The Emperor’s Western Maze and the Making of a Global Garden in China: Part I
In a special three-part virtual series for the Garden Conservancy this winter, Professor Andrew Hui explores the fascinating yet overlooked history of the Western Gardens at the Chinese Emperor’s Summer Palace in the eighteenth century. Over the course of three episodes, he will explore the unexpected story of how these vast gardens came to be designed by Jesuit priests and how they influence the development of Europe’s own gardens.
Part I: The Summer Palace: Beijing and its Creators: January 29, 2026, 12 noon
The Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuanmingyuan), better known as the Summer Palace, was the most ambitious garden complex in imperial China. Conceived by the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, it brought together traditional Chinese landscape art from all parts of its sprawling empire. This talk introduces the palace’s vast grounds and classical Chinese gardens—pavilions, lakes, and rockeries that embodied dynastic authority and literati aesthetics. We will set the stage for the drama of cultural exchange that would soon reshape its landscapes.
Part II: The Maze: Jesuits, Emperors, and the Invention of the Western Style Gardens in China: February 26, 2026, 12 noon
In the early eighteenth century, Jesuit missionaries astonished the Qing court by designing a European-style maze in the Summer Palace. What began as a playful mimicry soon expanded into an entire quarter of Western-style gardens: fountains, cabinets of curiosities, and perspective vistas unlike anything in China before. This lecture tells the story of how Jesuits, armed with mathematics, hydraulics, and the technique of linear perspectives, became imperial garden makers—and how their creations embodied wonder, diplomacy, and power at the meeting point of two civilizations.
Part III: From Beijing to Europe: Chinese Gardens and the Rise of Chinoiserie: March 19, 2026, 12 noon
While Jesuits introduced European designs to the Qing court, Chinese gardens themselves profoundly shaped Europe. Jesuit letters back to Europe described landscapes of winding paths, asymmetry, and surprise, a sharp contrast to Versailles’ rigid geometry. These ideas—captured in the English neologism “sharawadgi”—helped spark the English landscape movement and a wave of chinoiserie across Europe. This final lecture traces the paradox: the Summer Palace absorbed European mazes and fountains, even as Europe reimagined itself through the Chinese garden. Together, these exchanges reveal gardens as a global art form in the early modern world.
Andrew Hui teaches at National University of Singapore and is the author of three books: The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (2025), A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter (2019, translated into 4 languages), and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (2017). His newest project is The Emperor’s Maze: The Jesuits in China and the Making of a Global Age (under contract, Penguin Press). Andrew is an experienced public speaker who has lectured widely, including recent talks at Yale, Oxford, and Brown universities, as well as online for the Medici Archive Project, the Smithsonian, and the 92nd Street Y.
Dates: Lectures are on Zoom.