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The soul of
Suzhou’s gardens
Lu
Wenfu, Chinese writer. |
Rocks are the soul of the gardens and trees their most precious good. Here, in the
“Garden of the Master of Nets.”
Suzhou
The gardens are dotted with miniature stone and wooden spans.
Latticed windows sculpt space in the “Garden of Harmony.”
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Lu
Wenfu
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| Born in 1928
in the Chinese province of Jiangsu, Lu Wenfu has lived in Suzhou since 1945. A journalist,
he went on to become a novelist and has won several national literary prizes. Vice
President of the Association of Chinese Writers, he is the founder and editor of
the Suzhou Magazine, published monthly. His books translated into English
include The Gourmet and Other Stories of Modern China (Readers International,
1987). |
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One
must choose pebbles the size of a goose egg so that the paving resembles the brocade
of the Shu region.
Ji
Cheng, Chinese landscape artist (1582-circa 1634)
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The
Suzhou gardens in southern China recreate nature in miniature to celebrate the harmony
between heaven and Earth. An initiate guides us along their winding paths, decoding
a host of refined symbols
In the 13th century,
the Venetian merchant and adventurer Marco Polo was the first Westerner to introduce
Suzhou to Europe. For him, this paradise on Earth was above all a flourishing silk-production
centre. Later, other Europeans fascinated by the city, which is criss-crossed by
canals, called it “the Venice of the Orient.” In the 1980s, I helped to spread Suzhou’s
fame by presenting it as a paradise for gourmets in my novel, The Gourmet. And when,
in 1997, UNESCO inscribed Suzhou on
the World Heritage List because of its classical gardens, the town’s reputation acquired
yet another dimension.
Cruel as they may be, human beings are children of nature and cannot live without
mountains, water, grass, trees, sunshine and air. If we are far away from those elements,
we feel stifled, ill at ease, trapped. As soon as we can, we go on vacation. But
rather than travel, which can be a tiring, expensive and even dangerous exercise,
why not make a replica of nature in miniature, “an artificial nature” intended for
daily use?
In Europe, for example, parks are huge. Immense forests crossed by abundant rivers
stretch as far as the eye can see without any obstacles to mar nature’s spectacle.
These parks are actually large stretches of nature that have been “fenced off” and
touched up a bit by adding a building here and there on the banks of a river or at
the edge of the woods.
Chinese landscaped gardens, on the other hand, put more emphasis on the idea of harmony
between heaven and Earth, a salient feature of Chinese philosophy. The gardens of
Suzhou are actually a man-made landscape. Its designers have replicated all of nature’s
basic features in miniature on flat ground. Since it is impossible to move mountains,
they built rock gardens. Since the courses of rivers cannot be changed, they dug
canals into the earth and made water flow through them. And the ground beneath Suzhou
is so gorged with water that all it takes is a hole three metres deep to create a
pond. The people who live there, without a false sense of shame, acknowledge that
they have “falsified” mountains and rivers. But that “falsification” is a work of
art in the fullest sense of the term and, consequently, fundamentally truthful.
Rock gardens are the soul of Suzhou. The stones of which they are made–the soul’s
receptacle–come from Lake Tai, which is located near Suzhou. Worn down by erosion,
these delightful, steep rocks were so famous that even the emperors of the distant
north sent their builders to bring them back to decorate their gardens. The most
famous and precious among them are called “rock peaks.” The assessment of their quality
is based on three criteria. They must be “slender” rather than “bulky,” they must
contain horizontal as well as vertical “tunnels”; and their surface must be wrinkled
rather than smooth.
But there is more to creating a work of art than piling up beautiful rocks. The first
rock garden masters, highly skilled and very cultured craftsmen, appeared at Suzhou
under the Tang (618-907) and Song (907-1271) dynasties, a period when gardens were
flourishing everywhere in China. The successors of these first landscape designers
were so numerous and talented that under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the town and
its surrounding area was dotted with between 200 and 300 gardens. Today, 77 are left,
of which 27 have been designated national landmarks. But many of them are actually
just large courtyards containing small gardens decorated with flowers, plants, bamboo
and rocks, like the ones that were once found in most of Suzhou’s houses.
Changing
the landscape with every step: a rule of garden design
Qing
Gu Yliang was an undisputed master under the Qing dynasty (1644-1840). He created
the limestone “Mountain of the Villa of Embracing Beauty”1 (Huanxiu). Gu Yliang went
blind towards the end of his life, but his followers completed the work under his
supervision. And therein lies the secret of the mountain’s beauty: it was built by
the master’s soul, rather than his hands. It is the exact replica, in miniature,
of the real mountain that lived in his heart. Its dimensions are modest–it covers
less than 500 square metres and its peaks are no more than seven metres high. But
the moment you go inside, you feel as though you are walking into the entrails of
a huge, wild mountain located on the edge of a winding gorge. And you think of these
words by Chen Congzhou, a current-day specialist on Chinese gardens: “the mountain
that looks like a rock garden is strange; the rock garden that looks like a mountain
is a thing of wonder.”
However, it takes more than a mountain to make a landscape. Water is another of the
gardens’ crucial features. But to bring water to the gardens, it is necessary to
either make use of an already-existing pond or stream, or dig into the ground. In
any case, the builders must know how to open trenches and make water flow through
them, to create and then re-unite the branches of a river. In short, they must know
how to imitate the bends of a river in order to obtain what we call “sinuous currents.”
