Most studies of Chinese gardens have focused on their historical development, their design aesthetics, or their spiritual significance. This talk, based on the speaker’s forthcoming book, will take a different approach, looking at how Chinese gardens functioned in society and as social spaces, especially in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The best-known types of Chinese gardens today are imperial gardens, such as the Summer Palace in Beijing, and so-called scholar’s gardens or literati gardens, such as the Yu Garden in Shanghai or the Garden of Cultivation in Suzhou. Emperors and scholars, however, were far from the only people to make use of gardens. Besides these two types of people, there were merchants, women of various social classes, and the artisans who planned and constructed the gardens or cultivated the plants which adorned them. The speaker will discuss how these different groups used gardens for their own purposes, using evidence from art and literature as well as from the gardens themselves.

The Speaker

Alison Hardie is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK, having retired in 2015 as a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies. She holds degrees in Classics from the University of Oxford and in Chinese from the University of Edinburgh, and a doctorate from the University of Sussex. She is the translator of Ji Cheng’s 17th-century garden manual, The Craft of Gardens, as well as other texts on Chinese gardens. She revised Maggie Keswick’s The Chinese Garden: History, Art and Architecture, and has written extensively on Chinese garden history. A Senior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies
at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC, from 2010 to 2016, she is the editor of The Dumbarton Oaks Anthology of Chinese Garden Literature. In 2022, she will publish a short illustrated social history of Chinese gardens with Better Link Press of Shanghai, and her monograph on the late-Ming poet, playwright and politician Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646), the original publisher of The Craft of Gardens, will be published by Hong Kong University Press.

Programme

Time: 7.00pm-8.00pm Hong Kong Time (11.00am UK Time)

Venue: Online via Zoom

Admission: No charge. Please sign up to receive the link

Booking: Please email membership@royalasiaticsociety.org.hk in advance to register your attendance.