“Luxury” and “the Surprising” in Sir William Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772): Commercial Society and Burke’s Sublime-Effect

Yue Zhuang, University of Exeter

Chinese gardens fascinated the English and British elite in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This fascination was not mere exoticism but was associated with the moral political discourse within which the English landscape movement evolved.[1] In seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe, China enjoyed a considerable reputation for its civility and moral government.[2] In Britain, the Chinese garden, known for its irregularity and its capacity to please the senses and imagination, was evoked by various people, including Sir William Temple (1628–1699) and Joseph Addison (1672–1719), in order to articulate and legitimate their own interests and pursuits in society.[3] In the late eighteenth century, a book entitled Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772)[4] by Sir William Chambers (1723–1796),[5] an architect to King George III (r. 1760–1801), marked yet a new representation of Chinese gardens. Contrary to previous representations of the irregular Chinese style by Temple and Addison, Chambers’s gardens were not enemies of “the regular,” which had become associated with the tyrannical state.[6] Cultivating an air of sensationalism,[7] Chambers’s Chinese gardens consisted of scenes of the pleasing, the terrible, and the surprising, which, he emphasised, were capable of exciting opposite and violent sensations (DG,28, 64); whereas the English style, typically represented in Lancelot “Capability” Brown’s (1716–1783) “naturalistic” gardening, which Chambers criticized, was a mere imitation of nature.[8] The English style was monotonous, insipid, and demonstrated a languor of the mind (DG, 33).

Although attacked by “Old Corps” Whigs as a “Tory landscape,”[9] the Dissertation won support from other Whig politicians like Edmund Burke (1729–1797), who called himself a “Chamberist.”[10] Burke’s showing favour to the Dissertation was not mere coincidence. In fact, the contrast between the two mental states—languor and violent sensations—which Chambers proposed in the Dissertation,resonated deeply with the effect of the beautiful and the sublime as described by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which Chambers had carefully studied.[11]

The Burkean sublime-effect and the Dissertation on Oriental Gardening

As Richard Bourke has suggested, Burke’s Enquiry was an investigation into training imaginative sensibilities.[12] Terms like sensibility, imagination, and taste, in eighteenth-century Britain, were as political as they were psychological or moral. An important background to this phenomenon lies in the nature of the constitutional government of Britain. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, political authority no longer rested upon the monarch’s prerogatives. The morals or virtues of Englishmen were seen to include the very protection of English liberty and constitutional government.[13] This English concept of virtue was inherited from the Roman virtus, which referred to martial values like courage, self-restraint, and strength.[14] As Philip Ayres discusses, following the Revolution the newly empowered English aristocrats used Roman-republican constitutional liberty as their model of governance.[15] The aristocrats identified martial values as constituting the core values of an Englishmen’s virtues. According to the Stoic philosopher Seneca, the greatest enemy of virtus was fortuna—that is, wealth or luxury.[16] The Stoic’s teaching was close to British hearts and was reflected in the anxiety about the corruption of morals by commerce that was constantly on display in different representations of the time including, for example, the famous pamphlet,Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757) written by the ardent Whig, the Reverend John Brown (1715–1766). Whilst traditional minds condemned commerce as sinful, Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith (1723–1790) considered commercial society as the final stage in the development of society, naturally succeeding that of agriculture.[17] In this final stage, the aesthetic qualities of commodities satisfied “the nicety and delicacy of our taste,”[18] which signalled progress; however, Smith also noted the emasculating effect of excessive luxury. Inhis Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) he commented that “perhaps the delicate sensibility required in civilized nations sometimes destroys the masculine firmness of character.”[19] The refined material culture of commercial society, which enhanced sensitivity to the pleasures of liberty and commerce (i.e. liberal or civilian virtues), also undermined martial values. To counteract the negative effect of commerce Adam Smith and many other liberal thinkers suggested military strategies to revive the languishing martial spirits of Britons and the nation.[20] Chambers, of Scots descent, emphasised this Scottish Enlightenment discourse.[21] But as an architect he took up a sensationalist approach and, following Burke’s theory of the sublime, introduced the theory that moulding citizens’ martial virtues could be achieved through city landscaping; he disguised this theory in the garb of Chinese gardens.

