Reflection of Landscape Heritage Conservation after Visiting the Mater-of-Nets Garden

The abolished “Traditional Market and Art Museum” project that I talked about last week is now partly reborn because the art museum collects hawkers’ daily necessities as an art exhibition wall. This is a kind of reminiscence of the lost traditional landscape. But today I want to talk about my thought about the improper protection of traditional landscapes that still existing.

Yesterday I visited Keyuan garden and Pavilion of Surging Waves and watched the program of “Night Tour to Master-of-Nets Garden” in the evening. I grew up in South China and went to university there, and I have always been fascinated by Suzhou gardens. So, this semester took advantage of the opportunity of online classes to come to Suzhou to live in, hoping that the traditional Chinese garden culture can complement the landscape knowledge I am learning from the West World. But the impression of visiting the garden for several weekends is very different from my imagination. It is true that the current gardens have largely maintained the appearance of the Ming and Qing dynasties, but the neglect of details makes it difficult for tourists to restore the elegant life of the literati family in the past. For example, rigid furnishings, shoddy scientific and educational signs, the surrounding modern buildings’ oblivion to the view, the heavily polluted water in the pool, the planting design of the messy unrepaired rooms, the tacky lighting configuration like a nightclub, the completely changed structural system (partially the wooden structure was replaced with a concrete structure). In addition, there are over-saturated tourists and staff who dealt with things perfunctorily and actors have greatly reduced my perception. I have also visited the Forbidden City, the Japanese garden, the hollyhock house in Los Angeles and other architectural and landscape heritages. While carefully preserving their original appearance, they also use new media and professional tour guides to make the audience respect the wisdom of their ancestors, triggering reflections on their past lives. But the feeling that Suzhou gardens give me is only a pity for the past glory.

I searched for some information about the modern protection records of Suzhou gardens. The garden originally belonged to wealthy merchant families and scholar-official families with extremely high artistic accomplishments. They hired specialized craftsmen to design and gardener servants to take care of it. In the period of the Republic of China, the descendants of nobles who could not make ends meet were not allowed to open to the public to earn maintenance fees. In the New China era, gardens were donated and confiscated to nation because of the good political attitudes of their owners, and they were redistributed by the government as factories, dormitories or schools. In that era, when culture was dead, no one cared about garden art that could not directly produce value and even destroyed it. The structural system of many garden buildings was replaced, the soil and water were polluted, and the artwork was damaged since then. After “the reform and opening up” policy came out, the pursuit of culture and art was slowly restored, and the garden was reborn. There are no less than 20 classical gardens in Suzhou that are open to the public, but they share the annual maintenance cost of 100 million yuan from the country, which is nothing short of a drop in the bucket. There are many cultural relics that need to be restored, water and electricity facilities need to be re-laid, and the administrative expenses of the management office are complicated. Therefore, 70% of the current garden income still comes from garden tickets and garden activity services. This model originated from the model of “cultivating a garden with a garden” that emerged in China in the 1990s. This has also led to the current overload of receiving tourists, the flood of service personnel, and the lack of researchers. The historical blocks and sights surrounding the gardens are occupied by shoddy residents or new office buildings from different eras in the past. These historical treasures seem to be leftover beads scattered in the uniform urban fabric.

I also learned about the protection mechanisms of garden heritage in other countries and regions. Because the Anglo-American foundation and trust management and maintenance model are quite different from the government management and maintenance model under China’s public economy, I would like to introduce the state-owned garden maintenance experience in Taiwan, China. The Linbenyuan garden in Banqiao can be traced back to the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty. After the garden was donated to the Taipei City Government in 1976, it was managed and maintained by four government departments at different levels. The descendants of the cultural heritage owner partly funded it and some private enterprises funded it too. Every year, 90 volunteers with tour guide qualifications for non-profit cultural groups are recruited to guide tourists and restore and protect cultural relics. In the park management, restrictions on the flow of people and reservation system are strictly implemented, and some buildings in the garden and surrounding buildings are used as restaurants and boutique shops to supplement income. In order to increase visitors’ understanding and awe of Chinese classical gardens, a garden introduction film was set up at the entrance, free guided tours and new media game designs suitable for different age groups were arranged. What surprised me the most was that in the restoration process of the garden, scholars did not blindly pursue the restoration of the appearance, such as the deception of using the concrete structure to restore it and then painting the wooden structure after the wooden structure collapsed. They believe that “simply restoring according to the original is closer to the cultural requirements of our traditional society of lack of richness”. Therefore, based on the introduction of modern infrastructure to the garden, the classical architectural elements are translated with modern methods and some buildings are innovatively restored to adapt to and lead the current aesthetic trend.

From Wikipedia

However, it is undeniable that under the reservation model of Taiwanese gardens that strictly limit the flow of people and the preferential appointment of scholars, soldiers, doctors and police, the appreciation of garden art seems to have set a threshold. It is no longer a civic park facing the whole public, but a filtering mechanism for high-quality people. Although this will be more conducive to the protection of garden art, it also widens the distance between the citizens and even deprives ordinary people of the right to pursue beauty. I don’t know if it is appropriate, but it may also be a kind of cultural “gentrification”, which is worthy of our thinking.