Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe by Stephen H. Whiteman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe by Stephen H. Whiteman Aurelia Campbell Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe by Stephen H. Whiteman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Pp. xix + 271. $70.00 hardcover, $70.00 e-book. Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe, by Stephen Whiteman, focuses on the Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat (Bishu shanzhuang 避暑山莊, hereafter Mountain Estate), the renowned Qing dynasty (1636–1912) summer palace in Rehe (now Chengde), located 180 kilometers northeast of Beijing, beyond the Great Wall. Originally one of a network of traveling palaces at which the Manchu emperor would stop during his annual tours among the court's Inner Mongolian allies, in the first decade of the eighteenth century, the site was transformed by the Kangxi 康熙 emperor (r. 1661–1722) into a lavish complex of gardens and palaces that eventually served as a secondary Qing capital. Most extant scholarship examines the Mountain Estate as it was handed down to us from the reign of the Qianlong 乾隆 emperor (r. 1735–1796), Kangxi's grandson, who made a number of significant additions to the site. Whiteman instead takes up the difficult task of reconstructing the Mountain Estate as it existed, in both actual and represented forms, during Kangxi's reign. Drawing [End Page 193] upon a wide array of primary evidence, including maps, paintings, prints, poems, and essays, Whiteman reveals that the landscape of the Mountain Estate served as a key medium through which Kangxi defined his imperial ideology. In the introduction, Whiteman lays out the book's main arguments and methodologies. He begins by explaining the reasons why he concentrates on the Mountain Estate during the reign of Kangxi instead of Qianlong: "To view the park solely through the lens of Qianlong's vision for it … risks (indeed, enacts) an act of historical erasure, subsuming the intentions of an earlier period under the actions of a later one" (p. 4). Whiteman's goal is instead to "pull apart the collapsed layers" of the Mountain Estate in order to understand how Kangxi shaped the estate to establish Qing political legitimacy within the "rapidly developing networks of the early modern world" (p. 8). Rather than basing his discussion of the Mountain Estate on nineteenth-century records, as scholars have done in the past, Whiteman relies mainly on sources from Kangxi's reign, including the emperor's own writings as well as imperially sponsored paintings and prints of the gardens. Part 1, "Recovering the Kangxi Landscape," begins with a translated excerpt from "Record of Traveling at the Invitation of the Emperor," the high official Zhang Yushu's 張玉書 (1642–1711) brief but detailed personal account of his visit to the Mountain Estate in 1708. This text is followed by chapter 1, "Reconstructing Kangxi," which, in the absence of surviving buildings, relies on textual evidence to reconstruct the estate's early built environment. Whiteman determines that the Kangxi-era park was constructed in three main phases over the course of a decade (1703–1713), and he describes in great detail its early palaces, temples, gardens, and water features. One of Whiteman's most important sources is the Imperial Poems on the Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat (Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi 御制避暑山莊詩, here-after Imperial Poems), a set of poems written by Kangxi about thirty-six favorite scenic spots at the park. In 1713, an album of the poems, accompanied by woodblock-printed illustrations by the court artist Shen Yu 沈喻 (1649–after 1728), was published in many copies, affording a "virtual tour" (p. 6) of the estate to a broader audience. Several of Shen's prints are reproduced in this chapter, along with topographic maps created by the author, aiding present readers in envisioning the early layout of the Mountain Estate. [End Page 194] Part 2, "Allegories of Empire," comprises three sections. It begins with chapter 2, "Mountain Veins," in which Whiteman discusses how Kangxi created a new Manchu imperial landscape at Rehe by touring, hunting, writing, mapmaking, and conducting rituals. Within this new political geography, Whiteman argues, the geomantic significance of the Manchu ancestral homeland in the northeast...