The interdisciplinary prospects of reading Yuan ye

Abstract

For students of Chinese gardens, the Ming dynasty treatise Yuan ye, written by the garden designer Ji Cheng (b. 1582),1 is an indispensable source today. Oswald Sirén was the first scholar to call the attention of Western readers to this text with a partial translation of Yuan ye in his classic Gardens of China.2 At the time, many Chinese scholars were struggling with the task of reading Yuan ye, a treatise well-known for its opacity, and Sirén, who was not himself a fluent reader of classical Chinese, made his translation with the help of Chinese readers. For three decades, to a large degree, Western understanding of Yuan ye and of Chinese gardens derived from Sirén's work. It was not until Alison Hardie published a full English translation in 1988 that Western readers were able to appreciate something of the overall impression of Yuan ye.3 More recently, the French translation by Che Bing Chiu brought to Western readers a detailed knowledge of the work of modern Chinese commentators that has been accessible only to specialists.4