ZH       Wang Ao   Gusu zhi, 1506.  A gazetteer, a type of local history combining information on the administrative geography, famous sights, agricultural produce, industrial manufacture, events of significance, and notable inhabitants of a given region.  Produced for all the major towns and districts of China, these are another example of the massive bureaucracy which recorded all sorts of details and which were periodically updated.  Initially, this particular one was compiled by Wu Kuan (1436-1504), whose wealthy textiles merchant father had laid out the nine acre 'Eastern Estate' inside the city walls of Suzhou in Jiangsu province.  For much of the late imperial period, that city, perhaps 75 km. west of modern Shanghai and 125 km. northeast of Hangzhou, was the most populous non-capital city in the empire, housing half a million people within an area of at least 14.8 square kilometers.  The Eastern Estate, unlike so many other pieces of property in the region, had remained in the hands of the same family through Suzhou's turbulent fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.  A veritable model of rural self-sufficiency, it was not a real rural estate, but one of the sights of Suzhou for members of the elite who passed through, taking advantage of the city's reputation as a center of cultural production and luxury consumption.  Wu Kuan's teacher had been Du Qiong.  Wang Ao (1450-1524), who finished this book, was an even more important member of the Suzhou elite, and there is no doubt that he owned some of the most celebrated gardens in the Lake Tai region west of the city.
       It "also seems plausible that such things [as pan zai ] were a specialty of Suzhou and one that spread extensively through China only in the course of the sixteenth century, as part of a wave of expansion of garden culture that also has Suzhou as a key point of origin.  [T]he author of the Suzhou gazetteer seemed to feel the need to explain the term, as if it might be unfamiliar:  'The people of Tiger Hill [an elite resort spot to the northwest and connected to Suzhou by the canal, along which suburbs stretched] are excellent at planting strange flowers and rare blossoms in a dish.  A dish with pine or antique flowering plum, when placed on a table, is pure, elegant and delightful.'"   10

ZH       Tian Rucheng   Xi hu you lan zhi yu (Visiting and Seeing West Lake: A Gazetteer),  preface dated 1547.  Tian lived c.1500-1570.  The first ten scrolls are dedicated to the main lines of mountains.  The following nine scrolls address branches of mountains [actually, foothills] that extend inside the southern portion of the Hangzhou city walls around the Imperial Palace in Zhejiang province.  These branches seem never to stop extending, because the book includes almost all the districts of the city.  The structure of landscape depicted by Tian consists of mountains, branches of mountains, and tacit branches of mountains, which are not physically visible.  As a result, the whole landscape includes both the lake surrounded by mountains, and the city explicitly embraced and implicitly penetrated by mountains.  "As for the growing of pine, cypress and hai tong in dishes, they mostly imitate a pictorial idea ( hua yi ).  Aslant and supine ones are in the Ma Yuan (fl. c.1190-1260) technique, those with erect trunks and spreading foliage in the Guo Xi ( c. 1001-90) technique.  Other forms, such as 'phoenix and crane on pavilion and pagoda' are variously refined and marvellous, and can be laid out for pure enjoyment."  11

ZH       Gu Qiyuan   Kezuo zhuiyu (Idle Chatter on Sitting with My Guests ), 1617 or 1618.  Gu lived from 1565 to 1628.  In 1617 he published a work on the history, topography and customs of his native Nanjing in Jiangsu Province.  In Kezuo zhuiyu, he "continue[d] to stress the importance of a 'pictorial idea,' as well as providing evidence that Suzhou (also in Jiangsu Province) was still considered to be the source of the finest exponents of the art:  'Of old, dish landscapes to be placed on a table consisted of no more than one or two types of Damnacanthus.  Recently, flower gardeners ( hua yuanzi ) have moved here from Suzhou, and the number of varieties has increased, so that apart from Damnacanthus there are things like Tianmu pines, yingluo pines, crab apples, prasine peaches, little-leaf boxwood, carnations, Xiangfei bamboo, shuidongqing, narcissus, small plantains, wolfberry, gingko and flowering plum.  These must have roots and trunks, with a pictorial idea to the branches and leaves, and must be installed in an antique porcelain dish with fine stones.  The price of the expensive ones can go as high as several thousand cash.'"   12

