A retired official’s house of courts and halls on a canal lane, with a walled garden beside it round a pond, rockwork and pavilions; a plausible place modelled on the gardens of Suzhou, not a survey of any.
Suzhou, a city of canals in the lower Yangzi valley, was where officials of the Ming and Qing went to retire, and its gardens were their work. Ji Cheng wrote down how to make them in the Yuanye of 1631: adapt the design to the site, pile rocks into mountains and choose single stones for their shapes, bring water in and let it wander, and borrow what lies beyond the walls, a hill, a temple roof, the sky.
The house and the garden are separate worlds side by side, as at the Garden of the Master of the Nets. The house runs back from the lane in a line of halls and courts, each hall facing south: a gate hall, a hall for the sedan chairs, the main hall where guests were received, the private hall of the family and a study. A door in its side leads into the garden, where everything turns and nothing is straight: a pond with a rocky shore, a zigzag bridge, a pavilion on a rockery, a covered walk along the wall, and windows of lattice that frame bamboo and stones.
Outside, the lane runs along a canal crossed by a hump-backed bridge, with shops on the far side and the white walls of other houses all round. On a hill to the north stands a pagoda, its top seen over the garden wall, borrowed into the view.