This article was published in Sanlian Life Weekly, No. 5-6, 2020, and the original title was "Coupling Garden: Where You Live is What You Love", which is strictly prohibited from being reprinted privately, and infringement must be investigated
The name "Coupling Garden" is intended to be coupled, that is, two people ploughing together, which also has the meaning of good couple Tiancheng. From the beginning of the name, this garden is a testimony of love.
Text/Xue Qian
Coupling Garden
The 19th day of the twelfth month of the lunar calendar is the birthday of Su Dongpo, and the famous people of Suzhou in the late Qing Dynasty admired this person, and every time on this day, they would hold a poetry meeting to commemorate Su Shi, and also on this reason, they gathered together to drink and write poetry, and enjoy the elegance and interest of the literati. Usually, this is a male gathering, wu yun, Gu Wenbin, Shen Bingcheng, Wu Dazheng and other collectors and calligraphers who love calligraphy and painting jinshi will attend, and Shen Bingcheng's wife, Yan Yonghua, is the only woman among them.
Shen Bingcheng is a native of Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, and has hardly left the Jiangnan area, whether for officials or for life. In the sixth year of Qing Xianfeng (1856), Shen Bingcheng became a jinshi and embarked on a career path, and then experienced the era of Tongzhi and Guangxu successively, and various social turmoil and diplomatic humiliations in the last years of the Qing Dynasty occurred around him. The year of his death, China and Japan signed the Treaty of Maguan in 1895.
In his later years, Shen Bingcheng and his wife Yan Yonghua lived in the Suzhou Coupling Garden for 8 years, from the construction of the garden to the pavilions and rockeries and grass and trees in the garden, all of which are closely related to the avant-garde and classical love of the late Qing Dynasty.
The coupling garden is not far from the famous Pingjiang Road, next to the outer city river of old Suzhou, formerly known as the Garden, built during the Qing Yongzheng Period, the name of the garden is taken from Tao Yuanming's "Return to xi ci" in the "Garden Day Wadding into Fun". In the thirteenth year of Tongzhi (1874), Shen Bingcheng bought the old site of the garden, leaving only the Huangshi rockery in the garden, and he hired the painter Gu Hu to redesign the design on the base site.
Since the late Ming Dynasty, the landscape arrangement of the garden has been regarded as an important artistic act, the so-called "master has no vulgar state, and the garden is built to see the heart of the text". This attitude continued into the Qing Dynasty, which had a great influence on the appreciation and construction of gardens, and "Wenxin" became a core element of garden value. How to show the garden owners' respective "literary hearts" is also a secret contest between literati and elegant interests.
Suzhou's gardens are mostly front and back garden, while the coupling garden is a house and two gardens, the middle courtyard is the owner's living area, there is a garden in the east and west, from the top view, it is almost the central axis symmetry pattern, which is an isolated case in many gardens in Suzhou. Shen Bingcheng took the image of the Southern Song Dynasty poet Dai Retro "Early Summer Tour to Zhang Garden" that "the East Garden carries wine and the West Garden is drunk", and after decades of official ups and downs, he prefers to spend the rest of his retreat life with his family in this garden.
Entering the garden, there is a sense of retreat everywhere. Through the entrance hall, a plaque hangs on the main hall of the car hall - "Kaiyin Double Mountain", and the left and right pillars of the yanglian are written with a seal "Hanging out of the city, as if between mountains and rivers". Yan Yonghua was born in Tongxiang, Zhejiang Province, was a famous female lyricist and painter in the late Qing Dynasty, with high poetry attainments, and because of his outstanding talent, he could become a member of the Suzhou Yashi gathering, of course, because of the high social status of her husband Shen Bingcheng, he had a lot of prestige in Suzhou. In any case, the four words "Kaiyin Shuangshan" come from Yan Yonghua's sentence "Kaiyin Shuangshan, One Gap Can Be Trusted", and the couple also collected their years of joint poetry into a book, called "Flounder Lu Lian yin collection".
The end of the Qing Dynasty was the last peak of gardening in Suzhou. When the Qing Dynasty was in jeopardy, the invasion of external powers, the internal concerns about social corruption and cultural despotism, and the chaos in the official field made some literati officials frustrated and powerless, so they had to resign their official duties and hide in the garden. There are also some literati who are reluctant to leave the army and are attached to the landscape and forest springs. They all have common goodwill, and they have formed a special circle of literati in suzhou. Wu Yun's Tingfeng Garden, Shen Bingcheng's Coupling Garden, Li Hongyi's Master of Nets Garden, Gu Wenbin's Yi Garden, Yu Fan's Qu Garden, Sheng Kang's Lingering Garden, and Zhang Zhiwan's Humble Administrator's Garden were all built or rebuilt during this period. Some of them also held a "Wumen Zhenzhi Meeting" following the example of the Tang and Song dynasties, and regularly gathered feasts and visits in their private gardens and gardens to taste poetry and paintings. Such a life of retreat sounds leisurely, but it is not difficult to imagine that in the face of the turbulent and chaotic situation of the home country, there are unspeakable pains.
