The Forbidden City at 600: The Secret Life of the Qianlong Emperor, 12.2.20

just going to make sure that everybody's getting into the room and then we'll start the program okay so good evening and welcome i'm dinda elliott director of programs at china institute and it is my real honor to welcome you to the second program of our series on the forbidden city at 600. we learned last time about architecture and the craftsmen who worked for various emperors so tonight we thought we would turn to the life of the emperor wandering through those intimidatingly formal halls of the forbidden city who hasn't wondered what it was like to be the emperor of china it seemed to us that the perfect subject for exploring that question was chen long the fifth emperor of the qing dynasty who ruled china when it became the richest and most powerful country in the world and also built some of the most exquisite buildings in the forbidden city you are in for a real treat tonight we have two wonderful scholars with us this evening to talk about chen long the ruler and the man and about the magnificent gardens that he designed for his retirement mark elliott who's a professor of chinese and inner asian history at harvard and the author of a definitive biography of chen long is going to start us out this evening mark is currently harvard's vice provost for international affairs and he has also served as the director of the fairbanks center for chinese studies among his many talents and skills mark speaks and reads not only chinese but also the manchu language and then nancy berliner who is curator of chinese art at the museum of fine arts in boston will share with us images and thoughts about the chen long garden whose restoration was completed in 2016. nancy is an equally amazing scholar an art historian who really knows how to bring objects to life by telling stories one of nancy's most amazing achievements i have to share with you is that she managed to bring a ming dynasty house from a village in an way to the peabody essex museum and of course she worked for years as an advisor on the chan long gardens restoration after those presentations henry ng who was executive vice president at the world monuments fund for 15 years will join mark and nancy for a conversation and uh during his time at the world monuments fund henry built that institution's initiatives in china and he was a key player in the restoration of the chen long garden so he knows that place very very well we're going to try to cram this into about an hour so without further ado i'd like to hand the program over to mark elliott who will tell us about chen long so mark why don't you turn on your camera come on to the stage and over to you thank you very much denver i'm really really pleased to be here it's a great opportunity especially to share the virtual podium with my good friend and colleague nancy berliner let me start this out here sharing my screen and give this a go okay so uh you know we're here as as dentist said to to talk about chen long primarily and chen long's uh particularly the uh the the uh imprint that uh chen long left uh on the palace uh which uh is the focus of uh the events that the china institute is running uh this fall of the forbidden city uh at uh 600 and this will continue into into next year uh so i've uh put together a a few slides here to to try to give uh to give you all some sense of of of channeling as a person and of what it meant for him anyhow to be emperor of china the question that dinda it's a wonderful question what was it like to be emperor of china i think the answer that probably depended on the on the day uh and maybe even the time of day uh the emperor was powerful to be sure but he was not all-powerful uh and there were many things actually that he that he couldn't do so let's get go go back to the to this to the early days chandler's early days so gentlemen was born in uh in 1711 uh and uh he's shown here in a in a portrait uh with his father who was the young jung emperor uh in a very unusual kind of a painting painted by a very a famous italian jesuit painter who who did a lot of work for for chen long during his long career living in beijing and castillone or longshining as he's known in chinese like and buried in in beijing kang shi was the grandfather of uh chen long and and i was he was very very fond of his of his grandson gave him the title the the precious uh prince uh paul chinwang uh and so people already kind of knew when chen long was a young uh when he was a teenager that it was quite possible he might someday end up as emperor which in fact he did in uh late 1735 his father youngjung died very suddenly in his uh late 50s and at the age of about 25 then chen long became the uh the emperor the sixth emperor of the qing dynasty this dynasty established in uh established power in china in 1644 its origins go back to the earlier part of the of the 17th century uh and chan long was a uh there are many superlatives that we can apply to cello i'm sure nancy will have some to share as well but one of the most commonly referred superlatives about him is that he ruled longer than any other emperor in all of imperial history so that goes back to the third century bce up through the 20th century he officially ruled 60 years but in fact he ruled a little longer than that or he reigned longer than that because even after he retired he abdicated the throne in 1795 but he lived for another four years and and continued to exercise a lot of power even in those years so he uh he lived a very very long time and led a very very full life a life full of many many interests and i'll try and uh some use some of the images i have here to explain uh explore some of those i'm going to start though with some some a series of portraits made of chen long at uh at the time he became emperor so you have here the detail of a portrait that was made by castillone executed in in 1736 and you can see a high degree of symmetry here uh the very formal uh uh hat and and and and uh gown that he's uh wearing um there's another portrait that was done about the same time uh also on silk uh in which he looks uh maybe a little less severe a little less young i'm just gonna toggle back you can see him here very kind of straight on and uh serious looking maybe just a little more relaxed here a little bit more shading around the face this was the portrait that custodian they did around the same time and then this portrait in which he looks almost like he might have looked i think when he was 25 years old uh this is a painting in oil uh that castilloni did probably as he was getting prepared to do the the first picture i showed you which is the formal as it were coronation portrait we have more more paintings of chen long also than any other emperor uh in in chinese history for sure this one shows him as you can see on horseback a beautiful horse he himself in a very beautiful costume which we have today this is sometimes displayed if you go some of you may have seen this at the different museum exhibitions about the the uh the glories of of of the palace or king court dress uh here he really is modeling manchu martial virtue and he took to calling himself the old man of the ten perfect victories church and this was a reference to the military conquests that happened under his uh rule that ended up leading to the expansion of the empire by about about a factor of two so the what we often say what i often say is that general really laid the geographic blueprint for modern china uh here's a map from 1790 which shows more or less the extent of the qing empire as it looked at the very end rain uh here's a western map is the map printed in england from 1806. uh and the