Vera Schwarcz is Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies, Director/Chair of the Center for East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of seven books and over fifty articles on Chinese intellectual history and comparative memory studies, including Time for Telling Truth Is Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu, published by Yale University Press.

 If you wish to contact Professor Schwarcz you can write or fax her at:

Professor Vera Schwarcz
343 Washington Terrace,
Middletown, CT 06459
phone: 860-685-2330
FAX: (860) 685-2781

Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden
A volume in the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series

Vera Schwarcz

 
"Well written, carefully structured, and beautifully focused on the importance and values associated with memory and remembering. Vera Schwarcz emphasizes the interest in exploring a garden whose materiality has been lost but whose spirit endures, and does so creatively and with grace."—Peter Jacobs, University of Montreal

The Singing Crane Garden in northwest Beijing has a history dense with classical artistic vision, educational experimentation, political struggle, and tragic suffering. Built by the Manchu prince Mianyu in the mid-nineteenth century, the garden was intended to serve as a refuge from the clutter of daily life near the Forbidden City. In 1860, during the Anglo-French war in China, the garden was destroyed. One hundred years later, in the 1960s, the garden served as the "oxpens," where dissident university professors were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. Peaceful Western involvement began in 1986, when ground was broken for the Arthur Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology. Completed in 1993, the Museum and the Jillian Sackler Sculpture Garden stand on the same grounds today.

In Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden, Vera Schwarcz gives voice to this richly layered corner of China's cultural landscape. Drawing upon a range of sources from poetry to painting, Schwarcz retells the garden's complex history in her own poetic and personal voice. In her exploration of cultural survival, trauma, memory, and place, she reveals how the garden becomes a vehicle for reflection about both history and language.

Encyclopedic in conception and artistic in execution, Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden is a powerful work that shows how memory and ruins can revive the spirit of individuals and cultures alike.

296 pages | 6 x 9 | 44 illus. | Cloth Mar 2008 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4100-6 |
A volume in the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series

Amazon Link: Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden