… 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 […]
Category: THE GARDEN. AS ARCHITECTURE
Ideology and Prototypes
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 […]
Raising Mountains (Duo Shan) and Selecting Rocks (Xuan Shi)
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 […]
Screens (Ge) and Curves (Qu)
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: Compositional Techniques
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 […]
The Garden Treatise Yuan Ye
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 […]
Landscape-Style Gardens
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, […]
An Outline of the History of Chinese Gardens
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 […]
Garden-Related Terminology
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 […]
Spatial Composition of the Unworldly
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. […]