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.
Rules · Materials · Site · Ornament
Rocks as mountains
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.
Ji Cheng lists the rocks of the lower Yangzi and their qualities, from the Taihu stone dredged from Lake Tai near Suzhou, grey limestone worn by waves into perforated and wrinkled shapes, to the yellow stone of Changzhou, solid and angular. He gives advice on piling rock into mountains that look natural and are safe, with caves, ravines and paths, and warns that a poorly made rockery is a heap of stone.
Later tradition, usually traced to the Song painter Mi Fu, judged a Taihu rock by four qualities: thin (shou), leaky or channelled (lou), perforated (tou) and wrinkled (zhou). The finest were collected, named and moved from garden to garden; the Cloud-Capped Peak in the Lingering Garden is about six and a half metres high.
Related rules
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Rocks as mountains”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/yuanye-rocks. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.