Creating the kangxi landscape [electronic resource] : Bishu shanzhuang and the mediation of Qing imperial identity
Keywords: Art and Art History

This dissertation examines how the construction and representation of cultural and geo-political landscapes contributed to imperial legitimacy in the early Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Focusing on the largest of the Qing garden-palaces, Bishu shanzhuang ("Mountain Villa to Escape the Heat"), the project draws on the physical landscape and its depictions in paintings, woodblock prints, maps and personal ac-counts to reveal the importance of space, geography, and memory in the negotiation of dynastic identities. The intersections of geography, landscape and ethnicity were central to the formation of the Qing state and its power. The Qing conquest elite and the empire they ruled were geographically and culturally distinct and mutually unfamiliar. The early state's principal challenges lay in establishing the legitimacy of their rule while creating a geographically and culturally cohesive empire out of highly disparate parts. The invention of a new, fundamentally "Qing" landscape, one that reflected both the empire's diversity and its ideal unity, was central to the success of all these goals. Through the construction of imperial garden-palaces, and court-produced representations of them in paintings, books and other media, the court created a politically and culturally significant landscape associated solely with the emperor. Bishu shanzhuang was perhaps the most important of these imperial landscapes. Built beyond the Great Wall, it is located in a region, Rehe, or Jehol, that the court simultaneously described as non-Chinese and as wild, natural and undiscovered -- a culturally blank canvas. There, the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1723) ordered the construction of an expansive garden-palace that miniaturized the diverse geography of the empire, while at times literally recreating the landscapes of the historic heart of Chinese culture, the South. In their seeming contradictions, together garden and site thus embodied the court's complex negotiation of multiethnic identities, a central concern of the state throughout the dynasty. Treating the Mountain Villa as a second capital, the emperor and many of his successors hunted, engaged in diplomacy, and en-joyed the crisp, cool air of the mountains and valleys. Through these activities and imperially-produced representations of the gardens in paintings, albums, gazetteers and other media, the court created a politically and culturally significant landscape associated primarily with the emperor, used to assert legitimacy, demonstrate authority and create bonds of loyalty with those whose support was most crucial to the ongoing stability and power of the Qing dynasty. The dissertation seeks to address a number of methodological concerns, as well. By focusing primarily on the Kangxi period, the project counters conventional treatments of the site that consider only its final state of development under the Qianlong emperor and reestablishes the Kangxi emperor as an independent political actor whose ideologically oriented cultural productions laid the foundation of Qing imperial practice for the remainder of the dynasty. Similarly, departing from earlier narratives that framed Bishu shanzhuang either as a recreation of a literati garden on a massive scale or as a reconstruction of the Buddhist universe intended for a non-Chinese audience, this project recognizes the centrality of both Chinese and non-Chinese vocabularies in the Rehe landscape. Finally, this study presents new approaches to under-standing the importance of landscape as medium for ideological expression throughout the Qing and in the early modern world more broadly.