Theatricality in the moonlit garden: Qi Biaojia’s (1602–1645) garden of Mount Yu and his midnight suicide

Abstract

This paper examines the Garden of Mount Yu in the late Ming Dynasty, owned by the prestigious scholar-official and drama critic Qi Biaojia. As seen in his literature on Mount Yu, Qi had projected his theatrical sensitivity onto his viewing of the garden, imagining the emotional interactions between his ‘theatrical self’ and the garden, which emerged again on the night of his martyrdom upon Ming’s collapse. In both circumstances, the alienation of a ‘theatrical self’ enabled Qi to immerse himself in the imagined theatrics while apprehending their illusory quality. This paper takes the nocturnal obscurity and mutability of temporal stages as opposites of daytime normality and demonstrates the obsession with theatricality and its manipulation in seventeenth-century China. Such obsession, when examined in the context of the Ming-Qing transition, reflects a philosophy of living in the post-conquest world, wherein the significance of a garden was highlighted.