My name is Yue Zhuang, and I'm a senior lecturer in Chinese at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. In this lecture, we shall survey “entangled landscapes”, that is, the exchange of landscape culture between China and Europe from 1500 to roughly 1800. During these three centuries, China and Europe made direct transactions in commercial, religious, and political spheres. Representations of Chinese landscapes were found in Europe in diverse forms in prints, books, porcelain, lacquerware, murals, wallpaper, pavilions, and gardens. These landscapes not only inspired new genres such as Chinoiserie, which is the European imitation of Chinese artistic traditions, especially in the decorative arts, garden design, and architecture. But also, they entered European intellectual and social history provoking debates about the Chinese and European societies more generally. On the other side of the exchange, the Chinese were exposed to European landscape conventions. Religious and secular images, like European palaces, cityscapes and world maps, drawn with meticulous precision, were introduced by merchants and the Catholic missionaries, and attracted Chinese interest. European techniques of landscape representation and garden elements, since the Ming dynasty, were assimilated into the Chinese visual tradition. Under Qing state sponsorship, in particular, this cultural assimilation produced a hybridity, a balanced mixture between Eastern and Western cultural attributes, which became an intrinsic aspect of Qing court art and cartography. These topics have attracted much attention in the past. By using the notion of “entangled landscapes” in our module, we hope to highlight a new perspective in examining this history of landscape exchange. In conventional studies, China and Europe are often treated as separate entities. Exchanges between the two sides were a linear process of transfer from A to B. These conventional studies often constrained an ethnocentric attitude. For example, the European interest in the Chinese cultural forms or concepts was seen through the lens of exoticism or orientalism: the Chinese forms were presented as the “inferior other” in contrast to European forms. Deriving from the notion of “entangled histories” first used in colonial studies, our term, “entangled landscapes” stresses a reciprocal and a multifaceted approach in cultural exchange as opposed to the ethnocentric narrative. In Albert Einstein and his colleagues’ quantum entanglement theory, particles interact so that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the other particles, even when the particles are separated by a large distance. Similarly, even when China and Europe are far away, they are not independent from each other. Also, in accord with the social and cultural turn in landscape studies since the 1990s, we see landscape exchange as being inherent in the formation of national, social, and cultural identities in both China and Europe. In brief, the strength of the “entangled landscapes” approach may be summed up in three concepts: plural histories, global network constraints, and negotiation of concepts. By portraying the plurality of histories, our “entangled landscapes” approach questions the myth of history being driven by unilinear progress and the myth that it is best represented by the Western, European states from the 19th century onwards. We assert, instead, that there are many cultural parallels between China and Europe, especially surrounding the ideology of building universal empires, both the renaissance of the Roman Empire in Europe and the mighty Asiatic empire of the Qing landscape as both a symbol and an instrument of power. For early modern European monarchs, China, like the Roman Empire, functioned as the locus for dreams of attaining a golden age of prosperity and abundance. And superior to the Romans was China’s ability to ensure stability and good government, built upon the Confucian philosophy of moral cultivation, an ability esteemed and promulgated by the early European Enlightenment thinkers. Whilst contemporary historians have already revealed the resonance between classical Chinese and early modern European thoughts of economy and socio-politics, it remains for students of literature and art history to fully explore the mutual borrowing in the cultural sphere. It’s a common sense nowadays that the world we live in is a global network in which each unit is interacting with a wider world. “Entangled landscapes” not only highlights that such a global network was already functioning in the early modern period, but also that this network, similar to today, was not woven with independent and free relations. Instead, just like the roots of the tree shown here were constrained to certain routes by the bricks of the wall, the global network was constrained by the interplay of larger social, economic, and political forces or constraints. Therefore, the exchange of landscape images and ideas between China and Europe was rarely voluntary, linear, or smooth. Rather, the effects and the forms of these exchange activities, whilst facilitating internal changes in societies, were constrained by the disparate and often conflicting powers of nation states and monopolies. Cultural exchanges between early modern Europe and China often involved the comprehension of concepts on a transcultural scale. And these concepts, when circulating across cultures, elicited tangled narratives and confusion. This is because the representations of outside cultures are never simply descriptive. Rather, the representations involve locating the other cultures within the symbolic frameworks of the observing culture. The meanings of the circulating concepts must continually be negotiated by different groups, relating the meanings to different cultures of knowledge, thus producing both their own new meanings along with feedback effects upon the meanings of other cultures. One such example found in the connection between the Chinese and English landscape gardens is the concept of the garden imitating nature as an ethical ideal, which exists in both European classical rhetoric and in Chinese Confucian and Daoist thoughts. Insisting on a binary approach, conventional studies have divided on this matter between the “Chinese influence” and the “internal European development”, a debate continuing today. Our idea is to consider this connection as an “entanglement”, that is, considering the effect of cultural exchanges on the tangled narratives or of reciprocal concepts between European and Chinese cultures. Attempted at a time when relations between China and Europe are attaining new importance in world history, this “entangled” approach offers a new way of thinking about landscapes in the making of in-between cultures and identities. Exchanges and encounters among environmental cultural forms may signify more than the cultural cooperation an artistic fusion that is often argued in relation to landscape practices. Rather, such exchanges and encounters are agencies that perform the complex economic, socio-political, and cultural relations of societies in a multilateral global network formed within constraints and dependencies.
