Chinese gardens

China has the oldest garden tradition in the world; Chinese is one of the first nations that cultivated gardens on their homeland 3000 years ago.  In present-day China, ‘the Chinese garden’ has become a symbol for the excellence of traditional Chinese culture, because it is one aspect of Chinese culture which has been widely admired in the West over several centuries, and which has had a significant influence on Western culture. China has become more and more influential in today’s world politics and economy. Some metaphors have considerable implication for education in China and the Western world.

China has the oldest garden tradition in the world; Chinese is one of the first nations that cultivated gardens on their homeland 3000 years ago. The great Chinese manual on gardening Yuan Ye by Ji Cheng (b. 1582) has been influential in the West as well. In present-day China, ‘the Chinese garden’ has become a symbol for the excellence of traditional Chinese culture, because it is one aspect of Chinese culture which has been widely admired in the West over several centuries, and which has had a significant influence on Western culture. Some metaphors that are related to the elements used in the Chinese gardens have considerable implications for the environmental and moral education in the contemporary world.

Culture has been recognized as the fourth pillar of sustainable development, and culture is often viewed as a system of symbols that arises from human interpretations of the world. The cultural codes of symbols and symbolism are imperative to be reexamined for any reinterpretation of a traditional culture. This article explores the origin and meaning of the Yin Yang symbol in Chinese culture, and its subsequent numerological and color applications in classical Chinese architecture, such as Sanqing (Three Pure Ones), Wuxing (Five Natural Elements), Bagua (Eight Trigrams) in courtyard house design, and Jiugongtu (Nine Constellations Magic Square Matrix) and Jingtianzhi (Nine Squares land ownership system) in imperial Chinese city planning. The examples cited are Beijing siheyuan (courtyard houses), the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and Ningbo's Tianyi Ge library. The paper aims to inspire younger generations to continue Chinese architectural heritage, and respect traditional principles when planning and designing architectural projects. It finally proposes the Yin Yang Yuan symbol to expand traditional Yin Yang symbol, to solve the dilemma of binary thinking and to avoid extremities.

After 1911's Xinhai Revolution, with the prevalence of constructions of public parks in the Republic of China era (1912-1949), the history of Chinese Garden started to be noticed by Chinese scholars. Especially in the 1930s and 1940s, during which time The Society for the Study of Chinese Architecture (yingzao xueshe) was founded, and Chinese architectural history was introduced into the modern global discourse by the Chinese First Generation of architects, the historical writings of Chinese history became an instrument to explore the rebirth of an ancient nation. It was a period that rethinking Chinese traditions and embracing new Western knowledge always occurred as a dichotomy, which provides an interesting scope to examine Chinese scholars' approaches to the historical writings of traditional Chinese Garden at that time. This comparison and analysis of different Chinese groups in the historical writings of Chinese Garden are vital not only to the understandings of varied methodologies applied in the scholarly writings, but also to the glimpse of how these scholars consider China as a nation with its history. Furthermore, it is also crucial to bring some of the Chinese groups into conversations with Western scholars from the English-writing field, to see how different or similar their approaches and cognitions could be, in a lens through which the interventions of western knowledge into the self-process of rethinking Chinese traditions could be revealed and delineated.

This paper offers a preliminary reading of the Painted Album of the Garden of Artless Administration by Wen Zhenming (Wen Hengshan Zhuo Zheng Yuan shi hua ce 文衡山拙政园诗画册, 1533) and articulates the imagination of multi-sensory experiences of this garden by focusing on text-image relationships in the album. The analysis begins with an overview of all thirty-one sections of the album and then undertakes a close reading of five sections. The reading articulates the imaginal world constructed by Wen Zhengming and rethinks issues of representation and referentiality in relation to this album. This paper argues that the album as iconotext points to multi-sensory experiences, rather than objective reconstruction.

Square-bracketed references at the end of an entry indicates the source of the reference. I have been attempting, ultimately, to cover all sources in English. A major present specific lack is anything that treats sources of design ideas in the private or scholar gardens deriving from family cemeteries. (The lead is provided in, for example, Clunas 1996. 1) Further, explicit treatment of the differences between temple gardens and other types of Chinese gardens is rare-particularly from the point of view of the act of designing. I know only of what is implied in Miller (2004). And, something in English on the relationship between the operas of Suzhou and the gardens they were written for would be good. Finally, there is much of a general nature on feng shui but little that is scholarly that directly deals with the details of its use in garden design. 2 Surely it cannot simply be the result of Ji Cheng's opinion of feng shui practitioners in Yuan Ye? For me, that reads as professional rivalry.

