The only Chinese treatise on garden design by a professional designer: how to choose and read a site, how to place and build halls, pavilions and galleries, how to make walls, windows, paving and artificial mountains, how to choose rocks, and how to borrow views from beyond the garden.
Ji Cheng (1582–after 1634) was a painter from Suzhou who became a designer of gardens for officials and merchants in the cities of the lower Yangzi, among them a garden for Wu Xuan at Changzhou and one for Wang Shiheng at Yizheng. He wrote the Yuanye in 1631, and it was printed about 1634 with a preface by the official Ruan Dacheng, whose later disgrace as a traitor to the Ming did the book no good. It was almost forgotten in China, survived in copies in Japan, and was republished in China in the 1930s.
The book is in three volumes, written in an ornate parallel prose. It opens with two essays: on building, which says the designer matters more than the craftsmen, and on gardens, which gives the book’s two principles, yin (to follow, adapting the design to the site) and jie (to borrow, drawing views into it). Then come chapters on the site, the foundations, the buildings and their timber frames, decorative partitions, balustrades (with many patterns), doors and windows, walls, paving, making mountains, selecting rocks, and, last, borrowing views. The aim is a garden that, although made by people, seems to have come from heaven.
The book, part by part
I Volume I: on building, on gardens, siting, foundations, buildings, partitions
The two principles of adapting and borrowing; the kinds of site (mountain, forest, city, village, suburb, riverside); the placing and framing of halls, studios, pavilions and galleries.
Rules: Borrowed scenery
II Volume II: balustrades
Patterns for railings, drawn and named.
III Volume III: doors and windows, walls, paving, mountains, rocks, borrowing views
Shaped openings and lattices; walls of plaster, stone and brick; patterned paving of pebbles and tile; artificial mountains; the kinds of rock, Taihu stone among them; the borrowing of views near and far, above and below, and in the seasons.
Rules: Rocks as mountains · Borrowed scenery