Chambers confessed in personal correspondence to his friend, the famous Swedish naval architect, Frederick Chapman (1721–1808), that his account of Chinese gardens was not authentic. But rather, as Chambers wrote, “it is a system of my own which as it was a bold attempt of which the Success was very uncertain, I fathered it upon the Chinese who I thought lived far enough off to be out of reach of Critical Abuse.”[22] The Dissertation therefore may be read as an allegorical text that talked about English landscape gardening through a Chinese garb—a literary technique that was not uncommon during Chambers’s time.[23] Allegorical Chinese images were often adopted by European authors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because of the general model-effect or cultural superiority that China enjoyed at the time.[24] As previous scholars have noted, the Chinese models adopted by Europeans functioned as mirrors or disguises for certain values that were inherent in the Western non-orthodox tradition. As models, the Chinese subjects served as a justification for those Western values.[25]

In the case of the Dissertation, the decision to introduce the Chinese garden to Europe was made because, as Chambers proposed, Chinese gardeners were “not only Botanists, but painters and philosophers, having a thorough knowledge of the human mind, and of the arts by which its strongest feelings are excited” (DG, 11).These “Chinese” philosopher-gardeners may be seen as mirrors of both those contemporary French architects in the Academy of Architecture who emphasised the impact of architecture on sensations, such as Germain Boffrand (1667–1754) and Jacques-Francois Blondel (1705–1774) with whom Chambers studied;[26] and British philosophers (e.g. Edmund Burke and Lord Kames [Henry Home, 1696–1782]) whose works on aesthetics were written from the perspective of the operation of the senses.[27] For example, beauty, as Burke defined it, “was some quality in bodies, acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses”(PE, 112). In his Elements of Criticism (1762), Lord Kames stated: “architecture [and gardening] cannot otherwise entertain the mind, but by raising certain agreeable emotions or feelings.”[28] These ideas influenced Chambers’s exploration of the art of landscape gardening. As he declared at the beginning of the Preface to the Dissertation in reference to gardening, compared with buildings and other arts “its dominion is general; its effects upon the human mind certain and invariable” (DG, v).

These architects and philosophers’ sensationalist notes deviated from the authority of Lockean associationism and the popular concept of the dominating role of “reason in producing our passions.” The sensationalist notes were underpinned, as recent scholarship has revealed, by eighteenth-century physiology.[29] Developed from Thomas Willis’s Anatomy of the Brain (1664), major teachers at the Edinburgh Medical School, such as William Cullen (1710–1790), emphasised the nervous system as the structural basis for the total integration of body function and the perceptive capacity or sensibility of the organism.[30] The sensibility of the nerves, they assumed, depended not on the faculty of reason but on the quality of received perceptions.  Hence, the Edinburgh medical school held that “all man’s higher attributes—taste, imagination, and indeed the capacity to reason—would, in the last analysis, depend on his condition of existence, diet, weather, labour and so forth… Sensibility [was] in the end related to the individual’s mode of life and should, in the healthy state, be properly adjusted to it.”[31] This physiological account of the nervous system, combined with a new interest in the environment as a determinant of man’s nature and of civilization generally,[32] directly influenced the discourse of imagination, aesthetics, and philosophy. “The beautiful” and “the sublime,” or buildings and gardens, were not valued as mere aesthetic objects but as constituting the living environment that played an important role in shaping the human imagination. As Burke made plain, his Enquiry was “to find whether there are any principles, on which the imagination is affected, so common to all, so grounded and certain, as to supply the means of reasoning satisfactorily about them.”[33] Lord Kames also claimed that a built environment reflected the moral worth of its proprietors: “a house and garden surrounded with pleasant fields, all in good order, bestow greater lustre upon the owner than at first will be imagined. The beauties of the former are, by intimacy of connection, readily communicated to the latter.”[34] It is upon such an integrated psycho-physiological and moral discourse that Chambers built and envisioned his sensationalist landscape theory, emphasising the effect of the art of landscape gardening on shaping the imagination.

With scenes of “the terrible” and “the surprising”—howling jackals, gibbets, apparatus of torture, and shocks of electrical impulses (DG, 27–29), Chambers’s descriptions differed radically from Addison’s earlier account of Chinese gardens as a source of the pleasures of the imagination; however, it was still firmly in accordance with Burke’s concept of the sublime.[35] Whilst for Addison the beautiful evoked the soul or senses’ highest gratification (or a perfect state of perception), for Burke the sublime elicited a more superior, intensified experience. Burke’s definition of the sublime, as Aris Sarafianos suggests, was designed to be compatible with the physiologists’ theory of the contractility of the nerves.[36] From the physiologists’ view, the rational “soul” as the vital force was not a speculative form of mechanical fluidism but rather an innate “force in the fibres themselves, a life which makes them contract.”[37] A healthy condition was obtained when fibres were in “continuous oscillation, in constant movement as an expression of the vis vitalis.”[38] Whilst Burke connected the beautiful with pleasures (relaxation), his definition of the sublime was affected in terms of “pain or danger” or of “sickness, and death” (heightened instances of tension). The most intensified, lifting emotion, according to Burke, therefore, could not be the pleasures evoked by the beautiful, wherein the fibres are in constant rest or trapped in an unchanging movement, but rather that great emotion of “delightful horror” caused by the sublime, which occurred at the point of a baffling, contradictory, but clearly physiological threshold where “a change as produces a relaxation should immediately produce a sudden convulsion,” and “a violent pulling of the fibres” (PE, 132). The sublime was thus positioned by Burke against the beautiful as an antidote against the languid, for it intensified vitality through “an exertion of the contracting power of the muscles” (PE, 173), keeping the organism in an active, healthy condition. As Suzanne Guerlac suggests, the tension of the sublime functioned as a kind of homeostatic device, or constancy mechanism, ensuring against the risk of the dangerous reduction of tension induced through pleasure. [39] The sublime thus had the effect of curing weakness.