ZH       Li Rihua  Weishuixuan riji.  A famous and influential late Ming book and art collector, important writer and artist, and one-time official at the huge ceramic and porcelain production center of Jingdezhen in south-central Jiangxi province, the largest industrial complex anywhere in the world prior to the eighteenth century, he lived from 1565 to 1635.  His diary covers the years from 1609 to 1616.  Every day of the eight years is mentioned, but several days are not filled in.  It contains very rich documentation in the field of painting and especially calligraphy, and weather is an important topic.  The diary includes Ranking of Antique Objects -- remembering that to the Chinese "antique" did not mean simply "chronologically old," but also implied "morally ennobling."  This begins with calligraphies of the Jin (265-420 C.E.) and Tang dynasties and paintings of the Tang, Five Dynasties (907-960), and early Song periods.  It then goes on to include (#11) ancient ritual bronze vessels, (#12) jades, (#13) Tang-dynasty inkstones, (#14) ancient qin (zithers) and world-famous swords, (#15) finely printed books of the Five Dynasties and Song periods, and, significantly, (#16) "strange rocks of a rugged and picturesque type."  Following the strange rocks come (#17) "a combination of some old, elegant pines and small needle-like rushes in a fine pot," (#18) "plum trees and bamboos that are fit for poetry," and such categories as imported spice, fine tea, exotice foreign foods, and white porcelain.  Unlike Zhao Xigu's listing (footnote 6) from four hundred years earlier, Li Rihua ranks his "elegances" according to level of cultural prestige. 13

