Chang Ta-chien's Eight Virtues Garden: The Artist's Picturesque Retreat

Behind the building of Eight Virtues Garden lies a background of war and turbulence.

When mainland China fell to the Communists in 1949, Chang Ta-chien followed the flood of refugees fleeing the mainland to Hong Kong. Hong Kong was panic-stricken and rife with rumor, and people exhausted every means they had to try to escape overseas. In that frenzied atmosphere, Chang mortgaged two of his most precious possessions--a pair of paintings by Ku Hung-chung of the Five Dynasties period and Tung Yuan of the Sung dynasty--to a bank for 50,000 Hong Kong dollars and moved with his family to South America in 1952.

His son-in-law Li Hsien-chueh, who moved to Brazil a year later and still lives in Mogi, recalls that Chang's first home in South America was Argentina. But the frequent political coups there, the cold climate, and the death of his nephew from acute pneumonia made him decide to move.

Chang Ta-chien visited Brazil in 1953. In Mogi, just an hour's drive from Sao Paolo, he met an old friend of his--Tsai Chang-luan, an expert in herbal medicine--and several fellow Szechwanese who owned farms there. The country's abundant resources, its pleasant climate and the goodness of its people all spoke in its favor, and when he found some land that reminded him of the Chengtu plain in Szechwan, he decided at once that he wanted to live there.

Li recalls his brash style: "He plopped down the money for it (about US$200,000 in all) on the spot, and his family in Argentina didn't even know anything about it!" Unfortunately, for just that reason he was unaware that the area had already been designated by the Sao Paolo state government as the site for a dam. The garden's fall had been fixed by fate even before its creation.

Having bought the land, which covered more than 145,000 square meters, he followed his friends' advice and had it planted with more than 3,000 persimmon trees to increase its "economic value." But running a farm didn't fit well with his artistic nature. The fruit rotted when no one picked it, and the trees were gradually chopped down and disappeared as work on the garden progressed.

Although only a few remain, the trees are still the garden's "registered trademark." The eight virtues of its name refer to the traditional "seven virtues of the persimmon"--long life, lots of shade, no birds' nests, no insects, leaves that look lovely in the frost, a treat for visitors, and big, plump fallen leaves that are nice to draw--plus an addition of his own: the leaves can cure stomachache when fried in water.

Looking at the weeds and wilderness today, it's hard to imagine that the scene was once so grand. But anyone who was close to him knows that Chang Ta-chien built lakes and hills here, constructed a huge atelier called Great Wind Hall, collected exotic animals, plants and minerals from all over the world and, in fact, planned to live here permanently.

"Five Pavilions Lake alone took three years to build and cost US$200,000," says the painter Hsu Chi-tai, who used to be editor in chief of the Huan Kuang newspaper in Brazil and now engages in gem mining. The lake, which covered 13 acres, was dug out completely by human labor, one stroke at a time. Besides the five pavilions, the lake was surrounded by carved stones and Canadian pines, whose dense needles, twisted roots and gnarled branches were reflected in the tranquil surface of the lake.

Pine and bamboo, in fact--both favorites of the traditional Chinese literatus--were the driving forces of the garden's scenery. The bamboo grove flanking the lane into the garden still exists, but the pines that shaded the promenade from Great Wind Hall to Five Pavilions Lake have fallen prey to the woodsman's ax. In their heyday, there were nearly ten varieties of pine and six kinds of bamboo.

"My father-in-law spared no expense whatever in building the garden," Li says. "Mao bamboo had to be brought in from Japan at the time. It cost US$1 a stalk, and he bought a hundred just like that."

Professor Sun Chia-chin, a painter who lived at Eight Virtues Garden for more than two years and was one of Chang Ta-chien's prized pupils, has a similar impression: "Whatever he took a liking to he had to get. Money was no object."

In addition to the pines, all the other plants and trees were pampered guests brought to the garden from around the world, even the peonies, which frequently appear in Chinese paintings. "Eight Virtues Garden wasn't laid out with reference to historical gardens. It was done entirely according to my father-in-law's ideas," Li points out. "Everything went through his design--the slant of each stone and the shape of each plant or tree--so there were a lot of especially picturesque places."

Meticulously laid out as it was, when could the garden be considered finished?

"For my father-in-law, work on the garden was never finished," Li says with a smile. "He'd be happy with certain plants and trees being where they were one day and feel they weren't right and want to move them the next... he was even more that way with rocks and potted plants. Every day meant looking again and changing. The garden always had a different look."

Since hills and streams, exotic plants and strange rocks weren't lively enough, swans, pheasants, peacocks, golden carp and even a pair of big Saint Bernards were brought in one after the other. All that and the dozen or more people who lived there during its prime--Chang, his family and his students--made for very bustling surroundings indeed.