Congruent with Burke’s theory of the beautiful and the sublime, Chambers orchestrated oriental scenes of luxury and the surprising where the passenger’s “attention is constantly to be kept up,” and his mind led through a “quick successions of opposite and violent sensations” (DG, 64, 28). For this scenic dyad of luxury and the surprising, Chambers used an ambivalent image of the Chinese garb as a narrative model with which to refer to the British reality. The refined summer scenes of the Chinese gardens, as I will show, are not a mere backdrop for an oriental paradise but a mirror of British commercial hedonistic gardens like the Vauxhall Gardens in London. Reflecting the urban commercial exuberance from colonial trade, the luxury gardens signalled a refined sensibility to the pleasures of liberty, commerce, and the arts, which marked out a higher commercial civilization. However, the excessive luxury of the summer scenes, projected through the effeminacy and decadence of the Chinese princes, alerted the British elite to their own potential corruption by way of material comforts. The scenes of the surprising, on the other hand, are appropriations from both the Jesuits’ accounts of the Emperor Kangxi’s (r. 1661–1722) annual autumn hunts in Mulan, a vast area of mountains and forests in Inner Mongolia,[40] and the underground Renaissance humanist practices of initiation rites.[41] The Manchu strategy of sustaining military vigour in its army, intermingled with Hermetic-Neoplatonic tenets of spiritual regeneration, was transplanted into the British discourse of rejuvenating the nation’s military spirit and martial values. Pseudo-military journeys through “Chinese” gardens, when further applied to visionary national transportation networks, would have functioned as vehicles of the sublime-effect for Chambers, the Comptroller of the King’s Works. Landscape, in Chambers’s vision, was not a mere object catering to the landowners’ aesthetic gaze. Rather, embedded in living environments, landscape was a site for moulding British citizens’ sensations, and it was expected to counteract the emasculating effect of the excessive commodities produced by commercial society.

Luxury: Visions of a commercial society

The 1760–70s were a time in which Britain experienced economic prosperity as the Peace of Paris (1763) secured great imperial gains. Under the conditions associated with the new commercial society, national anxiety about moral corruption became particularly pertinent. As John Brown observed about civil life in hisEstimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757):

Every house of fashion is now crowded with porcelain trees and birds, porcelain men and beasts, crossed legged mandarins and Brahmins, perpendicular Lines and stiff right Angles: every gaudy Chinese Crudity, either in Colour, Form, Attitude, or Grouping, is adopted into fashionable Use, and has become the Standard of Taste and Elegance… There is hardly a corner of the kingdom, where a summer scene of public dissipation is not now established.[42]

The greatest worry concerning the new economy was that the rich English middle class who had made quick fortunes in the colonies were not only bringing back habits of luxurious consumption, but also of oriental corruption. These “nabobs” openly competed for political power with the landed aristocracy in Parliament and elsewhere, by means of bribery. As the historian and Whig politician, Horace Walpole querulously asked in 1773:

What is England now? A sink of Indian wealth, filled by nabobs and emptied by Maccaronis! A senate sold and despised! A country overrun by horse-races! A gaming, robbing, wrangling, railing nation without principles, genius, character, or allies. [43]

Chambers’s “Chinese” summer scene—a landscape of luxury—precisely responds to these social reflections. It is worth noting that in his representation the landscape of luxury has an ambivalent effect encompassing both civility and effeminacy. This ambivalent image not only reflected Chambers’s own identity—a patriotic politician from a mercantilist background—but it also aligned him with his companion Scottish liberal thinkers who not only saw the necessity of global trade to make Britain a great nation but were also aware of commercialism’s fatal side-effect—effeminacy.

