園林과 公園의 사이에서 ― 19세기 중국인의 公園 유람

Abstract

Chinese travellers to Europe in the mid-to-late 19th century, both officially and unofficially, were deeply interested in Europe's advanced science, technology, and especially military weaponry, but they were also very interested in its parks. This article seeks to answer that question by focusing on the travelogues of the envoys who visited in the 80s and 90s, starting with Wang Tao. Their enjoyment of the park may have been due to their own cultural tastes as celebrated scholar. They sought out parks when looking for accommodation in Europe, and in their writings, they described their excursions in the sense of a traditional travelogue. This way of perceiving the park was also reflected in the conceptual language they used. The expressions they mainly used followed the traditional nomenclature, such as 'park', '~en', '~囿', etc. They also used the term '公園', but it was extremely rare, so it seems that the park was still an unfamiliar and universal concept. In this way, it can be said that for them, the park had a dual character of being both a familiar place imagined as the traditional garden and an unfamiliar and new place at the same time. On the one hand, the park was a place to be enjoyed, but on the other hand, it was also a place to be explored and examined. Therefore, unlike the traditional garden, they paid attention to the publicness of the park and recognised the function of public hygiene to compensate for the poor living conditions. However, behind the scenes, the fact that parks and promenades were designed as a way to control the workers who were pushed into the city due to industrialisation, and the fact that they were used as a space to recharge from hard labour, were outside their vision. Moreover, the identity of a European mission encouraged them to push themselves to understand European society in depth, but at the same time, by limiting where they could stay and what they could see to a certain extent, it prevented them from advancing to a comprehensive understanding, and in particular, the records of the first writer acted as a guide in another aspect and served as a framework that prevented them from recognising new problems.