part that's uh darker that shaded what we might what i refer to as as inner asia or the northern and western chinese frontiers these are the territories that were added to the qing empire some of them uh before chan long but a lot of them really during chen long's reign so here you can see the extent to which the shape of china today is uh has has taken shape another portrait of chen long this one from 1793 by a western artist william alexander who accompanied lord mccartney on a famous uh embassy to the qing court uh at the very again near the end of chen long's reign uh there's much one can say about this uh this embassy uh people have often had a negative many negative things to say about about the emperor uh that he did not agree to british demands for open trade he did not agree to let the british open an embassy uh in uh in beijing a few other things this criticism has its points but it's important to remember that at the time at least in england the expectations for what lord mccartney was going to get out of this were uh not exactly very high and lord mccartney himself here if you take a a good look um is uh it was a gentle satire or maybe not so gentle satire of uh the goodies uh that uh he brought with him that were supposed to impress uh the emperor uh the emperor himself looking distinctly unimpressed there on the left side chen long carefully cultivated his image as a scholar a chinese scholar and indeed he was busy here uh with calligraphy and poetry and painting and gardens and nancy will say more about that uh here's a there are many portraits of him dressed like a chinese scholar interestingly enough nobody's ever found any chinese style clothing in the palace museum wardrobes a gentleman dressed like a manchu which with much more tightly fitting kind of uh kind of clothes but he'd like to have himself portrayed this way and that said something says something very important about his attention to image making which is one of the things that allows us lots of glimpses of chen long but what we're really looking at sometimes is a matter of debate chelong was a very avid collector and the palace museum collection we have today owes greatly to chan long's very uh assiduous efforts to expand uh the different kinds of collections in the palace uh all of which he had very carefully cataloged he even had catalogued exactly where in the palace everything was supposed to be displayed uh which i think later uh curators and art historians are very grateful for uh must have driven people in the palace a little crazy at the time since the emperor seems to have been able to remember everything uh and would always uh would make comments when when things were not exactly the way that he wanted to i'm showing you uh this poem in particular uh i think nancy may refer back to this later the the occasion on which uh uh this poem was written uh was something that chandler in fact uh reinscribed in the forbidden city later on now as much as he enjoyed life in the palace and and uh life uh the life of a scholar he was very active in life he he spent a good part of every year outside of the palace and a lot of it actually hunting so here we have a painting again by castillo the emperor facing down a tiger in his mountain retreat of course uh he has backup just in just in case uh and there are many such portraits of him hunting bears or foxes or rabbits or birds or all kinds of things he was definitely uh quite the sportsman or at least he wanted us to think that he was he was also a very religious man and had very serious interest in tibetan buddhism in in particular he had his own guru who was a boyhood friend of his and had himself painted in a number of tankas as the the emanation of the bodhisattva manjushri here's a close-up of the emperor you can see him holding the wheel of time and his hand in a classic mudra tibetan inscription there below he also built within the forbidden city a tibetan-style temple uh uh one of the more uh one of the frequently visited places and one of the most interesting uh sites i think within within the forbidden city the emperor was nothing if not a passion passionate person about language including the manchu language i show you an example of that here from a text that is in the collection of the harvard yinjing library this is the manchu translation of the langensing a famous buddhist sutra popular sutra he had translated and you can see here that he wasn't happy with the original draft of the translation and he went back and corrected this amazingly he actually took a second look at the revised translation and made additional corrections on the second draft so he was somebody who cared a lot about words he compiled lots of dictionaries uh and made a very uh concerted effort to ensure that uh manchu in particular was elevated to a prestigious place in the rank of languages used in the empire and finally on a personal note i'll just say a little bit about chen long's wives uh he had uh a number of of consorts uh uh but only two empresses and not as many not as many uh concubines as you might you might think uh his first wife whom he married when when he was about 16 years old she was 15 uh with someone to whom he was it seems authentically very close and uh here they are portrayed together again at the time of his accession to the throne she's right next to him uh she died tragically uh quite young in 1748 and this seems really to have kind of soured him on life in a way he becomes notably more more bitter maybe we could say after this time and all of his life he wrote poems uh lamenting her absence and i'll leave you with uh the last poem he wrote this is a poem he wrote in 1798 the last visit he made to her grave before he died uh i won't read it you can you can read it for yourself but i think uh we can again chen long's reputation as a poet is is is not great but this poem i think is uh is rather sweet and sad and melancholy and one i think we can we can see some real humanity uh here so with that i will bring my presentation to a close i will stop sharing and uh we'll pass past the baton here to nancy berliner of the mfa or maybe to you dinda dinda you'll have to unmute thank you for telling me that yeah over to nancy in a second but just one of the things i love so much about that is imagining you looking at the text the manchu text that chen long had edited because he didn't like the translation and that you could read what he was saying and what he was how he was correct i just love that so much but anyway that was fabulous thank you now nancy over to you i'm going to disappear again okay great thank thank you dinda for bringing us all together it's such a wonderful opportunity to be to travel back in time and and to travel to china which unfortunately none of us have been able to do for months on end and i'm going to take you today to a place called the chen long garden and this is a place that the chen long emperor created and he created it as a place where he said to cultivate his mind and refine his emotions so let's dive in there now sorry here we go and i want to start with this picture this is an image believe it or not taken in the forbidden city uh and it was places like this where the channel emperor imagined himself going to be as far away from politics as he could be um just to really feel himself as a person not feel himself as an emperor just to um be in these these dark rockeries uh surrounded just by stone and no glitter and no man-made edifices so that's just an image to give you as we start to wander through this space and just to compare this space here with the rest of the forbidden city which you see on the right the rest of forbidden city is all straight lines