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INTRODUCTION

FIRST, THE LAND

The land—topography, waters, stones, vegetation, and climate—bestows the framework and materials of the great garden traditions of the world. Persian gardens amplify scarce water resources into fragrant courtyards. The Renaissance gardens of Italy negotiate the hills around Rome and Florence with terraces from which prospects are revealed, grottoes are embedded, and watercourses flow. The basins of water in French Renaissance gardens stretch across the level plains of central and southern France. The eighteenth-century English landscapes of rolling hills and shallow lakes were constructed on soft, chalky soils criss-crossed with gentle streams. The gardens of Kyoto benefit from a propitious climate for broadleaf evergreens, an abundance of moss spores, and a territory rich with both mountains and rivered plains.

Similarly, the gardens of Suzhou are born of their region. Suzhou is situated in the alluvial plain of the Yangtze River which spreads across eastern China from Zhejiang Province in the south to Shandong Province in the north. This great delta—a fecund land of water, rice, and fish—provides the foundation for one of the world’s great garden traditions—one that has been cultivated for over 2,500 years. Mark Elvin, in his environmental history of China, reassures, “Here we are at last in the good part of China…. It is fifty leagues from south the north, and there is no question of mountains. This landscape is as level as a mirror all the way to the horizon.”

Figure 2. Suzhou sits between the Yangtze River delta to the north, Hangzhou Bay to the south, Tai Lake to the west, and the Pacific Ocean to the east. This land of shallow, slow-moving waters and temperate climate establishes the framework of natural history from which the garden traditions of Suzhou grew.

Twenty thousand years ago, the area that is now Suzhou was a shallow sea where coral flourished. Rivers brought sediment from the western loess plateaus and deposited it on the ancient shores while the ocean slowly receded—water giving way to low-lying flat land. Today, Suzhou is still only about thirty-five miles, or sixty kilometers, inland from where the Yangtze River meets the Pacific Ocean.

The oceanic coral metamorphosed into limestone that was subsequently carved by the rivers that stream across the plain. This water-carved formation—the porous limestone from Tai Hu, or Tai Lake, would become one of the most prized materials for the construction of the gardens of Suzhou and throughout China. These limestone rocks are preferred for the piled rockeries and specimen stones that are unique features of the Chinese classical garden. It is the masculinity of these stone rockeries contrasting with the limpid shallow waters of the region that establish the framework of mountains and water, or shanshui, for the gardens of Suzhou.

GARDENS IN CHINA

The earliest description of a garden in China is contained in the Book of Songs, the fourth-century B.C. collection that is regarded as the first book of Chinese literature. In it, a wall encloses a residence as well as specimens of useful trees such as mulberry and willow. The description closely resembles the Chinese character for garden.

In a poem dating from about the same time and later compiled in the Songs of Chu, an imaginary garden is described in a passage where the soul of a dying king is being coaxed back to his body by describing the place where he will find a princess: a garden where linked corridors capture the aroma of orchids, streams meander past halls, pavilions rise above palace roofs, balustrades support the king to lean over and look into lotus-filled ponds, and a tall mountain provides a prospect to look down on the garden and out to distant hills.

THREE TYPES OF GARDENS

There are three types of traditional gardens in China: the monastic courtyards, the imperial gardens and hunting grounds, and the scholar gardens such as those in Suzhou. The monastic courtyards are distributed throughout hills and mountains where the Buddhist and Daoist doctrines establish the idea of hermitage or retreat. The imperial gardens and hunting grounds that remain are in and around Beijing (including the Mountain Resort in Chengde), although evidence remains of them in many of the cities that have, over time, served as capitals of the Middle Kingdom. Last, the private gardens that are the subject of this book are largely concentrated in the area just south of the Yangtze River in eastern China in cities such as Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Wuxi, Nanjing, and Yangzhou, which have been prosperous centers of commerce and education for centuries.

Figure 3. Courtyard Garden at Tanzhe Temple outside Beijing, where the monks have tended an ancient ginkgo tree for 1,400 years. (Photo by Brendan Riley.)

Monastic Courtyards

At Tanzhe Temple in the western hills of Beijing, the monks have tended an ancient ginkgo tree for 1,400 years. In courtyards such as this, the ginkgo—one of the oldest species of plants-was cultivated at the brink of its extinction. Other trees such as pines and horsechestnuts, known as the Buddha tree because it is the genus under which the Buddha presumably achieved enlightenment, are also common in the courtyards.

Both Daoist and Buddhist temples maintain similar four-sided courtyards, the pervasive architectural building block of China. From rural farmhouses to the imperial residences, the enclosure of a plot of land with a wall and the organization of south-facing buildings around a courtyard has been the module of human dwelling.

