A Monument of Artistic Production under Imperial Patronage

KANGXI, Emperor of China.

Ma. Han-i araha alin-i tokso de halhūn be jailaha ši [Ch. Yuzhi bishu shanzhuang shi 御製避暑山莊詩; Imperial Poems on the Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat].

36 folding black & white woodcut plates. 88 folding leaves. Two debtelin in one vol. 8vo (265 x 166 mm.), pink wrappers, orig. block-printed title-slip on yellow silk on upper cover, early(?) stitching. Beijing: Wuying dian 武英殿, Postscript dated 1712.

First edition of the Kangxi Emperor’s (r. 1661-1722) poetic cycle for the 36 scenic sights within the Rehe summer estate, each accompanied by a stunning double-page woodcut illustration. Printed under the emperor’s direct supervision on superior paper and using woodblocks carved by two of the finest artisans in the palace workshop, this celebrated album had an initial print run of only 400 copies, 200 in Manchu (our copy) and 200 in Chinese. As Stephen H. Whiteman writes in Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe (2020), these exclusive royal albums were most likely gifts from the Kangxi Emperor, to “a relatively small circle of imperial clansmen, steppe elites, senior officials, and others close to the throne,” on the occasion of his 60th birthday in 1713, and their presentation was meant to “generate a particular bond of loyalty between the emperor and those he favored with this rare gift” (pp. 183, 224).

First constructed in 1703 and enlarged over the next century, the Rehe summer estate, located beyond the Great Wall in present-day Chengde, about 175 kilometers northeast of Beijing, played an important role throughout the Qing empire’s political history. It is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. When the Kangxi Emperor ordered its initial construction in 1702 after half a century of expansionary war, the summer estate was to become “the most substantial in a network of traveling palaces (Ch. xinggong 行宮) that supported his annual tours north among the court’s Inner Mongolian allies.” But its significance quickly expanded. The Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat, as the site would eventually be named, effectively served as a secondary capital, the emperor residing there from late spring through early autumn each year over the last decade of his life.

“Yet it was also decidedly not the capital. Freed from the architectonic constraints of the Forbidden City, Kangxi employed imperial parks and gardens as alternative spaces of rulership. Like his almost exact contemporaries in Europe and South Asia, Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707), Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715), and Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725), Kangxi made designed landscapes central to his performance of authority…Kangxi’s Mountain Estate was substantially a site of rituals of intimacy and exchange that performed a temporary elision of social difference between emperor and subject: roaming in the gardens, banqueting, entertainments, and gift giving”–ibid., pp. 4-5.

“In 1711 the Kangxi emperor formally initiated a project that sought to interweave the physical and sensory experiences of the Mountain Estate with his ideology of rulership and personal biography. Imperial Poems on the Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat presented the thirty-six scenes of the park-palace through a combination of imperially composed texts and images created by artists of the court. Produced almost simultaneously in three different mediums, the work was part of a coordinated, multifaceted effort to articulate a vision of Qing imperial rule through the links between landscape, technology, and the emperor himself”–ibid., 151.

Our edition is the first to contain woodcuts; it was the second of many installments of the album — including a later one with copperplate engravings made by the Italian missionary Matteo Ripa (1682-1746) — and the earliest that survives. It opens with the emperor’s “Record of the Mountain Estate” (Ma. Han-i araha alin-i tokso de halhūn be jailaha gi bithe) dated Kangxi 50 (1711), followed by the impressions in red of his personal seals: Ti yuan zhu ren 體元主人 and Wan ji yu xia 萬幾餘暇; the latter, which means “a brief leisure,” was reserved for the emperor’s own calligraphic and literary works. The emperor briefly introduces each of the 36 scenic poems, in prose, as if guiding the reader through a personal tour of the summer estate. The fold-out woodcut illustrations, drawn by the court artist Shen Yu 沈崳 (b. 1649) and carved by the artisans Zhu Gui 朱圭 (ca. 1644-1717) and Mei Yufeng 梅裕鳳 (fl. ca. 1696-1713), follow each poem. The album concludes with the Postscript signed by four palace officials who supervised its production, dated Kangxi 51 (1712).

