Humble Administrator's Garden
From ArticleWorld
The Garden of the Humble Administrator in the old part of Suzhou city dates back to 1509, the early Ming dynasty, and is considered one of the four finest Chinese gardens. Today, its underlying guiding theme is water. More than half of the over 4 hectares the garden is taken up by ponds. All the buildings, including a popular tea house and bonsai display. The garden is designed to give the appearance of floating on water, and so all buildings, pavilions etc are located on the edge of water.
The Humble Administrator's Garden was originally designed by Wang Xianchen, retired envoy to Suzhou of the Emperor Zhengde. Over the next 450 years it saw disrepair, division, re-modeling, and modification until 1949, when it was remade in its present form. There are many sketches and notes left behind from Wang's time, but the changes along the way mean that the garden today is not much like the original.
Design
The Humble Administrator's Garden was built by reclaiming swampy land, so today the water theme seems a natural choice. However, Wang's original garden was designed to simulate naturalness. There were ponds, but there was also a profusion of other interconnected design themes that combined to create a kind of moderated nature. They included the numerous varieties of native trees from the region, noted for its temperate climate and lush vegetation, as well as rocks, [flower]]s, buildings, bamboo, hillocks, and valleys. Suzhou lies in the lower reaches of the Yangtze river and on the edge of lake Taihu. This creates a unique landscape of which the Humble Administrator's version presents a refined, stylized and highly individual version.
Context and allusions
Traditional Chinese gardens and their designers are noted for the breadth of vision and knowledge they display, and there are many reasons why the Humble Administrator's Garden is a classic. Gardens were meant to not only present a vision of the natural world; they also emphasized their particular constructedness through the placement of [[pagoda]s, teahouses, pavilions, islands, bridges, pergolas, and viewing areas that displayed best the passage of time through the change of seasons, as well as morning and evening. Wang's garden goes further than merely recreating one man's picture of nature. It is full of allusions to literature and antiquity, with inscriptions of poems in suitable places, and allusive names. The Fragrant Isle is planted with scores of aromatic herbs to suggest higher feelings, the Hall of the Mandarin Ducks looked over a pond with mandarin ducks that signify marital loyalty, and the Hall of Drifting Fragrance is filled with lotus blossoms to suggest purity. The name of the garden is also literary and ironic, and derived from an essay entitled On Idle Living, which stated that: Building houses, planting trees, watering gardens and vegetables were the 'affairs' of 'humble' people.