At midnight on 30 June 1997 the Royal yacht Britannia, carrying a British prince and the last governor of Hong Kong, slowly departed from the colony. More than a hundred years of complex history between the Chinese and foreigners passed away.

Two centuries ago, Lord Macartney, the first British ambassador to Peking, saw the emperor Qian Long then sailed home. The objective of opening Chinese ports to foreign trade was not achieved. However, this journey deep into the Chinese court was an experience that aroused great curiosity.

In his recollections, Macartney specially mentioned his impressions of the Imperial Park at Jehol (today called Chengde), which was to become as familiar in Britain as the landscape garden at Painshill and the park at Woburn in the countryside near London. Two centuries later, when Chinese people visit an English-style garden they cannot help but feel a shock of recognition when they see its waterside buildings and rock grottoes.

Distinct from the French-style formal garden, the English garden with its appreciation of nature is a contribution to culture that the British are very proud of. Yet the French call it the "Anglo-Chinese garden."

Is the English garden a creation of English ingenuity alone, or was it inspired by French and Chinese gardens? What is the nature of this case that has been debated from the eighteenth century to the present, with scholars in China and the West, experts on gardening, and sinologists all coming up with their own evidence and having their own say. What can we read into this marathon battle?

In his 1930s book My Country, My People, Lin Yu-tang, the Chinese master of satire, poked fun at the European formal garden.

For Lin, the Chinese word for "garden" conjured up an expansive scene of pavilions, waterfront buildings, crooked bridges and artificial hills that blended in with nature. There were no straight tree-lined avenues and topiary trees, the kind of clumsy forms to be found at Versailles that the Chinese would not even glance at.

Louis XIV's Versailles was at the leading edge of the European formal garden. The Sun King, who was so fond of the Chinese political system and its exquisite crafts, could never have foreseen that in the eyes of Chinese literary figures two centuries later, this proud model for the gardens of Europe would have been seen as something of a crude eyesore.

Yet Lin Yu-tang was not the first person to scrutinize the formal garden with the aesthetics of the Chinese garden.

The Chinese are laughing at us

" . . . (among Europeans) the beauty of Buildings and Planting is placed chiefly in some Proportions, Symmetries and Uniformities; our walks and our trees ranged so as they answer one another, and at exact Distances. The Chinese scorn this way of planting and say a boy, that can tell an hundred, may plant walks of trees in strait lines, and over against one another, and to what length and extent he pleases. But their greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye without any order of disposition of parts, that shall be commonly or easily observed . . . We have hardly any notion of this sort of Beauty . . . The Chinese have a particular word to express [it]-Sharawadgi."

This passage is from an essay on gardens written in 1685 by the English diplomat Sir William Temple. Such views were quite unusual at a time when the whole of Europe was following the French formal style. Yet this was also the period when Chinese philosophy and artifacts were sweeping Europe. So using the aesthetics of the Celestial Kingdom to criticize contemporary fashion was perhaps not quite so unexpected. It was thus that the "Chinese" word "sharawadgi" became a standard of beauty when discussing gardens, as Temple's views came to appeal to those who came after him. The English writer Addison was one of these. He also questioned why the English did not pursue nature in their gardening but did all they could to depart from it.

A silent Anglo-Chinese revolution?

Just as Temple and Addison were attacking the formal garden, English society and gardening were going through their own dramatic changes.

From the fifteenth century, the English religious and political revolutions had meant a transfer of power from the Church and the old aristocracy to the new landlords, a process that was complete by the middle of the eighteenth century. The size of property had shrunk, and much of it had been developed into new pasture land and farms. The wool industry was flourishing and the agricultural economy was developing at a rapid pace, changing the face of the countryside.

Following a reduction in tax and interest rates and a rise in grain prices, the new landlord-aristocrats were wallowing in wealth. They built large mansions, which led in turn to a great enthusiasm for gardens.

In the past, the formal classical garden had been based on that of the royal palace. Beginning with the gardens built by the Egyptians on the banks of the Nile, it had used straight lines and rectangles to create order and symmetry out of nature. The gardens of Versailles only led to more prominence for these gardening ideals. In his garden the Sun King could thus enjoy the pleasure of lording it over nature and the impression of absolute monarchy.

