Original author: Cao Lindi
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In Chinese gardens, there is a pattern that can be seen everywhere: bats are inlaid on the doors and windows of the garden, bats are laid on the ground, bats are carved in relief of mountain flowers, bats are carved on furniture, and bats are also painted with ancient porcelain. This image, which is regarded as a "vampire incarnation" in the West, was beloved in ancient China and was deeply engraved in traditional culture. To this day, we continue to inherit the views of our ancestors, viewing bats as symbols of happiness, longevity, benevolence and elegance, and using rich empathic imagination and bold deformation techniques to spread them throughout Chinese gardens.
Top: Bat plaque (Summer Palace) Bottom: Bat decoration (Kunqu Tangdan)
In Beijing, there is a huge banner on the Renshou Hall of the Summer Palace with more than 200 birthday characters, a hundred bats symbolizing "Fu", and a plaque "Shouxie Renfu". King Gong's Mansion has a bat-shaped hall, which is called the bat hall, and the repair pool is bat-shaped called a bat pool. In the mountains southwest of the Palace Palace's Royal Garden, there is also a large bat pattern embedded with terrain that is two meters long and one meter wide. In Suzhou, Dongshan Chun is also decorated with copper bats on the threshold of the hall, which means "stepping on the blessed land", and the doorknobs on it are also bat-shaped, symbolizing "blessed to reach out".
Top: Pedal Blessed Land (Spring in the Building) Right: Blessed Hands (Door Knocker)
Such a cultural outlook is not uncommon in the history of world civilization. The primitive ancestors in many areas worshipped animals as well as voice, believing that speech had an extraordinary magic power, which could enslave all things, talk to gods and monsters, and pray for blessings to dispel evil spirits, resulting in the emergence of two basic cultural phenomena of "language witchcraft" and "language taboo".
So in ancient Chinese, the "bat" of the bat became a symbol of blessing because it was the same as "fu", and formed a variety of combination patterns. Five bats surround a "Shou" character called "Five Blessings and Shou". The combination of bat and copper coin is called "Fortune in Sight". The bat combines mountain rocks and waves and is named "Fukuyama Shouhai". The bat mouth is long, accompanied by auspicious clouds, symbolizing "good fortune is long". The bat latches on to two ancient money, birthday stars, and birthday peaches, which means "happiness and life". The bat flies above the doll's head, which means "blessing from the sky". Bats are accompanied by Shou Peach and Ganoderma lucidum, and the homonym "blessing to the soul".
Top: Happiness in front of you, satisfactory (Yi Yuan) Middle: Fu Shou Shuangquan (Bangyan Mansion) Bottom: Five Blessings (Chen Yushi Garden)
In addition to being a symbol of blessing, the bat image also derives other auspicious meanings, such as Jin Cui Leopard's "Ancient and Modern Note, Fish and Insects": "Bat, a fairy mouse, a flying squirrel." Five hundred years old is white and heavy, and the set is hanging head, so it is called upside down, the god of food. Jin Gehong "Holding Puzi": "Chitose bats, the color is like snow, the set is upside down, and the brain is heavy." This thing is obtained and the yin is dry and obeyed, and it makes people live long." The bat is busy, and if it is not careful, it becomes the hope of "immortality".
Happy High Life (Master of Nets Garden)
Fairy rats are hard to find, and "bat fans" are easy to find. Bat fan is a folding fan, legend has it that it was founded when the Japanese Shingong Empress, she saw the bat wings open and close the beginning of the fan, because it was invented to imitate bats, so it is called "bat fan". Bat fans were introduced to China during the Northern Song Dynasty, and their production became more and more exquisite, mostly steamed bamboo as a bone and sandwiched with ayara. The noble family or ivory as bone, decorated with gold and silver, was expensive, and only the rich and nobles could afford it. The Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty liked to fold the fan to roll comfortably and conveniently, and the upward and downward effects originated from the bat-shaped folding fan so it was universal in the world.
Folding fan paving (good deeds)
Since then, the folding fan has completely entered the art world and aesthetic vision of Shi Dafu, and merged with the elegance of Shi Dafu, and the literati have swiped Han ink on the folding fan, sent their feelings, and fan art has become an art world on the literati side. At the same time, the image of the bat fan is also materialized as a part of the garden architectural design, including folding fan pavilions, fan halls, convenient windows, folding fan-shaped hole windows, folding fan paving patterns, folding fan-shaped book strip stones, fan-shaped furniture, etc.
