From Beijing to La Flèche: The Transcultural Moment of Jesuit Garden Spaces

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 the European style by French Jesuits. As witnessed by a number of Chinese and Korean travelers, however, the Beitang garden was not the only tangible garden constructed by Jesuit missionaries. Like their counterparts in Europe, garden spaces were essential to the Jesuit residences in Beijing. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these gardens, in which advanced European knowledge of cultivation, mechanism, as well as water conservancy were applied, were gradually turned into a dynamic space of increasing Jesuit botanic and cosmopolitan learning. Considering their unique social and political functions within sacred spaces, this paper will first synthesize the relevant facts in order to re-contextualize the construction of these garden spaces by examining various forms of their visual representation. Relying on written records by Korean travelers, this paper will elaborate on how concrete spatial arrangements and pattern designs, which were used to convey certain attitudes and ideas, became accessible for the Beijing Jesuits. This paper thus captures a transcultural moment for Jesuit garden spaces by demonstrating the ways in which a Jesuit garden in France was transferred to an eighteenth-century Jesuit space in Beijing.