Chinese culture has an obsession with moonlight. It struck the people from Western cultures living in old China that the Chinese so trusted the ebb and flow of moonlight and always looked forward to the day when the moonlight would be at its best. Especially so when the memory of a garden named Yuanming is cherished. Yuanming means the 'round brightness' or the 'perfect brightness' that only the full moon can give. The obsession with moonlight was widespread in Chinese gardens. At the time of the Yuanming Yuan, a painter in Suzhou wrote, 'Every time the wind rustled the bamboos in my courtyard or the moon silvered the leaves of the banana trees beside my window. I remembered other moons and other nights until my soul became entranced with an unreal world of dreams and fancies. It was a national loss when this imperial garden, the garden of moonlight in fullness, was suddenly burnt down to ruins. It is said that the year before the arson, the god of the garden visited the emperor in a dream and asked tor a leave. There is a pervasive melancholy about the ruins that recalls the perfect brightness that the garden once enclosed. Thousands of people have visited the site attempting to retrieve the lost garden in their minds. A moving essay says: In front of the ruins, I can only gaze distractedly. Wind whistles in the nearby proves in tears. A voice of 'remain, remain...' echoes over the ruins. In the twilight, the white marbles tend to talk to me. Do they want to tell how they experienced the hugefire and how time was measured?... Wind, waving over the ruins, is calling. With the ambiguity of 'a garden in mind,' the identity of the Yuanming Yuan keeps splitting apart. Lived in by six Chinese emperors of the Qing dynasty over 150 years, the garden consisted of four tiers: three Chinese ones and one European (figure 1). Its split identity originated from the fact that both the whole of the gardens and the first garden were called Yuanming. It was further accentuated because the garden was not pure Chinese, but partly European, with a garden called Xiyang Lou. 'western storied-buildings,' designed and built by the Jesuits. The tension between the Chinese and European parts was exposed by the huge fire of 1860. Before the fire, the latter was hidden in the former; after the fire, while the former were burnt to cinders, the ruins of the latter remained as a paradoxical reminder of the former. The reversion of figure and ground splits the identity again: the ruins of the Xiyang Lou are now well known as the Yuanming Yuan.
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