In an essay entitled ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus,’ the English statesman and essayist Sir William Temple uses the term sharawadgi to describe the irregular beauty of Chinese gardens. Wybe Kuitert (2013) suggests that just as Temple’s own garden, Moor Park, in Surrey, was inspired by Constantijn Huygens’ Hofwijck garden estate and exemplified the beginning of a taste for the Dutch garden in England, so Temple’s notion of sharawadgi resonated with Huygens’s interest in the irregular pattern of a Japanese robe, then fashionable in the Low Countries.
Rather than treating sharawadgi as a foreign form of beauty that was to trigger a radically different aesthetic in the Enlightenment, this paper argues, instead, that sharawadgi and its associated Confucian philosophy were received comfortably within a European intellectual framework, that is, the poetics of variety as framed by Epicureanism and Stoicism in the 16th -17th century. Examining both Temple’ and Huygens’ descriptions of their gardens (Moor Park and Hofwijck) respectively, Dr. Yue Zhuang will demonstrate that they do not judge the art of gardening by proportional or disproportional forms only; rather they hold dear to the heart the experience of variety and contrast evoked by strolling through the garden, an experience helping to maintain an emotional balance of the soul in their search for ataraxia or tranquility. Not unlike the gardens of Moor Park and Hofwijck, sharawadgi may also be perceived by Temple and Huygens as a source of humanist pleasure, a means to attain tranquility which, as they understand, was equally treasured by the Confucian literati.
Yue Zhuang was trained in both China and Europe (1st PhD Tianjin University; 2nd PhD University of Edinburgh; Postdoc University of Zurich), specializing in landscape art history. Her research projects on early modern Chinese and European interactions around landscape issues have been sponsored by institutions such as EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (2011, 2014) and the Leverhulme Trust (2016). She is the main editor of Entangled Landscapes: Early modern China and Europe (2017).