(A) Luxury as civility

In contrast to the conservative moralist presentation of chinoiserie as “foreignness” and grotesque, Chambers welcomed and even celebrated oriental luxury as a scene of civility. He presented them all in detail: the plentiful waterworks, the rich plantations, the exotic animals and birds, the sophisticated tree-lined walks; the “cabinets of verdure” and the grottos adorned with “incrustations of coral shells, ores, gems and christalisations [sic]”; the elegant pavilions with sophisticated names (e.g. Miao Ting), the finishings of marble, “inlaid precious woods, ivory, silver, gold, and mother of pearl”; the splendid and spacious buildings, furnished with “pictures, sculptures, embroideries, trinkets, and pieces of clock-work of great value,” “enriched with ornaments of gold, intermixed with pearls, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and other gems” (DG, 20–23).

In the Chinese gardens, all senses were satisfied. As Chambers related, smell was pleased by aromatic herbs and flowers, as well as fragrant, artificial breezes; taste was aroused by sweet-scented water; hearing was entertained by melodious birds and murmuring fountains; And there were many objects that pleased the sense of sight and stimulated the imagination: the finest verdure, the most brilliant, harmonious colouring imaginable; the most colourful birds, such as gold and silver pheasants and pea-fowls; painted glass that fitted in windows, which tinted the light and gave a glow to objects; and the tinted-glass skylights in the Halls of the Moon, which filled the interiors with the pleasing gloom of a fine summer’s night.

In this way, Chambers showed himself to be a follower of the new evaluation of luxury that was put forward by liberal thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith. Hume and Smith did not consider luxury items as being associated with the excess and ostentation of the older elite consumption, nor did they consider that foreign imports harmed the domestic economy. Instead they suggested that these imports expressed civility, comfort, fashion, taste, and moderation. Hume, for example, identified “luxury” with the invention and production of manufactured goods designed for the “gratification of the senses.”[44] Thus luxury functioned as an incentive for individual and social-economic improvement.

As Maxine Berg points out, the emerging higher way of life and the new capitalistic economic order in Europe had drawn inspiration from the growing trade with Asia since the seventeenth century.[45] The Asian craft objects of luxury in Chambers’s scenes, therefore, represented for Europeans a whole new category of what Berg calls “an economy of quality and delight,” which stimulated new ways of thinking about a more civilized way of life and undermined the existing system of feudalism. Monarchs and politicians skilfully used Asiatic luxury to promote this new liberal political-economic order to aid their own interests. Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales (1707–1751), Chambers’s royal patron, was one such example. Frederick sponsored the famous Vauxhall Gardens (1732), a popular pleasure garden displaying oriental tastes and entertainment. Vauxhall was a key site of “the new capitalists’ cultural enterprise” in London.[46] For Frederick, who brought reformation to the British economic-political system,[47] to patronize the luxury hedonistic garden was not only an effective way to distinguish him from the old feudal political-economic order and monarchical tradition; it was also an effective way of bringing down that order and of promoting the new order of free trade that had won him tremendous support from the mercantile middle class. The “Chinese” scenes of luxury, with their obvious parallels with this hedonistic garden, may be seen as homage by the Scottish merchant’s son to the Hanoverian prince who, by promoting Asiatic luxury gardens, had initiated the reform of foreign and commercial policies in favour of the overseas trading community and had facilitated the establishment of a liberal, civil, and commercial society.

(B) Luxury as effeminacy

However, the scenes of luxury in oriental gardens had another aspect in that luxury objects were marked with the character of femininity: sweet and scented vegetables, “clumps of rose trees” and “lofty flowering shrubs” made up “a wilderness of sweets adorned with all sorts of fragrant and gaudy productions.” (DG, 20) Birds were chosen for their beautiful colours and melodious songs; animals for their mild and obedient nature—deer, antelopes, spotted buffaloes, and sheep; there were “murmuring fountains, sleeping nymphs”; water gave sweet scent, breezes were fragrant and artificial; music was soft; the books in the library were for entertainment; and the paintings were amorous. (DG, 21) The feminine character of objects was virtually expressed in human figures—eunuchs, women servants, and concubines—who were either indulging in all sorts of entertainment: dining, conversation, music, and playing games or waiting in secret recesses for their visiting patrons. The only male characters, Chinese princes, as represented by Chambers, were engaged with nothing in particular, instead preferring to “retire with their favourite women” to pavilions, “whenever the heat and intense light of the summer’s day becomes disagreeable to them; and here they feast, and give loose to every sort of voluptuous pleasure” (DG,23–24).

In describing it thus, Chambers echoed a predominant view in the minds of the eighteenth-century British elite: Asia, like India and China, epitomised the evil union of luxury and effeminacy. The seventeenth and eighteenth-century British readers were familiar with the conquest of the Ming Empire by the Manchus through works like the Jesuit Martin Martini’s Bellum Tartaricum (London 1654) and Elkanah Settle’s play The Conquest of China by the Tartars (London 1676). These descriptions perpetuated what would become a familiar binary in the eighteenth century of the sensual, effeminate Southern Chinese and their antithesis in the hardy masculine Northern Tartars (Manchus)[48] who in time would be softened and feminized by those they had conquered, the Han Chinese. For eighteenth-century British audiences, such representations dovetailed with warnings about the potential effeminisation of Britain through the import and consumption of luxury items, which would emasculate the masculinity and virility of their virtus.

In the early eighteenth century, in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713), the third Earl of Shaftesbury, had already warned of the negative effects of commercial luxury and effeminacy.[49] It was therefore widely recognized by the mid-eighteenth century that commercial society inevitably brought with it luxury consumption and effeminate masculinity. As mentioned above, aristocratic men’s public virtues were seen to include the very protection of liberty and national freedom. In commercial society, martial values were seen as being undermined by refined living. As Adam Smith recognized, the outcome of an increasingly commercial and liberal order produced “weak men.”[50] Adam Ferguson described the upper class of Britons in the following way: “The Hearts of our People are not Steel, they are softened by a Disuse of Arms, by Security, and pacific Employments.”[51] Lord Kames also noted that “where arts, manufactures, and commerce, have arrived at perfection, a pacific spirit prevails universally.” [52] He saw this “pacific spirit” as a danger on the grounds that now “not a spark of military ardour” remains, “nor will any man be a soldier.”[53] The anxiety of decline resulting from excessive commerce was prevalent. In his highly popular History of Europe, first published in 1786, William Russell warned:

So great an influx of wealth, without any extraordinary expenditure, or call to bold enterprise, must soon have produced a total dissolution of manners; and the British nation, overwhelmed with luxury and effeminacy, might have sunk into an early decline.[54]

The task, therefore, as Adam Ferguson, among others, saw it, was to find a way “to mix the military Spirit with our civil and commercial Policy.”[55] War, military exercises, militias, and a standing army, were among various means proposed by Scottish liberal thinkers[56] to stir up the military spirit. Chambers was familiar with this discourse. As he wrote in his correspondence, “Our gardeners, and I fear our Connoisseurs too, are such tame animals, that much sparring is necessary to keep them properly on their haunches.”[57]

The 1760–70s was a period that witnessed continued and extensive militia agitation in Britain. The British navy, benefiting from the “blue water” tradition,[58] grew at a greater rate than the army, and at immense expense. Naval reviews and exercises were also intensified during George III’s reign (1760–1820).[59] These social phenomena were reflected in the scenes in the Dissertation, for example, “They observe, that the different aquatic sports of rowing, sailing, swimming, fishing, hunting and combating, are an inexhaustible fund of amusement”; “sea-ports with fleets of vessels lying before them, forts with flags flying, and batteries of cannon”; “upon their lakes, the Chinese frequently exhibit sea-fights, processions, and ship-races” (DG, 47–48).

For Chambers, such active scenes of military exercises became an integral part of urban scenes, emphasizing masculinity and virility and transferring their resultant virtue “or moral stiffening” to citizens.[60] But these virtue-inducing military spectacles had to be moderated in accord with the time and place in the city or country. To engage with a larger polity, Chambers instead orchestrated a pseudo-military journey through a landscape containing scenes of the surprising, in which citizens were not merely spectators but became travellers on a journey, like a Manchu-Roman soldier on a campaign.

The Surprising: making the martial self

As Chambers described in the surprising scenes:

His way now lies through dark passages cut in the rocks, on the side of which are recesses, filled with colossal figures of dragons, infernal fiends, and other horror forms, which hold in their monstrous talons, mysterious, cabalistical [sic] sentences, inscribed on tables of brass; with preparations that yield a constant flame; serving at once to guide and to astonish the passenger: from time to time he is surprised with repeated shocks of electrical impulse, with showers of artificial rain, or sudden violent gusts of wind, and instantaneous explosions of fire; the earth trembles under him, by the power of confined air; and his ears are successively struck with many different sounds, produced by the same means; some resembling the cries of men in torment; others the roaring of bulls, and howl of ferocious animals, with the yell of hounds, and the voices of hunters; others are like the mixed croaking of ravenous birds; and others imitate thunder, the raging of the sea, the explosion of cannon, the sound of trumpets, and all the noise of war.

