Yuan ye: How the Texts on Gardens Help the Writer – Ji Cheng – Crossed the Social Boundary and Gain Economic Benefits

This paper aims to explore how the design manual, Yuan Ye (The Craft of Gardens), became a means for the professional garden designer/craftsman, Ji Cheng (b.1582), to trespass the social boundary and helped him idealize himself as a literatus more than a talented craftsman. Yuan ye, written by Ji Cheng and published in approximately 1634, did not circulate widely in China and was later re-discovered in Japan in the 1920s. It is arguably the most studied text in the field of Chinese garden design since its re-publication in the 1930s. Many architects and scholars have discussed the content of Yuan ye as a “treatise” in which some key garden design concepts are established. Aesthetic guidelines proposed by Ji Cheng profoundly influenced how one should appreciate gardens today. Unlike these studies, this paper would consider how the possible readers of Yuan Ye in the seventeenth century would have evaluated Ji Cheng. Through comparing Yuan ye with other textural records on garden designers, I believe that Yuan ye was used by Ji Cheng not only to convey his aesthetic theory on garden design but also to establish his identity as a writer or a scholar and toned down his status of a craftsman. By doing so, the book might help Ji Cheng and his family gain economic benefits for their business.