Suzhou's classical gardens arrange water, rocks, buildings, and plants to direct sight lines. Window openings and winding paths allow the same space to present different scenes. Owners, craftspeople, and later rebuilding all contributed to their development. Today's landscapes often contain layers from different periods, rather than the complete original appearance of a single design.
Historical background
The Classical Gardens of Suzhou are a group of gardens in the city of Suzhou, in Jiangsu, China, that are on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Spanning a period of almost one thousand years, from the Northern Song to the late Qing dynasties (11th-19th century), these gardens, most of them built by scholars, standardized many of the key features of classical Chinese garden design with constructed landscapes mimicking natural scenery of rocks, hills and rivers with strategically located pavilions and pagodas.
The elegant aesthetics and subtlety of these scholars' gardens and their delicate style and features are often imitated by various gardens in other parts of China, including the various Imperial Gardens, such as those in the Chengde Mountain Resort. According to UNESCO, the gardens of Suzhou "represent the development of Chinese landscape garden design over more than two thousand years", and they are the "most refined form" of garden art.
These landscape gardens flourished in the mid-Ming to early-Qing dynasties, resulting in as much as 200 private gardens. Today, there are 69 preserved gardens in Suzhou, and all of them are designated as protected "National Heritage Sites". In 1997 and 2000, eight of the finest gardens in Suzhou along with one in the nearby ancient town of Tongli were selected by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site to represent the art of Suzhou-style classical gardens.
Design of the classical garden
A Chinese garden was not meant to be seen all at once; the plan of a classical Chinese garden presented the visitor with a series of perfectly composed and framed glimpses of scenery; a view of a pond, or of a rock, or a grove of bamboo, a blossoming tree, or a view of a distant mountain peak or a pagoda. The 16th-century Chinese writer and philosopher Ji Cheng instructed garden builders to "hide the vulgar and the common as far as the eye can see, and include the excellent and the splendid."
Western visitors did not always find the order of Chinese gardens easy to recognize. Some described the different buildings and irregular arrangements as confusing. Jean Denis Attiret, a Jesuit who lived in China and worked as a court painter for the Qianlong Emperor, instead admired the skill behind their apparent irregularity. His response records a different way of encountering the same design principles. A garden's sequence of changing views can have a deliberate organization even when it avoids the obvious symmetry of a straight central axis.
"Borrowing scenery", time and seasons
According to Ji Cheng's 16th century book Yuanye, "The Craft of Gardens," "borrowed scenery" (jiejing) was the most important thing of a garden. This could mean using scenes outside the garden, such as a view of distant mountains or the trees in the neighboring garden, to create the illusion that garden was much bigger than it was. The most famous example was the mist-shrouded view of the North Temple Pagoda in Suzhou, seen in the distance over the pond of the Humble Administrator's Garden.
But, as Ji Cheng wrote, it could also be "the immaculate ribbon of a stream, animals, birds, fish, or other natural elements (rain, wind, snow), or something less tangible, such as a moonbeam, a reflection in a lake, morning mist, or the red sky of a sunset." It could also be a sound; he recommended locating a pavilion near a temple, so that the chanted prayers could be heard; planting fragrant flowers next to paths and pavilions, so visitors would appreciate their aromas; that bird perches be created to encourage birds to come to sing in the garden, that streams be designed to make pleasant sounds, and that banana trees be planted in courtyards so the rain would patter on their leaves. "A judicious 'borrowing' does not have a reason." Ji Cheng wrote. "It is born simply of feeling created by the beauty of a scene."