But for the English aristocracy, who had already been through the Glorious Revolution and put in place constitutional and parliamentary politics, the French-style garden was not only wholly unsuitable in spirit, but was also extremely expensive to maintain.

In the years between the 1720s and the 1740s, English landscape gardening consisting of pasture land scattered with clumps of rustling trees, which had not been seen before in Europe, was born with the encouragement of fashionable people of letters. Later it was to spread to the whole of Europe, where monarchs and aristocrats began to build natural gardens as adjuncts to their more orthodox formal grounds.

This led to a problem, however. The French, who since the age of Louis XIV had led Europe in the arts, gave this style the rather ambiguous name of the "Anglo-Chinese garden."

Facing the unbearable

On the maritime extreme of Europe, England had always been saturated by the arts of Italy and France. It was not easy to work out how to create a "natural garden" and it was hardly desirable to give half the credit to the far-away Chinese. Unable to bear this, patriots have taken up their pens in defense of the creativity of the people of the motherland

Some say the idea that the natural garden originated from China is a product of French envy. "They found it difficult to believe so charming a scheme could have been invented by the English," comments one English historian. Then there are those who managed to cut the Gordian knot of originality altogether, such as the poet Richard Cambridge, who stated, "it is certain that we are the first Europeans to have founded their taste."

Thomas Gray, of the same period, went a step further in rejecting Chinese origins when he proclaimed, "It is not forty years since the art was born among us; and it is sure, that there was nothing in Europe like it, and as sure that we then had no information on this head from China."

Gray probably never thought that his harsh judgment would from then on become the treasured weapon of the opponents of the China theory. Down to today there are still scholars who see this as the focal point of the debate.

The British mentality

To say that the English of the first half of the eighteenth century-especially the influential intellectuals-had absolutely no knowledge of China in their brains is actually unsustainable.

At this time, Chinese tea, porcelain, silks, and wallpaper had already come into the homes of the aristocracy and royalty in large quantities. It was even fashionable for country ladies to make their own lacquer ware, copying the scenery from their porcelain and wallpaper on to their cabinets and tea tables.

Even earlier, the Travels of Marco Polo had recorded the scenery, lakes and fishing scenes of the Southern Song dynasty gardens. Although he had not spent a lot of energy on describing China's "most beautiful and pleasing gardens in the world," he had captured the attention of the Europeans. Following this, the seventeenth-century records of missionaries and envoys to China appeared, revealing a continuous stream of descriptions of Chinese gardens. These were quickly translated into English and disseminated. Moreover, the English intellectuals in those days were no strangers to Latin and French.

This knowledge might have been fragmentary and far from concrete, but it certainly conveyed the stress on the imitation of nature and the mastery of the untrammeled principles of its creation. It also represented the landscape elements of hills, paths, expanses of water, curved banks, and the addition of artificial hills and stone grottoes.

Just by coincidence, these also happen to be exactly the characteristics of the "sharawadgi" of the English natural garden.

The unreliability of travel records?

The natural philosophy and experience that lies behind the Chinese garden can be traced back as far as the Han and Tang dynasties. A specialist book on gardening theory can already be found in the Ming dynasty classic, the Yuan Ye (1634).

Was it that the elite poets, scholars, thinkers and dilettantes of eighteenth-century English society, in vigorously rejecting the formal garden and proposing that there had been "nothing like" the natural garden, really had no idea in their heads about the accumulated legacy of human civilization, or were the labors between China and the West that had taken place over the centuries just in vain?

Due to this rather conceited attitude that has lasted down to today, the mainland-Chinese architect Chen Zhihua decided to read through the works of the seventeenth and eighteenth century missionaries and check how they were disseminated. "If they say that the English in those days did not know about Chinese gardens" he says, then they are underestimating the knowledge that their ancestors in intellectual and cultural circles possessed. Concerning Gray's judgment, Professor Chen thinks that, "The original idea was to give his country some face, but the result was the opposite."

How could it be that as early as the end of the seventeenth century the literary figures Temple and Addison had already written in black and white about the "sharawadgi" that was in their minds?

Naturally, Western scholars also have their views. The letters and books of the missionaries might have flooded in over the centuries, and the eye-witness records and pictures of merchants, envoys and travelers had been translated into English in great quantities and used widely. But talking about things on paper is not the same as putting them into practice. Moreover, travel records are well-known for their unreliability.

