400 years ago, he built a "peach blossom garden"

According to media reports, "The Album of Stopping the Garden - Peach Blossom Garden in Painting" was published in full HD for the first time. Zhiyuan is the garden of the Wu family in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, which was built 400 years ago and was first discovered 70 years ago. Whether it's built or re-entered into people's sights, it's a legend.

Panoramic view of the garden

Garden

In the thirty-eighth year of the Wanli Calendar (1610), Wu Liang, who was the shaoqing of Dali Temple, was impatient with the party strife and decided to retire to the township and build a garden. He was 48 years old.

Wu Liang had planned to return to Yixing, where his ancestors were, and choose a place to build a house, but the old mother was still alive and inconvenient to travel, so he finally decided to build a garden outside the Qingshan Gate in the north of Wujin City, Changzhou.

The Wu family is a veritable cultural family. Before Wu Liang's grandfather Wu Sex led his family to move to Changzhou, his ancestors were very prestigious in Yixing. Among the Wu clan in Yixing, Wu Lun, Wu Shi and others are the pioneers of the purple sand pot culture, and the purple sand pot made by Wu Shi Shuchun is regarded as the founding father of the purple sand pot. Wu Jing and Wu Lun brothers were closely related to Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, and Wang Shizhen in the "Four Houses of Wumen", and Shen Zhou's "Poems of Other Wu Dachang" and Wen Zhengming's "Tea Poems Sent by Wu Daben in the Night Drinking Spring Test Yixing" were written to them. Dong Qichang, Hou Fangyu, Gao Panlong and other celebrities also sat down for the Wu family. Wu Shi's old residence Nanmu Hall "Yunqi Lou" is a plaque inscribed by Dong Qichang, and the "Fuchun Mountain Residence Map" has also been included in the Wu family.

In the fourteenth year of Jiajing (1535), Wu Shi's descendant Wu Sex led his family to move from Yixing to The Changzhou capital city of Shimaqiao to live. Since then, the Wu family has spread its branches and leaves in Changzhou. Wu Huan, the son of Wu Zuguang, treasures the "Genealogy of the Wu Clan of Beiqu", which mentions that Wu Ying, Wu Zuguang, and Wu Guanzhong all came from this family.

Wu Liang was the second son of Wu Sex, who entered the imperial examination in the twenty-ninth year of the Wanli Calendar (1601), and was a ten-year eunuch who retired from the rapids. He wanted to build a manor and seek a peaceful and quiet peach blossom garden. His grandfather and father had done this before. Wu Liang's father, Wu Zhongxing, was a student of Zhang Juzheng and was the official in charge of the Hanlin Academy; Wu Liang's grandfather, Wu Liang,Wu Sexguan Bai ShangbaoSicheng ,also known as the emperor's palm seal official.

From the Jiajing and Longqing eras of the Ming Dynasty, the economy was rich, "there were many large mansions", and the construction was "exquisite". Frustrated literati tried to build their favorite gardens to soothe their inner anxiety and disgust in the harsh political environment.

At that time, Wang Shizhen's "Yishan Garden" was the leader in the garden, and Wu Liang asked Zhou Tingce, the son of Zhou Bingzhong, one of the "Four Great Masters of The Ming Dynasty Garden", to ask him to build a garden with "Yishan Garden" as a benchmark, and he also gave this garden a name - ZhiYuan.

This is not the first garden made by Wu Liang. Previously, he had built the family's small garden, White Crane Garden, Jia Shu Garden and other gardens. Among his seven brothers, the fourth brother Wu Xuan built the Dongdi Garden in the east of Changzhou City, which was built by the gardener Ji Cheng; the third brother Wu Yi built the "Luofu Garden" in the east of Qingshan Bridge, which did not fall until the middle of the Qing Dynasty; and the sixth brother Wu Yan built the Qing Dynasty. Jia shu Yuan, on the other hand, was the residence of Wu Liang's father, across the water from the garden he wanted to build.

