Pavilions like this were indeed sometimes used as setting for the consumption of tea and snacks, including ice cream in the case of the Chinese House at Wroxton Abbey, Oxfordshire, and for garden parties as in the case of the Chinese tent at Montagu House, Whitehall.

Robert, you are very kind. For those readers who are inspired by your praise, the post can be found here: http://bit.ly/yMkwJJ (and also through the ‘Stowe’ link on the right). And I would agree with you that the interiors of the Chinese House are extraordinary.

Thank you as always! Robert

You may be right about the ‘tiger’ reference, but the interesting and complicating factor is that the only clearly recognisable source for the characters on the Chinese House is the Chambers illustration. The painter may have copied characters from other sources, or he may have mangled the Chambers characters to such an extent that they look like other characters or have become unreadable, but we cannot really be certain.

And the Chambers illustration is mysterious too: only two lines in it are obviously quotes from the Zhuangzi, two more lines are readable without it being clear (as yet) where they derive from, and the rest of the text is indecipherable – it almost looks like the engraver got fed up halfway through and botched the second half of the job

So we are talking here about a fragmented copy of an indifferently transcribed copy of a Chinese text that contains two brief out-of-context quotes from the Zhuangzi – which is why it is so amazing that Dr Mansvelt Beck was able to spot the Zhuangzi reference at all!

And yes I agree that it is a similar sort of thing to the European interest in Egyptian writing and decoration. Both Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs were studied by those trying to identify the original universal language, such as the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher.

Philip, yes it is worth investigating where else the ‘Chambers’ characters might pop up – especially in illustrations of French and other Continental chinoiserie garden pavilions of the late eighteenth century (mostly now lost), which were often heavily inspired by Chambers’s book.

I seem to remember that the characters on plaques on that pavilion at Batsford are more accurately copied, or are originals – probably because by the late Victorian and Edwardian periods it was easier for British garden-makers have access to original Chinese and Japanese texts.

One refers to “tigers and leopards in cages”, meaning that great powers is useless once constrained. The other reference tells of a hermit who is eaten by a tiger, meaning that all the knowledge he stored up was useless because he separated himself from other people.

Both of these parables do seem to have some applicability to a country estate. Of course, almost any allusion to the Zhuang-zi would probably be notable either for its fitness or its irony.

Incidentally, the copying of Chinese text from a pattern book is reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs used as decoration–either the artist made up pseudo-hieroglyphs, or he copied out of a plate-book, sometimes using a wildly inappropriate original. Still, there is a chance that the Stowe quotations were selected intentionally, and this is worth checking out.
–Road to Parnassus