The Gardens of Suzhou. Ron Henderson

“was four times renovated to attain its perfection.” Most of the current gardens, as I have pointed out, actually date from recent, exhaustive renovations. The Garden of the Peaceful Mind, in Wuxi, has probably survived with greater “authenticity” than any other. The gardens have all undergone changes of ownership and maintenance, and one should, with few exceptions, understand that what is seen today is a physical palimpsest of repairs, renovations, and extensions of the gardens. As Maggie Keswick declared, “Chinese history is littered with the corpses of gardens.”

      For some, the fact that the gardens are reconstructions is problematic in a current period sometimes described as the “age of reproduction.” Yet, as Pierre Ryckmans cautions, “The Chinese past is both spiritually active and physically invisible.”

      The non-Chinese attitude—from ancient Egypt to the modern West—is essentially an active, aggressive attempt to challenge and overcome the erosion of time. Its ambition is to build for all eternity by adopting the strongest possible materials and using techniques that will ensure maximum resilience. Yet, by doing this, the builders are merely postponing their ineluctable defeat. The Chinese, on the contrary, have realised that—in Segalen’s words—“nothing immobile can escape the hungry teeth of the ages.” Thus, the Chinese constructors yielded to the onrush of time, the better to deflect it.

      REPOSITORIES OF HISTORY AND CULTURE

      The gardens are also repositories of cultural artifacts and traditions. The names of halls and gardens allude to—and remind knowledgeable visitors of—ancient poems and legends. The inscribed horizontal boards above doorways and above the honored position inside the halls perform similar roles, as do the paired vertical couplets mounted on the columns of the halls. These are not only renowned for the sentiments of the words but also for the spirit and skill of the calligraphy—sometimes at the hands of an important figure such as the Emperor Qianlong, who composed many such artifacts.

      Stone inscriptions, doorway carvings, and steles also contain rich literary allusions or propagate the philosophical views of Confucian, Buddhist, or Daoist schools of thought and are intended to trigger lofty thoughts or enhance the potency of places in the garden.

      Ancient scroll tables (whose ends turn up to prevent scrolls from rolling off), upright chairs, blue and white porcelain, carved inkstones, and other furnishings of the scholar’s residence are also preserved in the gardens.

      ANCIENT TEXTS

      Three books provide special insight into the Chinese garden. The Craft of Gardens, or Yuan Ye, was compiled in three volumes by Tongli native Ji Cheng at the end of the Ming Dynasty. The Story of the Stone, the Ming Dynasty novel with vivid depictions of life in the gardens, was inspired, in part, by the boyhood experiences of the primary author, Cao Xueqin, in the Humble Administrator’s Garden. The Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, first published in 1679, codifies the art of landscape painting and includes a collection of exemplary landscape paintings.

      GARDEN CONSTRUCTION

      The designers of the gardens of Suzhou are largely anonymous. A myriad of skilled craftsmen worked within extended cultural traditions to produce them. Many gardens are attributed, instead, to poets or painters who inspired the gardens or scenes within them. There are a few notable garden makers—such as Ge Yuliang, who made the centerpiece rockery at the Mountain Villa of Embracing Beauty—yet most of the garden makers are obscured in history.

      The revitalization of the construction trades and craftsmen in all aspects of Chinese gardens, landscapes, and architecture after the fall of the Qing Dynasty continues to be an imperative. For more than a century, these skills have atrophied, and the passing of expertise from generation to generation has been abruptly severed. Today, the quality and material integrity of construction in many fields is largely artless, and the successful emergence of contemporary material culture will require the education of new skilled craftsmen.

      Figure 8. Zuisen-ji, a garden by the Zen Buddhist monk Muso Soseki, bridges the traditions that underlie essential aspects of the gardens of China and Japan. A veranda looks out onto a rock cliff with a pond, two bridges, and a man-made cave at its base.

      GARDENS OF CHINA AND JAPAN

      Two of the world’s great garden traditions are separated by a narrow sea, yet the experience of the gardens differ radically. The iconic Chinese garden is full of fanciful scenes that are entered with anticipation of joyful camaraderie and romantic trysts. The iconic Japanese garden, such as Ryoan-ji where fifteen stones are arrayed across a raked gravel surface, is a space separated from the observer and marked by silent personal introspection.

      In Japan, the monastic gardens are perhaps the most celebrated, and therein rests a key distinction between the traditions. In China, design of monastic gardens clung to the pervasive model of four-sided courtyards enhanced by trees, shrubs, and flowers, many of which are embedded with metaphorical meaning or illustrious associations, such as the ginkgo, peach, and peony. In Japan, the material articulation and spatial organization of monastic gardens aspired to what the twentieth-century Japanese architect Shinohara Kazuo describes as the removal of all external associations—a search for the essence of things.

      Figure 9. A framed slice of rock from the Lingering Garden portrays a mountainous landscape.

      Chinese garden ideas were carried in the minds of Buddhist monks who travelled between China and Japan. Among them was Muso Soseki (1275–1351), who, with others, reopened trade between China and Japan during the Yuan Dynasty. He was first among the Buddhist garden-making monks of Japan and several Zen Buddhist gardens attributed to him survive.