In the monastic courtyards, the routine tending of plants, such as the ginkgo or the peony, has embodied a relationship between human and natural cultures. In this case, the monks of Chinese temples share a compulsion with greater humankind. As Robert Pogue Harrison proposes, “If life is indeed a subset of gardening, rather than the other way around, then there is every reason to believe that if humankind has to entrust its future to anyone, it should entrust it to the gardener, or to those who, like the gardener, invest themselves in a future of which they will in part be the authors, though they will not be around to witness its full unfolding.”

Imperial Gardens and Hunting Grounds

The earliest imperial gardens were hunting grounds, and the Mountain Retreat in Chengde north of Beijing remains as physical testament to their scale and refinement. In Beijing, the Nanyuan District, south of the formerly walled capital, is named for the South (Nan) Garden (Yuan), the imperial hunting ground where Pere David’s deer and other game were collected for imperial hunts. These Chinese imperial hunting grounds parallel the hunting grounds of Europe and Middle Asia where kings and royalty would enter into the wilder landscape of plains or forests for pleasure and camaraderie.

The imperial gardens were built as large winter or summer palaces just outside the city. The Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuanming Yuan) and Summer Palace (Yihe Yuan), gardens in the northwest suburbs of Beijing, are such imperial gardens. The Garden of Perfect Brightness, which was destroyed in the nineteenth century, effectively served as the seat of the Qing Dynasty emperors for half of each year—and was perhaps more of a favored home than the Forbidden City. The gardens of the Garden of Perfect Brightness, like most gardens in China, are gathered around central bodies of water.

Private Gardens

Unlike the imperial gardens, the private gardens are urban residences where the gardens and living quarters are retreats within the city. In part, their potency lies in the abrupt transition from the bustling life of the city into the quiet and carefully cultivated—albeit lively and domestic—garden. Residents of the garden, in addition to the primary family, might include parents, visiting or wayward relatives and friends, mistresses, and an array of domestic help. The life of the garden would have a variety of impressions and meaning depending on the group to which you belong. As joyous and idealized as we may imagine the gardens (they were often full of music and celebrations), they were also full of family intrigue and misadventure.

Figure 4. Water commonly lies at the center of classical Chinese gardens. An array of nine islands surround a square-shaped pond at Jiuzhou, a precinct of the Garden of Perfect Brightness, the imperial garden in Beijing.

AGRICULTURE IN THE GARDEN

To these three garden types, as with landscape traditions in most cultures, one must add agricultural practices. China is remarkable for the enduring and pervasive cultivation of land in all corners of the country. The Chinese word fan designates not only food or a meal in its’ general sense, but it is also the word for rice. In the language, rice is food; the meal. For millennia, the cultivation of this staple crop has created enduringly beautiful expressions of the farmer’s art—vertiginous terraces clinging to the contours of hillsides and ingenious earthen weirs that deploy water across shallow alluvial plains. These are the techniques that became essential to the construction of the Suzhou gardens—stacking stones and diverting water.

Orchards figure prominently in the Chinese cultural imagination, especially the peach blossom. In his prose poem “Records on the Land of Peach Blossoms,” Tao Yuanming (365–427) describes a fisherman who follows an orchard of peach blossoms along a creek to the edge of a cliff. In the cliff, he spies an opening—a cave—into which he enters and discovers a peaceful and fertile society. This Land of Peach Blossoms is the most enduring of Chinese models of idealized landscapes and utopian societies.

In the Ming Dynasty, the imperial families of Beijing began building gardens in the fecund territory just northwest of the capital city. These were didactic gardens intended to re-introduce agriculture, and by example agricultural policy, in the new regime. The scholar gardeners of Suzhou are often described as constructing urban places for retreat and as a place for aesthetic pursuits that epitomize a Daoist ideal, yet, as Craig Clunas has pointed out, the owners were also situating themselves in a political practice as highly educated gentlemen farmers—a parochial reinterpretation of the Beijing emperors.

EARLY GARDENS OF SUZHOU

Suzhou was founded in 514 B.C.E. in the Spring and Autumn Period when He Lu ascended the throne and built a city twenty-three kilometers in circumference that was protected by eight land gates and eight water gates. Panmen (Pan Gate), in the city’s southwest corner, is preserved from this period. The first recorded gardens in the city were imperial gardens built by He Lu, whose Gesu Terrace was built southwest of Suzhou, and by his son, Fu Chai, who built the Guanwa Palace. Private gardens first appeared in the Eastern Han Dynasty with gardens such as Zuo’s Garden, built by the senior official Zuo Rong.