“The character of dwelling in the mountains is silence, the character of dwelling in the city is clamour, only dwelling in a garden enjoys the pleasant balance,” said leading Ming literatus Wang Shizhen 王世貞 (1526-1590) once to his friend Chen Jiru 陳繼儒 (1558-1639). Besides being a literatus, Wang had many other identities: a historian, a refined poet, and among all, a lover of gardens. For many men of letters, gardens are a miniature form of nature. They are a place for solitary enjoyment; an ideal space where one could reside and escape from the wider society. In his dialogue with Chen, Wang saw gardens as an ideal environment, linking nature with the secular world. Such a view underlined an important feature of gardens in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), a period when garden culture flourished in the history of China. In the Ming, the construction of private gardens gained cultural and economic prominence, both in the quality of gardens, and in the amount of textual and visual works they generated. As much as they remain as a symbol of reclusiveness, gardens also performed critical roles in other aspects of life. How did gardens interact with the fascinating, rapidly transforming social and cultural environment? What changes took place in the practices around gardens and people’s views of them? This essay will look at the intersection of Ming gardens with other discourses and discursive activities, with an emphasis on their roles in agricultural production, as spaces for active social engagement and expression of local identity, and finally, their relations with the more problematic categories in the late Ming such as status, wealth, and consumer culture.

This paper examines the design philosophy of classical Suzhou gardens in China, with regards to their natural and architectural elements on the moral education of the inhabitants. Through studying the metaphorical connotations of garden elements, the author reflects on their propositions for contemporary environmental ethics, aesthetic appreciation, and moral education. As such, the article is structured around three themes: classical Chinese gardens cultivating environmental ethics, classical Chinese gardens cultivating appreciation of aesthetics, and classical Chinese gardens cultivating moral characters. The essay finally suggests that classical Chinese gardens are landscapes for self-cultivation.

This article on paeonia moutan has three objectives: first, to trace the history of  the voyage of tree peonies from their origin in China and  in Chinese literature up to today’s planting breeding especially in Europe. Relatively few authors englobe Chinese texts and authors in their oservations and if, they do not refer to the original text. This is certainly due to the language gap. In this respect the work of Emil Bretschneider at the end of the 19th century is worthy of praise. The second objective is to go as close as possible to the contemporary sources of the major developments. There is a lot of from hearsay and copy without really verifying the information that is passed on in a large part of the literature. Reason might be that it is much more convenient to copy what you hear than to invest time in verification. That means the defy was to either find the original source e.g. the letters of Banks, Kerr and others or to go as close to information of contemporary authors as possible. The third intention is therefore to be as precise as possible concerning the dating of the arrivals of paeonia moutan in tracing their voyage. An earlier dating was possible for example concerning the arrival of the moutan in England and in Paris as well as the first hybridation by Baumann in Bollwiller in Alsace and not in Paris.

There is a great difference between early Jiangnan gardens and those of existing today, and the Late Ming is the key period when important changes happened in various aspects for garden-making. For rockeries, stone peaks were separated from artificial mountains. For ponds, the square shape lost its popularity. For plants, the new way of picturesque appreciation established the dominant position. And for buildings, the quantity and density increased greatly with more emphasis paid on the formal aspect, and at the same time, covered corridors were unprecedentedly used, which importantly changed spatial effects. As a result, the overall appearance of gardens was transformed greatly. The new understanding of difference of early Jiangnan gardens objects to the fixed notion for Ôthe Jiangnan garden¡¯ which is pervasive today, and would contribute to new findings in Chinese garden study.

Taking an interdisciplinary perspective from cultural memory studies, this essay examines how the garden of the northern refugee Xiang Ziyin 向子諲 (1085-1152), Aromal Arbor 薌林, became a site of memory for two generations of Southern Song literati following the collapse of the Northern Song dynasty in 1126-1127.  Investigating the dialogue of major figures like Li Gang (1083-1140), Hu Hong (1105-1161), Zhou Bida (1126-1204), Fan Chengda (1126-1193), Lou Yue (1137-1213), and Zhu Xi (1130-1200) writing in a range of genres (shi poetry, song lyrics, personal letters, travel diaries, and the preface and postface to Xiang’s collected works) on Aromal Arbor, the essay concludes that the reason the space of his garden became a site of memory was due to the way it captured the tension between setting-down-roots and a nostalgic desire for return which defined the literati ethos of 12th century China during the “migration south.”
        Keywords Culture Memory, Chinese Gardens, Song Lyrics, Chinese Historiography, Migration, Song Dynasty

