Shikina-en: What a Garden Could Offer an Envoy

The celebrations for King Shō On's investiture in 1800 did not follow their usual course. The Chinese mission arrived during mourning for the Qianlong emperor, and the formal banquets at Shuri Castle were curtailed. Yet the guests still went to royal gardens, where their hosts offered entertainment that included fireworks. The National Theatre Okinawa's historical account places Shikina-en among these alternative settings.^[1]

That combination is more revealing than a garden's reputation for receiving important visitors. A ruler could provide a place and issue an invitation; he could not simply determine what his guests would accept. At Shikina-en, hospitality included the negotiation of an occasion. It also produced something that outlasted the occasion: words written for the garden, and later words written about it.

Shikina-en occupied a plateau south of Shuri Castle, within reach of the royal residence but outside its principal ceremonial enclosure. Naha City's history dates its establishment to 1799 and records the reception of Zhao Wenkai and Li Dingyuan the following year. Zhao led the Qing mission that recognized Shō On as king; Li was his deputy. The garden was also a retreat for the royal family, rather than a residence permanently set aside for foreigners.^[2]

Its alternative name, Nan'en, means South Garden. An older royal villa at Sakiyama, east of the castle, was known as Tōen, the East Garden. The two provided different destinations within a royal landscape extending beyond the palace walls. An account of a visit to one cannot automatically describe what happened in the other.

Li's mission record shows why that wider choice of settings mattered. During an audience at Shuri in the eighth lunar month, the king explained through an interpreter that the absence of banquets had left little opportunity for conversation. He proposed a visit to the East Garden and a less formal meal. The envoys initially declined, then agreed; Li says they retained only a small group of servants, sending the others back to limit expense.^[3]

This was an invitation to Tōen, not Shikina-en. But it establishes the problem facing the same host and guests before the later South Garden outing. The suspension of the prescribed banquets had reduced occasions for extended company. A garden visit offered a different form in which company might become acceptable.

The distinction continued to require care. When another outing was proposed, the envoys warned against expenditure that would make it equivalent to a banquet. At the Mid-Autumn festival, they twice declined gifts of food and drink before accepting them as seasonal offerings.^[3] Hospitality involved naming the occasion as well as supplying it. A meal, gift or performance might be permissible under one description and objectionable under another.

The king had alternatives to an empty reception hall. Those alternatives still had to be accepted by people with obligations of their own.

Later that month, the king sent officials to invite the envoys to the South Garden. Li's entry for the twenty-second day describes the excursion. Modern accounts of Shikina-en use this passage as evidence for the early garden, although Li's additional identification with an older estate leaves a topographical uncertainty. His pavilion names should not be placed directly onto the buildings now restored at the site.^[4]

What he describes is a landscape with recent work still evident. A newly excavated pond lay before the principal building. Rock formed a bridge across it. To the south, earth removed in digging the pond had been piled into mounds, with a small pavilion on the raised ground. A more spacious structure stood toward the west. The new garden had not acquired its shape solely by arranging buildings around an untouched natural pool.

Moving soil connected two parts of the design. The excavation made a place for water and supplied material for higher ground nearby. That rise in turn offered a position for looking outward. In Li's account, making the pond and making a viewpoint belonged to the same undertaking. The garden's apparent variety emerged partly from the redistribution of its own ground.

The visit also included an explicit request from the host. Shō On asked the envoys to provide written names. Zhao supplied Yinghui, welcoming the light, for one structure; Li gave another Yilan, taking in the view. Before their departure, the king ordered fireworks.^[5]

The names were contributions solicited from the visitors. The king did not merely ask them to approve a completed work. He invited them to add something that could be associated with it afterward. In this respect, the garden was still being made through its use: earth and buildings had supplied the setting, while an encounter supplied words by which parts of it might be remembered.

Li's record preserves his side of that encounter. It gives us the invitation, features he noticed and the request for names. It supplies no warrant for inventing the designers' private intentions or the guests' lasting change of allegiance. The useful result is smaller and more concrete: a royal outing generated an exchange in which visitors became contributors.