In 1624, Wu Liang, who had lived a leisurely literary life for more than ten years in the Garden, died. In 1627, after the second son Wu Rousi's filial piety expired, he was going to Kaifeng Xiangfuzhi County to find a painter to paint the Garden.

He found Zhang Hong. Zhang Hong, who lived in Hengxi Town, thirteen miles southwest of Suzhou, had sought fame but had not yet obtained it, and was forced to turn to painting under pressure. His family depended on one of his paintbrushes to survive. Zhang Hong once went to Nanjing, and Nanjing was the gathering place of missionaries at that time, after European paintings entered Nanjing, the technology and style of painting different from Chinese painting had attracted the attention of the Chinese people, and of course attracted Zhang Hong's attention.

Influenced by Western painting, which is more focused on "the scene of the heart" in contrast to traditional literati painting, Zhang Hong's paintings have a strong realistic style, and "accurate reproduction" has never been a problem under his pen. High-point perspective and chiaroscuro processing give his picture a sense of space that is different from traditional Chinese painting.

Wu Rousi hopes that the gardens and ancestral properties painstakingly managed by his fathers can be inherited and continued. The 20 albums that Zhang Hong painted for him are naturally regarded as the glory of the family. However, at some point, the Garden was abandoned, either because of the fall of the family road, or because of the flood, and by the time of the Daoguang, no one could say its location clearly. Zhang Hong's paintings, on the other hand, survived and crossed the ocean to the United States, quietly waiting for a man named Gao Juhan.

True stops

Reconstruction

Born in California in 1926, Gao Juhan was exposed to oriental art in Japan as a U.S. soldier during World War II, and after World War II, he returned to the United States, entered the university, and began to study ancient Chinese art.

In the early 1950s, Gao Juhan, a young student, saw a garden atlas in the storeroom of a museum in the United States. But at the time, his focus was still on Chinese literati paintings, and the album did not attract his attention.

By the 1970s, Gao Juhan had his own unique view of Chinese painting in the late Ming Dynasty. In His Book: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting, he places Zhang Hong in such a prominent position as the first chapter.

From the 1970s onwards, Gao Juhan began to study the Atlas of The Garden. He has always had a question, this set of albums based on the field, where is the field in China?

In 1978, landscaper Chen Congzhou visited the United States to help the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York build a Chinese garden, Ming Xuan. When meeting chen congzhou, Gao Juhan and Chen Congzhou discussed this set of albums. The 14 copies of the garden that he gave to Chen Congzhou later appeared in the book "Garden Synthesis" edited by Chen Congzhou.

In 2010, the puzzle of "where is the Stop Garden" was finally solved — that year, Cao Xun, a professor in the Department of Architecture at Beijing Jianzhu University, discovered in the National Library a set of ancient books called "The Collection of Stop Garden", which is an isolated book in The Sea, with a total of more than 800 pages, including a bunch of "Garden Residence Poems" and a 3,000-word "Stop Garden". Cao Xun, who was familiar with Chinese gardens, found that after reading the poem, he found that the content it depicted corresponded exactly to the stop garden map published in Chen Congzhou's "Garden Synthesis". He thus concluded that Zhiyuan was not a "castle in the air" in the literati's paintings, but that it existed in Changzhou, Jiangsu, the hometown of Wu Liang, the author of "Zhiyuan Collection".

Cao Xun asked Huang Xiao and Liu Shanshan, phD students in the Department of Architecture of Tsinghua University, to contact Gao Juhan by email, and Gao Juhan was very surprised when he learned about it.

Comparing the text and pictures, more historical details of the garden have surfaced.

According to Wu Liang, the garden covers an area of more than 50 acres, with four-tenths of it being water, three-tenths being earth and stone, two-tenths being a house, and the other one giving bamboo and trees. Such a proportion is naturally different from Wang Shizhen's "soil and stone account for four-tenths" of the mountain garden. However, there is no shortage of imitations, and the scenery of the garden: Gulian Stone, Crab Peak, Zhijin Bridge, Furong Pond, etc., are all inherited from the Kaishan Garden.

