Page 34 - Art of the Ming and Qing Dynasty by Johnathan Hay

symbols and establish a ritual language. If the Manchu conquest was now a fact for the

Chinese, China's entrepreneurial society was no less a fact for the Manchus. Faced with an
overwhelming diversity of commodities, and needing the prosperity that this implied, they
largely left the question of symbolism aside and concentrated their attention instead on
technology and production. In art as in other domains, it was by their managerial efficiency
that they legitimized their place as rulers. In this early Qing world, political goals could be

achieved through, and not despite, the engagement with materialism and pleasure.
Characteristically, the Qing emperors devoted little energy to purely ritual
architecture, other than to repair and maintain the buildings of the Polar Forbidden City with

typical efficiency, and to build tombs on the Ming model. They did, however, pay a great
deal of attention to gardens and summer palaces. To the west of the Forbidden City, Kangxi
began the remodelling and expansion of the Western Park, which was built around a lake and
divided into Northern, Central and Southern Seas. To the north-west of the city, meanwhile,
some twelve miles from the Forbidden City, he set aside a vast terrain for new summer

palaces. His own building activities centered on the construction of the Garden of Glorious
Spring; however, the much smaller Garden of Perfect Brightness intended for his son, the
future Yongzheng emperor, eventually proved more important. Strikingly, Kangxi on

occasion held audiences there in a pavilion, the Peony Terrace, which as its name implies
gave on to a court filled with peonies. After his accession to the throne, Yongzheng expanded
the garden enormously and used it not only for pleasure, but as the seat of government during
the summer months. Much further from Beijing and closer to the Manchu homeland, in
Jehol, Kangxi constructed an imperial hunting park with the name of the Park of Ten

Thousand Trees. Adapted to the life of the steppes, it served both as a pleasurable location
for diplomatic relations with other Inner Asian groups, and as a bulwark against the
sinicization of the Manchu aristocracy. Adjoining the park, however, he also began the

construction in 1703 of a garden estate in southern Chinese style (530). In all these
enterprises, Kangxi drew upon the expertise of the Lei family of architects, pioneers of the
scale model, who assured a continuity in palace architecture into the nineteenth century.
The merger of politics and pleasure that characterized the palace macrocosm was no
less typical of the microcosm of the object. In 1680, Kangxi dispatched a central government

official from the Board of Works to re-establish state control over ceramic production at
Jingdezhen and organize production for the court. No imperial kilns were set up: instead, a
practice of the late Ming was regularized whereby official wares for court use were fired for

the government by private kilns. The official wares from the imperial factory were given the
best place in the kilns, whose owners had to stand any losses. Yet the system was also
advantageous to the kiln owners, since it gave them access to the new shapes, decorative