Figure 5. The entrance to Surging Wave Pavilion, the garden with the longest history in Suzhou, is at the end of a bridge that crosses one of Suzhou’s many canals.

PROSPERITY BORN OF THE YANGTZE RIVER AND GRAND CANAL

The early history of China is marked by west to east transportation along the Silk Road and the great rivers. Xi’an, an early capital, is far inland from the commercial, trade, and political centers of contemporary China. The construction of the Grand Canal strongly influenced the change that altered the “flow” of China forever and linked Hangzhou, Suzhou, Yangzhou, and Beijing, among others. These cities remain, almost thirteen centuries later, the most prosperous in China. Suzhou lies at the strategic intersection of these two systems—the east to west Yangtze River and the north to south Grand Canal. Coupled with fecund agriculture and the development of silk culture in the region, Suzhou has remained a commercially successful, and thus, wealthy, city for much of the past millennium. This prosperity contributed to the rise of a class of citizens interested in making gardens.

THE GARDENS OF SUZHOU THROUGH HISTORY

The history of the design and construction of gardens of Suzhou—as with many sites in China—is complex. Gardens were constructed, bought, sold, left to degrade, appended to, and modified in many ways over centuries. The golden age of the Suzhou gardens was from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries during the Ming and Qing dynasties, but most of the gardens of Suzhou were significantly destroyed by the end of the 1940s following invasion by foreign nations, the internal Taiping Rebellion, the fall of the Qing Dynasty, and the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century. Most of the gardens and pavilions are, thus, recent restorations or reconstructions. Yet the desire to restore the gardens of Suzhou affirms that gardens are one of the highest cultural accomplishments of humankind, and they persist in both the imagination and in material culture despite their neglect or destruction.

The Song Dynasty

Surging Wave Pavilion, the garden with the longest history in Suzhou, was first built during the reign of Emperor Qingli (1041–1049) of the Northern Song by Sun Shunqing. It exemplifies the fleeting nature of gardens for, although it maintains the general layout from the Song Dynasty garden that was built on the site of an earlier residence, it has been repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt. It was fully destroyed in the nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion and rebuilt in 1927 as part of the adjacent art college.

The Master of the Nets Garden was first built as the Ten-Thousand-Volume Hall in 1440 by Shi Zhengzhi. It was abandoned after his death and was rebuilt in 1770. The current garden is largely the result of a fine restoration in the 1940s by the He family.

The Yuan Dynasty

Among the characteristics of the Yuan Dynasty, founded by Kublai Khan, was a cultural polyglot that provided freedom for various religions—including the flourishing of Buddhism in China. It was in this context that disciples of the Buddhist monk Zhongfeng built the monastery Shizilin, the Lion Grove, which subsequently became a private garden.

The Ming Dynasty

In the Ming Dynasty, the Han Chinese regained power and a flowering of culture ensued that led to the creation of elegant painting, poetry, furniture, calligraphy, architecture, and gardens. There were more than 270 gardens in Suzhou during this period.

Gardens which were founded in the Ming Dynasty and still survive include the Humble Administrator’s Garden, Garden of Cultivation, and Lingering Garden. The Garden of the Peaceful Mind in Wuxi, the Garden of Peace and Harmony in Shanghai, and the Garden of Ancient Splendor in Nanxiang also date from this period.

The Qing Dynasty

Among the 130 gardens that were founded in Suzhou in the Qing Dynasty, those that survive include: the Mountain Villa of Embracing Beauty, the Couple’s Garden, Garden of Harmony, Zigzag Garden (former residence of Yu Yue), Mountain Villa of Embracing Emerald, Crane Garden, and Carefree Garden. The Garden of Retreat and Reflection in Tongli also dates from late in this period.

Contemporary Suzhou Gardens

By the middle of the twentieth century, domestic and foreign unrest had wracked China. In a period of more than one hundred years, much of the knowledge and skill of building the gardens was lost. Chinese landscape architects and garden designers continue to struggle with the lost construction skills and extension of the ideas embodied in these gardens. Contemporary Chinese garden design is in a crisis of poorly built reproduction gardens on a grand scale.

Figure 6. Shen Zhou (1427-1509), Lofty Mount Lu (1467). Water spills into a rocky waterfall and into a calm stream. A trail winds up the left side, across a bridge, and leads to a small hermitage tucked behind a peak in the center right. National Palace Museum, Taiwan, Republic of China.

