在亚洲文明博物馆为文图学会会员导览《汇流：卢浮宫的莫卧儿、萨法维与奥斯曼艺术珍品》展览之前，我在每个人的手心轻轻喷了一点玫瑰露。
当时没有多作解释，只觉得这样走进展厅，似乎多了一点仪式感。后来才说明，这个动作其实来自我准备导览时，对一面十七世纪萨法维王朝诗会瓷板的反复观看。
祥云飘荡，花团锦簇，两位相对跪坐的年轻诗人，面貌清秀，头戴包裹式头巾，衣袍上缀满了花朵纹饰。其中一人身体略向前倾，抬手作吟诵或辩说的姿势，神情专注，像正在念出自己的诗句；另一人则低头执笔，把诗句写入狭长的 safīna 诗文册中。两人的旁边各有侍从，一位叉手而立；一位捧着有盖的食器，整体表现出从容而优雅的诗歌交流。虽然博物馆解释这是一场诗歌竞赛（Poetry Contest），我想到“以诗会友”，称它为《诗会图》瓷板。
Safīna和有盖的食器在展场里都能见到实物。我后来被画面里的瓶子吸引。那是一种鼓腹、细长颈、小口的器物。再看亚洲文明博物馆另一处展柜，我发现几件中国制造、外销海外的银器，器形十分相近，馆方明确标示为 rosewater
sprinklers，玫瑰露洒水瓶。再查大都会艺术博物馆、英国维多利亚与艾伯特博物馆收藏的萨法维人物瓷板，也看到了相似的长颈瓶。
我当然无法证明诗会图中那只瓶子盛的就是玫瑰露。可是，萨法维时期的伊朗确实使用这类长颈洒水器来盛放芳香水；后来印度宫廷所用的 gulabpash 玫瑰露洒水器，也延续了这种细长颈、鼓腹的形式。于是，那些原先只是画面中物件的小器物，以及整面瓷板令我流连忘返。
它原来并不是一张挂在墙上的画。
它就是墙。
艺术史学者 Farshid
Emami 根据宫廷史料、旅行记、十九世纪照片和收藏记录，把相关人物瓷板，重新放回伊斯法罕一座已经拆毁的皇家亭阁 Jahan-nama Pavilion。换句话说，我们今天在博物馆里看到的，其实是一座消失建筑留下来的残片。
十七世纪走进这座亭阁的人，他们可能坐在廊下，身边有食物，有花木，有谈笑，也有诗歌。墙上的人物与现实中的人物彼此映照，画里的花园与建筑外的花园互相延伸。诗歌在这里并不只是写在纸上的文字，而是进入建筑、进入日常生活的一种环境。
中国的雅集图比如《兰亭修禊图》《西园雅集图》，描绘文人在山水或园林中赋诗宴饮。中国文人把雅集画成长卷，萨法维王朝却把诗会烧成瓷砖，镶进建筑。两种文明选择的媒介不同，却都把“理想的生活”变成可以观看的图像。
而萨法维的诗会墙面，又比一幅可以收起的长卷更进一步。它不会等你打开，而是一直在那里。人走进建筑，就走进图像；坐下来，也坐进诗会的世界。
如果从建筑文图学来看，这面墙保存的并不只是文学题材。人物、文字、花园、器物、饮食、建筑位置与观看方式，共同构成意义。甚至那些我们今天已经无法确定用途的细颈瓶，也提醒我：一个空间的经验，从来不只属于眼睛。
所以，那天导览开始以前，我在每个人的手心喷了一点玫瑰露。
我并不是想复原一个已经无法证明的萨法维仪式。那一点香气，只是想补上一种今天的博物馆难保存的东西：嗅觉。
也许四百年前的诗会究竟是什么气味，我们永远不会知道。但至少这一面墙提醒我，文学曾经不只被阅读，也曾经被写下、被吟诵、被观看，并且生活在建筑空间。
诗会在墙上。
也曾经，在人的身体之间，在花园里，在空气中。
2026年9月26日，新加坡《联合早报》“上善若水”专栏
A Poetry Gathering on the Wall
I Lo-fen
Before
leading members of the Text and Image Studies Society on a guided tour of Crosscurrents:
Masterpieces of the Mughal, Safavid and Ottoman Arts from the Louvre at the
Asian Civilisations Museum, I lightly sprinkled a little rosewater into each
person’s palm.