Shen Bingcheng was also a man with a lot of career, who had been promoted all the way to Susong Taidao, and then to the governor of Guangxi and Anhui, and the governor of Liangjiang, but he was eventually dismissed from office and retired to Suzhou. Unlike the mercurial literati, Shen Bingcheng had both the traditional literati and doctor's side, and at the same time an open-minded and politically responsible person, and when he was serving as Su Songtai in Shanghai, he did a lot of things to play with foreigners.
Outside the official scene, Shen Bingcheng's family life was also quite bumpy, and the first two wives died early until he met his third wife, Yan Yonghua. When he married Shen Bingcheng, Yan Yonghua was 29 years old and the two spent 24 years together. Her brother Yan Jisheng commented on her: "Among the three sisters, the sister (Yan Yonghua) is the most sensitive and understands the most. He also praised his sister's poetic talent many times, and was the best among the women at that time. Shen Bingcheng and Yan Yonghua's love begins with poetry. During the xianfeng gengshen and xin you years (1860-1861), Yan Jisheng and Shen Bingcheng lived together in Beijing for official positions, and once Yan Yonghua sent four pictures of flower and bird albums to his brother, and there were six chapters of inscription poems.
The overall design of the coupling garden is almost symmetrical from east to west, balanced left and right, and the symmetry of the pattern means spiritual reciprocity in a sense. The West Garden is dominated by the hostess Yan Yonghua, sitting in the old house of the central building weaving curtain, opening the window to the south is a lake stone rockery, the mountain stone is empty and flexible, pointing to the feminine and delicate beauty of the woman; while the East Garden is dominated by the male owner Shen Bingcheng, the garden retains the Yellowstone rockery left by the former owner, tough and tough. Between the east and west gardens is the residence, and the cloister connects the gardens on both sides, and outside the space where they live together, the male and female owners have their own piece of the world.
In the backyard of the West Garden, the Flounder Pavilion seems to avoid the sight of tourists and quietly guards there, unless specifically to find it, and few tourists will come here today. However, at the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Flounder Yanlou was a private library building with the same name as the GuoyunLou, and the collection of Shen Bingcheng and Yan Yonghua occupied a place in the history of collection.
Shen Bingcheng's collection of gold stones, calligraphy and paintings, classics are exquisite, the number of books in the collection exceeds 10,000 volumes, and most of them are precious classics such as Song Ben, and the Shanghai Museum has a collection of "Cursive Thousand Characters" by Gao Xian, one of the three major grass saints of the Tang Dynasty, on which there is a stamp of "The Most Precious Treasure of the Coupling Garden". When Shen Bingcheng's friend Li Hongyi died, many of the collections of the Master of Nets Garden were transferred to the Flounder Building in the Coupling Garden, which is also the library building shared by shen and his wife, the so-called "ten thousand volumes of books passed down from generation to generation, and the two chicks play with the old Huaikuan".
The famous calligrapher and painter Wu Changshuo had a very good relationship with Shen Bingcheng, and he wrote a "Brief Biography of Shen Bingcheng" in the "Stone Intersection", and many later studies on Shen Bingcheng were based on this. One paragraph writes about the origin of the Flounder Yanlou - Shen Bingcheng likes to hide the Yan, once got a piece of Fenyang stone in Beijing, cut open the stone and found that the cross-section of the pattern is very similar to the shape of a fish, so he made two bricks, and his wife Yan Yonghua used one piece each, named Flounder Yan. The so-called "flounder" actually refers to the flounder on the same side of the eyes, both eyes grow on the left side called "turbot", both on the right side is called "flounder". Wu Changshuo said that Yan Yonghua "worked on poetry and painting, and the qin was very dedicated", and that Shen Bingcheng and Shen Bingcheng often chanted poems together, and these two flounder stones were the relics between them. At that time, the owner of another garden, Yu Fan, learned that they had made two brick platforms, and he also went to see it on purpose, and gave a poem: "He Nian East Sea fish, turned into a fist stone." Heaven is a virtuous Liang Meng, producing this double combination. ”
The various collections of gold stones, calligraphy and paintings, ancient books and other collections in the Flounder Yan Building are gathered together, hidden in the quiet and quiet garden, and together with the winding path mountain stones, they constitute the peach blossom source of their couple's life. Saying that it is a garden, it is actually a home, and as the common residence of Shen Bingcheng and Yan Yonghua, the coupling garden not only carries the rich material world, but also the spiritual habitat. Nowadays, when we look at the garden, we will observe through various angles such as the art of gardening and the realm of gardening, but in fact, we are just visiting the homes of these ancients. Trying to experience the love and warmth of home may be another dimension of viewing the garden.
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