In the early modern world, the Jesuit garden arguably became a transcultural phenomenon materializing the transfer of both elite knowledge and ideas. This paper elaborates the transcultural dimension of the Jesuit symbolic garden by focusing on the so-called Beitang garden in eighteenth-century Beijing, built in the European style by French Jesuits. As witnessed by a number of Chinese and Korean travelers, however, the Beitang garden was not the only tangible garden constructed by Jesuit missionaries. Like their counterparts in Europe, garden spaces were essential to the Jesuit residences in Beijing. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these gardens, in which advanced European knowledge of cultivation, mechanism, as well as water conservancy were applied, were gradually turned into a dynamic space of increasing Jesuit botanic and cosmopolitan learning. Considering their unique social and political functions within sacred spaces, this paper will first synthesize the relevant facts in order to re-contextualize the construction of these garden spaces by examining various forms of their visual representation. Relying on written records by Korean travelers, this paper will elaborate on how concrete spatial arrangements and pattern designs, which were used to convey certain attitudes and ideas, became accessible for the Beijing Jesuits. This paper thus captures a transcultural moment for Jesuit garden spaces by demonstrating the ways in which a Jesuit garden in France was transferred to an eighteenth-century Jesuit space in Beijing.

The Good Gardener? Nature, Humanity, and the Garden illuminates both the foundations and after-effects of humanity's deep-rooted impulse to manipulate the natural environment and create garden spaces of diverse kinds. Gardens range from subsistence plots to sites of philosophical speculation, refuge, and self-expression. Gardens may serve as projections of personal or national identity. They may result from individual or collective enterprises. They may shape the fabric of the dwelling house or city. They may be real or imagined, literary constructs or visions of paradise rendered in paint. Some result from a delicate negotiation between creator and medium. Others, in turn, readily reveal the underlying paradox of every garden's creation: the garden, so often viewed as a kinder, gentler, 'second nature,' results from violence done to what was once wilderness. Designed as a companion volume to Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia, and the Garden, this richly illustrated collection of provocative essays is edited by Annette Giesecke, Professor of Classics at the University of Delaware, and Naomi Jacobs, Professor of English at the University of Maine. Contributors to this wide-ranging volume include photographer Margaret Morton, landscape ethicist Rick Darke, philosopher David Cooper, environmental journalist Emma Marris, and food historian William Rubel.

Imperial gardens have formed a particularly rich medium for the geographical analysis of interactions of culture and place. Imperial gardens are elite gardens that often were designed according to a political strategy that aims at inspiring the deference, admiration and obedience of an audience of peers and vassals. Functionally speaking, the imperial gardens of the eighteenth-century courts were conceived to fulfill the monarchs' agendas as they attempted to impress their subjects. This paper is intended as a contribution to the understanding of the limits of making a homology between all imperial gardens across eighteenth-century Eurasia, the comparability of which is assumed to be valid from a functional viewpoint. To analyse the relationship between imperial garden design and the political spectacle displayed by the Qing court, the ways in which visual depictions of gardens as cultural constructions have contributed to the representation of the environment as perceived by the Qing are examined. In the application of the methodology developed by recent scholarship for the study of garden history, I try to make use of contributions in landscape studies, cultural geography and cartography to reveal the Qing ideology of garden representation. I discuss the function of gardens in the expansion of the Qing Empire and use as a case study the gardens of Chengde.

This article examines the description of the Changchun Garden in eighteenth-century Beijing, featured in Matteo Ripa's "Storia della Fondazione della Congregazione e del Collegio de' Cinesi". An Italian missionary at the court of the Kangxi Emperor, Ripa had a chance to see and describe both the imperial parks and the intricacies of Chinese court etiquette. His detailed account, a precious source of information on the Changchun park, was accompanied by commentaries aimed at explaining the differences between "European" and "Chinese" aesthetic values. Therefore, this article offers a critical analysis of the account as a historical source, discussing the accuracy of some of the details described by Ripa, and subsequently provides an interpretation of the way he perceived Chinese parks, with an emphasis on his explanations of the "Chinese style" of laying out gardens. Finally, the last part of the article is dedicated to a comparison between a Neapolitan nativity scene (presepio) and the Qing gardens as drawn by Ripa at the end of his description, in order to demonstrate the "artificial naturalness" of Chinese parks.