Some recent gardens, such as the ones at the Suzhou Museum, point to possible directions. However, the central garden is poorly scaled, among other shortcomings. The bamboo courtyard off of one of the north galleries, however, is exquisite. Suzhou remains a center of garden scholarship and talent with many elegant private gardens constructed in recent years which provide promise for the continued vitality of Suzhou, a modern city of four million people, as one of the world’s great places for gardens.

LANDSCAPE PAINTING

Chinese landscape painting has expressed the place of humans within the world for centuries. By the late Tang Dynasty (618-907), landscapes had emerged as their own genre and have remained a central subject of painting in China since. The Tang paintings depict vast mountains and watersheds with sparse evidence of human inhabitation. These mountainwater, or shanshui, landscapes depict places of retreat for men in times of political upheaval or personal quests for understanding and enlightenment.

The landscape painting of the ensuing Song Dynasty (960–1279) reflected the more strict Confucian social order initiated during this time. The image of the private retreat, or hermitage, emerged as well-educated—but disgraced or retired—officials retreated into poetry and an expressive painting style that shared its emotional force with calligraphy.

The Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368), begun under Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, expelled the educated Chinese officials from service. Many retreated into garden residences where they continued, with their friends and colleagues, to practice the life of the courtly scholar. The model of the domestic retreat flourished in this short, but dynamic, period. From these urban retreats, the scholars produced paintings that began to represent idealized versions of a cultivated society where thatched cottages and fishermen became metaphors for a humble life.

Figure 7. Wang Hui (c. 1632—c. 1717), The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Three: Ji’nan to Mount Tai (Kangxi nanxun, juan san: Ji’nan zhi Taishan). Qing dynasty, datable to 1698. Handscroll; ink and color on silk. 26¾ in. × 45 ft. 8¾ in. Detail. Purchase, the Dillon Fund Gift, 1979. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.

When Han rule was restored under the Ming Dynasty, (1368–1644), there was a return in the imperial courts to Confucian orderliness in all aspects of society, including painting that represented a benevolent, well-governed, hierarchical government. However, the personal expression of the scholar-painter endured, especially as officials suffered political setbacks or retired from imperial appointments to return to their native cities and towns. Among the places that had sent many scholars to the imperial court, and was therefore a place of retreat for retired officials, was Suzhou.

When China came under the rule of the Manchu Qing Dynasty (1644–1912), many scholars lived in self-enforced retirement. Lacking court access to the vast artistic holdings of the government, these scholar-painters were forced away from the common process of copying master-works. The result was an emphasis on local scenes or landscapes and a wide ranging invention of subject matter. In this period, the gardens influenced the subject of paintings where previously gardens were influenced by the paintings.

In contemporary China, the landscape genre remains central to the emergence of international Chinese artists. Among them is the expatriate Zhang Daqian (1899–1983) who, with his brother Zhang Shanzi, lived for a period of time in Suzhou's Master of the Nets Garden, where the current Peony Pavilion served as their studio.

SPACE IN THE GARDENS OF SUZHOU

The gardens of Suzhou neither recede from the visitor nor spread out in repose. The elements of the gardens confront the visitor—pushing rocks, trees, and walls into the foreground—compressing and compacting space—is if great hands gathered a mountainous territory with rocks, forests, and streams, then squeezed it tightly—and ever more tightly—until the entire region would fit into a small city garden.

Peter Jacobs, the Canadian landscape architect and educator, remarked to me that his photographs of the gardens of Suzhou were predominantly oriented vertically—in contrast with his photographs of most gardens elsewhere in the world, which were oriented horizontally in so-called landscape format. The modern instrumentality of the camera assists us in interpreting the movement of our gaze rising from shallow waters, up stream banks, and high to distant peaks. A similar analysis is often undertaken in the study of Chinese landscape paintings, many of which are also oriented vertically. Common among many is the division of the painting into three zones: at the bottom, a foreground of water; at the center, a small sign of human habitation in a wide landscape; and at the top, the craggy outlines of folded mountains. The viewer’s gaze, as with the observation of the gardens, travels up and down these paintings.

THE QUESTION OF AUTHENTICITY AND HISTORY

The Chinese garden historian Chen Congzhou, in his collected essays, On Chinese Gardens, remarks that the Garden of Harmony “was four times renovated to attain its perfection.” Most of the current gardens, as I have pointed out, actually date from recent, exhaustive renovations. The Garden of the Peaceful Mind, in Wuxi, has probably survived with greater “authenticity” than any other. The gardens have all undergone changes of ownership and maintenance, and one should, with few exceptions, understand that what is seen today is a physical palimpsest of repairs, renovations, and extensions of the gardens. As Maggie Keswick declared, “Chinese history is littered with the corpses of gardens.”

