Credibility crisis
In England, however, promotion of the Chinese garden had only led to a credibility crisis for the royal architect.
Ultimately, just how much of what Chambers wrote about this subject can be believed?
According to his own description, the illustrations in his books are sketches from his time in Guangzhou. He claims that the information about Chinese gardens is partly from what he saw for himself there, and partly based on what he was taught by Chinese artists.
Chambers also accepts that within this material there are the views of travelers down the ages. His readers, however, usually take a different view. Most of them think that his work on Chinese gardens is merely used to attack Brown. A contemporary reference work on famous English people lists his work as a "ridiculous book."
" . . . A skillful blend of borrowings, imaginative infilling, and-perhaps-Chambers' own experiences at Canton and its vicinity," points out Patrick Conner, a London art dealer who has carried out in-depth research into oriental architecture in the West. Most of Chambers' ideas about Chinese gardens are borrowed from the description of the Yuan Mingyuan (or Summer Palace) at Peking by the French priest Attiret, while his knowledge of Chinese plants comes from the General History of China by Du Halde. As for the "horrid" elements in his gardens, these come from the idea of the sublime that can be found in the writings of the British philosopher, Edmund Burke. What, then, do the Chinese say?
In the 1930s, to find out how much Chambers relied on Attiret, the Chinese scholar Chen Shou-yi made a careful comparison of the two authors. He concluded that the strange scenes described by Chambers, which were way beyond comparison with any of the trifles to be found in Europe at that time, must be from the Yuan Mingyuan. Yet at that time it was not easy even for those close to the Emperor to see such things. So how could Chambers do so in far-off Guangzhou? However, Chen also thinks that Chambers definitely did not copy everything from his predecessors. Having been to China himself and talked with Chinese gardeners, he cannot simply be considered to be an idle gossip. Unfortunately, though, he raised what the Chinese gardeners had said much too high, making people suspect that his whole book was a figment of the imagination.
Good medicine, bitter taste?
Chen Shou-yi was an expert on the history of communications between East and West. When Ho Chen-tsu, a late professor of architecture at Chengkung University who wrote a work on Chinese gardens in the 1960s, visited England and looked around with the eye of an architect, he concluded that Chambers "really understood Chinese gardens and architecture." As for his views on gardens, Chambers' work was the "medicine that saved English gardens from the wilderness." Yet he adds, "Unfortunately good medicine has a bitter taste and unavoidably invites scorn."
It can be said that the attack on Chambers was also partly due to political factors. At that time in England, the literati who attacked French styles and advocated the natural garden were, on the whole, opponents of the concentration of power in the aristocracy and monarchy. It is not surprising that when the master architect at the side of the King made an attack on the natural English garden he unavoidably drew attention. His use of the distant to criticize the nearby only served to stir up those patriots who were zealously promoting a national style.
Chiu Po-shun, Associate Professor of Art at Tainan College of Art and a student of Ho Chen-tsu, has gone a step further in comparing materials on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of Chinese gardens with the chapter on Chinese gardens in Chambers' Designs. He points out that, "It seems with every paragraph you can find similar theories in the Chinese materials." It might thus be possible to believe that Chambers really did study the basic knowledge of Chinese gardens while he was in China.
"As an architect, Chambers' understanding of Chinese gardens and architecture was naturally deeper than that of the missionaries and merchants who came before him, and it was also stronger than that of Attiret," is the opinion of mainland-Chinese scholar Chen Zhihua. Chen maintains that Chambers' knowledge of Chinese gardens surpassed the superficial observations about the untrammeled imitation of nature of the age of Temple. It touches on the principles of appropriateness to the environment, using scenery to stimulate the emotions, using winding paths to provide a variety of vistas, and generating poetic and artistic sentiments from nature.
Strange beasts
What, then, about the Western view that the Tartarean damsels, the thunder and lightning, and the wild beasts are all made up? When Chambers was in Guangzhou, points out Chen Zhihua, the idea of the southern garden was actually comparatively crude and toyed with a lot of dramatic effects. So what Chambers said may not be entirely without foundation.
For those who are more familiar with the literati gardens of southern China, or who have been influenced by the cultured spirit of the imperial gardens of the Qing dynasty, putting wild beasts and machines in with the pipa-playing and painting might indeed seem incredible and unexpected. However, it is said that in the parks of the ancient emperors and the back gardens of the rich merchants there really were gathered together all kinds of oddities such as "bull-tendon dog-bone trees, chicken-head duck-foot grass," and a "splendid bird-strange beast range." Everything had to be more than unusual.
Records also reveal that in the parks of Han dynasty palaces not only were there raised a great variety of deer, birds and other beasts, but "elephant hides" and "white deer hides" were also constructed for watching strange creatures from afar. There were even mechanical bronze dragons spouting water, wave machines, and drinking sages. There were yaks and "green rhinoceros" wandering about in the garden of Yuan Guanghan, a businessman at Maoling. Then there was the garden of the Tang-dynasty official, Li Deyu, which contained an enormous fish bone.
In the late Ming dynasty, it is said that the salt merchants of Yangzhou graced their great halls with mechanical nudes. The export porcelain of Guangzhou is adorned with grossly distorted depictions of the crucifixion and naked missionaries chasing peasant girls. Who knows, then, what clever tricks Chambers' rich business acquaintances in Guangzhou might have wanted to show off when trying to impress the Westerner?
Talking about ice to summer insects
"Of course, there could have been a problem of understanding when Chambers heard people making descriptions," says Chen Zhihua. In the gardens of southern China, for example, there were many works that used the shapes of rocks. The "Lion Garden" of Suzhou, for example, was named after its collection of stones shaped like lions in a variety of positions. The Da Guan garden of the Dream of the Red Chambers contained stones shaped like monsters and fierce beasts. As for what Chambers said about volcanoes and lightning, Chen thinks that this could have been derived from the fireworks in the Yuan Mingyuan. You cannot say that all of these things were just dreamt up out of nothing by Chambers.
For the young Chambers who had sailed the seas with the East India Company, the complex politicized and nationalistic dispute about gardens that he became embroiled in must have made about as much sense as talk of ice to a summer insect. In one letter to a Swedish friend he exclaimed bitterly that the English find it hard to imagine an island that is big enough to have forests that elephants can walk in. "Our gardeners, and I fear our Connoisseurs too, are such tame animals, that much sparring is necessary to keep them properly on their haunches," he lamented.
It was to China that the experienced and knowledgeable Chambers looked for support to complete his mission of the "great improvement" of the natural garden. He originally thought that the Chinese "lived far enough off to be out of the reach of critical abuse." He could never have imagined that some time after he had stepped on this particular land mine, he would actually get a measure of sympathy from them.
As with Temple, after fully admiring the beauty of the Chinese garden, Chambers concluded by warning his compatriots that it was a profound art that was not to be tried lightly.
Two centuries later, when you wander along the winding paths of the English landscape garden and suddenly come across the burnt-out shell of a building, then turn and are confronted by a reclining golden bull, you cannot avoid worrying: Is Chambers still arguing with Brown, alongside whom he lies in Westminster Abbey, about how to improve the scenery in Heaven?