The walled garden of the Chinese scholar and official: a landscape in miniature of rocks and water, the “mountains and waters” of painting, seen from halls, pavilions and covered walks along a winding route, with views framed by shaped openings and borrowed from beyond the walls.
Chinese emperors had made great hunting parks and pleasure grounds since the Qin and Han, but the garden that defines the tradition is the private garden of the scholar-official, the literatus who passed the examinations, served the state and retired to paint, write and entertain friends. It flourished from the Song dynasty, when the Canglang Pavilion in Suzhou was made (1044), and above all in the cities of the lower Yangzi under the Ming and Qing. Suzhou alone had more than a hundred, of which the Humble Administrator’s Garden (from 1509), the Lingering Garden and the Master of the Nets Garden are the best known.
Such a garden is small, enclosed by high white walls in the middle of a city, and its subject is a landscape: shanshui, mountains and waters, as in a landscape painting. Water is gathered into a central pool with irregular banks; mountains are made of piled rocks or represented by single upright stones, the most valued being the eroded limestone of Lake Tai, pierced, hollowed and wrinkled (Rocks as mountains). Round the water stand halls for receiving guests, studios, pavilions and terraces, linked by covered galleries that zigzag and climb so that the view changes at every step.
The garden is designed as a sequence of views. Openings in the walls, the round moon gate, doorways shaped like vases or leaves, and lattice windows, frame scenes like pictures; small dark courts open into bright large ones; the path winds so that the garden can never be seen at once and seems larger than it is. Beyond the walls, a pagoda, a hill or a temple roof is drawn into the composition by borrowed scenery, the device Ji Cheng names as the most important of all in his treatise, the Yuanye of 1631 (Borrowed scenery).
Plants were chosen for their associations as much as their looks. The pine, the bamboo and the flowering plum, which endure the winter, were the “three friends of winter” and stood for the scholar’s integrity; the lotus, rising clean from mud, for purity; the chrysanthemum for retirement. Willows lined the banks, osmanthus scented the autumn, peonies flowered in spring on raised terraces, and banana plants were placed by windows for the sound of rain on their leaves. The bamboo was planted against white walls so that its shadow fell on them like ink on paper. Names and poems inscribed on boards and stones told the visitor how to read each scene.
The imperial gardens of the Qing at Beijing, the Yuanming Yuan (destroyed in 1860) and the Summer Palace, gathered copies of the famous southern gardens into vast parks. European travellers’ reports of them, and William Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), fed the European taste for irregular gardens and for Chinese pavilions and bridges.