The garden's enduring arrangement offered alternatives to remaining in one reception room. A path circulated around the pond, rising and falling with the ground. Bridges led to islands; pavilions supplied places to stop. Naha's description identifies this as a strolling garden, with a pond whose outline is associated with the written character for heart. Chinese-style structures and arched bridges were incorporated into a landscape built with Ryukyuan limestone.^[6]

The different routes changed the relationship between a guest and a view. From the residence, the pond formed a prospect before the rooms. Moving around it brought bridges, buildings and stretches of shore into new alignments. Reaching an island placed the viewer inside a scene previously seen from outside. The same enclosed grounds could therefore support a succession of shared activities rather than a single long audience.

Water could also be crossed without using a bridge. The site's architectural interpretation identifies a stone slipway, the Fune-ageba, for launching and storing pleasure boats. The larger bridge arches allowed boats to pass beneath them.^[7] Those features belong together: a boating place needs somewhere to put a vessel into the water, and bridges must leave enough room if movement is to continue beneath them. The pond was an available space for recreation as well as an object to look at.

The Udun, the residence, supported a different rhythm. Formal reception rooms faced the garden, while other spaces served sleeping, dressing, cooking and bathing. Raised shutters admitted light and air while providing shade. The building combined provision for company with provision for a household.^[8]

Its present room arrangement includes later history. The residence was enlarged twice in the early twentieth century; its reconstruction therefore cannot be treated as an unchanged floor plan for the 1800 reception. Even so, the documented division between reception and residential functions explains the identity of the estate. This was a royal place in which people could stay, entertain and withdraw, with the garden extending the range of possible settings outside.

The architecture made such choices possible. Whether a particular guest accepted a meal, boarded a boat or remained for entertainment still depended on the occasion. Li's negotiations show why provision and use must be connected through actual decisions, rather than assumed to be the same thing.

The freshwater spring called Ikutokusen feeds Shikina-en's pond. Its stone enclosure gives a visible focus to the source on which the surrounding water landscape depends. Two inscriptions connect that source with different Chinese missions: Zhao Wenkai's writing of 1800 and a later text by Lin Hongnian, who came in 1838.^[9]

Their language made more of water than a statement that it was available. Ikutoku, written in the characters used for cultivating virtue, joined the spring to a moral vocabulary. Lin's phrase, Kanrei enrei, praises sweet water and the prolonging of life. These are auspicious words attached to a spring, not evidence that drinking it produced longevity.

The two dates matter because they show successive visitors responding to the same feature. The garden did not depend on one unique encounter to acquire its written associations. A later mission could add another inscription without replacing the earlier name. The physical source supplied a continuing subject for acts of praise separated by decades.

An inscription also changes the duration of a visit. A guest who leaves can remain present as a name and a text. For later readers, the spring is both part of the garden's water system and a place connected with a particular envoy. Neither meaning requires the water to stop being useful. The written addition gives an existing feature another history.

Such contributions fitted a wider practice of literary exchange. A scroll catalogued by Kyushu National Museum brings together Chinese poems associated with the 1800 mission, including work by the envoys, their companions and Ryukyuan men of letters. Many of the Ryukyuan poems use Li's rhymes. The surviving calligraphic compilation is later than the visit and is not identified as a set of poems all composed at Shikina-en.^[10]

Its relevance is the kind of exchange it preserves. An initial composition supplied a form to which someone else could respond. The response required an accomplishment of its own. At Shikina-en, the request for pavilion names and the spring inscriptions made written contributions part of the local landscape; the wider poetic record shows that visitors and hosts also exchanged words in forms that could circulate beyond it.

Foreign visitors were not the garden's only literary interpreters. A collection known as Nan'en hakkei, the Eight Views of the South Garden, includes poems associated with King Shō Iku and other Ryukyuan authors. Historian Takahashi Yasuo dates this group to the king's reign, 1835–1847. Unlike garden sequences composed in literary Chinese, these works used ryūka, Ryukyuan verse.^[11]

The themes included summer coolness, the autumn moon, garden chrysanthemums, farmers' songs and waves of pine. They described the garden through seasons, sounds and cultivated surroundings as well as through objects occupying fixed positions. A moon belongs to a time of night; coolness to a felt condition; a song to something heard. The place could be recognized through experiences that no plan of buildings and paths could show together.