Let us see the proof!

Reading between the lines, what Addison had to say about Chinese gardening was really just building on Temple. However, although Temple was a diplomat, he had never been to China. The source of his thinking came from second-hand news when he was ambassador to Holland. The "Chinese" world he so faithfully reproduced has down to today left the "beauty of which the Europeans have no idea" as something of a mystery.

For two centuries, people have ceaselessly used Cantonese, Fujianese and Peking dialects, and even Japanese, in trying to guess the original meaning of Temple's word, "sharawadgi." When the famous writer Qian Zhongshu visited England in the 1930s there was even a British scholar who quizzed him about this. "Random" might do, or perhaps "flavor of the wild." It is hard to say. Whatever can be guessed from the sound of the word, "irregular" is the best meaning that can be gained from Temple's book as a whole.

The scholars who oppose the theory of Chinese origins point out that when the classical garden reached its peak under the absolute despotism of Louis XIV, there had to be some kind of reaction. It took the form of a movement against monocentric symmetry, which had to be "irregular." This is a simple rationale that any "boy" could discover without difficulty. Was there really any need for a diplomat to come up with a "Chinese word" for it?

"The French obviously took the descriptions people had made of China and mistakenly linked them with the real English garden, and misunderstood both of them simultaneously," says Oliver Impey of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He thinks that to understand the real relationship between the Chinese and the English garden, all you have to do is take a walk around a famous eighteenth-century English garden and discover the inspiration behind the natural garden. Without doubt, it comes from the description of a country garden in the classical Roman writer Pliny, not the vague writing about the Chinese garden in Temple or Addison.

Look to Italy, not China

Another art historian, Hugh Honour, in his famous book Chinoiserie, points out that, "English eighteenth-century gardens . . . owed more to the landscapes of Salvator Rosa, Poussin and Claude than to the artfully contrived scenes of Yuan Mingyuan."

Although this theory of rejecting Chinese origins in favor of Italian does not completely support the "original creativity" of the British nation, it does at least mean that no credit for the work has to be given to the vanquished of the Opium War.

In a number of famous eighteenth-century English landscape gardens, the shaded ruins and columned temples of Poussin are there to be seen. When the search for origins is taken a step further, the relationship between the English natural garden and the classical Italian landscape is certainly a very close one.

Most theories, though, trace the move from straight lines and monocentric symmetry to the break with classical regularity and the appearance of the natural style to two eighteenth-century personalities: the leading man of taste, Lord Burlington, and his protege, William Kent. The place where these two met was indeed a principal source of classical art-Italy.

Eighteenth-century Britain was the new rich man of Europe. As the economic miracle took place, a cultural renewal was expected to accompany it. At that time, when the sons of the gentry had completed their education in England, they would go on a trip around Europe with a personal tutor, completing a circuit of what was called the "Grand Tour." In particular, only after seeing the ancient relics of Italy could one be considered a true gentleman.

It was on the Grand Tour that Burlington met Kent. He returned not only with a large quantity of extravagant souvenirs, but also with Kent, who was to improve his Chiswick house in south London to display his trophies.

In the 1720s Burlington's garden became something that had never been seen before. Its eastern section was in the formal classical style, with three radiating shaded avenues leading in straight lines to classical monuments. In the western part, though, Kent had created an irregular natural style, with groups of small trees and winding paths!

Discovering nature beyond the fence

After his experiment in Burlington's suburban garden, Kent went to work with other gardeners in large country estates and became the pioneer of the natural style.

In this new type of garden, geometrically arranged borders did not play the leading role. There were no straight canals or paths. Instead, these had been replaced by extensive lawns, clumps of trees and winding surfaces of glistening water. The garden did not have a perimeter wall, but was only separated from the wilderness by a dry ditch, called a ha-ha. Kent was praised and described as the one who "first leaped the fence and saw that all nature is a garden."

In the garden that learned from nature, a winding path was used as the way to reach tranquil spaces. Within the shaded glades there would usually be the "ancient relic" of a Roman temple to emphasize Italian origins. What could be a better souvenir of the halcyon memories of the Grand Tour?