At
the time, I offered no particular explanation. I simply felt that entering the
gallery in this way lent the occasion a certain sense of ritual. Only later did
I realize that the gesture had grown out of my repeated contemplation, while
preparing for the tour, of a seventeenth-century Safavid tile panel depicting a
poetry gathering.
Auspicious
clouds drift across the scene amid luxuriant blossoms. Two young poets kneel
facing each other. Both have delicate features, wear wrapped turbans, and are
dressed in robes covered with floral motifs. One leans slightly forward,
raising a hand as if reciting or debating, his expression intent, as though he
were speaking his own verse aloud. The other lowers his head and writes,
recording the lines in a narrow safīna, a manuscript anthology of
poetry. Each poet is accompanied by an attendant: one stands respectfully with
hands clasped before him, while the other holds a covered food vessel. The
overall impression is one of poised and elegant poetic exchange. Although the
museum identifies the scene as a “Poetry Contest,” I am reminded instead of the
Chinese expression “making friends through poetry,” and have come to think of
it as a tile panel of a “poetry gathering.”
Actual
examples of both the safīna and covered food vessels can be seen
elsewhere in the exhibition. Yet it was the bottles in the image that
eventually caught my attention. They have swollen bodies, long slender necks,
and small mouths. Looking again at another display case in the Asian Civilisations
Museum, I noticed several pieces of Chinese silverware made for export overseas
whose forms were remarkably similar. The museum explicitly identifies them as rosewater
sprinklers. When I subsequently examined Safavid figural tile panels in the
collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert
Museum, I encountered comparable long-necked bottles there as well.
I
cannot, of course, prove that the bottle in the poetry-gathering scene actually
contained rosewater. Yet long-necked sprinklers of this kind were indeed used
in Safavid Iran for scented waters, while the gulabpash rosewater
sprinklers later used at Indian courts continued the same basic form of a
bulbous body and slender neck. Objects that had initially seemed merely
incidental within the composition thus began to hold my attention, as did the
entire tiled wall.
It
was never simply a painting hung on a wall.
It
was the wall itself.
Drawing
on court records, travel accounts, nineteenth-century photographs, and
collecting histories, the art historian Farshid Emami has reconstructed the
original architectural setting of related figural tile panels in the
now-demolished Jahan-nama Pavilion in Isfahan. In other words, what we
encounter in museums today are fragments surviving from a vanished building.
Those
who entered the pavilion in the seventeenth century may have sat beneath its
verandas, surrounded by food, flowering plants, conversation, laughter, and
poetry. The figures on the wall echoed the people inhabiting the actual space;
the painted garden extended into the garden beyond the architecture. Poetry
here was more than words written on paper. It became part of an environment
embedded in architecture and everyday life.
Chinese
images of literati gatherings, such as the Orchid Pavilion Gathering and
the Elegant Gathering in the Western Garden, likewise portray scholars
composing poetry, feasting, and socializing amid landscapes or gardens. Chinese
literati transformed such gatherings into handscrolls; the Safavids fired
poetry gatherings onto ceramic tiles and set them into architecture. The two
cultures chose different media, yet both transformed an “ideal way of life”
into images that could be seen.
The
Safavid tiled wall went even further than a handscroll, which could be rolled
up and put away. It did not wait to be opened. It remained permanently present.
To enter the building was to enter the image; to sit down was to sit within the
world of the poetry gathering.
Seen
from the perspective of Architectural Text and Image Studies, what this wall
preserves is far more than a literary subject. Figures, writing, gardens,
objects, food, architectural placement, and modes of viewing all work together
to produce meaning. Even those long-necked bottles whose precise function we
can no longer determine remind me that the experience of a space never belongs
to the eyes alone.
That
is why, before the tour began that day, I sprinkled a little rosewater into
everyone’s palm.
I was
not attempting to recreate a Safavid ritual that can no longer be proven. The
faint fragrance was simply an attempt to restore, however briefly, something
that museums find difficult to preserve: the sense of smell.
We
may never know what a poetry gathering smelled like four hundred years ago. Yet
this wall reminds me that literature was once more than something to be read.
It was also written, recited, seen, and lived within architectural space.
The
poetry gathering was on the wall.
And
once, perhaps, it was also between human bodies, in the garden, and in the air.
Published in the “Shang Shan Ruo Shui” column,
Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore, 26 September 2026.