Pride of place among all the animals at the garden has to go to the eleven gibbons from Southeast Asia. Chang Ta-chien always had a liking for monkeys, and with good reason: his mother gave him the name Yuan (a homophone for monkey) when he was born because she dreamt that a black monkey jumped onto her lap before giving birth to him. He is also said to have had a hairy body, which is quite unusual for a Chinese. Naturally, he coddled creatures "of the same kind."

Ideal for both rest and activity, the garden served as much as a studio as a place to live.

"He used to say it wasn't enough just to copy model paintings. In whatever you paint--whether it's birds or fish or plants or scenery--you have to capture the essence. And in surroundings like those, where you can compare what you paint with what you see around you, your painting naturally becomes more vivid and fresh," Sun Chia-chin recalls.

The cost of that kind of a studio, however, was astounding. "He spent all his money on the garden," Li says. "Everybody used to laugh at him. Whenever he ran out of money he'd run around and sell some paintings. Then he'd come back to Brazil and pour it all into building the garden."

Despite his special fondness for the garden, he actually spent more of his time away from home involved with exhibitions and such during his 20 years there (from 1953 to 1973, when he immigrated to the United States)--except for a time after France established diplomatic relations with Communist China (his main overseas market was Europe), when he stayed holed up at home and didn't care to travel about much.

That period happened to be a key time, stretching from the maturity of his fifties and sixties into the crucial, peak period of his seventies: in 1954 he was chosen by the New York International Arts Association as "the greatest painter in the world"; in 1956 he visited Picasso, a trip hailed as "a summit meeting of Eastern and Western art"; in 1964 the German Commercial Bank and Lufthansa bought his entire collection at the Cologne show; in 1968 he was chosen as the number one contemporary Chinese painter in a public opinion survey in the World Daily newspaper of Bangkok....

In addition to painting itself, collecting paintings and authenticating them were prime concerns of his artistic life.

"His learning was really superb," Sun Chia-chin recalls, "and he had a photographic memory, like a computer's."Sun had originally asked for a year's leave of absence from his teaching position at Taiwan National Normal University, but after meeting the master in person and being amazed at the depth of his knowledge, he decided to "do my utmost to stay with him forever."In fact, "his photographic memory, come to mention of it, was forced on him by collectors."

Chang Ta-chien was long ago renowned for assessing paintings and imitating them. Collectors used to rely on his expert eye to determine whether a painting they had bought was genuine or not, but they were afraid he might copy it or take a liking to it and want to buy it himself, so they had an unwritten agreement: they would only unroll a scroll halfway, let him take a quick look, and then roll it back up again!

Chinese paintings are notoriously difficult to authenticate. How did did he manage to do it in just one glance?

"That's precisely where he exceeded everyone else," Sun says, citing an anecdote in evidence. When Chang and Picasso met, Picasso showed him four paintings of his, one of which a was a fake, and asked him if he could tell which one it was. To everyone's astonishment, Chang, who had never studied Western painting, answered absolutely corectly. When people asked him his secret, he calmly replied, "I look for the ch'i (vital energy)." That one simple word was worth more than all the brushstroke-by-brushstroke scrutiny of a connoisseur with a magnifying glass!

The fact that his studios were all called Great Wind Hall is related to his mastery at copying.

In 1928, when he lived in Shanghai, an art dealer offered a painting for sale by the Ming dynasty master Chang Ta-feng (Great Wind). Chang fell in love with it, but he didn't have enough money to buy it, and when he asked to borrow it for a day to look at it he was refused.

Soon afterwards, the painting was shown in an art exhibition. Chang asked someone to take a photograph for him, but the dealer found out and exposed the film. Then Chang told a student of his to make a rough sketch of the painting in a dark corner at the show. He himself memorized the brushwork and coloring and made an exact copy of it, based on the student's sketch, when he got home.

Never a quitter, Chang had the copy framed as soon as it was finished and sent to the show the very next day, where it raised a big stir. Since it was so hard to tell which was which, the owner had to lower his asking price, and Chang bought the real one for less than half the original price.

That Wasn't the first time he passed off a copy as genuine, but it was a success he took special pride in, and he called his studios Great Wind (Ta-feng) Hall ever after.

Despite his frequent romps in the art world and his unconstrained personality, he wasn't the least bit lax or inattentive. "Most of the time, he would notice even if one of your shoelaces was untied," Sun says, describing him as "an old fussbudget." "If you consider how he painted and how he built his garden, you'll realize that an artist has to have both types of personality."

Eight Virtues Garden was renowned for its ability to please the eyes, the palate and the ears (listening to the master's disquisitions on everything under the sun). Two worldfamous chefs from Chinese restaurants in New York and Hong Kong were hired as cooks.

Living in Brazil, where did they go for delicacies like sea cucumber, shark's fin and abalone?

"Even if it was available there, he wouldn't buy it," Li Hsien-chueh says, his eyes sparkling at the memory of the cuisine. "He didn't want anything ordinary. Everything was specially selected and flown in from Hong Kong. The ingredients and the methods had to be special--not the least bit lackadaisical!"