Of course, these interesting points were not completely derived from the travel memories of the two men. In Burlington's circle there was a certain Robert Castell, who presented the aristocrat with a translation of Pliny's description of a Roman garden. It is interesting, though, that according to Chen Zhihua's research, Castell once jested that Pliny must have known about the Chinese gardens talked about by Temple!

In addition to all this, a new thread of inquiry appeared when an article appeared in the British Museum Quarterly in 1960. This indicated that what was in the minds of Burlington's circle in those years was probably not only Temple's "sharawadgi." They also had pictures of real Chinese gardens!

Among the Chinese gardens that the Europeans were familiar with in the eighteenth century, the one most talked about was the Yuan Mingyuan, or Summer Palace, that was described by Attiret. When actual pictures of the forty scenes of the Yuan Mingyuan reached Europe, it became even more famous. When Attiret, who had been an artist at the court of Emperor Qian Long, painted the forty scenes, he gained a deep knowledge of this famous garden. In 1743 he wrote a letter to Paris in which he described in great detail the scenery he had seen there.

In the eyes of this artist, who was so used to the classical gardens of Europe, the Yuan Mingyuan was "the garden of gardens, or the garden par excellence." He understood that what people in China wanted to express in their gardens was "a natural and wild view of the Country . . . not a Palace form'd according to the rules of Art."

When Attiret compared the Yuan Mingyuan to European gardens, he pointed out that what the Chinese liked were winding paths leading to secluded places, not straight tree-shaded avenues; their exquisite river banks were made up of freely arranged groups of rocks showing great variety and a taste of the wilderness. Not only was this unlike the European way of making embankments out of square slabs, but there would even be small islands in the lakes joined by crooked bridges leading to pavilions. "The people here seem to like a kind of beautiful disorder, preferring the irregular," he said.

When, in 1747, Attiret's letter was included in the Lettres edifiants en Chinenses ecrit des Missions Etrangere, it drew attention from across Europe, and two English translations appeared. This piece of writing not only had distant echoes of Temple and Addison but was even followed by engravings of the forty scenes of the Yuan Mingyuan, which thus became the model "Chinese garden" in the minds of the Europeans.

The members of the Dutch embassy that reached Peking at the end of the century and visited a garden there, remained convinced to the end that what they had seen was the Yuan Mingyuan. It was in fact another garden, called the Qingyi Yuan.

Gardens beyond the garden

In defending the "originality" of the natural garden, the English counter-attacks also circle around the example of the Yuan Mingyuan. This is because although Attiret's letters were translated into English in 1749 (by Burlington's circle), and the forty scenes of the Yuan Mingyuan reached England in the 1760s, the garden of Burlington and Kent had already appeared in the 1720s. Because of this, scholars propose that what was in the minds of the creators at that time could not have been based on real images of Chinese gardens.

The new thread that appeared in the 1960 article, though, was another Chinese garden-the Imperial Park at Jehol.

In 1959 the British Museum had purchased a set of prints of "Thirty-Six Scenes from the Imperial Park at Jehol" by the Jesuit missionary Father Matteo Ripa. There were in fact only thirty-four scenes left in the collection, but the seal that appeared on them made it quite clear that they had been in Burlington's library at Chiswick House.

The following year the scholar Basil Gray published his article in the British Museum Quarterly which argued that Ripa had been commissioned by the emperor Kang Xi to go to Jehol and make the engravings. In 1724, after Kang Xi's death, Ripa returned to Italy with five Chinese converts. He stopped off in London for almost a month, where he held discussions with George I on two occasions.

According to Gray, it was in September of that year that Burlington's new style of garden was in the making. As a leading luminary of aristocratic society at the time, it is most likely that Burlington would have been one of the guests at the King's table, and would have discussed Temple's and Addison's advocacy of the art of Chinese gardening with this honored guest who had been lucky enough to go to the Imperial Park.

"The views of Jehol from the Chiswick House library may therefore have marked a point of departure in the development of the English taste," concludes Gray.

A non-existent country?

The appearance of the pictures of the Imperial Park at Jehol and their close relationship to the Burlington circle is not enough to change the views of most people, though.

