Gardens of the East: The Garden of Suggestion

The slow unbroken evolution of centuries offers little in the way of dramatic recorded development. There are legendary references to the great gardens of the Chou dynasty, but no physical evidence such as the equivalent period of Egyptian history provides in its tomb paintings. We know nothing of the Chou gardens save that they were large. During the Han dynasty, which lasted from about 200 B.C. to A.D. 200, and which saw the introduction of Buddhism, the Emperors constructed in their great park gardens artificial mountains on the top of which palaces were built. The gardens of the Emperor Wu-ti covered fifty square miles of mountainous country, of which every valley had its own summer house. But none of this tells us much of what we need to know of the earliest gardens of the East, nor yet of how the advent of Buddhism affected them. Fortunately in A.D. 1026 the statesman Hsi-Ma-Kuang wrote a long and detailed account of his own garden. `Other palaces may be built, wherein to escape from grief or to subdue the vanities of life, but I have built a hermitage where at my leisure I may find repose and hold converse with my friends.' It was no more than twenty acres in extent, in the middle of which he built a library pavilion containing 5,000 books . . . `in which I can consult wisdom and hold converse with antiquity'. There were also streams, cascades, and lakes on which swans lived; and a great overhanging rock upon which was a pavilion where he could sit and enjoy the red sunrise. In the stream was an island the shores of which were covered with sand and shells and multicoloured pebbles; there were evergreen trees and a hut of rushes just like a peasant fisherman's. Through the garden were many other pavilions, some on the hills, some in the little valleys. There was a forest of bamboos intersected with sandy paths where the sun never penetrated. There was a cedar wood; a grove of pomegranates, citrons and oranges; a walk of weeping willows, a rocky eminence covered with ivy and wild flowers; a deep grotto lit by an opening hung round with wild vine and honeysuckle.