rectangular and this space uh in the rockery is is just the opposite of that there's no straight lines there's nothing to remind the emperor of of the world of politics and and his place in the political world um he created a palace in the 1770s that he planned to use for his retirement and he called it the palace of tranquility and longevity it's in the northeast corner and the concept was that he would retire after 60 years of rain and live in this area it didn't really happen but that that was the concept and he wanted to retire after 60 years because he didn't want to reign any longer than his beloved grandfather the kangashi emperor now in the palace of tranquility and longevity he created a garden and the garden as you can see is that northwest corner of uh the palace of tranquility and longevity so here it is it's thin and narrow it's just 525 feet long by 121 feet wide it's divided up into four courtyards there are 26 structures and at least about six major rockery areas and we're going to travel through it um starting first at the south but um before we get there i just want to read to you again why he said he wanted to create this space uh in in 1776 he said in my 80s when i'm exhausted from diligent service i will cultivate myself rejecting the worldly noise so let's go in there with him now and as we go through this space i'm going to be telling you about different ways that this emperor spent his private time he enjoyed being a literati there and pursuing literati pursuits he also had spiritual pursuits and um the man also had a i it seems to me a great sense of humor and so he also entertained himself and planned for entertaining in these spaces so here we are at the entrance it looks like the entrance to any other uh area of the forbidden city big red walls um with these uh gold brass knockers um and this the name of this gate is yanchi men which means extending the gate of extending auspiciousness and we're going to open these gates and what we see is something completely different than we usually see when we open gates in the forbidden city we see rocks and rockeries and as we get a little closer we see this pathway and instead of a straight pathway like all the other corridors and pathways in the forbidden city this one [Music] in a mountain and in china rocks and mountains um rocks were meant in gardens to be to substitute for mountains the mountains were the places with the ideal location in china for a cultivated person to be it's where the immortals lived it was where people went to meditate in europe often people thought of the mountains as something wild we call it the wilderness in europe and america but in china it was the most ideal place to be and it's where people wanted to escape and so here we have the emperor wanting to escape and cultivate himself in this space now we're in the first courtyard and on the eastern side we see more rockeries but on the western side we see this little waterway and for people in china particularly literati if they see a little waterway like this they immediately think calligraphy and not only calligraphy which was considered the highest artistic pursuit among the literati but not only calligraphy but they think about the year 3-5-3 when the greatest piece of calligraphy was created and mark showed it to you earlier or that was a copy of the original from 353 and that piece of calligraphy was created uh when a group of men got together um all literati um officials uh poets calligraphers they got together along a stream and they floated cups of wine down that stream and if the cup of wine came to the bank next to you you had to write a poem so during the course of this day in the year 353 they wrote over 40 poems and at the end this man named wong shiger wrote a preface and to to that group of poems and uh here we see uh the first bit of it um just giving the date uh which equates to 353 um and this piece of writing was considered the greatest piece of calligraphy and anybody who studies calligraphy in china must learn to do this piece of calligraphy but because it was created along the stream the chen long and because the cello emperor loved the calligraphy he created a bunch of these fake streams in gardens around the forbidden city and so this is just right there in the first courtyard to say i am a literati i respect calligraphy um and calligraphy is one of the things i want to pursue um and there is calligraphy all over the channel garden all over these 26 structures including one structure where the walls are just carved copies of chen long's emperors as mark said he wrote 40 40 44 000 poems um and so some of them are carved into this one building now in addition to these literati pursuits as i said there were spiritual pursuits they were uh his opportunity to go into the mountains and and cultivate himself through these rockeries this is a wonderful rockery it's the third courtyard which instead of being an open space is a space completely filled with rockeries you see it over here on the right there are buildings on all four sides and the space in the center is all rockeries um and you can this is just from one of the buildings looking over the rockeries to another building this is from up above those rockeries looking down to another building and this is inside one of the buildings looking out you have no sense you're in the forbidden city you look out and all you see are rocks i'm going to quickly take you into a little space that's not really considered part of the channel garden but it's on the edge of the chennai garden this is where in the first courtyard now we're looking east and if you go behind those rockeries there you come to another little space here it's never really been published um and so i don't have any photographs of it it's called the hall of fragrant snow which i think is a fabulous name you think of the smell of snow um and uh it's a box it's about maybe 15 by 15 uh feet and the front of it facing south just as crack diced windows that look out to a little courtyard and then there's another little window here on the side but if you go inside it is completely filled with rocks real rocks just like the rockeries elsewhere the only non-rock object in there is a little cushion on top of a rock where the gentle emperor would sit and meditate so um but we need to move on i'm sorry and so if you go up these rockeries and come down you look down on that wonderful uh waterway here um but if you go back down the steps you come to another doorway and this is a doorway into a buddhist shrine so in addition to all these um rockeries there were many many buddhist shrines throughout the chennai garden i'll briefly take you into this one building that was a buddhist building called the supreme chamber of cultivating harmony this was a little space where the chen long emperor would sit and meditate as you can see the opening here is in the shape of a lotus petal off also a reference to buddhism often people call these moon windows but in fact other people have believed that this these type of shaped doorways might be a reflection of going into a grotto rather than um anything to do with the moon and and i think that is probably the origin of these type of doorways in china now if we go uh upstairs from that small meditating room we have these wonderful images all lined up each one is about five six feet high and these are buddhist images of sixteen lohans who were enlightened beings and you can see i think baby these are not white paint these are not painted these are actually cut jade that has been adhered to black lacquer incredible feat of jade carving uh and one of the images one of the lohans reminds me of the channel emperor sitting in his grottos