中国私家园林

The Chinese private garden was owned and built by highly cultivated individual who created a Chinese garden for himself was generally also a poet, a painter and perhaps also a musician. He built the garden for his own pleasure, on one hand as a means of cultivating his being, through bringing himself into unison with the forces of nature, on the other hand as a means of pure self-expression. So, the Chinese private garden embodied the sentiment of the poet and the eyes of the painter. When one enters a Chinese garden, he finds himself surrounded by the atmosphere of the poetic and the painting. To learn some cultural background about the art of the Chinese poem and landscape painting will help us to understand the characteristics of Chinese private garden. Rich Literatural and poetic content

The integration of poetry with the art of garden-making is one of the special achievements of Chinese private garden’s construction. Chinese private gardens are extraordinarily rich in poetic content. For example, many scenes depicted in Chinese gardens have been based on themes taken directly from poems of famous poets. The Keep and Listen Pavilion (the Lin Ting Ge) in Suzhou’s Zhuo Zhen garden was built on the theme of the lines by Shan-Yi Li (813 –858): “Keep the remaining lotus leaves, that I may listen to the sound of rain.”Chinese garden scenes helped one to visualize the selected verses that enriched the garden’s artistic content. A successful scenes inside Chinese garden, such as a rock grouping with a waterfall and a gnarled pine or plum tree shaking under summer wind, etc, in their turn, could evoke the poetic mood within the viewers. Private Chinese gardens were favorite subject of Chinese literature. They became a common background for many famous poems and novels. For example, the entire story of classical work “The Dream of the Red Chamber” was based on a background of a imaginary private Chinese garden, Ta Kuan Garden. Strolling in a Chinese private garden, one will often encounter couplets written on boards hanging beside the gateways ad doors and poetic quotations carved on stone tablets or rocks. Either they are the famous

lines which guided the construction of the special garden scenes or poetry inspired by the beautiful scenes. The poetic inscriptions, usually written in the wonderful calligraphy, provide the viewers with great aesthetic enjoyment and also help them understand and appreciate the garden’s scenes. Poetry can be regarded as the guide book for the garden

builder as well as the viewers.

Designed By painter’s eyes

The second characteristic of the private Chinese garden was generated from the painter’s eyes of its owners and can be summarized as free and asymmetrical. It is almost impossible to fully understand the private Chinese garden without any background knowledge of the Chinese paintings, especially the Chinese landscape paintings. Almost all of Chinese garden-makers were also painters. When building a Chinese garden, the Chinese garden-makers not only followed the natural landscape formations, but they also imitated the brush works of the old masters. Even for the visitors, they also looked at the Chinese garden through eyes educated by thousands of years of landscape paintings. Chinese landscape painters provided several basic conventions through which Chinese looked at

their garden. Because the art of Chinese garden-making was integrated with the art of the landscape paintings, the evolution of Chinese garden styles in different regions could be thought as being guided by the styles of original Chinese landscape paintings. The Chinese gardens in the south of China are distinctly different in character from those of northern regions. The differences seem to be due not only to the different functions, which, as noted before, the Chinese gardens in south served those Chinese scholar-officials for private use while those in the north served mostly imperial needs, but also to the different styles of paintings developed in these regions.

There were two obvious different styles of the landscape paintings in the ancient China, the “Northern” and “Southern” styles. The former stressed “Kungbi”, which can be translated in English as “the hard-work brush”, and