JOY OF DAILY RAMBLING OF GARDENS
Written on a mid-summer day, 1981
A crystallization of architecture, calligraphy and painting, literature and horticulture, the picture-perfect and poetic Chinese garden is a school in its own right worldwide.
Every traditional garden in this country has a personality peculiarly its own. What the Summer Palace of Beijing impresses us most is its Kunming Lake at the foot of the Longevity Hill. The centerpiece of the Beihai Park is a lake with the Jade Flowery Islet on it. Also impressive is the mist-enveloped serpentine water surface of the Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou, and the mammoth artificial mountain built of yellow stones in the Geyuan's Garden1 of Yangzhou.
If the lie of the land is taken into consideration while a resourceful design is pencilled out accordingly before a garden comes under construction, not only manpower and resources can be economized, but the scenic sights can also be arranged judiciously. In garden-making parlance, this is put as "accommodating measures to the circumstances."
The traditional Chinese garden is centered on mountain or water. If a garden is predicated on mountain, water plays a supplementing role, or the other way round. Bodies of water are scattered or congregated, and the mountain takes the form of a transverse ridge or steep peak. Gardens make a name for themselves with scenic attractions; such attractions differ from one another to give every garden a distinct personality. Scenery may be enjoyed when the onlooker stays put or moves along, hence the terms, "in-situ viewing" and "in-motion viewing." A garden's artistic attainment is judged by whether it has eschewed the old rut and worked its "trademark" scenery to the best vantage.
The overwhelming majority of traditional Chinese gardens are walled in, with scenic sights concealed in their precincts. However, external views are oftentimes incorporated into such a garden to extend its space as far as possible and to yield a haunting impression, which is what is meant by "view borrowing." Observed from a balustrade in the True-Meaning Lake and Mountain Pavilion in the Summer Palace of Beijing at sunset, the Jade Spring Mountain close at hand and the Western Hills in the distance look like they had been spirited into the garden by a celestial hand.
A large Chinese garden often contains a number of small ones. Examples are the Garden of Harmonious Charms in the Summer Palace, the Tranquil Mind Chamber in the Beihai Park, the Loquat Courtyard in the Humble Administrator's Garden, and the Kowtow-to-Peak Verandah in the Lingering Garden. Such groupings of
large and small gardens create settings that are either extravert or introvert, and set the stage for buildings in different sizes along with mountains, rocks and trees in many a becoming manner. The Three Pools Mirroring the Moon at the West Lake is a typical case of small pools ensconced in a large lake. In most cases, such a small pool or garden becomes the pick inside of a large one because it is worth pondering over for a lingering time with its architecture, rockwork and miniature landscapes designed with attention to the minute detail. In contrast with views that keep changing with the shift of the visitor's footsteps along a roofed walkway, a small scenic attraction is best observed when the visitor pauses for some time on his track.
The scenic sights inside of a Chinese garden are in the main imitations of nature. They are natural-looking vistas constructed with human resources so that, "Though man-made, they look like born of nature." Such a vista does not necessarily stress which mountain or body of water is its prototype, but the connection is generalized succinctly. A good example in this regard is the Summer Palace of Beijing, which is patterned after the West Lake of Hangzhou but does not look the same in every aspect. Lands-capepainting images are also incorporated with the emotional setting of a certain poem to conjure up scenic wonders at once poetic and picturesque. Contrasting and complementing techniques are employed to add variations to a twisting and turning scene. In the Summer Palace, for example, the frontal hills are strewn with sumptuous buildings, whereas on its back hills nature presents herself in saturated verdure—the two scenic sections are designed to bring out the best in each other and engender different feelings in the spectator. The Chinese garden is replete with contrasts between architecture and rockwork large and small, high and low, scarcity and density, and so on. The leading scenery is often brought into bold relief by secondary scenery, such as the White Pagoda of the Beihai Park, the Five Pavilions atop the Prospect Hill, and the Buddhist Incense Belvedere of the Summer Palace.