meditating um as as we've talked about a little bit and we'll talk about more the the chenle garden has been going through conservation and uh these screens were originally set up in this type of shape in uh in a little niche on the second floor of this chamber when they were removed for conservation there was a big surprise because on the back of each of these panels were these gorgeous uh gold lacquer or gold lacquer designs and um fascinatingly um they still look absolutely brand new because they never saw the light of day for some reason the chennai emperor looked at them and decided this was something he didn't want in the garden he just wanted the buddhist images so there's a detail of one of them they're just gorgeous objects and there's many other images um and and references to buddhism unfortunately we can't see all of them because we don't have time but we're going to quickly go through and look at a few more details in these wonderful buildings this building is called the studio of exhaustion from diligent service and this was a theater and here we start to think about how the chen long emperor was thinking about entertaining himself here we are in this little miniature theater and it's a theater built for one which is uh the chen long emperor and so he was just gonna sit here and be entertained on that little stage there and you can see all the walls and the ceiling here are painted and they're painted in a trunk lois style it was a style that was brought to the imperial court by as mark mentioned castiglione a jesuit priest who was a fabulous painter in fact he was the cello emperor's favorite court painter and he taught the other artists within the imperial court to do these these trompoy paintings and just want to show you a few details that's a crane looking through a moon or a grotto window this is all painted um this is some of the wisteria on the ceiling the ceiling is meant to look like um a trellis a bamboo trellis with this wonderful wisteria hanging down uh here's a detail of some of the painting and you can see it's done in a very european style it's chinese materials but you can see the light bouncing off the round bamboo which is not something that the chinese would have done before because castiglione introduced these and just one parting shot of this fabulous room um and again this looks like bamboo lattice but in fact it is also trump lloyd because it was made out of hardwood and then painted to look like bamboo and there are more of these trumploy paintings all throughout the garden there's more in this garden than there are anywhere else in the palaces here's one called the bower of jade purity you see a bunch of women and children in this wonderful palace space um and uh channel just loves things like this if you look at the wallpaper in the painting it's exactly the same as the wallpaper on the walls and also the wallpaper on the ceiling so you really get this wonderful trumploy sense that you can walk right into the painting there are also many paintings and calligraphies within the painting and these are all done by different imperial artists and are all signed this is just a detail of this small one up here exquisitely painted and here is another thing that that comes up in the channel garden which is more influences of european painting um and it's it's the concept of reflection and we see this woman here on the side looking rather serious i would say uh and looking at her reflection in the black lacquer screen um before her and and i kind of think of this as the chen long emperor also um himself in the garden um involved with self-reflection and i was going to end there but i just wanted to show you a couple of other slides this is a paint palace museum um also done by a court artist it's called 10 000 countries paid tribute and if you look down here this is the palace and and down in the bottom right hand corner are all these different different foreigners who are paying tribute to the emperor they've all come to the palace they're all bringing presents um we've got all different kinds of people here um this little flag says england and you can see these guys look pretty english um this fellow here i'm not sure where he comes from but he's bringing a rock um which is the channel emperor i'm sure would appreciate um and here we have the chen long garden amazingly and there is the chen long emperor sitting right in the garden and is holding one of his children you can see into the building here and um i bring this up because it's one of the few instances where we actually see the chenglong emperor or even here of the chen long emperor in the garden itself if we go through household records and and various uh records of the cheng emperor's activities very rarely do we see that he was in uh the chenglong garden so i know i've just given you this whole description of all the things that he imagined he would be doing there and cultivating himself and meditating and even being entertained but in fact i feel like his real deep pleasure was not being in the garden but the process of designing and creating the garden so um i'll leave you to think about that and to think about your own gardens and i thank you for all listening today beautiful beautiful beautiful nancy thank you so much and um wow as promised she is a great storyteller i told you she would be um and in particular i want to thank you for that literati drinking game which i think we should all try for ourselves once we get past covid um you know we float the cup and if the cup comes to you you have to write a poem i love that so much so so let's bring mark and henry onto the stage for a conversation that will be led by henry um and i'm going to disappear again over to you henry thank you uh dinda and hi nancy and uh hi mark nice to see you again um i got to know nancy and mark largely through the conservation project for the chimlong garden uh through the world monuments fund although in the interest of full disclosure uh all those wonderful pictures of the garden that nancy gave us are all post-conservation and the first time that i think that um nancy and i actually went there the place was just chock full of piled up furniture dust on dust that looked like sort of an archaeological site so it's a big achievement actually what was done that project actually which started just with one single building became the single largest and most comprehensive conservation project in the history of the world monuments fund which is uh celebrating its 55th anniversary this year and i think it's not only the significance of the site which is unparalleled as nancy was describing in the provenance in terms of the chin long emperor's input but also the extraordinary story of its survival basically when it came down to be conserved it had largely despite being created over 240 almost 150 years ago before that came down largely intact only almost just worn but the original materials and spaces and design uh largely were untouched and this is highly highly unusual not only in the forbidden city where things constantly change with new emperors but in a country like china which had experienced so much poverty and war in the 19th century and then and of course with the cultural revolution and that survival uh created you know a extraordinary site for conservation because it was a time capsule of materials aesthetics of technique long lost in many cases and that result really became um was because of two very fortunate um well unfortunate one maybe one unfortunate circumstance one was an imperial edict where the chin long emperor made a decree that after he died this place should not be changed which is very unusual because most places do change and