When British power reached an unprecedented peak at the time of the Opium War, whether a weak and defenseless country like China could have influenced the creation of the English garden was an "obvious" matter. In the twentieth century, when this past has not been raised in passing by Western sinologists, then it has been done so by Chinese scholars who have been unable to accept the degradation of their culture. The only person who has really conducted in-depth research into this whole subject is the art historian Osvald Siren. His works do not really wield much influence, though, because "recent students of landscape gardening have tended to marginalize, if not completely ignore, the possibility of Chinese influence," explains the most quoted authority today, Hugh Honour.

These recent views are of the opinion that the admiration for Chinese gardens held by the Society of Jesus was a kind of "self-defense" against the skepticism that the Vatican held about China; and in the eyes of the English, who had expelled the Catholics in the Reformation, the Jesuits under the corrupt banner of the Vatican not only suffered from a China fever, but their Popery could never have much influence in empiricist England anyway.

As for the porcelain imported from China, or the scenery on Chinese lacquer screens, these were "quite obviously fantastic and imaginary." The modeling of the European decorative arts on Chinese styles in the eighteenth century could thus be put down to what "sinologists" liked to believe. The waves of Chinese fever that have swept Europe since the writings of Marco Polo are in fact nothing more than a "Cathay" that exists only in the imagination of Europeans, or the use of things from afar to satirize what was close at hand by the Enlightenment philosophes. They bear no relationship to the real world. If this beautiful Cathay did not actually exist, then how could it possibly have influenced the English garden?

The marathon hits a dead end

Siren's view was quite different from this. He used his knowledge of China and the West, took pictures and carried out research in the gardens of both places, so as to find the original sources. His work China and the Gardens of Europe of the Eighteenth Century was published in 1950, so he did not know about the pictures of the Imperial Park in the British Museum. However, his research concluded that the art of the Chinese garden was "of fundamental importance" to the natural appearance of the eighteenth-century European garden. Unfortunately, because he knew the Chinese language, Siren could not shake off the suspicion that he suffered from "China fever." Although his official title and curatorial position were all linked to Italian art, when he died in 1966 he was still accused in his obituary of being a "sinologist."

Is the "fundamental importance" of China for the natural garden just the wishful thinking of the sinologist? There are still those who say that the English had no idea about the Chinese garden before the Yuan Mingyuan pictures reached their country. There are also those who try to prove that Burlington only bought the prints of Jehol in his later years, not when Ripa went to London.

The Britain that was on the rise to glory just at the time of the Kang Xi emperor could quite feasibly look back with admiration to the teaching of ancient Rome, and could accept the influence of French and Italian painting. Why could it not have learned a bit from China, the economic and cultural great power of that time?

It seems as though there is no end in sight to this winding marathon debate, and that it has turned into something of a blind alley. "This kind of argument already lacks any significance and is not worth quarreling over," says Chen Zhihua. In his opinion, there is no way that the interest of the Burlington circle in Chinese gardens can be denied. As for whether Burlington had really seen Ripa, it does not really matter.

In pursuit of spiritual freedom

Apart from trying to find out how old Burlington was when he bought Ripa's prints, is there another way of looking at how this kind of garden appeared in human civilization?

The discussion of English neo-classical architecture by the late German iconologist Karl Wittkower is still worth paying attention to. In his view, having been through the Glorious Revolution of 1688, England had become a democracy established on the rule of law, constitutional government and a parliamentary system. In the early years of the new century, the Burlington circle was full of optimism. Its members hoped that under the liberal spirit of the new body politic they could create a brand new national taste and style. Having always followed the lead of Europe in art, when Britain broke with the system of absolute monarchy, where could it look for its identity? What could adequately express the quest for liberty, human rights, tolerance and the literary spirit and creative energy they sought?

They looked to Republican Rome and contemporary China. As the Earl of Shaftesbury put it, after Rome lost her liberty under the Caesars, "Not a statue, not a medal, not a tolerable piece of architecture could shew itself afterwards." And the Britons of his time, he maintained, were in a position similar to that of the Romans of the Republican days, "when they wanted only repose from arms to apply themselves to the improvement of arts and studys."

The glory of ancient Rome had long departed. Yet since Confucius, the China that had such respect for art and learning was dazzling the world. And these two nations both understood how to use nature in pursuit of spiritual freedom. It is thus that Castell could point out that, "By the accounts we have," namely the descriptions of the rocks, cascades and trees in the Roman accounts he had translated for Burlington, "such are the gardens presently designed in China."

