Dhat Zhuangzi could not have dreamed of: more than 1200 books in 26 languages ​​about trees in pots, in other words: bonsai. The old master of philosophical Taoism praised the gnarled tree because it was useless: “No hatchet nor ax would cut it down and nothing would harm it. Why should it be a cause for sorrow that something is of no use?” A tree from which nothing can be made was then considered a symbol of Chinese wisdom. But around the same time, around 300 BC, the first trees are said to have been cultivated in pots. Had Ayurvedic healers brought the potted plants from the south? The experts argue about that. In any case, trees in pots are first documented during the Han Dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD) on scrolls, vase paintings and wall paintings.

At that time, the magician Jiang-Feng is said to have conjured up entire miniature landscapes on a tray. So the Han emperors had this art imitated: with stones, sand instead of water and gnarled little trees that could grow up to two meters high in large bowls. But the smaller the imitated landscape, the greater the magical power that should emanate from such a miniature tree or rock: the gnarled and twisted the tree trunks, the more sacred they were considered because they were not used for building like normal trees. “The suffering of usefulness,” Zhuangzi said, seemed to pass them by. Their roots and branches were trimmed, shaped with brass wire and presented in ceramic bowls on their own wooden pedestals. Poets and painters turned to them: the dwarf tree became the symbol of a cultivated man.

epitome of the universe

Since the sixteenth century, the tray landscapes and trees in bowls have been called pun-tsai, today penjing. At least a thousand years ago, however, the art of dwarfing reached Japan, where it has only been graphically documented for 800 years. Monks of Chan Buddhism, which emerged from Chinese Taoism and meditative Dhyana Buddhism from India, presumably brought the tray landscape art with them. Chan became Zen. However, since the Zen monks did not have grandiose landscapes as a model like the Chinese, they developed aesthetic norms that declared the individual tree in a particularly deep bowl to be the epitome of the universe.

From the military rulers, the shoguns, to the peasants, most Japanese henceforth cultivated the art of the bowl tree: Hachi-no-ki. Pine trees have traditionally been popular and have been exhibited annually in what was then the capital, Kyoto, since the late eighteenth century. The art of Zen was commercialized and its spiritual background was perverted in entire cultivation fields with preformed dwarf pines. As at the time of the Dutch tulip fever, the dwarf trees became objects of speculation. Around 1800, the learned elite distinguished themselves with a new label in a flat bowl: the bonsai was intended to refine the trivialized arts and crafts. New styles emerged: from chokkan, the upright form, to fukinagashi, the windswept form, to the kengai cascade, which needs a tall pot to be able to overhang. The literati tree, “Bunjingi”, was intended to testify to a poetic character. Bonsai trees in the “Imperial” size class can still grow up to two meters in height. But the tiny ones of the “Mame” class are more popular.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Spanish colonizers discovered small ficus trees among Chinese migrants in the Philippines. At the same time, botanical cultivated and wild forms were discussed in Shakespeare’s England, as can be read in The Winter’s Tale. The poet sided with the breeders: “an art that nature makes”. In 1637 the English discovered the puntsai trees in Macau. Japanese bonsai first came to the West with the World’s Fairs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first book on bonsai was published in French in 1902, the first in English in 1940. When Yuji Yoshimura wrote his “Bonsai Bible” for the West in 1957, the dam was broken: not only Japanese pines and Japanese maples are grown from seed or tree nursery plants today, wired, processed with special tools and sold in hardware stores, but also local field maples, hornbeams and junipers. Zhuangzi is forgotten: “No one knows how useful it is to be useless.”