Between the Far East and the West: The Useful Instruction of Market Exchange and Garden Design

Abstract

Though more connected today than ever before, the Far East and the West are still divided by an issue which first arose more than 400 years ago: the complaint of the West that its ideology has never been fully adopted by China. To provide a useful conceptual framework for a discussion of this intriguing situation, this essay invokes the instructive give-and-take of market exchange on the famed Silk Road in the long ancient past and takes a careful and close look at the analogous enactment of the same principle in the quiet but consequential transplantation of Chinese horticultural and related philosophical ideas to England and continental Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the initially skeptical but eventually appreciative reception of many Western political and technological ideas in China in the last two centuries.

Notes

I am grateful to the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their careful and constructive comments on earlier versions of this essay. In addition to recent short-term fellowships at the Warburg Institute of London University, the Clark Library of UCLA, and the Phillips Library of Peabody Essex Museum, I would like to express my appreciation for the crucial research support of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and a sabbatical leave grant of Niagara County Community College for the 2006–7 academic year and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute fellowship in 2010 at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and the East West Center.

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