Trip Report: The National Bonsai and Penjing Museum
I venture into the National swamp in search of some very small trees. Plus, lots about rocks!
I sent myself on assignment to the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum in our nation’s capital: Washington, DC!
I knew I was entering another world when a man on the train asked me what time it was.
Downtown, I found myself elbowing through a whirlwind of policy wonks and prostitutes, hedonists and attorneys. I met a Kierkegaardian who raised funds for National Parks. I listened to a Desert Storm veteran expressing his deep sympathy for bin Laden.
At last, I was spat out into the National Arboretum: sky and flowering hills. The air was the same humid pall of Maryland swamp, but the winding paths and azalea blossoms suggested the magisterial vision of the Founders.
Nestled near the entrance of the massive park is the National Bonsai and Penjing Museum. Technically part of the Department of Agriculture (USDA), it evolved (somehow) from a government initiative after the Civil War to engineer hardier crops for the farmers to rebuild the South. Government is weird.
This museum is the coolest place in DC. The outdoor section is divided into Chinese, Japanese, and American bonsai gardens. The small indoor space is filled with Chinese scholar’s rocks (gongshi) and a reconstructed poet’s chamber from the Ming dynasty.
The literati found inspiration in these fanciful rocks. In their contours, they saw mountain ranges. In their textures, they saw clouds. In their fissures, they saw the caves of Immortals. Scholar’s rocks—also called viewing stones—allowed the poet’s mind to meander, expanding and contracting like the very geological forces that shaped these curiosities.
Practitioners of daoyin and yangsheng saw in rocks the fruition of their daily cultivation: timeless bodies shaped and layered by the labor of water and wind—outwardly radiant and inwardly obscure.
Here is a Chinese herbalist’s description of the properties of stone, as quoted in the book Cultivated Stones: Chinese Scholar’s Rocks from the Kemin Hu Collection:
Stones are kernels of qi and the bones of the earth. In their large state, they are cliffs and crags; in their small state, they are sand and dust. Their refined essence becomes gold and jade; their concentrated toxicity becomes yu and arsenic. When qi coagulates, it joins to become cinnabar and malachite; when qi metamorphizes, it dissolves to become alum and mercury. Qi transforms, sometimes changing from soft to solid; stalactites become stone in this way. Other times, it changes from movement to stillness; grasses and trees become stone in this way. When spirit-endowed beings that fly and walk become stones, this is a change from sentience to non-sentience; when clapping thunder and falling stars become stones, this is a change from formlessness to form. Earth provides and Heaven transmutes. Though metals and stones may appear to be dull, insensate matter, the transformations wrought by Creation are unending.
What surprised me about hanging out with these lithic lifeforms was the feel of them. The museum curator dispelled my reluctance to touch the stones, explaining that historically, servants were instructed to fondle the peaks and crevasses as they passed in order to keep the surfaces shining.
In books, these stones appear to defy gravity. But when you touch them, you feel the dense cold of the river bottom. Many possess a metallic quality.
One of the most important aspects of a stone is its sound. When you strike a Lingbi stone, it resonates like a bell. In fact, stones from this region were popular for crafting qing, or musical chimes. The oldest extant instrument, qing were played by ancient shaman kings to invoke the ancestors and honor fallen generals. In Daoist cosmology, the stone bell demonstrates the fruition of emptiness.
In the basement of the museum lies a set of chimes waiting to be resurrected. But the curator explained to me how she lost her employees to bureaucratic attrition. All that government pruning has turned this little museum into a bonsai tree—defying time, growing more precious every year.