Revisiting the Eastern Fence: Tao Qian's chrysanthemums

The poet and essayist Yuan Mei (1716-1798) was in his midsixties when Luo Ping (1733-1799) painted his portrait, and his aging face was marked by strong, distinctive features: a wedge-shaped beard, full, drooping mustache, flabby jowls, a tuft of hair at his ear, and a round, bald pate (Fig. 1). His animated, somewhat disputatious expression--brow furrowed, teeth and tongue exposed in his open mouth as he turns to speak--is distinctive as well. Under the firmly delineated garments, a compact, sturdy body makes its presence felt. It is the kind of portrait that looks for the unique personal character informing each detail of the sitter's physiognomy, posture, and expression. The sprig of chrysanthemums in Yuan Mei's hand has been furnished as another such telling detail.

Chrysanthemums were the favorite flower of Tao Qian (or Tao Yuanming, 365-427), a poet who retired in midlife to a small estate to live out his days in rustic obscurity, drinking wine and writing poetry. It was a rough period in Chinese history, with much of the land occupied by foreign invaders and the remainder governed by unstable and short-lived native dynasties. Tao chose to keep to himself. Private and quiet as his life was, though, his reputation grew steadily after his death, eventually reaching immense stature. Since the eighth century his poetry and life story have been familiar to every educated Chinese.

Tao kept a chrysanthemum patch by the eastern fence of his property, and from this one of the oldest extant paintings of him, a small scroll by the early thirteenth-century court artist Liang Kai, takes its name: Scholar of the Eastern Fence (Dongli gaoshi). The poet is pictured walking in the breeze by a grove of trees and looking off into the distance, a chrysanthemum in his raised right hand (Figs. 2, 3). (1) The presentation of the flower--pinched carefully between his fingers and held upright and level with his face--is unmistakably meaningful. Whether held in his hand, set in a vase, or growing in the ground nearby, it was to remain Tao's characteristic attribute in later images. An elegant eighteenth-century carving in the Shanghai Museum made from a bamboo root, roughly contemporary with the portrait of Yuan Mei, shows Tao strolling under a tree, chrysanthemums in hand (Fig. 4). (2) But as Yuan's portrait shows, Tao Qian's chrysanthemums had other uses. They served as a prop for the practice of sugges ting Tao-like qualities in a patron or sitter. Just by holding or contemplating one of these flowers, a pictured figure claims a likeness to Tao--even in the absence of any other allusion to him in the image or the inscribed test. (3)

Why would an eighteenth-century gentleman--a witty, worldly bon vivant at that, who relished travel, society, honors, and creature comforts--want to be identified with a melancholy, impoverished recluse who lived over thirteen hundred years before? Yuan Mei was, in fact, hardly alone; thinkers and writers throughout Chinese history aspired to be compared with him. What was the special quality of "Tao-ness" with which later people wanted to affiliate themselves? What, specifically, among the various ideas associated with Tao Qian, did the chrysanthemum signify as subject or attribute in the history of Chinese pictorial art? And how, indeed, is the evocation of Tao in Yuan Mei's portrait--face averted from the flower--intended?

This essay examines uses of the chrysanthemum as a theme and motif in Chinese art: key ideas embedded in chrysanthemum imagery, and ways it was deployed in various contexts. The project of mapping the chrysanthemum tradition and its dense web of signification necessarily calls for a broad perspective. The focus here is on the late imperial period--the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties--for, with a handful of exceptions, extant examples date from the fifteenth century on. With the help of written sources, though, the pictorial tradition can be traced much further back, for the titles of lost paintings and transcriptions of texts written on them are preserved in old catalogues and other compendia. Taken together, these resources allow us to observe the working life of a sign such as the chrysanthemum in the Chinese iconographic system.

Certain powerful forces in Chinese visual culture are at work in the material to be considered here. Alongside the tradition of chrysanthemum pictures, and frequently intersecting with it, is an extensive corpus of poetry about Tao Qian and his chrysanthemums. Some of these poems were occasioned by the viewing of Tao-inspired pictures, and many of the pictures are informed by the reading of Tao-inspired poems. This interaction of verbal and visual is characteristic of Chinese art--familiar enough in the form of inscribed paintings, but also at work in texts and images that are materially independent of one another. Also characteristic is the continual retrieval and refraining of old forms, as in Yuan Mei's portrait; early images and ideas are proactively, and knowingly, engaged by the new in an ongoing process of deconstruction and reinvention. Intertextual allusions are a pervasive part of this process and call for extended consideration, as forms and motifs drawn from different genres or categories of repre sentation, variously combined or juxtaposed, absorb and coopt meanings from one another and realign themselves to new times and ends.