What exactly is it then that we are looking for when we take a walk in a landscape garden in the summer? British self-respect? The pride of the Chinese nation? The lyricism of the pastoral scenes of Poussin and Claude? The meaning of Temple's and Addison's "sharawadgi"? Or, despite any differences between China and the West, is it an appeal to the earliest spirit of liberalism; the beauty of art, learning, human rights, and tolerance?

The early natural garden promoted by the Burlington circle has in fact already suffered the ceaseless "improvements" of those who came later, and its original appearance is hard to find. The nineteenth-century English garden became a theme park representing the world. As for the Yuan Mingyuan that the Jesuit fathers described so movingly, can it ever get back the glory that was destroyed by the guns of the Anglo-French expeditionary force?

"The winding paths have not yet been restored," describes one scholar. "But some people suggested that a few straight and wide roads should be built for the convenience of foreign tourists." With the roads built, and the addition of electric leisure boats and a children's playground, it has become a site of bustling activity.

p.7

Similar scenes--different countries. The "Chinese Dairy" at England's Woburn Abbey (above) and a view of the Summer Palace at Peking (left). (photo courtesy of Li Chien-lang)

p.8

From straight waterways and regimented trees, as seen in the gardens of Versailles (above, photo by Li Chien-lang), to the "beautiful disorder" of the natural garden as found at England's Stourhead (right, photo courtesy of National Trust Photographic Library (NTPL)\Nick Meers)

p.10

A marked difference can be seen between the Arcadia of the eighteenth-century English imagination (left, photo courtesy of NTPL\Angelo Hornak) and its seventeenth-century predecessor (right, Ham House, London)

p.12

False hills and grottos, seen here at Painshill near London, are also elements of the English landscape garden. (photo by Hu Ke-li)

p.13

Winding rivers and strange rocks as featured in Chinese export wallpaper. (photo by Cheng Yuan-ching)

p.14

A piece of Italy for a souvenir? The Temple of Flora at England's Stourhead.

(photo courtesy of NTPL\Nick Meers)

p.15

The ruined temple of Poussin's Italian landscape paintings came to be a typical feature of the natural garden.

p.16

An unrealised design by Repton for Woburn Abbey from which the owner could compare options for "improvement." Attiret's description of the Yuan Mingyuan, "On top of a rock there is a pavilion," can be seen. (photo courtesy of Woburn Abbey)

p.18

The "garden of gardens" in Western eyes. Ruins of a Western-style building at the Summer Palace in Peking which was destroyed by the Anglo-French expeditionary force. (photo by Li Chien-lang).

p.19

Green grass, clumps of trees and imitation sheep combine to create an English Arcadia in Taiwan.

From straight waterways and regimented trees, as seen in the gardens of Versailles （above, photo by Li Chien-lang）, to the ??beautiful disorder?? of the natural garden as found at England's Stourhead （right, photo courtesy of National Trust Photographic Library （NTPL） Nick Meers）

A marked difference can be seen between the Arcadia of the eighteenth-century English imagination （left, photo courtesy of NTPL＼Angelo Hornak） and its seventeenth century predecessor （right, Ham House, London）

False hills and grottos, seen here at Painshill near London, are also elements of the English landscape garden. （photo by Hu Ke-li）

Winding rivers and strange rocks as featured in Chinese export wallpaper. （photo by Cheng Yuan-ching）

A piece of Italy for a souvenir? The Temple of Flora at England's Stourhead. （photo courtesy of NTPL Nick Meers）

The ruined temple of Poussin's Italian landscape paintings came to be a typical feature of the natural garden.

An unrealised design by Repton for Woburn Abbey from which the owner could compare options for ??improvement.?? Attiret's description of the Yuan Mingyuan, ?? On top of a rock there is a pavilion,?? can be seen. （photo courtesy of Woburn Abbey）

The ??garden of gardens?? in Western eyes. Ruins of a Western-style building at the Summer Palace in Peking which was destroyed by the Anglo-French expeditionary force. （photo by Li Chien-lang）.

Green grass, clumps of trees and imitation sheep combine to create an En glish Arcadia in Taiwan.