the second factor was poverty you know after the gym long efforts reign there was the 19th century with a lot of political upheaval and china's decline and in the 20th century and basically the place was mothballed when we went into it it was as if the last emperor puyi he closed the door and then left the forbidden city but it left for us an extraordinary um collection of material culture and objects that um really hadn't been seen by either western uh conservatives or even um chinese colleagues uh so it um the a project like that to be uh undertaken correctly requires an extraordinary sort of interdisciplinary approach which is why um it's my introduction of how we got nancy so involved and seduced by the garden but a conservation project like that is more than just repairing something and making it better physically you know you certainly need conservators and scientists but you also need historians and nancy was brought in and mark was writing a book actually about the chin long effort at the same time but we need it's a symbiotic relationship with scholarship we both need them because otherwise we're working in the dark unless you really know the context of what we're working with and also um if we're a worthwhile conservation project we want to be able to contribute to uh the scholarship in the field and i think nancy has particularly helped us extraordinarily with that major exhibition that was at the met and the peabody es6 as well as milwaukee so with that brief introduction i do have i mean i love being you know going to the site with historians because i learned so much so i do have some questions you know for mark and nancy and i hope they'll indulge me uh even though we're sort of doing this tour virtually but um i do um you know my curiosities even after being uh involved with that site for 15 years um one of the themes that we discussed earlier i mean mark and nancy mentioned it which are china was extraordinarily engaged with the world at this time both economically politically balance of trade was huge and not just politically um and in terms of the social sciences but even aesthetically and there's one moment i just want to share with you uh and that nancy knows very well as i lead into a question which was one day we were in this wonderful pavilion three friends and we came across this extraordinarily car beautiful throne and screen where the wood almost looked like real tree trunks and jade flowers you know embracing the sides of the of this throne and the screen but the only thing that looked unusual was that the um panels around the throne and the screen were this really dull gray slate and you couldn't understand why they would choose such a really mundane material and nancy you know in with only the kind of um boldness that a experienced curator could have i remember um i think she put her water bottle on a tissue and then she wiped that gray slate and when she moved it away we were all all of us including pals museum were startled because it turned out to be that it was clear glass it was basically a glass throne which totally threw us for a bit and then um we learned you know of course later on that plate glass was a relatively recent invention done in england and the china did not have that capacity but the emperor knew about it obviously through trade and he had to have it for his garden and so he brought in plate class and made basically a beautiful what we call a we've come to call the glass throne but i think there are other examples like that where the china's engagement with the world you know brought in international influences uh nancy mentioned painting but i think nancy there are other ones are there not that you remember from the garden uh they were wonderful so many things that we discovered as we were poking around but um one of them the use of glass was incredible the use of mirrors and the mirrors were also imported from europe again the chinese had small mirrors that they made um but uh the cello emperor must have gotten so excited about these mirrors and uh there's there's one place in one of his bedrooms uh within uh drenching jag within one of the buildings where there are two mirrors and they're meant to look like standing screens that are mirrors but um and this is where you really see the channel emperor's humor is that one of them was actually a secret door and you could open that mirror and go through so it was literally through the looking glass so there were the mirrors and then there were also we went into a room one day and suddenly we saw what at first glance looked like japanese uh cabinets but in fact there were chinese made cabinets probably using [Music] japanese um lacquer work that had been taken apart and put back together again to be a chinese style cabinet so the cello emperor was not just interested in in europe and america um but he was also fascinated by japan he just he looked everywhere and in this garden um spacey really wanted to be delighted by everything that delighted him well it was nice to know that he wasn't afraid of these ideas you know that he brought them in you know as as he wished um interrupting for one sec i just wanted to say i forgot to mention this is dinda just that we will have some time for questions at the end so if anybody does have questions please you'll see the q a box at the you know button on the bottom so type your questions in and we'll take some of your questions at the end so sorry for interrupting back to you henry not at all um i have to ask mark a question because it deals with contemporary life in america which is you know as we're so obsessed with uh the topic of uh peaceful transition um and i know how the chipmunk emperor was seemed so well prepared and groomed for his role in all these capacities as a at least the image military ruler as well as a statesman and artist and scholar was the gen long emperor in terms of his ascension to the throne was it a given since the time he was born that is it a question of being the eldest in a generation or he had to actually be chosen either by the his grandfather his father i mean how was he uh when did he know he was going to become emperor did he know he was going to be emperor probably would have to ask him that question he he um you know he he he was a favorite of of the kang shi emperor and some people have have hypothesized that one of the reasons that chen long's father was chosen to be emperor was so that genome himself could succeed his father i'm not sure if that uh we don't really have any evidence to to support that theory but one thing that's important to point out here is that unlike uh the chinese tradition in uh uh in in manchu politics the eldest son did not automatically inherit uh the manchus uh belonged to the inner asian world before they became the rulers of china and there as in mongolia as in a lot of central asia and and we see this also in in the way that uh the sultans of the ottoman empire were chosen it was the most capable son or nephew of the deceased ruler who would take over and there was a a kind of council and make the decision um in the case of of kang shi uh it led to some pretty severe factionalism at court uh so that when the uh the emperor died um there was some uncertainty actually as to what the outcome would be uh and uh it was uh through very swift maneuvering uh in in part that the young jung emperor managed to assert his claim he is listed he's the fourth son yongjung was the fourth son and he is listed in the emperor's will as uh the one who should succeed but he wanted to make sure that there wouldn't be that kind of a problem again so he instituted a practice whereby the emperor the emperor alone would decide which of his