Gardens and walls: history and morality in urban China

This anthropological-historical paper explores the oft-neglected inner connotations of morality and history as embedded in China’s historic landscape. Situated in the heritage city of Kaifeng, it reveals how local gardens not only are architectural imitations of this ancient capital, but also are connected to the nation’s past and mediate moral lessons. A deeper textual dimension is further exposed, with an examination of a dynastic record, as well as the rich historiographical corpus lying behind it, to which garden designers refer. The arguments appearing in such a textual and intellectual dimension are then explicated with regard to the city’s old walls. The walls, which are supposed to be formidable defensive facilities, now are viewed as the symbols of learning, virtue and civilisation in contrast to sheer militarism. A further discussion about pertinent ideas in Chinese thought finally discloses the richness of this historical-moral aspect of the city’s landscape.