For Chambers’s contemporary British readers, such descriptions might not have been as whimsical as they now appear. They might have reminded them of the Manchu Emperor Kangxi’s hunts, which were vividly described by the Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688) who attended the Emperor on occasions in 1682 and 1683. These accounts were included in John Lockman’s Travels of the Jesuits, into various parts of the world (London, 1743),[61] a significant work of its type, which can be found in the public and private library catalogues of many elite of the time.[62]

As we read in Verbiest’s letter: “The emperor’s troops marching in high mountains and dark forests”; “Trumpets sounding and Drums beating all the way”; exposure to “the scorching Sun-Beams,” to the rain, and to other clemencies of the weather; experiences of extreme fatigue; “Cannon discharged, from time to time, in the Vallies—purposely that the Noise and Fire issuing from the Mouths of the Dragons, with which they are adorned, might spread Terror around.”[63]

It is not difficult to trace the parallels between Verbiest’s account of the Manchu emperor’s hunts and Chambers’s fantastical description of the Chinese gardens.[64] As previous scholars have revealed, Chambers did indeed use Jesuits’ accounts, including Jean Denis Attiret’s (1702–1768) recently published letters on Yuanming Yuan, to create his Dissertation.[65] But what is important to note is that Chambers’s imitation was not born of mere curiosity. Just as the luxury of his Chinese gardens reflected British commercial exuberance and frivolous effeminacy, the pseudo-military journey in the scenes of the surprising might well have referred to the Scottish thinkers’ debate on how to maintain British aristocrat men’s virility, for which the Qing emperor’s hunts might have served as a model.

As a minor ethnic group ruling a Chinese Empire with vast territories, the Manchurian imperial project rested on a strong military ethos. Aware of the Chinese traditional paradigm of civilian and military virtues of rulership,[66] the Manchu emperors considered the military a more adequate foundation than civilian culture for their extensive and powerful empire. For the emperors, maintaining martial prowess would fend off what they clearly perceived as a profound threat to Manchu identity after assimilating the Chinese civilization.[67] During the early and mid-Qing Dynasty (1683–1820), imperial hunts were frequently held in the area of Mulan. In their letters and reports missionaries, who were often obliged to join these hunts, unequivocally presented these hunts as a major strategy used by the Kangxi emperor to strengthen military spirit among his own soldiers. For example, Verbiest reported in his letter: “The Emperor, whose chief Design by this Progress was to keep his Troops in Exercise, succeeded in that Respect to the utmost of his Wishes,” which, as the Jesuit goes on to explain, was “to prevent the Luxury which prevails in China and a too long Inactivity, from enervating their Courage, and lessening their former Valour.”[68]

The Manchurian experience of balancing between the civilian and the military in their governance would have been of great interest for those British readers who saw themselves in similar situations. Thus, beneath Chambers’s scenes of the surprising a programme of landscape experience as pseudo-military training can be discerned, one which echoed those military schemes proposed by Adam Smith and other Scottish thinkers in order to reinforce British citizens’ martial virtues amidst commercialization. By way of the missionaries’ representations, the Qing imperial strategy therefore, became engaged in the reformation of governance technologies in Britain, which was transforming into an empire amidst their eighteenth-century global expansion.

However, it would be over-simplifying to consider the Jesuits’ descriptions as the sole source for Chambers’s ideas, which were also imbued with Western symbolism. For example, the narrative of the surprising scenes taking form in a journey as a trial of elements demonstrates the influences of Hermetic-Neoplatonic doctrines and a strong underground source of Renaissance humanism.[69] In Hermetic-Neoplatonic philosophies, the human being is a microcosm of the universe, and his interior relations and movements are connected to cosmic relations and movements.[70] As Corpus Hermetica relates, in an initiatory journey the neophyte, by “experiencing all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist” and embracing in his thought “all things at once, times, places, substances, qualities,” “may understand God.”[71] Associated with the practice of Hermetism-Neoplatonism in the Renaissance academies, a variety of initiatory rituals or ritualized “games” were reinvented from Greek and Roman mythologies, whilst landscapes and gardens were often employed as the sites for the initiation of the imagination.[72] For example, Malaspini in one of his Novella, recorded a ritualistic event that took place in the private garden of the Rucellai family of Florence in 1536. Members of the party from the Orti Oricellai School were systemically subjected to sights, sounds, and odours that confused their senses.[73] Similar stories recurred in a quasi-historical novel Séthos (Paris, 1731) by the French Abbé Jean Terrasson.[74] The novel proposed an initiatory journey through its description of the trials of Séthos, following in the steps of Orpheus through the underworld, who was subjected to three trials by fire, water, and air, before being admitted into the temple precinct.[75] The resemblance between the continental examples and Chambers’s scenes of the surprising reflected the continuing Hermetic-Neoplatonic tradition in Britain.