sons and it had to be his son which of his sons would inherit he would write the name on a piece of paper actually two pieces of paper one of them would be kept at the summer palace out in uh in the uh or yemen and the other be put in a box over the throne in the main throne room in the bahadian or taiwan and it would stay there everybody would know that an heir had been named people probably knew they probably could guess i mean was quite talented he was very serious as some of his brothers seem to have had um issues we might say uh one of them like to stage his own funeral for fun so with the brothers like that it might have been obvious to many people that the only really serious one to take on the business of ruling was hong li that was his given name before he became the emperor so well that's uh i never knew that before so to um so i have the correct understanding so when han chinese emperors like the song and the ming they would have been uh the eldest would have been automatically the success i see so it's really the non han that had this more meritocracy so right and and in the mean and certainly in the case of the ming dynasty you have a number of emperors whom we could you could argue probably shouldn't have been allowed to be emperor um but they were the eldest son and that was those were the rules and the one lee emperor actually got into a lot of uh got into a very serious uh dispute with his high officials because he wanted to name a different son and they said this cannot happen right they won they they prevailed they have some contemporary um chinese colleagues have often commented to me how they're astonished that america uh puts into place such elderly leaders you know we elect people in their 70s in contemporary china they just don't elect people that old um but i was wondering in terms of um the chin long effort when he ran that long was he revered in that culture as people think maybe he's too old did they when he abdicated it was a huge event or how was it received is you're actually stepping down and turning over power to another person was there a huge enthronement yeah that's a that's a good question i mean general ruled for such a long time right nancy and i have talked about this he was a complete icon i mean think about think about this okay john kennedy was elected president in 1960 imagine he is still president today yes that's how long chan long ruled extraordinary yes so he just he was like elizabeth the first or elizabeth ii for that matter you know somebody who who destroyed the age so you know he when he abdicated and as nancy said he did so so he wouldn't outshine his grandfather there was a lot of fuss made and and there was there was a special special rituals had to be invented and a title for him and a new seal so you look on many of the paintings you'll see tai chong huang which was his his new title but he never really let go and he never he was supposed to move into this wonderful compound that he had spent a lifetime designing and i completely agree with with nancy with what you said that he what he really loved was was the the making of it the creating of it design uh you see as far as we know i think you were the one who told me he never he never moved in never lived there and so even after he abdicated he effectively still ruled the country in terms of uh law making and the sun really didn't take ever didn't make laws uh as such uh but uh you know he he retained behind the scenes influence um uh that uh you know i think everybody knew who was still calling the shots even though his so his 15th son the judging emperor had taken over but within the court this is the telltale sign in the court dating continued to happen in the long range rain years so on the outside after chen long's 60 then it goes to cha ching one judging two in the court chandnon 61 chan long 62 chan loan 63. uh you and nancy have given us a you know a very sort of uh comprehensive view of chilon and in terms of you know his longevity and his impact and um my own uh information of course only from english but in terms of china are chinese historians and chinese the general public do they have the same view of chin long as western scholars do or is it do they have different criteria for judging leaders uh he's he's become a cultural icon again i mean he's been on the television show after television show with huge audiences so he's he's taken on a yes and artwork and and porcelain made under his reign is is just the rage and really and the style he he really had a an aesthetic um and it lives on today do you think uh in in terms of um you know your colleagues nancy uh in terms of curators and people who work at the palace museum you know i think we all i think all of us that worked on that project i think even particularly the western experts we brought in from institutions like the med and the getty uh it wasn't a one-sided um project you know i think they brought certain levels of international standards for conservation which the chinese were very interested in knowing about and for the western museum people you know they were handling objects and techniques and materials they had never seen before so it was a huge learning experience and do you think that um colleagues of the pals museum also learned through the process things that they didn't know before this the garden was restored i i think you know at one point you said i you like in walking through the channel garden to an archaeological site and i think that everyone on the team including the chinese were just constantly discovering new things you know you push away a little bit of dust and you might see something written there or there was a wonderful technique that was discovered on some of the gauze in in some screens in one of the building uh and it was a technique of building up lacquer with gold on top of the design and it was the first time anybody in the palace had seen that technique used and to this day you know they're still trying to figure out exactly how it was created because that seems to be the only instance of it so uh the chenglong emperor is still teaching us new things well i had to remember how much he pushed the envelope you know he just kept on doing things even if there were one off and of course it creates incredible conservation challenges but also told me about a lot about his outlook i think it's very uh and even understanding chinese emperors you know so much of it to me is about understanding what they did as opposed to their inner psyche which is something that i think you know western i think historian the public liked to know about their leaders and i think in i think was in mark's book that one thing that gave me a little little glimmer about him about he must have been you know apart from all the the ritual of the emperor he um had to be somewhat of incredible romantic you know when i read about his the way he treated his mother and took her on trips and had operas for her and she watched operas with her in the in the forbidden city and then his wife who you know as mark mentioned you know he still was writing poems to her you know 50 years after or 40 years after her death but i think i also i think maybe mark was it in your book too he had a great affection for his uh daughter he had a yeah um a doctor that he really thought was exquisite and maybe she should have been empress you know that's what he said princess christian yeah that's true and when i read that i thought you know i thought they should be you know it should be a broadway player musical about the women in general's life but i think it must have shown oh sorry go ahead i'd be happy to discuss what that would look like but i was just you know touched