Qufu, Kong's Forest, 2012. Credit: J.Richard, all rights reserved.
New approaches in Chinese garden history, conference abstract
19th June 2015, at the University of Sheffield
Lei Gao, NMBU, Norway
“A response to Alison's quest after a Chinese grove”
In the last two decades, the
subject of Chinese garden studies has expanded enormously. It has gone from a
situation where one person could be familiar with virtually everything that had
been written on the topic in both Chinese and English to one where it would be
impossible for an individual scholar to keep up with absolutely everything. One
reason for this is the great expansion in Chinese-authored academic research
(published in Chinese and English and also some other languages) consequent on
the expansion of Chinese academia, and of the number of Chinese scholars
working overseas, since the start of the reform era. Another important reason
is the ‘turn’, in garden studies more generally, from a primarily aesthetic and
art-historical to a more social-history focus, exemplified in Europe by
scholars such as Denis Cosgrove and Tom Williamson. In Chinese garden studies a
key text here was Craig Clunas’ Fruitful
Sites (1996). As Chinese garden history has become a more accessible way to
understand aspects of Chinese social and cultural history, it has been
integrated into undergraduate courses on Chinese culture; moreover, as Chinese
economic and ‘soft’ power has grown, more Chinese gardens have been created in
the West, and thus general as well as academic understanding of the Chinese
garden tradition has greatly increased.
See Lei Gao's profile on ResearchGate here.
Follow this link to her paper on Garden heritage in Hongcun and Xidi.
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