The story of (arguably) the greatest stone collector, Zhao Ji, and the creation and destruction of his collection, the imperial garden of Gen Yue, is much better known as a cautionary tale about how not to run a country, or a political satire about an artist forced to become an emperor, than the very great art of gardening.
At the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, while the army of Jin was approaching rapidly from the north, Huizong Emperor, Zhao Ji insisted on his massive construction project of Gen Yue in the inner city of the capital Bianliang: a landscape of springs, lakes, cliffs, and forests centered around a man-made mountain, which was purposed by one of his Taoist advisors, to elevate the terrain of the northeast part of the capital, in order to bring balance and fertility to the imperial family.
Hua Shi Gang - Fleets of flowers and stones - was assembled, to carry treasures, plants, and most importantly, stones of the lake Tai Hu, with the most extraordinarily shaped ones selected, all from the south of China, to be displayed in the garden. The lavish act accelerated the collapse of the frontline, and ultimately the country, during the siege of the capital, five years after its completion, Gen Yue was repurposed for the fortification, with its intricate constructions turned to firewood, exotic animals to army rations, ponds and creeks to trenches, flatter stones stacked to reinforce the city wall, and rounder ones hurled as catapult projectiles.
A fetish of collecting things, building (and then meticulously challenging and defying) a system of criteria for judging their quality. That is definitely nothing new or mysterious. We can’t really blame only Huizong Emperor for his bizarre passion, many of his bureaucrats, heroes and villains, had the same interest, the emperor collected stones that weighed tons, and placed them in Gen Yue, others collected stones of the sizes of their hats, and placed them in their homes, on their shelves.
I dream of seeing Gen Yue, with all the exquisite stones in the display, before they turned into fortifications, or returned to the unnoticed earth. It is a reaction, I believe, rather than a spontaneous behavior to collect these stones, and to praise or philosophize them, after all, it is supposed to be a manifestation of the natural beauty, or instead, a toy of novelty, to show the collector's ingenuity and great taste. It’s a substitute for the unfulfilled ambitions of aesthetics and other kinds - the security of a country, official rank, authority in another existing system.
Whether it is Gen Yue or other stones on the literati’s bookshelves, they’re miniatures of genuine nature, to a certain extent, it revealed a little secret of their owner - the suppressed or excessive desires of being in control. April 2023