“I work hard at present and I wait for the future when I can roam at leisure,’’ he wrote in one poem that he inscribed in refined calligraphy on imperial paper decorated with gold flowers. “I want to be called a person with nothing to do.’’
Unfortunately for him, the Qianlong Emperor was never called that (he was the longest-living ruler in Chinese history and he died with his hands — effectively, if not officially — still holding the reins). But as the all-powerful emperor, he certainly had every right to pretend. And his chosen method of playing out the fantasy of retirement left the world with one of its most exquisite built environments, the so-called “Qianlong Garden,’’ situated deep within the Forbidden City in Beijing.
The “garden’’ — really a complex of buildings and pavilions arranged around courtyards and landscaping — was the Qianlong (pronounced CHEE-en-lohng) Emperor’s intended place of retirement. He spent years designing it and fitting it out with the most refined, meaningful, and beautiful objects he could assemble.
Everything was arranged according to principles based in Chinese philosophy, poetry, and aesthetic traditions. And yet much about the end result revealed qualities very particular to the emperor’s own character and his time.
Ninety of these objects — from paintings and calligraphy through rocks, ceramics, European clocks, rootwood furniture, and exquisitely decorated panels, screens, and partitions — are now on display in “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures From the Forbidden City,’’ a revelatory show at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem.
How is it that we are getting to see these treasures in Salem?
For one reason and another (blame China’s turbulent 20th-century history), the garden was allowed to fall into a state of terrible disrepair. Its contents — those that were not removed in the 19th and 20th centuries — have long been off-limits to the public.
But in 2001, the Palace Museum in Beijing, which administers the entire Forbidden City complex, and the World Monuments Fund together set about a major restoration effort, due to be completed in 2019.
