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
