Make mountains of piled rock, and choose single rocks for their forms: the limestones of Lake Tai, eroded by water into holes, hollows and folds, are the finest; set them up like peaks, singly or in groups, against white walls or by water.
Rules · Site · Optics · Theory
Borrowed scenery
Draw into the garden the views beyond its walls: a distant hill, a neighbour’s trees, a temple roof, the sky above and the water below, and the changes of the seasons. Adapt the design to the site and borrow from what lies round it.
Ji Cheng opens his essay on gardens with two words: yin, to follow, and jie, to borrow. To follow is to let the site decide the design, placing a pavilion where the ground invites it and water where it lies; to borrow is to take into the garden what lies outside it. The last chapter of the Yuanye calls borrowing views the most important thing in the making of a garden and names its kinds: borrowing what is far off, such as mountains; what is near, such as a neighbour’s trees; what is above, the sky and birds; what is below, water and fish; and what comes with the seasons.
In Suzhou the Humble Administrator’s Garden borrows the pagoda of the North Temple, seen above its trees; at Wuxi the Jichang Yuan borrows the hill behind it. The Japanese call the device shakkei and used it at Tenryū-ji, Entsū-ji, whose garden frames Mount Hiei, and Shūgaku-in. Its effect is to make a small walled garden part of a larger landscape, without its walls being seen.
Related rules
Set stones by first placing a principal stone and then others that answer it, following the “request” each makes; recall famous landscapes; and obey the taboos: a stone that lay flat in nature should not be set upright, nor one that stood upright laid flat.
Where there is no pond or stream, make the landscape of stones alone: set rocks as mountains, cliffs and islands, and let gravel or sand stand for water.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Borrowed scenery”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/yuanye-borrowed-scenery. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.