The allegations of Chinese superiority without Jesus did not sit well with those who believed Jesus was the one and only Way. That Jesuits were running around China in local robes and allowing tablets dedicated to Shang Ti (highest god) in Catholic churches did not help matters any. The Jesuits were up to their usual tricks: they enticed the Chinese with Western science and once they were hooked on it, out came the Holy Bible - important Chinese Confucians became Catholics. There were arguments over whether or not the alleged Chinese one-god was the same as the Christian one-god. The Confucian rites were controversial; the Jesuits argued they were not religious rites but were simply civil ceremonies showing respect for the dead; the Pope begged to differ; the Emperor of China was angered and issued a decree; the Jesuits were suppressed in Europe; and so on.

We are not surprised Europeans were so enthusiastic about the Chinese political order, given their own record of European disorder. We might imagine that the imperial Chinese order of square Earth in harmony with round Heaven would be quite attractive to Europeans. But that is not quite so, for Europeans were breaking out of their own square-thinking and archaic molds, hence they turned to the popular conception of the Chinese garden as an asymmetric, romantic work of art resembling wild nature, to support their inclinations. The key word was Sharawadgi, or "Chinese want of symmetry". Hence Sinomania was closed linked with the Romantic and Gothic interest.

Many of the thinkers who expounded most eloquently on the Chinese Garden had never seen a Chinese garden in China and were speculating on second-hand reports. Sir William Chambers had visited China in his youth; he admitted that his aesthetic principles - which were opposed to those of others who reasoned on what is really beautiful - were based on a fictitious or ideal Chinese Garden. His descriptions are definitely Gothic: sublime combinations of the natural and supernatural in large-scale parks replete with ruins evoking feelings of horror, terror, melancholy. The Gothic Chinese gardener is a painter and poet who does not imitate nature - its limited materials and disposition is relatively boring - but assists nature by making certain artistic variations emphasize or de-emphasize this and exaggerate that, and so forth. Therefore Chambers contradicted the popular notion of nature as "wild", and presented the artist as a creator in his own right. Man, then, is the wild one juxtaposed to physical nature; his wildness is contrived. Thus the artist returns, like Rousseau, to an ideal, lost Nature, to an illusion of his own making, where he retreats from the discontents of civilization but is not killed and eaten by a wild animal.

But what in China was a Chinese Garden really like in ancient times? No doubt it resembled nature including human nature. Regular nature has it irregularities which can be uncertainly predicted with theories of probablity, at least where big numbers are involved. Individuals do not "obey the law of averages", notwithstanding the fool who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge on New Year's Eve because the law of averages was one shy of the thirty-nine jumpers per annum over the last twenty years.There is a degree of freedom within every order including human order which takes its cues from the rest of nature. The large-scale public projects of the imperial regime in China inclined to regularity, symmetry, predictability. But its gardens and palaces did not lack variety. We should recall here the inluence of the wizards and Taoists, who had their origins in the forests and wilds, on the "superstitious" emperors. Once at court the wise men may have become squares and taken up geometry in order to succeed; never mind, the Tao cannot be contained.

As for the individual who was sick and tired of feudal and imperial society, he had his retreat into the Classical Private Chinese Garden, a virtual Utopia, "another Heaven and Earth within a small pot." His fool's garden was itself a poem and painting. And within this garden we find vegetation, paintings and poetry throughout; perhaps a poem about a lotus flower in mud, a metaphor for the virtuous gardener in dirty society.

The Son of Heaven would have one Heaven on Earth, but earthlings want their own heavens too. The Chinese are only human. We all have much to learn from one another - and from the Dragon.

Notes:

While discussing the discovery of binary arithmatic by Fu-Hsi (a primeval emperor whom we shall discuss elsewhere) Liebniz said, "It is indeed apparent that if we Europeans were well enough informed of Chinese literature, then, with the aid of logic, critical thinking, mathematics and our manner of expressing thought - more exacting than theirs - we could uncover in the Chinese writings of the remotest antiquity many things unknown to modern Chinese and even to other commentators thought to be classical." (Ching) Leibniz believed Europeans to be superior to the Chinese in the abstract sciences, while, on the other hand, the Chinese excelled in the practical philosophy of civil life: "Be it said with almost shame - we are beaten by them... in the principles of Ethics and Politics. For it is impossible to describe how beautifully everything in the laws of the Chinese, more than in those of other peoples, is directed to the achievement of public tranquility...." (Lovelace) In any case, modern Europeans could educate both modern and ancient Chinese commentators on the true nature of their sources.

"A turning-point in the history of modern taste was reached when the ideals of regularity, simplicity, uniformity, and easy logical intelligibility, were first openly impugned, when the assumption that true beauty is 'geometrical' ceased to be one to which 'all consented, as to a Law of Nature.' And in England, at all events, the rejection of this assumption seems, throughout most of the eighteenth century, to have been commonly recognized as initially due to the influence and the example of Chinese art." (Lovejoy)

The term Sharawadgi, or "Chinese want of symmetry," is employed today in postmodern music, in "acousmatic music" and "acoustic ecology." The garden is a soundscape. Composer Claude Schryer strives for the Sharawadgi Effect in everyday sounds, which he presents in a deliberately contrived, confounding manner. The superficial chaos, for instance, of the voice of a city, eventually resolves when heard, by virtue of a discordant estrangement from auditory context, into a sumlime beauty which is no doubt beyond representation or normal sensory experience. The CD Autour ($15) includes a composition played by six boats frozen in Montreal Harbor, two trains in motion, cathedral bells, three wind instruments, blowing wind and crickets.