Gifts From The Gardens Of China

Celebrates the skilled gardeners of Imperial China through new research that opens a new chapter in the story of our garden plants.

An annotated collection of essential texts written by European observers from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Ideas of Chinese Gardens chronicles the evolution of Western perceptions of gardens of China, from curiosity to admiration and ultimately to rejection, echoing the changes in European attitudes toward China.

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Foreign Policy, Literary Hub, and The Millions Ghosh unravels the impact of the opium trade on global history and in his own family―the climax of a yearslong project. When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story. Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir, and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China to redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the empire’s financial survival. Following the profits further, Ghosh finds opium central to the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, of America’s most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself. Moving deftly between horticultural history, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, in Smoke and Ashes Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant has had in making our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West examines how the contact between China and Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries transformed the arts on both sides of the East-West divide. The essays in the volume reveal the extent to which images, artifacts, and natural specimens were traded and copied, and how these materials inflected both cultures’ visions of novelty and pleasure, battle and power, and ways of seeing and representing. Artists and craftspeople on both continents borrowed and adapted forms, techniques, and modes of representation, producing deliberate, meaningful, and complex new creations. By considering this reciprocity from both Eastern and Western perspectives, Qing Encounters offers a new and nuanced understanding of this critical period.

This book considers the British travelling beyond their isles over the last three hundred years, and through a range of interdisciplinary perspectives reflects on their taste for discovery and self-discovery both through the exploration – and exploitation – of other lands and peoples.

With their centuries-long development, the English landscape garden, the formal French garden, as well Japanese and Chinese gardens constitute an unparalleled repository of design solutions familiar throughout the world. They are frequently drawn upon as reference works, but often in a piecemeal and haphazard fashion and from botanical or art-historical vantage points. That is where the books of this new series come in. They present the various garden types from the perspective of contemporary landscape and garden design. Starting from the formidable beauty of the world’s most distinguished gardens, they point the way toward the essential compositional principles, the plants most commonly utilized and their most characteristic uses, and the possibilities for employing them in contemporary projects, thus providing readers with a rich source of inspiration for their own designs and creations. The panorama of "The Chinese Garden" stretches from the surviving historical gardens all the way to such modern examples as the garden at the Bank of China in Hong Kong (designed by I. M. Pei), Ai Weiwei’s Yiwu Riverbank Park, the Garden of Flowering Fragrance in the Los Angeles, California, region and the Garden of Awakening Orchids in Portland, Oregon.