In the emerging British Empire, Hermetic-Neoplatonic philosophies were fostered along with the growth of Freemasonry. The Neoplatonic-Masonic ideal[76] claimed a dominant presence in the ideology of key British social and cultural establishments, such as the Society of Dilettanti, the Royal Academy, and the Hanoverian royal family,[77] and they had a considerable effect on the art and architecture of eighteenth-century Britain.[78] A founder of the Royal Academy and patronized by the monarchs, Chambers was committed to making his architecture and landscape design engage with the public interest. The trial of “the elements” in the surprising scenes: Fire, rain, wind, electricity, and earthquakes, drawing from facets of Masonic folklore and Neoplatonic symbolism, were not for mere entertainment. Fused with elements from the battlefields, the “sounds of trumpets, cries of men in torment, explosions of cannon, and all the noises of war”—reminders of the Seven Years War of 1756–1764—the surprising scenes were intended to form an initiatory passage reinvented in an age of burgeoning commercial capitalism. These disturbing physical experiences embodied Burke’s sublime-effect as a kind of mental or sensory exercise or labour, “an exertion of the contracting power of the muscles,” which “as such resembles pain, which consists in tension or contraction, in everything but degree” (PE, 35). By increasing the tension of the body, putting the body on the verge of pain and exciting the strongest opposite sensations, the mock-trial experiences functioned as a kind of constancy mechanism, as if to expose the body of British subjects through the purification of war, to create a new martial identity.

“One magnificent garden”: The Dissertation as a sensationalist landscape theory

As the architect for Princess Augusta’s Kew Gardens between 1757 and 1763, Chambers had already experimented with his sensationalist landscape embodying the Burkean sublime-effect at Kew Gardens. Comprising twenty-three buildings, all freely laid out around irregular routes, Chambers’s Kew Gardens was not only “a designed emblem of British government,”[79] as Richard Quaintance suggests, but may also be understood as an instrument designed to shape visitors’ sensations and virtue.

The drawing of A View of the Menagerie, and its Pavillion [sic] in Chambers’s Plans, Elevations, Sections and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew in Surry (1763) (Fig. 1) is a good example. The delicate and exotic Chinese pavilion, the pond of goldfish, and the runways and cages for Chinese pheasants, anticipated the summer scenes of luxury in the Dissertation nine years later. In contrast to the fragility and femininity of the wood structure to the engraving’s left, is the sturdiness of a stone building, the Temple of Bellona (the ancient Roman goddess of war), dedicated to those who served in the Seven Years War (1756–1763). Thus the sublime of the bellicose goddess—the associations with military vigour would be evoked in the visitor’s mind—would counteract the softening effect of oriental luxury.

A further example is shown in A View of the Ruin in Chambers’s Plans. (Fig. 2) A passenger approaching the ruinous Arch from the south would note how the arch twists the path to focus a northward gaze through its arch towards the gleaming Temple of Victory crowning the hilltop. Richard Quaintance comments how a generalized “melancholy” seems an irrelevant self-indulgence to one’s experience on the walk with its vista of a military monument beyond.[80] According to the Burkean sublime-effect discussed above, this spatial-emotional effect may be understood as an embodiment of the sublime-effect. The tension between the Roman ruin and the Temple of Victory, for Chambers, would prevent the passenger’s imagination from sinking into melancholic reflection on the Roman past. Rather, at the sight of the monument to the British victory in the Seven Years War, his passion would be “shaken and worked to a proper degree.” Thus the viewer’s confidence would be cultivated in terms of British martial valour as a contemporary form of Roman virtus.

Equipped with the methods of shaping human sensations using the sublime-effect, Chambers in his Dissertation, was able to imagine beyond the boundary of a landscape garden like Kew to the whole “kingdom as one such magnificent vast garden.”[81] In about two thirds of Chambers’s Dissertation, he laid out in detail the “Chinese” methods of constructing roads, canals, bridges, and plantations, envisioning a scheme of “city landscaping.” If Burke, the political theorist, wished to affect citizens’ minds by aesthetic-psychological training, Chambers, the architect, proposed an ambitious project of making the garden city itself into an instrument of education and an experimental site for moulding citizens’ martial virtues.[82]

In Chambers’s vision, the Chinese roads, with various arrangements, could produce all kinds of different effect—the pleasing, the terrible, and the surprising. As he related a most striking effect was obtained by those spacious roads “planted on each side with lofty trees, and stretching in a direct line, beyond the reach of the eye.” Likewise, when the roads turned at certain points where some new or uncommon objects suddenly appeared, those objects would occupy the mind agreeably, “their abrupt appearance occasions surprise; which, when the extent is vast, and the repetitions frequent, swells into astonishment and admiration” (DG, 33). Still more exciting feelings were perhaps aroused when the roads were constructed in natural wonders. He imagined,

in some places, these roads are carried, by lofty vaulted passages, through the rocks and mountains; or, upon causeways and bridges, over lakes, torrents, and arms of the sea; and in others, they are supported, between the precipices, upon chains of iron, or upon pillars, and many tire of arcades, over villages, pagodas, and cities (DG, 38).

