北京耶穌會北堂花園綜考: 起源、功能及其隱喻

In the early modern world, the Jesuit garden arguably became a transcultural phenomenon materializing the transfer of both elite knowledge and ideas. This paper elaborates the transcultural dimension of the Jesuit symbolic garden by focusing on the so-called "Beitang garden" in eighteenth-century Beijing, built in Baroque style by French Jesuits. As witnessed by a number of Chinese and Korean, however, the Beitang garden was not the only tangible garden constructed by Jesuit missionaries. As their other counterparts in Europe, garden spaces were essential to Jesuit residences in Beijing. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these gardens in which advanced European knowledge of cultivation, mechanism was applied, were gradually turned into a dynamic space of increasing Jesuit botanic and cosmopolitan learnings. Considering their unique social and political functions within sacred spaces, this paper will first synthesize the relevant facts to re-contextualize the construction of these garden spaces by examining various forms of their visual representation. Relying on written records made by the Korean travellers, this paper will furthermore elaborate how concrete spatial arrangements and pattern designs through which certain attitudes and ideas are conveyed became accessible for the Beijing Jesuits. Based on these discussions, this paper captures the transcultural moment of Jesuit garden spaces by demonstrating the ways in which a French Jesuit garden was transferred into an eighteenth-century Jesuit space in Beijing.