| 摘要: |
| 18世纪，中国园林建筑在欧洲的文字记载与视觉图像之中甚为流行，但再造的特征与中国传统建筑之间存在着显著差异。通过综合考察欧洲建筑设计图纸以及相关文字记载，重新梳理中国园林建筑在欧洲的呈现形式与特征，进而揭示其中的文化观念与诉求。总结了西传图文所展现的“注重装饰”这一特征，亦剖析再造中国园林建筑的主要方式：（1）在欧洲审美趣味的影响下，中国园林建筑特征被纳入西方的数学尺度与比例、哥特式与洛可可装饰风格以及自然追求体系之中，呈现出明显的西化倾向；（2）在异域情调的影响下，中国园林建筑与众多异域的符号或场景杂糅呈现，模糊了文化意义，表现出异域化的倾向。这些因误读而形成的特征，乃欧洲的历史语境中，对异域的想象与建构以及自我文化认同的体现。研究可为中西方艺术交流与互鉴提供指引与启示。 |
| 关键词: 中国园林建筑 特征 欧洲 异域 重构 |
| DOI： |
| 分类号:TU981 |
| 基金项目:武夷山国家公园研究院专项（项目编号：KJG20009A），国家林业与草原局森林公园工程技术研究中心项目(PTJH15002) |
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| Reconstruction and Variation of Chinese Garden Architecture Features as Depicted in 18th Century European Illustrations |
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Wei Xinyi, Dong Jianwen
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Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University
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| Abstract: |
| The eighteenth century constitutes a pivotal moment in the European reception and reinterpretation of Chinese garden architecture. Far from merely replicating authentic Chinese traditions, European encounters with Chinese gardens produced a set of architectural and scenic forms that were fundamentally refracted through local intellectual lenses and aesthetic dispositions. What emerged on European soil was less an accurate transcription of Chinese practice than a creative reconfiguration. A meticulous inquiry into the defining characteristics of these forms is therefore indispensable. Such an inquiry not only elucidates the mechanisms through which Chinese garden aesthetics were transmitted, translated, and eventually transformed in eighteenth-century Europe, but also provides a robust conceptual framework for understanding the broader dynamics of transcultural artistic exchange between China and the West during a period of heightened global interaction. This study analyzes the representational strategies that framed Chinese garden architecture within the European context. Its methodology rests primarily upon a close examination of eighteenth-century architectural drawings, design schematics, travel accounts, and contemporaneous textual descriptions. Such documentary and material evidence allows for a precise delineation of how Chinese gardens were imagined and recreated in Europe. The study seeks to uncover the deeper cultural paradigms and socio-historical imperatives that structured these interpretive acts, thereby illuminating not only the immediate aesthetic consequences but also the ideological stakes embedded within them. European engagements with China during this period were mediated largely through travel literature. European travelers, missionaries, and diplomats who visited China frequently reported on gardens and pavilions, offering vivid descriptions. Their observations consistently highlighted what they perceived as an extraordinary profusion of ornament. This emphasis on ornamentation—whether exaggerated or merely misunderstood—did not operate simply as a descriptive detail; rather, it constituted a formative interpretive lens that shaped European conceptualizations of Chinese garden design. Ornament became the sign and the cipher of Chinese difference. It provided an interpretive baseline against which subsequent European readings unfolded, inevitably filtered through personal preconceptions, prevailing intellectual climates, and entrenched aesthetic regimes. In this respect, early textual representations did not merely document Chinese gardens; they actively produced the conceptual architecture through which Europe would come to see and reconstruct them. The subsequent transplantation of these imagined Chinese garden architectures into European design. Comparative assessment of European constructions alongside textual prototypes reveals that these gardens were profoundly shaped by dominant European sensibilities, particularly those informed by mathematical rigor and the stylistic exuberance of Gothic and Rococo ornament. Under the sway of these forces, architectural features ostensibly derived from Chinese precedents were reconfigured according to Western systems of scale, proportion, and decorative syntax. Features of the Pavilion, bridge, and tower were recalibrated to suit European expectations. What resulted was a marked tendency toward Westernization: the Chinese garden was not merely translated but assimilated into the European stylistic continuum. Yet the process did not end with Westernization alone. In parallel, these garden architectures were animated by an exoticist imagination that hybridized Chinese architectural elements with a range of foreign symbols and theatricalized scenic effects, producing a deliberately heterogeneous spectacle that blurred cultural signification. This eclectic assemblage diluted the original cultural meanings of Chinese garden architecture, propelling a broader process of exoticization in which China functioned less as a real cultural referent than as a screen for projecting European fantasies of the exotic. Within such constructions, misreading was not merely accidental; it became constitutive. Misreadings gave rise to hybrid forms that disclosed Europe’s historical imagination of alterity and its ongoing efforts to articulate cultural self-identity. These phenomena cannot be dismissed as superficial distortions. Rather, they illuminate the epistemic structures through which Europe consumed, appropriated, and rearticulated Chinese cultural forms. The eighteenth-century Chinese garden in Europe stands, therefore, not as a faithful reproduction but as a complex transcultural artifact—one that registers the entanglement of global circulation, aesthetic desire, and cultural misrecognition. To study these forms is to gain insight into the mechanisms of artistic exchange, mutual adaptation, and selective appropriation that defined Sino-European encounters during a formative historical juncture. Such dynamics furnish a valuable analytic template for understanding the broader mechanisms of transcultural encounter. Importantly, they also hold renewed relevance in the present. In an era marked by intensified global cultural circulation, expanding museum and exhibition networks, and new forms of architectural and artistic collaboration, the eighteenth-century reimagining of the Chinese garden architecture serves as a historical precedent through which to examine how cultural forms are negotiated across asymmetrical epistemic landscapes. |
| Key words: Chinese garden architecture feature Europe exoticism reconstruction |
