在李漁的〈夏宜樓〉中，來自西洋的望遠鏡為一對才子佳人穿針引線，唬弄冬烘的家長，使有情人終成眷屬。這篇小說創意十足，而「千里鏡」被尊為「神眼」，其所建構的「凝視」對於明清視覺文化來說意味深長。 　　望遠鏡的新視域在複雜的人文風景中展開，與倫理、性別、園林美學及春宮文學等歷史脈絡錯綜交織在一起，其所建構的男性「凝視」與社會權力機制、性別政治產生吊詭的關係。 　　本文認為，有別於由「文人畫」傳統發展而來「散視」方式，在元明以來的戲曲、小說中滋長一種另類的「窺視」。〈夏宜樓〉融合了這一「窺視」新潮，使視覺的地位得到加強，其接受和挪用西方「凝視」的方式對於近代中國視覺現代性的探討不乏啟迪意義。

Li Yu’s story “The Summer Pavilion” in which a telescope plays the role of matchmaker for a young couple, is more than renovating the romance of “talented scholar and beauty.” Represented as the “God’s eye,” the novelty from the West establishes the “gaze” as a new way of seeing, significantly turning a new leaf for Ming-Qing visual culture. Apart from the “glance,” the mainstream practice of vision developed from a long and prestigious tradition of “literati painting,” the trope of “peeping” increasingly appears in popular fiction and drama since the fourteenth century and the peeping merges with the gaze in Li Yu’s story. From the optical sense strengthened by the telescope engenders the desire for male gaze, ambiguously entangling with patriarchal order and power relations. Yet different from the visual technology leading to scientific discoveries in the West, the “God’s eye” is represented against indigenous humanist backdrops, complicatedly intertwined with the trends of ethics, gender, garden aesthetics, and pornographic literature. Provided with a mode of embracing and appropriating Western visuality, “The Summer Pavilion” is revelatory to the formation of visual culture in modern China.