Apart from rockwork and trees, the artistic layout of buildings such as a gazebo tucked away amidst flowers or a pavilion overlooking a stream is crucial to the Chinese garden. Ornamental supplements like roofed walkways, undulating walls, zigzagging bridges and latticed windows are employed as well to variegate the vistas, expand the space, and lend depth to the scenery. Visitors to Chinese gardens invariably feel that, despite their small sizes, a delightfully intricate plan resides in their scenic allure. Such a feeling is engendered through varied combinations of sights that are open or hidden, mystically distant or brightly and spaciously close at hand. Sightseeing in such a garden is like browsing a long scroll of landscape painting—once your eyes are fixed on it, scenes and sights would flash into your eyes in a constant stream.
"Good flowers ought to be set off by good lofts and terraces," as Chen Weisong (1625-1682)2 puts it. Few visitors leave the Round City in the Beihai Park of Beijing without being captivated by the clumps of pines and cypresses sagaciously arranged in front of the Light-Sustaining Palace. Why? For one thing, the contours and shapes of these trees are tailored to the heights of the buildings. For another, planted in tree beds, they are artfully scattered or clustered to mix and interweave their green foliage and curling branches against the vermillion walls and blue-glazed roof tiles in the surroundings, thereby invoking a vista so inviting that visitors would hate to go away any time soon. In a similar fashion, the crabapple trees in front of the Hall of Joyful Longevity are integrated with the encircling buildings to bring about a picture no less exquisite and brilliant than a horticultural masterpiece. The gardens in the Jiangnan area are a school in their own right in this regard, as they present eye-pleasing pictures by setting luxuriant flowers and trees and graceful-looking bamboos and rocks against white-washed walls. Most of the flowers and trees serving this purpose have been pruned and trained repeatedly for long years until desired configurations are achieved.
Apart from artificial mountains, the Chinese garden also features shapely rocks, every one of them standing out like an impressionist sculpture waiting to be singled out for enjoyment. Spectators are apt to invest sentiments into them, and affectionately call them "peaks with a human face," or "gui3-shaped peaks." To find their way into a garden, these rocks must be slim, wrinkled, riddled through, and well hollowed out, for only the exquisite and well-perforated ones are the choicest. No garden can come to fame without coming into possession of such exotic rocks. The Exquisite Jade Boulder in Shanghai's Gratification Garden and the Cloud-Crowned Peak in Suzhou's Lingering Garden are among the nature-wrought Lake Tai stones4 par excellence, which help augment the charms of their respective gardens greatly.
A pavilion or a belvedere in the Chinese garden often has a poetic name, which is sometimes graced by a well-written poetic couplet that flanks its front door. Those who have read the picaresque novel The Travels of Lao Can by Liu E (1857-1909)5 may well remember this episode: Lao Can cannot help murmuring to himself, "It's nice, really nice," upon reading this couplet during a visit to the Daming Lake6 in Jinan,
Lotus flowers in four directions, willows on three sides;
A whole city of mountains, with half of it given to lakes.
This couplet speaks volumes for the finishing touch literature renders the traditional Chinese garden.
A garden's scenery changes with the seasons. Guo Xi (c. 1023-c. 1085), a famed landscape painter of the Northern Song, says in his book on the theories of painting, The Lofty and Sublime Messages of Forests and Streams,
The mountain is charming in a subtle way as if it is smiling in spring, so saturated in greenness as to seemingly drip in summer, bright and clean as though wearing subtle makeup in autumn, and palely demure as if asleep in winter.
Landscape gardeners through the ages have more or less assimilated these traditional painting guidelines in the gardens they have created. In the Geyuan's Garden of Yangzhou, artificial mountains are installed to represent the four seasons through a play of colors: the spring mountain is built of bluish green stalagmites; the summer mountain, grey Lake Tai stones; the autumn mountain, yellow stones the color of ochre; and the winter mountain, Xuan stones7 as white as snow. Accordingly, the yellow stones are breathtakingly steep and sky-reaching to attract climbers in autumn. Snow stones are piled up in front of a hall for people to marvel at while staying indoors in winter.
When spring sets in at dawn as per human will, people ought to visit gardens before it is too late.