“Whether derived from, or simply correlated to, the unique album [now lost], the woodblock-printed book functions as a surrogate for the paintings. It imitates the album’s arrangement and mode of engagement with the landscape, pairing image and text in an intimately scaled format. The style of the images evokes Wang Yuanqi but also, and more significant, the emperor’s most important artist, thereby marking the book as a work of the court’s highest echelon of cultural production and an object clearly commissioned and owned by the emperor…

“Kangxi was intimately involved in the minutiae of the book’s production, from the selection of a specific type of high-quality paper, to reviewing and editing the printing proofs, to inspecting samples of the finished work. He was kept closely informed about the progress of the project, including difficulties in curing the datewood blocks Zhu Gui and Mei Yufeng used as well as the need for more artisans given the scale and intricacy of the work. The order for four hundred copies (two hundred in Chinese and another two hundred in Manchu) came directly from the throne. In comparison to other contemporary projects with print runs of one thousand or more, this number suggests that the emperor had a clear sense of the exclusive audience he intended to reach.”–ibid., pp. 182-83.

A monument of artistic production under imperial patronage, the album of 36 sites has been the topic of extensive scholarly research. Comparing the woodcut edition to earlier traditions of royal literature and garden illustration in China, the art historian Ma Yazhen 馬雅貞 of National Tsinghua University points out that many aspects of this album were unprecedented. For example, she observes that the album is likely the first use of a fold-out illustration in a Chinese book — a detail that has long been overlooked. The wide fields of vision printed without frames, the absence of persons within the buildings and corridors, and the visual presentation of imperial poetry alongside official commentaries are only some of the album’s many fascinating features that, being unusual and sometimes unprecedented, continue to generate new scholarly interpretation and debate.

Interest in the album has only grown in recent decades following the publication of court archives that shed light on the process of its production. We know now, for example, that the Kangxi Emperor personally specified the layout, choice of paper, number of copies, and even the thickness of brushstrokes of the Manchu issue, and that its printing was carried out in batches in the year 1713 rather than 1712 (date of Postscript). Some of the idiosyncrasies of the Manchu issue (which survives less well than its Chinese counterpart), nevertheless, remain under-explored by researchers, who have generally focused on the Chinese-language editions of the album. We find little scholarly discussion, for example, on the emperor’s choice to exclude from the Manchu issue the extensive commentaries for his poetry compiled by palace officials, a decision that surely gave the album a different — perhaps more personal than belletristic — tone of voice, a voice reserved exclusively for its Manchu-speaking recipients.

As mentioned above, the Manchu issue has survived less well than the Chinese issue. Of the Manchu issue, we locate copies at BnF, Columbia, LC, SBBerlin, Cambridge, Harvard, and SOAS in WorldCat.

In fine and fresh condition, preserved in yellow silk-covered folder and slipcase. The plates are fine and clean. The fold in each plate has been very carefully strengthened on the verso. A few minor marginal tears and paper flaws. Several other minor and skillful repairs.

❧ Philippe Forêt, Mapping Chengde: the Qing Landscape Enterprise (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000); 馬雅貞, “皇苑圖繪的新典範：康熙《御製避暑山莊詩》的製作及其意義,” 故宮學術季刊 32, No. 2 (2014), pp. 39-80.

James A. Millward et al. (eds.), New Qing Imperial History: the Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (Routledge, 2004).

Stephen H. Whiteman, “Creating the Kangxi Landscape: Bishu shanzhuang and the Mediation of Qing Imperial Identity,” PhD dissertation (Stanford, 2011); idem., Where Dragon Veins Meet: The Kangxi Emperor and His Estate at Rehe (University of Washington Press, 2020).

Price: $250,000.00

Item ID: 11361