Gardens of Suzhou: Timeless Ideals for Modern Living — Epoche B2
Nine walled gardens in the city of Suzhou, about a hundred kilometres west of Shanghai, together make up a single World Heritage property, inscribed by the UNESCO committee in two stages — four gardens in 1997, five more added in 2000. Suzhou is sometimes called the Venice of the East, which tells you about the canals and nothing about these. I spent three days walking between them, and what I had not expected was how much they disagree with one another. They are not variations on a single style. Each one is a proposal about how a person ought to live, built at considerable expense by someone who had thought hard about the question. This essay takes three of the nine and sets their proposals against each other. Because the argument each garden makes is made in stone, water and ground plan rather than in words, it has to be read out of measurements — how much land, how long a route through it, how much the materials cost to obtain. So the numbers below are not decoration; they are the evidence. The shared vocabulary, and the one surviving manual Before the three gardens can disagree about anything, they need something to disagree about, and that is a common design language. A Suzhou garden of this kind is a walled private plot containing four elements in combination: water, rock, buildings, and planting. Nothing is symmetrical, and nothing is visible all at once. We know what the makers thought they were doing because one manual survives. Ji Cheng's Yuanye , finished in 1631 and translated by Alison Hardie as The Craft of Gardens , is the only treatise on garden design to come down from the Ming dynasty, and it is unusually blunt: there is no fixed method, Ji Cheng says, only two things that matter. The first he calls yin , following — taking the site as found, its slopes, its water, its existing trees, and adapting the design to them rather than levelling and imposing. The second is jie , borrowing: composing the garden so that things outside it, a distant pagoda or a neighbour's tree, are drawn into the view and do the work of scenery without being owned. Both principles reward small sites, and both explain why these gardens are read as a sequence of framed pictures rather than taken in as a whole. Keep them in mind; the three gardens below apply them in three different proportions. The Humble Administrator's Garden: space, and what space cost The largest of the nine makes the most expansive proposal, and it is the one that depends most obviously on money. The Humble Administrator's Garden covers about five and a fifth hectares — some fifty thousand square metres — and was laid out from 1509 by Wang Xianchen, an official of the Censorate, the branch of the Ming bureaucracy whose job was to investigate and impeach other officials. His career in it ended badly, and the garden was his retirement. The name repays attention, and the usual English rendering softens it. It comes from a line by the Western Jin poet Pan Yue, whose rhapsody on living in idleness describes the man who, being no good at government, waters his garden and sells his vegetables — and calls that his way of administering. The Chinese character Wang took for his garden, zhuo , means clumsy or inept rather than humble. "Humble Administrator's Garden" turns a piece of bitter self-mockery into a modest boast, and the joke is worth restoring, because it was pointed at the men who had ended his career. Walking through the water pavilions and over the zigzag bridges, you can feel the argument being made: a life of leisure, space, and unhurried attention to beauty. What made that life possible was not the poem but the land. Craig Clunas's study of Ming garden culture, Fruitful Sites , assembles the documentary evidence that gardens of this period were not the pure retreats that later writing made of them. They were productive property — orchards, fishponds, vegetable plots, let out and sold from — and they were expensive markers of status in a prefecture that was then the richest in China on the strength of silk and cotton. Clunas's point is that the language of withdrawal was a claim their owners made, not a description of what they were doing. Pan Yue's joke about selling vegetables had a literal side, and Wang's garden was in that respect very far from humble. The Lingering Garden: compression, and how it is engineered The second garden argues something quite different, and it does so on less than half the ground. The Lingering Garden occupies about 2.3 hectares, roughly 23,000 square metres, and spends its ingenuity not on extent but on compression. The mechanism is a covered walkway running about seven hundred metres through the site. That figure only means something next to the size of the plot, so here is the comparison. A square site of 23,000 square metres has sides of $\sqrt{23000} \approx 152$ m. The corridor is therefore about $700/152 \approx 4.6$ times the width of the whole garden: the route has been folded back on itself roughly five times. This is the whole trick of compression stated numerically. You cannot enlarge the ground, but you can multiply the journey across it, and a visitor who walks seven hundred metres has had seven hundred metres of experience on a site he could cross in two minutes. Folding a path only helps if each fold shows you something new, which is what the windows are for. The walkway is pierced by louchuang , latticed openings whose stone or tile tracery leaves gaps to see through, and each frames a scene that would otherwise be invisible — a rock, a branch, a stretch of wall. This is Ji Cheng's borrowing applied at close range: the window does not create the view, it selects it, and selection is what turns a wall and a shrub into a composition. At the centre stands the Cloud-Capped Peak, a single rock over six metres tall. Its material is Taihu limestone, dredged from Lake Tai to the west of the city, and the holes that make it worth looking at have a chemical cause. Rainwater carrying di