Happiness and Goodness (Tsuruen)
"Fan Pavilion" (or folding fan pavilion), as a small piece of Chinese garden architecture, is mostly placed at the corner of the corridor or at the turn of the landscape and water, with a flexible shape, ingenious and elegant. Suzhou Lion Forest fan pavilion, located in the west and south of the climbing corridor corner, set the pavilion cut into a circle, the east of the pavilion leaves a small space, plantains, bamboo, summer evening, can accept the cool breeze from the east, west, north three sides, block the south warm wind, because of the corridor and the wall return wind, the fan pavilion in the wind sound, the pavilion name and pavilion scenery are inextricably linked, Ruoden Pavilion touching the piano, banana sound and song, is like heaven and earth, is really a wonderful composition.
Fan Pavilion (Lion Forest)
The "Who to Sit With Xuan" fan pavilion in Suzhou's Humble Administrator's Garden, the Kasa pavilion on the hill behind the pavilion is just embedded at the bottom of the fan surface, becoming a fan handle, the entire roof is like an inverted folding fan, and the cave windows and stone tables in the pavilion are fan-shaped, and the whole shape is light and elegant. According to people familiar with the inside affairs of the owner, the owner surnamed Zhang started his family by painting fans and selling folding fans, so he specially built a pavilion at the corner of this landscape to show nostalgia, to show that he did not forget the foundation of his family.
Fantei (With whom to sit in the Humble Administrator's Garden)
The fan pavilion in Beijing's royal garden flaunts learning from the ancient Confucian Saint Emperor Shun, fanning the emperor's grace, and showing compassion for the people. The fan-faced pavilion in Beihai took the legend of "Yu Shun as a five-stringed piano, singing "South Wind", and named the pavilion "Yannan Fumi". The front wall of the pavilion is recessed, just like the Chinese character "wind", and the overall viewing pavilion is like a folding fan. In front of the pavilion is a bluestone floor shaped like the skeleton of a folding fan.
The Beihai Fan Pavilion extends to the south
In addition, in the small garden west of the Summer Palace Le Shou Hall, there is also a fan-faced hall called "Yang Ren Feng", and the ground in front of the hall is made of white jade to form a fan bone shape; The recessed fan wall resembles the "few" of the Chinese character for "wind", and the architectural ingenuity is amazing. This rather chic courtyard flaunts the meaning of "good broadcasting and bridging the six combinations".
Summer Palace Fan Hall "Yang Ren Wind"
The image of the bat fan is also objectified as a "casual window" in Chinese gardens, created by Li Yu, a literati in the Qing Dynasty. Among them, the most elegant is the "lake boat" window - sitting in it, the lake and mountains on both sides, the temple and the floating slaughter, the cloud smoke and bamboo trees, as well as the woodcutters and drunken wandering girls, even people and horses into the noodles, as my natural pictures. And it changes from time to time, not in a certain shape. Within a day, millions of beautiful mountains and waters appeared, and they were always collected. Not only to entertain yourself, but also to entertain others.
Top: Hetang Happiness (West Park) Bottom: Happiness and Wealth (Lion Forest)
Looking inside and out, it is a landscape with a face; And from the outside, he is also a fan-headed figure. Of course, if the viewer "has a real leisure and a pair of discerning eyes", "then everything that passes by the eye is a picture, and the sound in the ear is nothing more than poetry", and obtains endless aesthetic pleasure. Many fan-shaped holes and leaky windows in the garden can be regarded as the same kind of casual windows.
Top: Happiness Ruyi (Yiyuan) Bottom: Happiness Ruyi (Humble Administrator's Garden)
Only then did we discover how deeply rooted the bat image was in our garden culture, becoming a symbol of good life, benevolence, elegance and other beautiful meanings, and objectifying as a part of garden life. It was not until the outbreak of the epidemic that the traditional meaning of the past bat image took an interesting turn in the contemporary context, and became an association between disease and death.
Fortune in front of you (Lingering Garden)
The bat is no longer busy, it has become the object of calls for "extermination", although it plays a very important role in the ecosystem, such as pest control, seeding and pollination. And for us who love garden culture, when we walk into the garden again and see the image of bats, what kind of cultural perception will we have?
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