Suzhou Gardens: A Masterpiece of Oriental Landscape Artistry
On this ancient land of China, Suzhou is renowned worldwide for its unique garden art and is honored as the “City of Gardens.” Here, every garden is a flowing landscape painting, and every scene holds profound cultural connotations. Today, let us step into the classical gardens of Suzhou together to explore their beauty and charm.
A path embraces the secluded mountain, yet it is amazingly within the city.
Su Shunqin
Suzhou Gardens are deeply culturally enriched “scholarly freehand landscape gardens.” The ancient garden designers, who were all highly cultured individuals skilled in poetry and painting, often took paintings as their foundation and poems as their themes when creating gardens. By digging ponds, heaping up hills, planting flowers and trees, they created landscapes filled with poetic and picturesque charm, earning the description as “silent poems, three-dimensional paintings.” Wandering through the gardens is like appreciating poetry or admiring paintings.
To express the owners’ tastes, ideals, and pursuits, the garden buildings and landscapes are adorned with inscriptions of poems, couplets, and plaques. Some use the fragrance of lotus flowers to symbolize the owner’s moral character (the “Yuanxiang Hall” in the Humble Administrator’s Garden), some use elegant fragrant herbs to signify a noble disposition (the “Fragrant Isle” in the Humble Administrator’s Garden), some aspire to the leisurely life of ancient scholars drifting freely in boats (the “Studio Boat” in the Yiyuan Garden), and others express the owner’s longing for a serene and simple life (the “True Meaning” in the Master-of-the-Net Garden and the “Little Peach Blossom Spring” in the Lingering Garden), among other themes.
These scholarly inscriptions are naturally and harmoniously integrated with the garden’s buildings, landscapes, flowers, and trees, giving each mountain, water body, plant, and tree in the garden profound artistic conception. Wandering through them can cultivate one’s soul and provide aesthetic enjoyment.
Despite their small size, the ancient garden designers of Suzhou Gardens employed various artistic techniques to creatively create a rich diversity of scenery. While walking through the gardens, one may encounter deep courtyards, villages emerging from the shadows of willows and flowers, small bridges over flowing streams, white walls with black-tiled roofs, winding paths leading to secluded spots, and winding paths with turns in the mountains, as well as ever-changing scenery with every step taken. As for those flower windows of various shapes and exquisite patterns, those endless paved paths spreading out like silk, and those decorative elements casually scattered in various corners… they offer endless viewing and lingering memories.
