China and the West

William Chambers und die chinesische Gartenarchitektur.
1996
Ludwig Trauzettel : Der Einfluss Chambers auf den Gartengeschmack wie auf die Gartenliebhaber und Gestalter Europas hat bis heute eine nachhaltige Wirkung. In seinen Argumenten sahen Chambers Anhänger das Ideal einer Naturnachahmung am vollendetsten erreicht und durchgesetzt. Die Umsetzung chinesischer Stilelement im Garten beschränkte sich jedoch in den meisten Fällen auf die Ausstattung mit chinesischen und später auch orientalischen Gestaltungselementen – mit Teehäusern, Pagoden und Moschen sowie auf die Verwendung von Zelten, Schirmen, Brücken und fernöstlich wirkendem Gartenmobiliar. Seine Absichten sind nur noch in wenigen Gärten zu spüren und der unter seiner Einwirkung entstandene Jardin anglo-chinois ist schon längst Gartengeschichte geworden, er wurde von anderen Entwicklungen abgelöst und gehört der Vergangenheit an.
Chambers' Bepflanzungsvorschläge sowie seine Artenauswahl sind von der europäischen Gartenpraxis bestimmt und keineswegs chinesisch.

1996
Adrian von Buttlar : Die Authentizität von Chambers' Chinoiserien ist aus heutigem Verständnis bis zu einem gewissen Grade eine Fiktion, doch war man sich dessen seinerzeit kaum bewusst. Der Einfluss den Chambers auf die deutschen Gärten und Garten-Chinoiserien übte, war die klassizistische Variante der Chinoiserie im Innenraumdekor. Kew Gardens wird zum Modell fürstlicher Gärten.

2008
David Porter : Chambers was sufficiently proud of his production to ship off copies soon after its publication to a host of European notables, including the King of Sweden and Voltaire, and to boast in at least one letter of the period that it had 'met with a very favorable reception' in England, though this seems not actually to have been the case. At the same time, other letters introducing the work to his correspondents describe it as so much 'coglioneri', or foolishness, and 'a piece of nonsense', gestures of dismissal considerably harsher than conventions of authorial humility would normally require. In the Explanatory discourse that accompanied the second edition as a response to the criticisms the first edition had provoked, Chambers initially repudiates any Chinese inspiration behind his ideas, describing their oriental setting in the earlier work as a mere ruse, a failed attempt to '[clothe] truth in the garb of fashion, to secure it a patient hearing'.
The paradoxical disjuncture between Chamber's aesthetic affinities together with his endless equivocations concerning his own allegiance to the Chinese style have rendered the interpretation of his Chinese writings, and the Dissertation in particular, a bewildering task, and a critical consensus has remained elusive. Certain readers, on confronting his descriptions of the horrid and enchanted scenes found in Chinese gardens, with their imported tigers, elephants, implements of torture, and bolts of artificial lightning, have been inclined to dismiss his more extravagant recommendations as nonsensical absurdities, playful diversions, or proto-romantic flights of fantasy, while others have confessed to ambivalence about the seriousness with which they are intended. At least one garden historian has demonstrated that Chambers's central ideas about gardening derive from earlier English sources, while another has shown, equally persuasively, that they are firmly rooted in Chinese theories of gardening. Some critics have seen the jealous attach on Capability Brown as the chief 'raison d'être' for the work, while others have stressed the prophetic importance of its original contribution to the theory of landscape design. One of the few points of agreement among students of Chambers's work is that his representation of the Dissertation as a work of cross-cultural translation complicates its reading considerably, in that the substance of his ideas on gardening is distorted beneath the 'fashionable garb' of chinoiserie.
For all the success enjoyed by his treatise, Chambers made no claim to originality in the work. The role he saw for himself, rather, was that of a compiler and an adjudicator of taste. He imitates the Chinese more directly in his carefully assembled menagerie of exotic species. The prominence of water in his fantasy garden, and of 'close walks' and 'intricate windings', suggest meanwhile a more generalized influence of Chinese gardening principles. The Dissertation frequently reads, in fact, like an allegorical narrative of voyage and discovery, with its visitor described repeatedly as a 'traveler' or 'passenger' as he makes his way among the garden's seemingly endless labyrinthine passages. The magnificence of the vistas he encounters fully justifies the use of such terms : these are not backyard arrangements of rock gardens and goldfish ponds, but seemingly full-scale depictions of natural wonders that transport the 'visitor' into a compellingly 'real' virtual world.
Chambers's depiction of the genius of Chinese gardeners is directed at two polemical aims. The author intends, most conspicuously, to paint an unflattering contrast between the exalted abilities of landscape artists in China and those of their English counterparts, and especially of his nemesis Capability Brown. But he also hopes, more constructively, to elevate the status of this art in England to that which architecture now enjoyed.
As a cross-cultural translation, the Dissertation should be read not as a more or less accurate rendering of 'authentic' Chinese practice than as a narrative mapping of the experience of Chinese difference. The genius of Chinese gardening expressed itself, for Chambers, through an aesthetic of contrast, variety, and surprise. While the modern English landscape park numbed the viewer with its monotonous repetition of formulaic conventions, the Chinese garden spurred the imagination with a splendid panoply of riveting scenes, calculated to lead the viewer through a succession of intense emotional catharses. The basic components of the aesthetic vision Chambers ascribed to Chinese gardeners had more obvious precedents not only in Burke's conception of the sublime but also in the English gardening theory of the previous half century.
If the Chinese garden, for Chambers, embodies the essence of his impressions of China in its genius, variety, and wondrous indecipherability, the dream of transforming the kingdom into a garden represents the transposition of an enthralling imaginative response to foreignness back to his more immediate surroundings. The dream is Chinese not in its specific content, but rather in the derivation of its aesthetic vision from a subjective confrontation with Chinese difference.