by the fact that these women from all generations mother his wife and his daughter they all meant something really you know very important in his life it's quite true yeah yeah and it's quite wonderful to see that that emotional part of him because you know i've only seen the material culture you know of him so it was pretty wonderful i didn't i'm sorry i didn't want to interrupt are you going to ask them no i was going to say i wonder if we might turn to a couple questions from the audience but but if you have you know if you please continue if you've got another you know a couple questions that you're dying to bring up wait and then we can turn to questions from the audience in a second well i would i have one question also sort of a temporary nature maybe for both of you which is you know we know that you know when you read about the chimling era when um there's so many sort of um um similarities in terms of what china's role has been in our in our own times you know the huge balance of payments surplus you know all foreigners trying to crack into their markets um uh i was wondering if the chin long emperor ever gave an edict or a commentary about those sort of that international environment and attitudes to china that actually has any relevance to what's happening now to china you know and the way the west sees it or is he just totally above all that because he felt he was the center of the world well and i i see that uh henry i see there's a there's a question on that's kind of on this topic in the in the q a a lot of questions there for you nancy about how do i get to visit the channel garden so you know how to answer you know where we mentioned chen long's reputation today he's he's all over the tv uh uh court dramas and and um you know everything he's a brand name things are being named for him artwork created during the channeling reign has increased in value dramatically 20 30 years ago he was he did not have this kind of cachet and his main uh claim to fame as it were was infamous in that he had dismissed the british ambassador mccartney and had said we don't need any of this stuff we don't need your fancy uh planetarium and your your spring wheeled coach and and and this kind of thing and this was seen as uh chen long effectively dismissing the not seeing what was coming in terms of the technological changes of the industrial age of the 19th century and had he been perhaps more accommodating of british requests which were very politely made and they were politely received and the emperor uh wasn't expecting this visit and he could have just said actually i don't i don't have time to meet you i'm a busy man but he did meet with them with them a couple of times and accepted their gifts and and and took care of them the way that they generally took care of foreign commissions but the expectation was that they would go home right so when he did not uh go along with what the british were hoping for in terms of expanded and improved terms of trade and arranging for an embassy as i said um you know of course later on 40 40 years later we have the opium war and the balance of power the balance of trade a lot of things have changed in the world and uh the complaint is that chen long should should have seen that coming he was not uninformed about world affairs but um certainly he did not see that there was a need for a a state as powerful as the qing many many many times larger than great britain uh with a much larger economy and and 320 million people it didn't it did not occur to him that and that this was something he needed to be mindful of and maybe we hold that against him on the other hand i'm not sure we should expect our leaders to be able to see that far into the future uh so there there's a debate about this that that's ongoing i i did my best in in in the biography of of channeling i wrote to provide uh kind of two sides of the coin thing but in i have to tell you in most of my conversations with chinese friends chinese colleagues i haven't persuaded very many people that chen long um was actually justified in dismissing the british embassy most people continue to think that that was a bad uh mistake on his part that cost china dearly so it's now 805 and i just want to you know recognize people's time we're supposed to start stop at eight but this is way too wonderful to stop right now so i would suggest let's let's continue to 8 15. um i'm going to give a give you a throw out a couple questions from the audience and then then we'll we'll conclude um so a question i guess which is maybe for both nancy and um mark is uh you know you mentioned that tien long never did retire to those gardens i guess um and so i am wondering did he ever have a chance to meditate in those gardens did he ever use them but if he didn't move into the gardens where did one of the questions from the audience is where did chan long live in the palace versus his success with the jiating emperor at the same time um and then this person is also asking if that was a palace cat in the tian long garden in the first photo um but but let's let's address the question of um the you know whether he ever used the the gardens and uh where did he live uh the one record that we do have about the gentle emperor using the garden is that he had a held a banquet there for some mongolian dignitaries um he must have spent some time there because there are um pieces of calligraphy um that he did there but um and he certainly would have gone through while it was being built so why didn't he ever retire there did he essentially die in office or what i i think you may have said but i i missed it emperors always die in office well yes right i guess that's right sorry um but what so why didn't he retire or or spend time there i i think he the reason and and mark you can correct me um the reason he didn't really retire ever is he he just didn't want to give up control and and power and he had a vision of of the way i guess as mark said that was that was not what was done anyway and that might have been just as you said nancy he enjoyed designing and building the garden um it was a dream a fantasy that he would probably never be able to use the abdication the abdication was more than anything a show of filiality where he did not want to outshine his grandfather uh and much was made of of the fact and he had he he had said i forget if it was 10 or 20 years before if i should be so fortunate as to live that long when i when i get to my 60th year i will step down uh and he made a big deal about about doing that um but i think that the habits of a lifetime you know well i can say from experience they're hard to shake i'm nowhere near gen long's advanced age but uh uh i think that that was uh you know the garden was a place for him to go perhaps to escape i i uh having been through those spaces together with nancy and henry um you know they they they do transport you away from the mundane world that chen long had to inhabit all the time and that the burden of that must have been very great as it is for any anybody in such a position and and surely this was a place of of escape uh for him uh a place uh where he could indulge some of his uh uh playful whims uh i remember so well that you showed me nancy the the the door that's a mirror or the mirror that's a door um so i think that probably chandler would say that the garden did for him what what he wanted it to do so there are as you mentioned mark there are several questions about um you know are the gardens open to the public and also about the rocks sort of uh a couple people are asking are they actually real rocks or are they concrete or some of the substance talk about the rocks for a second uh the rocks even