In April 1968, for his 70th birthday, the Chinese community in Sao Paolo put on a continuous program of events. Besides a birthday banquet at the Hua Yun Hotel, there was Peking opera, art shows and congratula tory name signings. "Those years were Brazil's golden age, and a time when the overseas Chinese community was at its height," says Hsu Chi-tai.

But against this happy background, the shadow of the garden's being expropriated and flooded always loomed.

"My father-in-law learned about the situation soon after the garden was built, but since the Brazilian government wasn't very efficient and had put it off for decades, he never thought it would happen so fast," Li says. In 1969, there was even talk about calling the project off completely when experts found that the riverbed contained oil and maintained it wasn't suitable for building a dam. Chang was excited for some time and even supervised work on a lotus flower pond and a viewing pavilion, but in the end everything vanished like mist and moonshine, only increasing his frustration and disappointment.

In early 1970s, Chang and his family began moving to the United States, bringing some of the exotic plants and stones they had collected from all over the world with them. He finally left Brazil in 1973, the year before it was expected to recognize Communist China. Chang, who had refused have anything to do with the Communists all his life, never returned.

In 1976, when he was 78, in view of his many friends on the island and rumors that the U.S. was going to recognize the mainland, he decided to move to Taiwan. He had a residence built at Waishuang Hsi, 1/240th the size of Eight Virtues Garden, as a home for his old age.

He lived there seven or eight years before his death at age 85, and his final resting place is beneath Plum Ridge nearby. That he could return to his homeland was naturally some consolation to him in his final years, but it is still a pity that Eight Virtues Garden lost its owner and was expropriated so soon. The remaining rocks and trees were sold or stolen; the gibbons and other rare animals were sent to the Sao Paolo zoo; and Great Wind Hall was left ankle deep in exquisite Chinese paper and scrolls. After the dam was built, Five Pavilions Lake was flooded and Great Wind Hall is now just a pile of rubble.

Chang's youngest son, Chang Hsin-yin, who now lives in California, occasionally returns to Brazil visit his sister and brotherin-law but has never wanted to go back to the old garden, which would only prove painful. Yet he too displays something of his father's philosophical, easy-come easy-go personality. Faced with the vicissitudes that time has wrought, he simply shrugs and says matter-of-factly: "There's nothing to say about it all."

The master is gone, and the garden that was once so famous is now more than a memory, but Li Hsien-chueh, with an enterprising spirit, is planning for the future; "Four fifths of the garden has been expropriated, but the other fifth can still be used." He plans to build a vacation center and residential area on the land, which faces the reservoir and is surrounded by rolling farmland. Some day in the near future perhaps, we can sit in a brand-new restaurant, look out over the lake and think about how it must have looked to Chang Ta-chien!

[Picture Caption]

Of the dense pine forest (right, photo by Wang Chih-i) that was once one of the sights at Eight Virtues Garden, only hacked and charred stumps (left) remain.

Great Wind Hall (right, photo by Wang Chih-i), where many grand and famous paintings were produced, is now a pile of rubble (left).

The pine forest flanking the entrance lane has escaped destruction and retains something of the look it once had.

This pond, a favorite of Chang Ta-chien's, was said to be able to foretell his financial fortunes by its rising and falling. He called it Magic Pool.

Chang Hsin-yin, who lives in Los Angeles, and his brother-in-law Li Hsien-chueh, who still lives in Mogi Brazil, get together on a rare occasion and talk about old times.

There is a wax replica of Chang Ta-chien with a stuffed gibbon beside him in the atelier at Maya Abode in Taipei.

Maya Abode is rather cramped for space but is still quite lovely to look at, thanks to Chang's meticulous design.

Chang Ta-chien loved plum blossoms. He is buried beneath Plum Blossom Hill, in back of Maya Abode, where a lot of plum trees were planted.

Gold carp, gibbons, exotic flowers and strange stones... it's painful to think how these pampered guests are now scattered and gone.

Great Wind Hall （right, photo by Wang Chih-i）, where many grand and famous paintings were produced, is now a pile of rubble （left）.

The pine forest flanking the entrance lane has escaped destruction and retains something of the look it once had.

This pond, a favorite of Chang Ta-chien's, was said to be able to foretell his financial fortunes by its rising and falling. He called it Magic Pool.

Chang Hsin-yin, who lives in Los Angeles, and his brother-in-law Li Hsien-chueh, who still lives in Mogi Brazil, get together on a rare occasion and talk about old times.

There is a wax replica of Chang Ta-chien with a stuffed gibbon beside him in the atelier at Maya Abode in Taipei.

Maya Abode is rather cramped for space but is still quite lovely to look at, thanks to Chang's meticulous design.

Chang Ta-chien loved plum blossoms. He is buried beneath Plum Blossom Hill, in back of Maya Abode, where a lot of plum trees were planted.

Gold carp, gibbons, exotic flowers and strange stones... it's painful to think how these pampered guests are now scattered and gone.