But the stop garden is more of its uniqueness, the stop garden focuses on "rational water", the ponds and swamps in the park are connected, the streams are longitudinal, and the forest water is deep. In the garden, there are flowers and grasses, there are mountain stones and clear ponds, Wu Liang "when the elk swim with it", one of his small Jai gates on the collection of Tang Sentence Yun: when the tree is deep, see the deer, and the snake is hanging next to the tree. "See the deer when the tree is deep", 400 years later, it is still a popular poem.

Wu Liang also took elegant names for the scenery of the garden, such as Shui Zhou Tang, "there are ponds under the mountain, and all four are water rings", so he took the name of "Water Zhou" in "Chu Sao", "On the Bird Ci Xi House, under the Shui Zhou Xi Tang"; then rulai Qingmen, "Wuyi Nameless Mountain, Fangmao, Anyang, Xiaoshan Dongzhi, Appropriate Zimen, Sunny and Beautiful, Faint as If Sending Qinglai", take Wang Anshi's "Shuhu Yin Mr. Wall" sentence "A water protection field will be green, and two mountains will send Qinglai".

Water Week Hall

Wu Liang's favorites are probably the three churches: True Stop, Sitting Stop, and Clear Stop. When he arrived at this place, the beauty of this garden was gone, and the work of building his own garden was also completed, and the view of the garden was no better than this garden, so he took "stop" as the name of the garden (until the victory of my garden is poor, I am the end of the garden, and the view of the garden is stopped, because the name of "stop" is my garden).

Of course, this "stop" word has a deeper meaning. Tao Yuanming has a poem to stop drinking: "The beginning of the consciousness is good, and the real end of the present dynasty."

Traditional literati loved Tao Yuanming, especially frustrated literati. They were impressed by Tao Yuanming's charm. Tao Yuanming became a symbol of "cain" in the spiritual genealogy of the scholars. Wu Liang is no exception. The garden he built was planted with willow trees and lone pines, echoing Tao Yuanming's "Biography of Mr. Wuliu" and "Return to Xi Ci".

The design ideas of "hundreds of south tree peaches, flowers are colorful, that is, looking far away and full of my eyes", and the design idea of "Zhongyuan Qingjin" in the garden are also based on Tao Yuanming's "Peach Blossom Origin".

Wu Liang built the Stop Garden, outside the Qingshan Gate in Changzhou, and now north of Guanzhong Middle Road in Changzhou City. Here the river is surrounded, the fields are full of fields, "one intention to eat, to be hidden in the city", if you do not use a boat, you have to go around three miles to reach, so although it is close to the city, it is rarely visited.

In the poem "Title Stop Garden", Wu Liang used Tao Yuanming's verses to collect two poems for the Zhen Zhi Tang, including a sentence cloud: Mistakenly falling into the dust net, the Sutra of Ten Years. This "ten years" refers to the ten years of his eunuch sea ups and downs. As for his own retreat life, he said in the poem: "From now on, I will regret it in recent days" and "My life will return to rest, and this dynasty will really stop." When the end stops, this more or less shows Wu Liang's determination to retire.

The original site of the park has also been found, and most of the sites are now commercial and residential areas, and it is no longer possible to rebuild the park on the old site. In 2015, the China Garden Museum wanted to build an ancient garden model for exhibition purposes. They made a fine carving model based on the atlas of the Garden, which was made by Kan Sanxi, the inheritor of the intangible cultural heritage skills and the master of micro-carving, to reproduce this historical garden to the greatest extent.

Yangzi Evening News/Purple Cow News reporter Zang Lei

Resources:

Immortal Lin Quan: Ancient Chinese Garden Painting, Gao Juhan, Huang Xiao, Liu Shanshan, Sanlian Bookstore Publishing House, 2012.8;

Imposing: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting, Gao Juhan, Sanlian Bookstore Publishing House, 2009.8;

Zhang Hong's Analysis of the Mentality and Landscape Mapping of the Literati in the Volume of "Stop Garden Map", Wang Ruixia, Art and Design, 2019.3;

Painting Reproduction and Gardening Thought, Gu Zhizhi, Art and Design, 2015.5. wait.