Chinese garden
The Chinese garden is a landscape garden style which has evolved over three thousand years. It includes both the vast gardens of the Chinese emperors and members of the imperial family, built for pleasure and to impress, and the more intimate gardens created by scholars, poets, former government officials, soldiers and merchants, made for reflection and escape from the outside world. They create an idealized miniature landscape, which is meant to express the harmony that should exist between man and nature.
The art of Chinese garden integrates architecture, calligraphy and painting, sculpture, literature, gardening and other arts. It is a model of Chinese aesthetics, reflecting the profound philosophical thinking and pursuit of life of the Chinese people. Among them, Chengde Mountain Resort and the Summer Palace, which belong to royal gardens, and several of the Classical Gardens of Suzhou in Jiangsu Province, which belong to private gardens, are also included in the World Heritage List by UNESCO. Many essential elements are used in Chinese gardens, and Moon Gate is one of them.
A typical Chinese garden is enclosed by walls and includes one or more ponds, rock works, trees and flowers, and an assortment of halls and pavilions within the garden, connected by winding paths and zig-zag galleries. By moving from structure to structure, visitors can view a series of carefully composed scenes, unrolling like a scroll of landscape paintings.
History
Beginnings
The earliest recorded Chinese gardens were created in the valley of the Yellow River, during the Shang dynasty. These gardens were large enclosed parks where the kings and nobles hunted game, or where fruit and vegetables were grown. Early inscriptions from this period, carved on tortoise shells, have three Chinese characters for garden, you, pu and yuan. You was a royal garden where birds and animals were kept, while pu was a garden for plants. During the Qin dynasty, yuan became the character for all gardens. The old character for yuan is a small picture of a garden; it is enclosed in a square which can represent a wall, and has symbols which can represent the plan of a structure, a small square which can represent a pond, and a symbol for a plantation or a pomegranate tree.A famous royal garden of the late Shang dynasty was the Terrace, Pond and Park of the Spirit built by King Wenwang west of his capital city, Yin. The park was described in the Classic of Poetry this way:
Another early royal garden was Shaqui, or the Dunes of Sand, built by the last Shang ruler, King Zhou. It was composed of an earth terrace, or tai, which served as an observation platform in the center of a large square park. It was described in one of the early classics of Chinese literature, the Records of the Grand Historian. According to the Shiji, one of the most famous features of this garden was the Wine Pool and Meat Forest. A large pool, big enough for several small boats, was constructed on the palace grounds, with inner linings of polished oval shaped stones from the seashore. The pool was then filled with wine. A small island was constructed in the middle of the pool, where trees were planted, which had skewers of roasted meat hanging from their branches. King Zhou and his friends and concubines drifted in their boats, drinking the wine with their hands and eating the roasted meat from the trees. Later Chinese philosophers and historians cited this garden as an example of decadence and bad taste.
During the Spring and Autumn period, in 535 BC, the Terrace of Shanghua, with lavishly decorated palaces, was built by King Jing of the Zhou dynasty. In 505 BC, an even more elaborate garden, the Terrace of Gusu, was begun. It was located on the side of a mountain, and included a series of terraces connected by galleries, along with a lake where boats in the form of blue dragons navigated. From the highest terrace, a view extended as far as Lake Tai, the Great Lake.
''The Legend of the Isle of the Immortals''
An ancient Chinese legend played an important part in early garden design. In the 4th century BC, a tale in the Classic of Mountains and Seas described a peak called Mount Penglai located on one of three islands at the eastern end of the Bohai Sea, between China and Korea, which was the home of the Eight Immortals. On this island were palaces of gold and silver, with jewels on the trees. There was no pain, no winter, wine glasses and rice bowls were always full, and fruits, when eaten, granted eternal life.In 221 BC, Ying Zheng, the King of Qin conquered other rival states and unified China under the Qin Empire, which he ruled until 210 BC. He heard the legend of the islands and sent emissaries to find the islands and bring back the elixir of immortal life, without success. At his palace near his capital, Xianyang, he created a garden with a large lake called Lanchi gong or the Lake of the Orchids. On an island in the lake he created a replica of Mount Penglai, symbolizing his search for paradise. After his death, the Qin Empire fell in 206 BC and his capital city and garden were completely destroyed, but the legend continued to inspire Chinese gardens. Some gardens have a single island with an artificial mountain representing the island of the Eight Immortals. Other gardens have gardens featuring three Boshan Mountains - Penglai, Yingzhou, and Fanghu or Fangzhang. The Yichi Sanshan system of one pond with three mountains has been a main model of royal gardens.
Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD)
Under the Han dynasty, a new imperial capital was built at Chang'an, and Emperor Wu built a new imperial garden, which combined the features of botanical and zoological gardens, as well as the traditional hunting grounds. Inspired by another version of Chinese classic about the Isles of the Immortals, called Liezi, he created a large artificial lake, the Lake of the Supreme Essence, with three artificial islands in the center representing the three isles of the Immortals - Penglai, Fanghu, and Yingzhou. The park was later destroyed, but its memory would continue to inspire Chinese garden design for centuries. The Jianzhang Palace in the Han Dynasty is the first known garden built with the complete set of the three remaining Bohai Shenshan mountains. Since then, the Yichi Sanshan system of one pond with three mountains has been a main model of royal gardens.Another notable garden of the Han period was the Garden of General Liang Ji built under Emperor Shun. Using a fortune amassed during his twenty years in the imperial court, Liang Ji built an immense landscape garden with artificial mountains, ravines and forests, filled with rare birds and domesticated wild animals. This was one of the first gardens that tried to create an idealized copy of nature.
Gardens for poets and scholars (221–618 AD)
After the fall of the Han dynasty, a long period of political instability began in China. Buddhism was introduced into China by Emperor Ming, and spread rapidly. By 495, the city of Luoyang, capital of the Northern Wei dynasty, had over 1,300 temples, mostly in the former residences of believers. Each of the temples had its own small garden.During this period, many former government officials left the court and built gardens where they could escape the outside world and concentrate on nature and literature. One example was the Jingu Yuan, or Garden of the Golden Valley, built in 296 by Shi Chong, an aristocrat and former court official, ten kilometers northeast of Luoyang. He invited thirty famous poets to a banquet in his garden, and wrote about the event himself:
This visit to the garden resulted in a famous collection of poems, Jingu Shi, or Poems of the Golden Valley, and launched a long tradition of writing poetry in and about gardens.
The poet and calligrapher Wang Xizhi wrote in his excellent calligraphy the Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion introducing a book recording the event of the Orchid Pavilion Gathering, another famous poetry setting at a country retreat called the "Orchid Pavilion". This was a park with a meandering stream. He brought together a group of famous poets, and seated them beside the stream. Then he placed cups of wine in the stream, and let them float. If the cup stopped beside one of the poets, he was obliged to drink it and then compose a poem. The garden of the floating cup, with small pavilions and artificial winding streams, became extremely popular in both imperial and private gardens.
The Orchid Pavilion inspired Emperor Yang of the Sui dynasty to build his new imperial garden, the Garden of the West, near Hangzhou. His garden had a meandering stream for floating glasses of wine and pavilions for writing poetry. He also used the park for theatrical events; he launched small boats on his stream with animated figures illustrating the history of China.
Tang dynasty (618–907), First Golden Age of the Classical Garden
The Tang dynasty was considered the first golden age of the classical Chinese garden. Emperor Xuanzong built a magnificent imperial garden, the Garden of the Majestic Clear Lake, near Xi′an, and lived there with his famous concubine, Consort Yang.Painting and poetry reached a level never seen before, and new gardens, large and small, filled the capital city, Chang'an. The new gardens, were inspired by classical legends and poems. There were shanchi yuan, gardens with artificial mountains and ponds, inspired by the legend of the isles of immortals, and shanting yuan, gardens with replicas of mountains and small viewing houses, or pavilions. Even ordinary residences had tiny gardens in their courtyards, with terracotta mountains and small ponds.
These Chinese classical gardens, or scholar's gardens, were inspired by, and in turn inspired, classical Chinese poetry and painting. A notable example was the Jante Valley Garden of the poet-painter and civil servant Wang Wei. He bought the ruined villa of a poet, located near the mouth of a river and a lake. He created twenty small landscape scenes within his garden, with names such as the Garden of Magnolias, the Waving Willows, the Kiosk in the Heart of the Bamboos, the Spring of the Golden Powder, and the View-House beside the Lake. He wrote a poem for each scene in the garden and commissioned a famous artist, to paint scenes of the garden on the walls of his villa. After retiring from the government, he passed his time taking boat trips on the lake, playing the cithare and writing and reciting poetry.
During the Tang dynasty, plant cultivation was developed to an advanced level, with many plant species being grown by means of plant introduction, domestication, transplantation, and grafting. The aesthetic properties of plants were highlighted, while numerous books on plant classification and cultivation were published. The capital, Chang'an, was a very cosmopolitan city, filled with diplomats, merchants, pilgrims, monks and students, who carried descriptions of the gardens all over Asia. The economic prosperity of the Tang dynasty led to the increasing construction of classical gardens across all of China.
The last great garden of the Tang dynasty was the Hamlet of the Mountain of the Serene Spring, built east of the city of Luoyang by Li Deyu, Grand Minister of the Tang Empire. The garden was vast, with over a hundred pavilions and structures, but it was most famous for its collection of exotically shaped rocks and plants, which its creator collected all over China. Rocks of unusual shapes, known as Chinese Scholars' Rocks, often selected to portray the part of a mountain or mountain range in a garden scene, gradually became an essential feature of the Chinese garden.