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Yang Lu

Abstract

The transmission of Chinese art and aesthetics to the West can be traced back to Matteo Ricci. The biases towards Chinese art evident in Ricci's journal reflect the intellectual and cultural conditions of his time. However, with the growing contact between China and Europe through missionaries and merchants in the seventeenth century, China gradually came to be perceived as a mysterious “Other” in Europe. In 1685, the British writer William Temple completed the long essay “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus”, in which he regarded the garden as a practical embodiment of the Epicurean philosophy of happiness. Temple proposed that, in contrast to the uniform and symmetrical layouts of European gardens, the irregularity of Chinese gardens rendered themselves superior in beauty. While both drew upon the gifts of nature, the designs of Chinese gardens displayed exceptional imagination and discernment. To describe this aesthetic of irregularity, Temple coined the term “Sharawadgi”. In recent years, with the rise of Chinese discourse, sharawadgi as a notion of “scattered splendor and wondrous beauty” has reemerged as an aesthetic category, extending its influence into diverse fields such as architecture and music. The accounts of the Macartney Embassy's 1793 visit to the Imperial Summer Resort in Rehe may be regarded as a comprehensive response to the long—standing debates on the transmission of Chinese garden aesthetics to the West. Their significance lay not merely in determining whether Chinese or British garden designs were superior, but in revealing the possibilities of equal and reciprocal understanding between Chinese and Western civilizations.

Keywords

Matteo Ricci, William Temple, Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, Sharawadgi effect, Macartney

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