Sharawadgi

Among us, the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly in ſome certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformities; our Walks and our Trees ranged ſo, as to anſwer one another, and at exact Distances. The Chineſes ſcorn this way of Planting, […] their greateſt Reach of Imagination, is employed in contriving Figures, where the Beauty ſhall be great, and ſtrike the Eye, but without any Order or Diſpoſition of Parts, that ſhall be commonly or eaſily obſerv'd. And though we have hardly any Notion of this ſort of Beauty, yet they have a particular Word to expreſs it; and where they find it hit their Eye at firſt Sight, they ſay the Sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any ſuch Expreſſion of Eſteem.

Long before the close of the seventeenth century, there was a fascination with "Sharawadgi" (a word supposedly derived from Chinese), a type of design that accented the wild, the surprising, the irregular.

Temple's word for this style is "sharawadgi"; it is the deliberate arrangement of form to create particular vistas, which also imply particular sites or points of view from which those vistas perfect themselves. But as [Horace] Walpole adapts Temple's reflections, first in his own treatise on gardening, and later in his thoughts on architecture, sharawadgi is the organization of a series of such views.

The kind of Scots we used was messy; it was going into all sorts of odd lexical corners and stirring these up with four-letter words. It was a kind of "sharawaggi", an absolute mixture. This didn't go down well.

There are no further ebullient accounts in [Horace] Walpole's letters of Chinese bridges and temples and the glories of sharawadgi, and he never moved forward with a proposed Chinese house at Strawberry Hill for which [Richard] Bentley had provided a plan.

For many, oriental asymmetry was a liberation, and sharawaggi became a cult term of praise when talking about everything from ceramics to buildings.