Chinese Garden - in Art and Literature

In Art and Literature

The garden plays an important part in Chinese art and literature, and at the same time art and literature have inspired many gardens. The school of painting called "Shanshui" (literally 'mountains and water' and with the actual meaning of 'landscape'), which began in the 5th century, established the principles of Chinese landscape painting, which were very similar to those of Chinese gardening. These paintings were not meant to be realistic; they were meant to portray what the artist felt, rather than what he saw.

The landscape painter Shitao (1641–1720) wrote that he wanted to "'...create a landscape which was not spoiled by any vulgar banality..." He wanted to create a sense of vertigo in the viewer: "to express a universe inaccessible to man, without any route that led there, like the isles of Bohai, Penglan and Fanghu, where only the immortals can live, and which a man cannot imagine. That is the vertigo that exists in the natural universe. To express it in painting, you must show jagged peaks, precipices, hanging bridges, great chasms. For the effect to be truly marvelous, it must be done purely by the force of the brush." This was the emotion that garden designers wanted to create with their scholar rocks and miniature mountain ranges.

In his book, The Craft of Gardens, The garden designer Ji Cheng wrote: “The spirit and the charm of mountains and forests must be studied in depth; …only the knowledge of the real permits the creation of the artificial, so that the work created possesses the spirit of the real, in part because of divine inspiration, but especially because of human effort.” He described the effect he wanted to achieve in the design of an autumn garden scene: "The feelings are in harmony with the purity, with the sense of withdrawal. The spirit rejoices at the mountains and ravines. Suddenly the spirit, detached from the world of small things, is animated and seems to penetrate to the interior of a painting, and to promenade there..."

In literature, gardens were frequently the subject of the genre of poetry called "Tianyuan", literally 'fields and gardens,' which reached its peak in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) with such poets as Wang Wei (701-761), The names of the Surging Waves Garden and the Garden of Meditation in Suzhou are taken from lines of Chinese Poetry. Within the gardens, the individual pavilions and view points were frequently dedicated to verses of poems, inscribed on stones or plaques. The Moon Comes with the Breeze Pavilion at the Couple's Retreat Garden, used for moon-viewing, has the inscription of a verse by Han Yu:

"The twilight brings the Autumn

And the wind brings the moon here."

And the Peony Hall in the Couple's Retreat Garden is dedicated to a verse by Li Bai:

"The spring breeze is gently stroking the balustrade

and the peony is wet with dew."

Wang Wei (701-761) was a poet, painter and Buddhist monk, who worked first as a court official before retiring to Lantian, where he built one of the first wenren yuan, or scholar's gardens, called the Valley of the Jante. In this garden, a series of twenty scenes, like the paintings of a scroll or album, unrolled before the viewer, each illustrated by a verse of poetry. For example, one scene illustrated this poem:

"The white rock emerges from the torrent;

The Cold sky with red leaves scattering:

On the mountain path, the rain is fleeing,

the blue of the emptiness dampens our clothes."

The Valley of the Jante garden disappeared, but its memory, preserved in paintings and poems, inspired many other scholar's gardens.

The social and cultural importance of the garden is illustrated in the classical novel Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin which unfolds almost exclusively in a garden.