An eight-view sequence also gives several writers a shared task. They address selected themes, each producing a version of the same named subject. A collection can thus preserve variety within an agreed frame, rather than requiring every author to invent a new inventory of what the garden contains.

Takahashi reads the short titles and use of Ryukyuan verse as evidence that the eight-view convention had entered a local literary world. A form with connections to Chinese landscape culture could be practiced without every new contribution remaining a Chinese poem. The garden was being described by people whose language and literary associations belonged to Ryukyu.

This is a different relationship from the king's request to an arriving envoy. In the earlier encounter, a visitor was asked to supply a name. Here, royal and local authors worked with a sequence of subjects associated with the estate. Both activities made words part of the garden's history, but neither was merely the passive reception of the other's culture.

The agricultural theme also reaches beyond the enclosed pond. It places the sounds of cultivation within the royal landscape's literary field. That does not turn the verses into testimony about how cultivators experienced the monarchy. It does show that the court's chosen image of its retreat included a surrounding world of fields and work, rather than only the elegance of its own residence.

At the higher ground known as Kankodai, the prospect extends toward the farms, settlements and hills of southern Okinawa. The site's interpretive account connects the overlook with the reception of Chinese guests. It also dates the pavilion associated with that viewpoint to the Taishō period, 1912–1926, well after the kingdom's end.^[12]

A familiar explanation holds that showing a broad landscape without a visible sea was intended to make Ryukyu appear larger. That is the interpretation presented in the modern account; it does not establish what every envoy concluded. A visitor could admire the prospect while knowing very well that the kingdom consisted of islands.

The less speculative relationship is still significant. From this part of the estate, looking outward brought cultivated land and settlements into an experience centered on a royal retreat. The garden's visual world exceeded the pond and its carefully placed structures. The agricultural subjects of the Eight Views provide another, literary connection between the estate and that wider setting.

The later pavilion shows that this relationship could be maintained in a new architectural form. It should not be supplied as the missing roof over Li's visit or confidently assigned one of his requested names. What can be followed across the evidence is a continuing interest in elevated viewing, not an unbroken identity for every building placed there.

This restraint leaves the garden's political role more intelligible. Shikina-en offered company, recreation and things worth discussing or writing about. The records show hosts requesting contributions and guests making them. They do not show an apparatus that automatically converted scenery into diplomatic agreement. Hospitality could create an occasion for exchange without determining everything that followed from it.

Shikina-en was devastated during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. The restoration begun in 1975 continued over the following two decades. Naha's account records completion in 1996. In the course of that recovery, Shō Hiroshi, a great-grandson of the last king, donated the property to the city in 1992.^[13]

The rebuilding returned the garden to use under a different arrangement of ownership and responsibility. It did not restore the royal household or the investiture missions. The Udun itself was reconstructed with timber brought from Kyushu because suitable local material had become scarce.^[14] The recovered setting belongs to a modern undertaking as well as to the earlier estate it makes legible.

The written landscape also contains replacements. The prefectural library's archive explicitly catalogues rubbings of a reconstructed version of the Kanrei enrei monument. The survival of the words and the age of the stone carrying them therefore require separate descriptions.^[15]

What returns through these different forms is the possibility of understanding how the place was used. A royal family had a retreat; visitors were invited under conditions that sometimes changed; a spring acquired the writing of successive envoys; Ryukyuan poets gave the garden a sequence of seasonal subjects. These were distinct acts, connected by the estate in which they took place or to which they referred.

Shikina-en's hospitality was never simply the presentation of a finished view to a grateful guest. People discussed what could be offered, moved through the grounds, requested words and supplied them. The garden gave those exchanges a setting. Some of their results became part of what the next visitor would find there.