ZH       Wen Zhenheng   Zhangwu zhi   ( Records of Excellent Creations / Treatise on superfluous things ) { Wen Chen-heng (1585-1645) / Ch'ang-wu-chih } , c.1615-1620.  Wen was owner in his own right of a garden ("an outstanding piece of extravagance") situated in the northwest corner of urban Suzhou in Jiangsu Province.  (He variously had residences, with their essential gardens, just outside Suzhou to both the east and west of the city, as well as a home within its walls.  One of these rural estates was still being constructed for him at the time of his death, and he never had a chance to visit it.  In addition, there was a property in Nanjing.)  The garden was steeped in the luxurious excess that moralists of the period were increasingly driven to protest, and which his own Treatise -- written when he was a much younger man -- also often attacks as "vulgarity."  His family were several generations of successful landowners.  His great-grandfather, Wen Zhengming, had been a Grand Scribe -- what may have been a largely ceremonial place in the central bureaucracy as a polisher of the literary style of documents -- one of whose teachers was Wu Kuan [see entry above, with footnote 12] .  Wen Zhenheng also held a similar position later in life.  He ended up fleeing his native city to the shores of Lake Yangcheng to escape the armies of the invading Manchus.  He committed suicide by starvation, choosing as many elite did to die with the Ming dynasty.  Eight literary works of his, much of them poetry, are listed as having been published in his lifetime.
      His 12-part guide concerned "appropriate" conspicuous consumption behavior for the Suzhou elite.  Most of the material surroundings of the Ming upper class are covered therein.  "'The garden' as a coherent site is only fleetingly presented in the Treatise, being broken down into literally hundreds of objects with an autonomy of their own, both in terms of the discrimination of taste and in terms of the market in which they circulated.  Yet it does cover almost all the 'ingredients' from which a late Ming aesthetic garden could be assembled."  "Wen's material in this [second, "Flowers and Trees"] chapter is exclusively on the consumption of flowers, with very little information as to how they are to be grown.  [K]nowledge of this type was for him beneath the dignity of 'our sort' of people.  He thus has nothing to say, for example, about the techniques used for the forcing of flowers in the late Ming, and their production out of season.  There has been a total rift between the discourses of 'horticulture' and of 'gardens,' the latter now characterized purely as objects of luxury consumption." 
       Eleven persons are listed as editors of and commentators on the work.  Pan Zhiheng (1556-1622) was the editor of the second chapter, and his interest in popular material culture is confirmed by his authorship of at least two treatises elsewheres on card games.  Unlike most similar works and despite its popularity, Wen's Treatise really didn't undergo a process of dismemberment which was common at the time, where component chapters might be reprinted and retitled as independent texts in a larger work.  Virtually any successful work might also immediately be printed and reissued by competing publishers.  Altogether, these works ensured a proto-consumer state where no one was excluded from participation in the market for luxury commodities on the grounds of ignorance of how to consume appropriately -- bearing in mind that in the case of Ming China the overwhelming majority of the population concerned itself not with choices of consumption but about whether it could consume enough of the necessities of life to avoid death.
       (The third chapter, "Water and rocks" which includes mention of Lake Tai rocks pierced through with caverns and hollows, reticulated on every side, was edited by Li Liufang (1575-1629).  He did indeed create a very fine and renowned garden for himself.  He is best remembered as an artist, one of the "Four Gentlemen of Jaiding," and a member of the artistic tendency crystallized around the great artist, artistic theoretician and major politician Dong Qichang (1555-1636).  The seventh and longest section, "Vessels and utensils," gives passing reference to antique blue-green Boshan incense burners.  This section was edited by Zhou Huanguang (1559-1625), a Suzhou native noted for his practice of calligraphy in seal script and as a poet.  His wife, also noted as a writer, was the daughter of Wen Zhengming's closest friend, Lu Shidao.)  It is believed that the reason the Treatise is not illustrated during this time which saw a massive increase in the publication of illustrated books of all kinds is because of the precision of the language used therein.
       ("Another kind of commodity, and one which was new in the late Ming period, was knowledge, transmitted personally or through the medium of published books.  The almanacs and encyclopaedias, the route books of Ming merchants, the collections of model essays for the civil service examinations and the very guides to elegant living themselves are commodities which make a commodity out of kinds of knowledge which had existed in earlier centuries but which had not been bought and sold.  Then, the merchant had learned the route from Nanjing to Suzhou by experience, the son of an elite family had learned the approved style for examination essays from his tutor, and the rules of taste in things had been learned through social intercourse with a peer group.  By 1580 all of this knowledge, or a version of it at least, could be bought.")
       Wen Zhenheng demanded that the design of gardens should reach such a state of perfection that the experience of roaming in one would cause the user "to forget his age, forget to go home, and forget his fatigue."
       The Treatise contains Tu Long's "Kao Pan Yu Shi" ("Desultory Remarks on Furnishing the Abode of the Retired Scholar," 1590) { T'u Lung (1542-1605) / "K'ao-p'an yü-shih" }   Tu Long was born in Yin county, in a suburb of Ningpo city, Zhejiang.  In 1577, he obtained the degree of jinshi, roughly equivalent to a doctoral degree, administered in the capital every three years.  He later became the Chief Magistrate of Qinpu county, Shanghai, just to the north.  After he was libelled and quit his job, Tu Long concentrated on writing plays and essays.  He rejected the adherance to strict ancient format, and advocated that a writer must write from his heart.  "Kao Pan Yu Shi" includes much information on tea varieties and preparation.
       It also refers to table culture plants and describes choice porcelain wares for various purposes.  "The best container landscapes [penjing { p'en-ching } ] are [the smallest ones,] those that can be set on a stool or table.  Then come those that one can set out in a courtyard..."  The landscapes served not only as objects of amusement, but also served to ward off evil with appropriately symbolic plants or by collecting the magical early morning dew.  "One of the longest sections in the chapter is that on 'Amusement with Pots' ( Pan wan ).  Wen Zhenheng opposes at least one of the choices of plants made by his slightly older contemporary Gu Qiyuan [see entry above, with footnote 12] , calling dwarf plantains 'ridiculous,' and seems in general to favour larger version of panjing.  He reverses what he says is the fashionable view that those for the table are superior to those used in courtyards and walkways, and gives pride of place to the Tianmu pine ( Pinus taiwanensis ), specimens of which should ideally be between one and two feet high.  As is now standard, he makes the link with named famous painters: an ideal tree should fit one description of Ma Yuan (fl.c.1190-1229), another of Guo Xi (c.1020-c.1090), another of Liu Songnian (c. 1150-after 1225?), and a fourth of Sheng Mou (active c. 1310-60).  He decries a fashionable trick of having flowers sprout from a chunk of incense wood, and lists other acceptable trees, which include the familiar flowering plum, as well as the Chinese Matrimony Vine ( Lycium chinensis ), Privet ( Ligustrum quihoi ), wild Elm ( Ulmus parvifolia ), and Junipers ( J. chinensis ) with snaky stems that do not show scars of tying and cutting [sic] , dwarf Water Bamboo ( Phyllostachys congesta ), and Sweetflag ( Acorus gramineus ).  Also, Cymbidium Orchids in the spring; Silk Tree, Yellow Fragrant Day Lily (probably Hemerocallis middendorfii ) and Oleander in the summer; yellow, dense, dwarfed Chrysanthemums in the autumn; and short-leaved Narcissus and 'Beauty Banana' ( Musa uranoscopos ) in the winter.  The Damnacanthus, which he associates with Hangzhou, is 'in between elegance and vulgarity.'  The rest of the entry discusses acceptable types of dish, acceptable forms (round, never square, with long narrow ones being 'particularly tabooed'), rocks, and placings, with a limitation of two being placed on the number to be set in any one spot."
       Landscapes in containers not only were an object of amusement, a toy (wan), but also served to ward off evil.  Thus, a certain mana (ling), a vague but beneficent magical power, is inherent in miniature gardens.  But like all magical powers, this quality is not only negative, averting evil; it is also positive.  It brings strength and power.
       The text also confirms the popularity of wood for rock or incense burner pedestals.  Ebony (wumu) was rated as being the best; zitan [Pterocarpus santalinus] and huali wood [Pterocarpus sp.] were also acceptable.  One needed to avoid the vulgar shapes like water caltrop flowers or mallow flowers, and thus highly decorated stands were not necessarily in accord with the scholars' proclaimed taste for restraint and austerity. 14