Chambers emphasised that the experiences of “the incertitude of the mind” and “the anxiety” that they arouse in the mind were likewise “very strong impressions, preventing that state of languor into which the mind naturally sinks by dwelling long on the same objects” (DG,33).

Applying the antithetical scenes as an emotional adventure in city landscaping, Chambers showed that by careful control of the urban landscape, the everyday travelling experience—an interplay between the senses and the landscape—could become a forum of pseudo-military training. The irregular, uncertain, and adventurous experiences that the traveller experienced would awaken his senses from the drunkenness of the pleasures of entertainment and the enjoyment of luxury, from the soft feelings of love and grief, from what Burke described as “that sink, that melting, that languor” effect of the beautiful and of the excessive commodities produced by commercial society. In these experiences of horror, fear, and sudden astonishment on their travels, the British elite would build their mind in the mould of a virtus, a stoic solider who learned to withstand the adversities and reversals of fortune. Roads and rivers might become a substitute for what Adam Smith proposed as military education and provide “the best schools for forming every man to this hardiness and firmness of temper” and for “curing him of the opposite weakness.”[83] In this way, the city, or the country per se, built as the landscape garden Chambers envisioned, would function as a Burkean homeostatic device or constancy mechanism. It came to act as a kind of displacement of the rigors of military experience whereby the moral effects of the latter were translated into the context of the modern commercial state.

Chambers’s grand vision of the sensationalist landscape city might have been influenced by the Chinese landscape tradition in which imperial gardens were constructed as integral to the city and the city was built as a landscape garden.[84] By the time of the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE), the Chinese construction of cities, systems of transportation, irrigation, water conservation, and city landscaping were already being combined to achieve an integrated effect on both moral cultivation and political economy.[85] This tradition was significantly elaborated by the early Qing emperors.[86] Through a number of letters, engravings, and publications contributed by missionaries and merchants, which had been circulating in Europe since the seventeenth century,[87] the image of Chinese landscape cities impressed the European audience. The reception of imagery of China in Europe, however, was not simply a bilateral process. As discussed, in the case of Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening the Chinese gardens were interpreted under overlapping intellectual frameworks of Scottish physiology, the Roman republican concept of virtus, as well as the initiatory journeys in the Hermetic-Neoplatonic tradition.Therefore, not only was the Chinese garden labelled as the psychological-physiological antitheses of the pleasing and the surprising or the relaxation and contraction of the nerves, but it was also associated with social and moral oppositions such as civility (regeneration) and degeneration, effeminacy and masculinity, which were central to British imperial anxieties.

In Chambers’s Dissertation, among the often confusing images of the Chinese garden, a masculine Manchurian empire, and an effeminate oriental civilization entangled with European traditions of making the virtus, are found encoded the British statesmen’s imaginings of an empire regenerated in an age of commercialization. Exploiting this double-entendre model, Chambers envisioned British landscape cities as sites of not only burgeoning commerce and refined taste, but also of pseudo-military training. Applying the sublime-effect to the design and construction of British cities, for Chambers, would ensure the British Empire’s stability and global dominance not only in terms of economic development but also in strengthening its military might and ethos. Chambers’s approach to landscape gardening differed from that of progressive Whigs like Horace Walpole who yoked landscape gardening to the idea of “liberty.” Nor can Chamber’s theory be simply labelled a “Tory landscape,” asserting the absolute right of the king.[88] Chamber’s theory rather embodied the ideology of classical republicanism (as held by Rockingham Whigs such as Edmund Burke), for whom virtue was the foundation of good government and society.  China, viewed as a model of a moral society and politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was evoked in order to mask Chambers’s politicized aesthetics of landscape theory. The Dissertation on Oriental Gardening provided a powerful and highly significant example of how European–Asian contact, in both its reality and imaginary dimensions, shaped discourses on the building of Britain’s identity in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Acknowledgements

This paper was completed under the sponsorship of EU Marie Curie Actions. Professor Mark Dorrian (University of Edinburgh), my PhD supervisor, helped with the focus of the paper and contributed many constructive suggestions. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the conference Dimensions of Transcultural Statehood (1500–1900) held at Heidelberg University, where it received useful comments from participants like Professor Philip Stern (Duke University).  Professor Andrea Riemenschnitter, Professor Hans B. Thomsen, and other colleagues at the University Research Priority Program “Asia and Europe” at the University of Zurich have also shared their thoughts during the development of this paper.