Page 56 - Ming_China_Courts_and_Contacts_1400_1450 Craig lunas

Chapter 5 Cities may be the largest premodern structures in China
that art historians take as an object of study. The Chinese
Green Beijing: Ecologies city takes on various guises in art-historical writing. We
encounter it at times as a configuration of architectural
of Movement in the New forms and spaces, and at other times as a frame for diverse

practices of art-making. More selectively, it sometimes takes
Capital c. 1450 form as a network of urban and extra-urban sites that were
especially important for the production and reception of art.
Illuminating as such characterisations of the city are, they
Jonathan Hay tend to underplay a dimension of urban experience –
movement – that the modern city-dweller is liable to see as
fundamental. Some might argue that our contemporary
awareness of the city as a constellation of movement is
irrelevant to a 15th-century Chinese city, especially one like
Beijing that had major symbolic functions. However, I raise
the question of movement not in order to collapse differences
between past and present, but on the contrary to suggest that
movement provides an analytic lens through which we can
gain a sharper sense of those very differences.
To craft movement as an analytic lens, one approach
might start from 21st-century thinking on the city. This
approach would posit that it is illusory to attribute to any city
an essential, stable form; instead, urban form crystallises in
perception and use, which happen in real time and are
socially and culturally mediated. But since the study of
Chinese art in English is by definition an intercultural affair,
this first approach can never be enough in itself. When one
works on another culture or another time period, it is also
necessary for both scholarly and ethical reasons to try to
reconstruct that culture’s self-understanding, as far as one
can. We would also need to adopt a second, more archival
approach, therefore, in order to ask how 15th-century
Beijingers themselves thought about urban movement.
Ultimately, though, it is at the intersection between these
two very different approaches, the theoretical and the
philological, that movement could become the analytic lens
needed.
In this short chapter, I cannot craft the lens itself but I
may be able to locate the intersection where it could usefully
operate. My starting point is a linguistic observation.
Whereas the English language does not have a word in
common usage to denote either form-in-movement or
place-in-movement, the Chinese language does. The
relevant term is shi 勢. Shi equally describes material forms
such as mountains or garden rocks, and ephemeral
configurations such as the balance of forces at a particular
moment in a battle or a chess game. For the former, we
might use a translation like ‘stance’ or ‘structural propensity’
or ‘lines of force’, and for the latter ‘state of play’ or ‘current
configuration’. Shi is equally applicable to form, space and
1
place, and I shall try to show that it can be usefully applied
to the city of Beijing c. 1450 (Pl. 5.1). What kinds of
movement would a mid-15th-century inhabitant of the city
have thought of as structuring the shi of Beijing at any given
moment? Three in particular would have come to mind, I
think. The first is energy flow, which in Chinese
cosmological thought up to and beyond this period was the
very condition of existence. Beijing was configured from
many different kinds of energy flow, but I only have space to
discuss two: one that is tangible, water, and another that is

46 | Ming China: Courts and Contacts 1400–1450