For some, the fact that the gardens are reconstructions is problematic in a current period sometimes described as the “age of reproduction.” Yet, as Pierre Ryckmans cautions, “The Chinese past is both spiritually active and physically invisible.”

The non-Chinese attitude—from ancient Egypt to the modern West—is essentially an active, aggressive attempt to challenge and overcome the erosion of time. Its ambition is to build for all eternity by adopting the strongest possible materials and using techniques that will ensure maximum resilience. Yet, by doing this, the builders are merely postponing their ineluctable defeat. The Chinese, on the contrary, have realised that—in Segalen’s words—“nothing immobile can escape the hungry teeth of the ages.” Thus, the Chinese constructors yielded to the onrush of time, the better to deflect it.

REPOSITORIES OF HISTORY AND CULTURE

The gardens are also repositories of cultural artifacts and traditions. The names of halls and gardens allude to—and remind knowledgeable visitors of—ancient poems and legends. The inscribed horizontal boards above doorways and above the honored position inside the halls perform similar roles, as do the paired vertical couplets mounted on the columns of the halls. These are not only renowned for the sentiments of the words but also for the spirit and skill of the calligraphy—sometimes at the hands of an important figure such as the Emperor Qianlong, who composed many such artifacts.

Stone inscriptions, doorway carvings, and steles also contain rich literary allusions or propagate the philosophical views of Confucian, Buddhist, or Daoist schools of thought and are intended to trigger lofty thoughts or enhance the potency of places in the garden.

Ancient scroll tables (whose ends turn up to prevent scrolls from rolling off), upright chairs, blue and white porcelain, carved inkstones, and other furnishings of the scholar’s residence are also preserved in the gardens.

ANCIENT TEXTS

Three books provide special insight into the Chinese garden. The Craft of Gardens, or Yuan Ye, was compiled in three volumes by Tongli native Ji Cheng at the end of the Ming Dynasty. The Story of the Stone, the Ming Dynasty novel with vivid depictions of life in the gardens, was inspired, in part, by the boyhood experiences of the primary author, Cao Xueqin, in the Humble Administrator’s Garden. The Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, first published in 1679, codifies the art of landscape painting and includes a collection of exemplary landscape paintings.

GARDEN CONSTRUCTION

The designers of the gardens of Suzhou are largely anonymous. A myriad of skilled craftsmen worked within extended cultural traditions to produce them. Many gardens are attributed, instead, to poets or painters who inspired the gardens or scenes within them. There are a few notable garden makers—such as Ge Yuliang, who made the centerpiece rockery at the Mountain Villa of Embracing Beauty—yet most of the garden makers are obscured in history.

The revitalization of the construction trades and craftsmen in all aspects of Chinese gardens, landscapes, and architecture after the fall of the Qing Dynasty continues to be an imperative. For more than a century, these skills have atrophied, and the passing of expertise from generation to generation has been abruptly severed. Today, the quality and material integrity of construction in many fields is largely artless, and the successful emergence of contemporary material culture will require the education of new skilled craftsmen.

Figure 8. Zuisen-ji, a garden by the Zen Buddhist monk Muso Soseki, bridges the traditions that underlie essential aspects of the gardens of China and Japan. A veranda looks out onto a rock cliff with a pond, two bridges, and a man-made cave at its base.

GARDENS OF CHINA AND JAPAN

Two of the world’s great garden traditions are separated by a narrow sea, yet the experience of the gardens differ radically. The iconic Chinese garden is full of fanciful scenes that are entered with anticipation of joyful camaraderie and romantic trysts. The iconic Japanese garden, such as Ryoan-ji where fifteen stones are arrayed across a raked gravel surface, is a space separated from the observer and marked by silent personal introspection.

In Japan, the monastic gardens are perhaps the most celebrated, and therein rests a key distinction between the traditions. In China, design of monastic gardens clung to the pervasive model of four-sided courtyards enhanced by trees, shrubs, and flowers, many of which are embedded with metaphorical meaning or illustrious associations, such as the ginkgo, peach, and peony. In Japan, the material articulation and spatial organization of monastic gardens aspired to what the twentieth-century Japanese architect Shinohara Kazuo describes as the removal of all external associations—a search for the essence of things.

Figure 9. A framed slice of rock from the Lingering Garden portrays a mountainous landscape.

Chinese garden ideas were carried in the minds of Buddhist monks who travelled between China and Japan. Among them was Muso Soseki (1275–1351), who, with others, reopened trade between China and Japan during the Yuan Dynasty. He was first among the Buddhist garden-making monks of Japan and several Zen Buddhist gardens attributed to him survive.