The masters of Suzhou excelled in this art.
Rivers mean bridges. The gardens of Suzhou are dotted with all manner of miniature
stone and wooden spans. For example, the “Garden of the Master of Nets”1(Wangshiyuan) has a
very pretty little bridge that can be crossed in two or three strides.
Suzhou has mountains, rivers, bridges–but what about trees? A landscape with neither
plants nor flowers is a desert. Old trees are the most precious feature of classical
Chinese gardens because anything is possible, including laying out a Suzhou garden
in the United States, except making an old tree. In the “Lingering Garden” 1(Liuyuan)
there is a thousand-year-old ginkgo tree. The shade of its fan-shaped foliage is
where the master decided to build the rock garden.
Visitors to Suzhou must not be impatient. Unlike Versailles, where the splendid vista
of palace and park can be taken in with a single, sweeping glance, the gardens of
Suzhou are hidden behind narrow streets like demoiselles in a boudoir. When you walk
into a garden, you might even feel a bit disappointed: the first thing you see is
a long, zig-zagging gallery. This is the “winding path leading to serene beauty,”
a basic feature of the garden’s architecture. At first sight, it may not look very
interesting. But before you know it, a patch of garden behind a wall will wink at
you through the latticework of a sculpted window. Trees and pavilions can be made
out in the distance. After a few steps on a winding path, a magnificent garden appears
before your eyes.
“Changing the landscape with every step” is the second rule that must be observed
in classical Chinese garden design. The scene shifts as you walk along. To avoid
the impression of monotony and repetition, the designers erected walls pierced with
sculpted windows that divide the gardens into several sections without obstructing
a view of the entire complex. Your eyes are never at rest in a garden of Suzhou.
At every turn, the sight of a rock, a stand of bamboo or a banana tree takes the
visitor by surprise. Each plot of land has been designed to resemble a splendid painting.
A dead angle here would be like a failed brushstroke.
This method of dividing up space with doors, windows, galleries, rock gardens and
streams creates the impression of contemplating a scale-model of nature. It provides
what we call “a glimpse of grandeur through the miniature.”
Gardens
inspired by poets, painters and calligraphers
Today,
landscape architects design projects before building a park or playground. The masters
of the gardens of Suzhou had no plans. They took their ideas from poetry. They also
drew plenty of inspiration from Chinese painters, who often returned the compliment
by exalting the beauty of their works. Thus, many painters, poets and calligraphers
helped to create the gardens of Suzhou.
The gardens were never really finished. As time went by, they were enlarged, enhanced
and perfected. Once a rock garden, a stream or a pavilion was completed, the masters
had the custom of inviting their lettered friends to savour famous liqueurs and give
free reign to their fertile imaginations. The guests inscribed calligraphy on the
door lintels and parallel sentences on the uprights2. They also gave advice
on where to build a new bridge or pavilion. Later, the masters embellished the garden
heeding the advice they had received and invited their friends back to have a drink
and write poetry.
Had it been any other way, the gardens of Suzhou probably would not have the refinement
that has made them so famous.
1. Site inscribed
on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
2. Two sentences of which certain words set up relationships between them with corresponding
meanings and sounds. Usually, these “matching” words occupy the same position in
both sentences. |
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Reflections
of change in classical china
Classical
Chinese garden design, which seeks to recreate natural landscapes in miniature, is
nowhere better illustrated than in the four gardens in the historic city of Suzhou.
Universally recognized as masterpieces of the genre, they were inscribed on the World
Heritage List in 1997. The gardens reflect not only the profound importance of natural
beauty in Chinese culture, but also the political, economic and cultural changes
that took place in classical China.
Created between the 16th and 18th centuries, when classical Chinese landscape design
was at its height, the gardens of Suzhou were designed to deeply satisfy both the
minds and the souls of the city’s inhabitants. Today, these microcosms, which enclose
all the basic features of nature and culture — water, stone, plants, buildings, poetry
and painting — contribute to the study of China’s architecture, human sciences, aesthetics,
philosophy, botany, hydraulic engineering, environmental sciences and folk culture.
The “Humble Administrator’s Garden” is the largest of the four gardens (52,000 square
metres). It contains a lake, which covers one-fifth of its surface area, and a wide
array of plant species, including lotus, wisteria, forsythias, trees and flowering
shrubs. Its central part is a reproduction in miniature of the lower Yang-Tseu-Kiang,
the world’s third-longest river after the Amazon and the Nile.
The “Lingering Garden,” which stretches out over more than 23,000 square metres,
contains the famous “cloud-shrouded peak” (a 6.5-metre-tall limestone formation)
and the gardens’ most beautiful collection of engraved stele. It was designed by
Xu Taishi and dates back to the late 16th century.
The much smaller “Garden of the Master of Nets” (5,400 square metres) was built in
the 18th century. Its most distinguishing feature is a magnificent house with four
successive courtyards built in strict observance of feudal rules.
The smallest of the four gardens (less than 2,200 square metres), and probably the
oldest, is the “Garden of the Mountain of the Villa of Embracing Beauty”, which belonged
to the royal academician Shen Shixing and housed the famous “mountain” designed by
Qing Gu Yliang (see article). Its artificial glens, trails, grottos, gorges, cliffs,
crests and cliffs vie with nature.
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