In the 17th and 18th centuries, Europeans were fascinated by “Chinese gardens”. Chinese gardens have inspired European gardens to turn away from their classical geometrical layout to a modern and natural appearance. Observing these so-called Chinese gardens or Chinese elements in Europe more closely, we shall discover that they were so diverse that it’s almost pointless to discuss the concept of a Chinese garden without referring to specific examples. In both this lecture and the following lecture, we shall focus on the British royal architect Sir William Chambers’ “Dissertation on Oriental Gardening”, as a case study. The Dissertation helps us to explore how the Chinese garden was appropriated into Chambers’ landscape theory with the aim of moulding British moral emotions, in particular, their moral fear and reverence. The new concept of “entangled landscapes” will guide our exploration of the “Chinese garden”. We shall show, how the royal architect’s borrowing of Chinese garden images is a complex process of appropriation and negotiation, a process which is entangled within the social and political discourses of building the British Empire. In today’s lecture, we shall focus on the historical background to Chambers’ writing of the Dissertation. In the following lecture, we shall examine the application of Chambers’ theory in Kew Gardens. Chambers was born into a Scots family in Gothenburg, Sweden. Through his family connections with the Swedish East India Company, the young Chambers had the opportunity to travel to China twice in the 1740s. The experience of journeying to China, still rare for the contemporary European elite, earned him a reputation as an amateur sinologist and connected him with renowned sinologists, such as the Swedish diplomat and writer Carl Fredrik Scheffer and later with the French writer and philosopher Voltaire. Chambers’ observations on Chinese architecture also granted him an advantageous link to the Hanoverian royalty in England. Frederick, Prince of Wales, commissioned Chambers to design the House of Confucius at Kew Gardens in 1749. Later, following his appointment as architectural tutor to Frederick’s son, Chambers published “Designs of Chinese Buildings”, in which he deliberately differentiated his own approach from the popular commercial “halfpennies”. Or in his own words, his primary concern was to “put a stop to the extravagancies that daily appear under the name of the Chinese.“ Between 1757 and 1763, Chambers redesigned the Kew Gardens in a picturesque manner, in which an eleven-story Chinese pagoda was erected, along with twenty odd other ornamental buildings, including a ruinous Roman arch. In 1772, Chambers’ controversial “Dissertation on Oriental Gardening” was published in London. In this book, Chambers was critical of the “natural” style of English gardening, which he said was monotonous and insipid. This natural style of gardening was favored by Lancelot Brown, who had the nickname “Capability” Brown. Chambers that was rather in favor of Chinese gardens, which he said consisted of three scenes or types of landscapes: “the pleasing”, “the terrible”, and “the surprising”. These three scenes included respectively, dancing concubines, howling wolves, and dragons in dark passages. Many readers dismissed those Chinese scenes as mere romantic fancy. Some considered Chambers’ attack on English gardening as being out of his jealousy of his rival garden designer Capability Brown. Others took Chambers’ theory seriously. The conservative politician and a fettig theorist, Edmund Burke, supported Chambers and even called himself a “Chamberist”. As the art historian Eileen Harris points out, Chambers’ scenes indeed, correspond with Burke’s theory of the beautiful and sublime, as described in his “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful”. As scholars suggest, the ideas described in Burke’s treatise aligned with the classical rhetoric tradition and the Scottish Enlightenment. They have a clear moral and sociopolitical purpose: to identify the principles of how objects of the sublime and the beautiful affect human emotions. They subsequently use these emotions to prompt actions that support society, politics, and religion. One problem in 18th century British society was the abuse of the idea of liberty. On the one hand, English constitutional liberty, or Whig liberty, was exploited by English urban radicals and jingoists. Exalting the excellence of their constitution, the English tended to dismiss other political systems, such as absolute monarchy, and slavery. Scots, for example, who were supporters of the Stuart dynasty, friends of France, and believers in the Catholic faith were despised by the English as being subservient. Their doctrines were considered as diametrically opposite to the spirit of the English Constitution. In the 1760s to 70s, anti-Scottish feelings prevailed in the streets of London. George the Third’s Scottish minister, Lord Bute, was frequently attacked by the mob, threatened with assassination, and vilified in pamphlets and prints. George the Third, himself, was accused of favoritism and pursuing unconstitutional prerogative. Though the king, he was personally insulted. A protégé of Bute and a favorite of the king, Chambers was deeply cautious of the fanaticism of the excessive liberty of English radicals. In his view, the English radicals were like children spoiled with too great indulgence: they lacked the necessary moderation and self-restraint. There cannot be happiness in society, Chambers believed, where liberty was exercised without restraint. On the other hand, the English authority also abused liberty. The Whig government, under progressive politicians such as George Grenville and Lord North, was governed by arrogant and mechanical principles without any respect for classical natural law, tradition, customs, and circumstances. The Stamp Act of 1765, which imposed direct taxation on the British colonies in America and provoked strong protests is one such example. For Burke, the parliament in exercising their abstract right to tax the colonies did not realize that such a policy must suit the circumstances. In other words, people must be governed in a manner suitable to their character. Americans were not used to being taxed and thus the imposition of such a tax would inevitably lead to war. For Chambers, both urban radicalism and the rationalist arrogance, both standing from a lack of moral fear and overconfidence in abstract principles, may be corrected through environmental design, which he believed, impacted on the human emotions. Just as Burke, for his sources of terror, cited widely from biblical, classical, and colonial literature, and also drew upon examples in nature to train one’s religious and the moral sensibilities, so Chambers explored corresponding architectural and landscape expressions to create landscape scenes that were capable of provoking fear and reverence. To some extent, it is correct to say that in many of these scenes of “the terrible” and “the surprising” in the Dissertation, the use of “the Chinese” was a mask for scenes in the European cultural tradition. What cannot be ignored, however, is that Chinese gardens or landscape devices in their own right struck the imagination over European spectators with the oriental visual effects of art imitating nature, such as rockeries, winding paths, and concealment. For European radical conservatives, these awe-provoking visual effects of art imitating nature formed a balance to the increasingly dominant image of nature being just pleasing scenes or mechanical serpentine patterns, as represented in many of Capability Brown’s designs. Instead, Chambers’ awe-provoking effects may help to reassert nature as God and classical natural law, which may operate as a constraint on man’s excessive liberty or his overconfidence in abstract reasoning. Thus, contributing not only to moderating an individual’s emotions, but also ensuring social stability, this socio-political indication may be further enhanced by the then European perception of Chinese government, and the morals as being in the cold with classical natural law. A message prevalent in many European Sinological publications at the time.
