Furniture Design Ideas

… Though man-made, [gardens] will look like something naturally created… like a painting…1 The Chinese garden—from buildings, to mountains and water, plants and trees—is a harmoniously syn­thesized work of art; it expresses the spirit of poetry and painting. Though man-made, the imitation of mountains and water must become real. Alas, just what is the proper […]

Confucian Thought and Social Structure T he appearance of Confucius toward the end of the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 B. c.) was the catalyst for the birth of a new culture. A class of Confucian- educated intellectuals became government officials, and with the political life of the nation in their hands a civil­ian-based feudal […]

The Chinese yuanlin is composed of some views designed to be appreciated from a seated position at chair height inside the buildings, and others designed to be viewed while walking. In the case of Japanese gardens, there was a gradual development from a static, frontal, unidirectional compo­sition in which the garden was viewed from a […]

The Japanese stroll garden is a thematically-based series of small garden spaces centered around a pond. It is struc­tured in such a way that as the visitor walks through it, the scenery flows by, with scenes appearing and disappearing sequentially through the use of the compositional tech­nique known in Japanese as miegakure. The Chinese yuanlin […]

Private yuanlin gardens were associated with, yet posi­tioned outside, and independent from urban dwellings. They were centered around the huating, which was used primarily for entertaining, and sought to create a “utopian” atmosphere of separateness from everyday life. From the techniques used to create private yuanlin arose a unique method of garden making which was […]

Garden design theory made great strides during the Ming and Qing periods, and the definitive treatise among the many works produced at this time on landscape garden­ing in the Chinese tradition—essential to any study of yuanlin—is Yuan ye (The Craft of Gardens), written by Ji Cheng in the late Ming dynasty. Ji Cheng was a […]

Garden ownership reached its height during the Tang and Song dynasties. It was during this same period that schol­ars and painters appeared in great numbers, leading to the emergence of free-form landscape-style gardens that were supported by literature and landscape painting. The Song dynasty in particular has been called the golden age of the arts, […]

Chinese gardens have a long history, which can be rough­ly divided into two categories: the Imperial forbidden gar­dens, or Imperial yuanlin, and private residential pleasure gardens of scholars, government officials, regional gover­nors and merchants, or private yuanlin, which developed from the ting yuan. Most Imperial yuanlin were royal pleasure parks linking the Imperial palace to […]

The Chinese terms relating to gardens are defined in the glossary in Sugimura Yuzo’s Chugoku no niwa (Chinese gardens) as follows: Yuan Fruit orchard Pu Vegetable garden You Pen in which fowl and livestock are raised, or any fenced-in garden Yuan (A different character, with the same pronuncia­tion as yuan above) This character came into […]

Ting Yuan, Prototype of the Yuanlin The hall and courtyard (ting) in Chinese dwellings form one unified, functional, everyday living space. In some homes there is also another important area associated with the residential complex, a ting yuan or yuanlin landscape garden, which is distinctly partitioned off from the hall/ courtyard portion of the dwelling. […]