Fashishan’s ‘Shikan’: A Beijing Mansion in Eighteenth-century Beijing

• In Event: Intercultural Spaces in Eighteenth-century Beijing

Abstract

The Mongol bannerman Fashishan (1752-1813) was one of Beijing’s leading cultural authorities during the late Qianlong and early Jiaqing periods. While his career in the Hanlin Academy often brought him into conflict with the Inner Court, Fashishan’s antiquarian and literary pursuits granted him a central position among the scholarly networks of the time. Fashishan’s legendary mansion, Shikan ‘Poetry Casket,’ stood on the Inner City’s fashionable Shichahai and became a must-see destination for local residents and out-of-town visitors. According to its owner, the property occupied land previously owned by the minister and literatus Li Dongyang (1447-1516), and it was against Li’s legacy that Fashishan began to forge his cultural and social profile.

From 1797 until his death in 1813, Fashishan sponsored a large-scale project of literary and pictorial celebration of Shikan. In 1797, Luo Ping produced two albums illustrating Fashishan’s poems after Li Dongyang that served as model for analogous sets by Zhang Wentao (1764-1814) and Gu Heqing (1766-1830?). At the same time, more than twenty-five painters and calligraphers collaborated in five monumental horizontal scrolls dedicated to views of the mansion. Virtually unknown, this body of about twenty paintings is the largest of Beijing’s privately sponsored commissions, involving court artists, independent masters living in Beijing, and southerners like Zhang Xin (1781-1820) and Xi Gang (1746-1803). By reconstructing circumstances of their patronage, this paper will examine the relationship between Bannermen patrons and scholar-painters in Beijing and investigate the revival of early Ming painting and poetry styles in the political climate of early early-nineteenth-century Beijing.

Author

• Michele Matteini, New York University