The paper is dedicated to the topic of the Chinese private garden, or the scientist's garden, and its functions in the social life of the Chinese aristocracy. The garden is presented as a kind of ideal environment for the "cultural leisure" of the Confucian scientist.

This essay is offers a close reading of the final chapter of Yuan ye,  the famous Chinese treatise on garden design from the Ming dynasty.  Unlike my early writings on this treatise which was focused on the explication of keywords, this essay demonstrates a new approach to reading the Chinese text line-by-line.  The peripatetic nature of the thinking discovered in the treatise is discussed in terms of the work of Wu Kuang-ming in comparative philosophy.

The Chinese garden now symbolizes timeless national, cultural, and aesthetic values. But as real property in the past, gardens inevitably were subject to the vicissitudes of their times. This article focuses on gardens and the Taiping Civil War (1851-1864). During the war, many gardens were reduced to tile shards and ash. Surviving gardens functioned as objects of longing and nostalgia, sites of refuge (physical and emotional), or a means to display status under the new regime. In the postwar period, gardens served as status symbols, places to commemorate loss or celebrate restoration, and venues for renewed sociability. This article uses a series of case studies to explore the multiple meanings associated with gardens, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and the Qing dynasty-in the past and today.

A Tentative Study on Round Thatched Hut in Chinese Architectural History / There is a special kind of round thatched hut in Chinese architectural history, with the feature of thatch material, round plan, dome-shape top and arched opening. It appears in various kinds of indirect materials such as paintings, writings, grotto murals and sculptures and is sharply contrasted with normal timber architecture, while having not been recognized clearly in existing scholarship. Through various images and texts, it can be understood that this special form of architecture was imported together with Buddhism, with function of meditation and symbolization. This kind of round thatched hut also experienced localization after imported in China and some similar constructions may also have connection with it. This study can add new understandings on the significance and possibility of primitive construction in architectural history, and also provide new perspectives on the problems of diversity in Chinese architectural history and communication of architectural culture between China and abroad.

Avec le développement sous les Ming des porcelaines à décor polychrome, les porcelaines chinoises s'ornent de décors variés et notamment de représentations de jardins. Ces représentations permettent de comprendre les caractéristiques (structure, fleurs, architecture) des jardins traditionnels chinois qu'elles résument. Elles illustrent aussi les usages du jardin chinois, entre lieu de sociabilité et désir d'érémitisme. L'exportation des porcelaines chinoises en Chine permet également la diffusion du modèle du jardin chinois vers l'Occident.

ESTABLISHMENT OF PICTURESQUE PRINCIPLE FOR GARDENS AND TRANSITION OF GARDEN-MAKING IN THE LATE MING / According to the study of historical literatures, the picturesque principle for garden-making was not established until the late Ming, which overturns the common notion that the painting¡¯s influence on gardens happened long ago in the history. The establishment of the picturesque pursuing contributes greatly on the transition of garden-making during the late Ming. There are great changes for processing of various garden elements and the whole garden style. The painting skill becomes a kind of indispensable ability for garden designers. And the picturesque standard for garden appreciation leads to the appearance of the first systematic garden-making theory in Chinese garden history.

In 1712, the Kangxi emperor published Imperial Poems on the Mountain Estate for Escaping the Heat (Yuzhi Bishu shanzhuang shi) to commemorate his recently completed summer palace. Through his perceptions of thirty-six of its most scenic views, his poems and descriptions present an unusually intimate self-portrait of the emperor at the age of sixty that reflected the pleasures of his life there as well as his ideals as the ruler of the Qing Empire. Kangxi was closely involved in the production of the book and ordered several of his outstanding court artists—the painter Shen Yu and the engravers Zhu Gui and Mei Yufeng—to produce woodblock prints of the thirty-six views, which set a new standard for topographical illustration. He also ordered Matteo Ripa, an Italian missionary serving as a court-artist, to translate these images into the medium of copperplate engraving, which introduced this technique to China. Ripa’s hybridized interpretations soon began to circulate in Europe and influenced contemporary aesthetic debates about the nature and virtues of the Chinese garden. This artistic collaboration between a Chinese emperor and a western missionary-artist thus marked a significant moment in intercultural imagination, production, and transmission during an earlier phase of globalization.