer Wen Zhengheng's Treatise on Superfluous Things, which is really a treatise on taste. Wen writes on "Ranking stones": "Of stones, Lingbi are best and Ying stones come next. But these two types are very expensive and hard to buy, large ones being particularly hard to obtain, so that anything over several feet is in the class of marvels. Small ones can be placed on the table, those with a colour like lacquer and a sound like jade being the best."

The chronicler continues in like vein, ranking according to rarity value and describing those stones that are regarded as vulgar or as not elegant because valued by the vulgar. Clunas uses this quotation to illustrate the ongoing debate about taste, which in contemporary Ming culture was inextricably linked with concepts of self-appointed virtue and vice. That which is "elegant" was greatly prized. The garden site together with its buildings was evidence of more than wealth. "The owner has no vulgar attitude. In building a plot we see his cultured heart" (Chen Jiru). This ties in with the ideal, discussed earlier in the book, of the "pure and lofty", where moral superiority is linked to a dislike of excess.

These are complex issues. They are explored in Clunas's discussion of the title of the main garden he considers, "The Garden of the Unsuccessful Politician". In Chinese it is named Zhuo zheng yuan. Zhuo has the meaning artless, guileless, in the sense of being without deceit, as opposed to "tricky", a pejorative term. So the unsuccessful politician is actually regarded as morally successful and his garden by association acquires virtue. In the Ming social system a virtuous morality is linked to high rank. The weight of Clunas's argument is to point to the degree of elitism implicit in this value system and the ways in which taste was used by Ming thinkers as an indicator of class and status. He describes gardens as vehicles and purveyors of a set of social codes in which these values are not only dominant in garden spaces but virtually exclude other concerns.

However, other sources, such as the Sancai Tuhui, an illustrated encyclopaedia of 1607, show another aspect of Ming society. A series of woodblocks depicts the outdoor pursuits of scholars. They are shown "Gazing at the moon", "Watching the waterfall", and even "Learning against a tree". The importance of silence and contemplation as part of a society in which a quietest religious practice was central is bypassed by Clunas at the expense of his detailed materialism. The possibility of a transcendent act, equally capable of being realised while staring at a small "cloud-root" rock sculpture as well as outdoors in either simulated (garden) or natural landscapes, is explored in terms of power relations. He sees the hermetic tradition as "imbricated with the specifics of social and cultural power", the garden as a potential meeting place for like, powerful minds. The principal hall in the Garden of the Unsuccessful Politician is compared to another "Hall of Making Relationships Clear", which Clunas describes as "the central structure in the Confucian temples that were a visible focus of elite status in every county of the empire".

Clunas charts the discourses running through Ming culture about success and taste, and like any argument they tend to return over and over again to the same issues. Chronology is not used to carry the reader systematically through the recurring debates, and at times the text is as tortuous as the mountain/rocky Chinese landscapes it sometimes describes. But like the Chinese garden, it frequently gives delight, as well as insight, into a society which may prove less "Other" than we had previously thought.

Anne Tockwell is a lecturer in critical studies, and is researching multimedia and landscape at The University of Portsmouth.