ZH       Lin Youlin    Suyuan shipu ( Stone Catalogue of the Plain Garden ), 1614.  The author (zi, Renfu; hao Zhongzhai), a native of Huating in Jiangsu province, was born into a family noted for stone collecting.  He became a great collector in his own right.  He also studied landscape painting and was conversant with events past and present.  One of the two buildings in Lin's family compound that housed prized stones was located in a garden called Suyuan ("plain garden").  He had a boat -- or detached studio set at the edge of a garden lake -- Qinglianfang (Blue Lotus Boat) into which he often took especially favored rocks.  (Sparse details of Lin's life mean that we can't be sure if the boat was actual or if it was a poetic name for his studio.)  In four volumes, this work introduces about a hundred famous stones and rock types with insightful commentary and 235 illustrations.  The well-drawn pictures in this represent sixty-five famous stones from the gardens of the Song emperors which had previously been reproduced in Xuan He Shi Pu { Hsüan Ho Shih P'u }.  The latter was a publication corresponding to the highly valued catalogues of the emperor's collections of paintings and sculptures.  Some of these illustrations may be pure invention, but there was probably a lineage for many of them, deriving partly from actual rock types and partly from pictorial convention.  Regarding Kunshan county, Suzhou, Lin states "People there grow sweet flag, small pines, and cypresses."  Later authors borrowed from these works with great freedom.  The stones depicted therein were valued as highly as any works of art executed by human hands.  From his preface: "...Stone collecting, in particular, is close to Chan meditation [sic], empowering the mind to visit the Southern Palaces and Mount Jinhua.  Since Emperor Xuanhe [Huizong, r.1101-1125], people have made illustrations and written poems about stones.  I have collected them in four volumes, which my friend Mr. Huang came to see.  After reading them, he suggested that the book be published."  This is the most detailed Ming source on the nature and significance of Lingbi stones.  The text discusses and illustrates categories of rocks as well as famous individual rocks, many of which are purportedly from the Song dynasty, and it contains numerous references to Su Shi, Mi Fu, and other famous Song-dynasty rock colections.  The section on Lingbi consists of long, abridged quotations from the relevant parts of the works of Du Wan [see entry above, with footnote 4] and Zhao Xigu [see entry above, with footnote 6].  These earlier texts were, in fact, extensively copied in the Suyuan shi, reinforcing, directly or indirectly, the view that Lingbi were the most prized of scholars' rocks from the Song dynasty through the Ming -- and then the Qing. 15

ZH       Wang Xiangjin    Qun Fang Pu ( Flower Catalogue / Compendium of Aromatic Plants / Thesaurus of Botany ) { Wang Siang Tsin or Wang Hsiang-chin / K'ün fang pu } ; 1630.  Thirty volumes.  Wang was born in Xinzheng, Shandong province.  After ten years of observations and readings (the preface was dated 1620), this work was produced containing a treatise on horticulture and also an anthology of quotations and poems on plants and more.  Some 433 names of plants are quoted as entries.  Under each name are indicated synonyms (if any), a description, therapeutic indications, cultural technics, alimentary use, medicinal recipes, extracts of prose literature and poems. 
       Also contains the treatise "Penjing" by Wu Chutai. 16

ZH       Ji Cheng   Yuan Ye (Garden Design / The Craft of Gardens ), 1631-34.  The author (1582-1642?) was a native of Wujiang county in Suzhou and was a prominent Ming dynasty garden designer.  This was the world's first monograph dedicated to garden architecture.  It is not a manual, as one would expect, however, as it neither contains a list of plants nor instructions on how to grow them.  Instead the three volume work emphasizes architecture, an integral part of the Chinese concept of garden design, and elaborates on the selection of various types of rocks and structures.  The first volume contains chapters on construction, selecting sites, designing artificial hills and the design and placement of garden buildings, including latticework grids for doors, windows and ceilings.  The second volume is entirely about balustrades.  The third volume contains six chapters: on doors and windows, on walls, on pavings, on the construction of artificial hills, on the selection of rocks, and on “borrowing views” (including views from outside the garden). 
       The book contains information about stone collecting and connoisseurship.  17