they're called in chinese fake mountains joshua um but they are indeed rock uh but they're not one rock you know they look from a distance like there it's one mass of a rock gree but in fact it's many pieces of rocks many of which were transported from all over china many from the southern china and then fitted together to create this illusion of um of one mass of a mountain um we know that they had um they would have holes drilled in them and then metal rods to hold the big pieces together remember nancy there are there's a one family that was specialized in the maintenance of these type of rocks and um it's a real specialty and i think they call them in not i think to look at our rockeries because of them were faulting but they used them in um the official complex across the street um i forgot the name of that family but they are like artisans who have been doing it for hundreds of years the same family multiple generations of craftsmen here for a second um henry you know you had talked about the fact that the restoration project itself really did help to revive and save some of the traditional crafts that had been had almost completely disappeared can you share a little bit about that some of the people who were found who came in and yes well a number of things were i think one of the challenges um in the in the garden is that many really fine um techniques that the um love uh things like inner van blues skin carving or poisoning lacquer often done on smaller objects in many cases he sort of supersized them for different work into architectural scale so you had a whole room a room of ploys biggest pieces of poison a in the palace museum or inner bamboo skin carving which is normally used for fresh pots but this big became a whole freeze in a room so finding people you know those craftsmen that he brought in particularly from southern china um were the finest of their time but that level of um quality has not been used in china well since imperial times so there was a great search at the pals museum using every uh resource uh going to particularly southern china looking for people that could actually handle this material and they could find people actually that knew the material but what they didn't know is the transition from not creating new things from bamboo but how to restore old you know and repair it so that's a whole education in terms of i think the project in terms of conservation not just you know replication but uh they did find people for intervention carving double-sided embroidery we have not found somebody as nancy said for that lacquered gauze which is still a mystery object to all of us so unfortunately we're just up against the the clock um and you know this is just so fascinating we could go on forever but i'm going to grab the opportunity to ask you all the last question and and throw it out to all of you which is why should we care about all this arcane stuff um you know at a time when u.s and china tensions are high etc and um you know we're facing off as strategic competitors is why should be why should we be interested in things like the forbidden city and chan long what difference does it make anybody what difference does it make well i'll i'll give it a try and then i i know nancy will uh will have some some important things to say here too you know i i think that the answer i give is the answer i would give to to uh any question about you know why it is that we study the past why does history matter and uh you know there's the innate fascination of different times and and different places and whether you're american like myself or your your uh uh chinese uh the past is always a foreign country it's it's different it it offers a a chance to um to learn and expand your horizons but it also gives you a perspective on on where we are today and here i come again to the uh point that i made and nancy also made um about the power of the empire of the emperor and the power of empire in the in the 18th century and we we are now looking at a china that is newly powerful and asserting its place on the world stage in a way that we haven't seen since probably the 1700s um as a historian i i i would say that there are things we can learn about the way that china looks as a powerful country a country that is dominant in its part of the world if we look at how how that world what that world looked like uh the last time we were in that kind of a situation and in fact i would say that the the experience of the preceding let's just say the period between the opium war so 18 1839 to uh i don't know what that you want to give it but uh you know the turn of the 21st century or something like that that 150 160 years that's an aberration in chinese history because china for most of most of its history is it's it's had the largest economy of any country in the world it's been the most powerful country in the region and a a you know a player on the world stage we're moving back into a time when that will be true again uh we need to figure out how to uh live together we've done it before we will do it again nancy play what can i just add one comment on that which is i think that you know the chinese culture and the history material culture or the things we're looking at even the forbidden city this forms the cultural and historic and world framework for one out of you know five people in the world so even if we have problems with china and there are things to disagree with you cannot really understand how they look at the world of understanding you know their history and which is very different in the perspective on the world which is very different without you know really studying i said that the things that we just mentioned today now how it sees itself in the world and it's in its place throughout uh not not only the globe today but throughout history so i think it's important that's that's a that's a great point henry and i but i think also in terms of the art the art historical part of this we get to see a common humanity here right and nancy i mean we really it's particularly in such an intimate space like like the general garden and and now such a wonderful focus on art and culture and corporation of art and culture in into politics as well as daily life um and um you know the the the channeling emperor was a great collector as well as a great producer of of fabulous art he was innovative and even though for instance his among his 44 000 poems they're not the greatest poems he wasn't the greatest calligrapher but um he respected great art and he was passionate about it and he was into being innovative and cutting edge in the arts and he also respected the past as well and and there's a lot to learn from that let me answer that you know that idea that a leader to be a leader had to incorporate culture and aesthetics as well as you know the people as well as just politics and economics you know that that's what he thought a great ever was it's nice how lucky we are to have you all tonight thank you so much um i am just basically speechless but it was so wonderful and um i hope you'll all come back again we are going to do a third forbidden city at 600 uh program in a couple of months it's going to be looking at the palace collection we're very excited about that so i hope uh you will all tune in to that thank you so much the audience for tuning in and um thank you again thank you thank you mark pleasure

Channel: China Institute in America

Views: 24,350

Keywords: Forbidden City, Emperor, Qianlong, Dinda Elliott, Mark Elliott, Nancy Berliner, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Harvard, Palace Museum

Id: wKwue5naIKA

Length: 78min 34sec (4714 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020