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| The Song Dynasty painting Listening to the Zither. the player who plays the Zither leisurely in the painting is an emperor of the Song Dynasty named Zhao Zhe, artist who painfed this painting. | Garden building developed to even further heights during the Song Dynasty (960- 1279). In addition to imperial gardens, private gardens and temple gardens, even teahouses and pubs in cites would embellish their surroundings with gardens with ponds and rockery in order to attract customers.
The Genyue Garden was built in Bianliang (today's Kaifeng of Henan Province), the east capital of the Song Dynasty. It is the most well-known, as well as the most representative of all the imperial gardens of the Song Dynasty. In comparison with the vast expanses of land (up to several hundred li ) that the gardens of the Han and Tang periods occupied, the actual area of the Genyue Garden was only about a dozen li, and the highest hill took less than a hundred steps to climb. However, Genyue Garden occupies an important place in the history of classic Chinese gardens. It is reputed to be "the most beautiful under the heavens, and the most excellent of all times". How was it possible to create a garden of such exquisite beauty on such a relatively small piece of land? Putting it into a few words, the secret lay in "concentration of scenery", in other words, trying to combine hills, ponds and streams, palaces and temples, rural cottages, and flowers and trees into one in a limited space, to achieve a multi-layered and three dimensional effect.
It encompasses the scenery of Jianhu Lake of Shaoxing City, the Feilai Peak of Hangzhou, the Tao Xi (Peach Creek) written of by writer Tao Yuanming (365-427) and the Meichi (Plum) Pond written of by Lin Bu (967 - 1028), renowned for his paintings of plum blossoms. There is also the legendary "Baxian Guan (Hall of Eight Immortals)" and the rural houses and beautiful village scenery. All of the parts making up the garden blend into each other naturally, and possess an artistic style which is natural, simple, peaceful and introspective. Walking through the garden, you see a different scene with each step you take, and the deeper you go into the garden the more of its beauty becomes apparent. From small scenes you can envision larger scenes. This is a man-made natural scenic garden that concentrates hills, ponds, streams and the most lush and gorgeous vegetation into one. This "in the teapot" model, which began to appear in the mid to late Tang Dynasty, was carried on and further developed during the Song Period, reaching new pinnacles of maturity and artistic perfection.
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| Tavern gardens portrayed in the Song Dynasty painting The Bustling River Scene in Qingming Festival. | The gardens of the intelligentsia of this time occupied much less space than those of previous times, but in the relatively small courtyards could be found brooks, hills, springs, ponds, islets, trees, flowers, rocks, pavilions and halls-in short, just about anything you could think of for a garden. Inside the small space of the "teapot", you could find artificial hills, ponds and streams, rocks and cultivated flowers and vegetation which were not only ingeniously combined but also ever-changing in their artistic effect, as well as structures exquisite and delicate in design. You can well imagine what difficulties this re-creation of the ever-changing scenes found in nature presented to the designers of these gardens. But people of the Song Dynasty took the art of garden design to new heights of perfection with their unprecedented creativity and artistic talent. This was also the period when China's traditional aesthetic spirit developed to its highest achievement.
The privately owned gardens of the Song Period, including large numbers of those belonging to officials, eunuchs and men of letters, were largely concentrated in Kaifeng, Luoyang, Suzhou and Hangzhou. These gardens were also the most representative of this period. The small garden art pieces of this time, such as scrolls with couplets, horizontally inscribed plaques, stone foundations with inlaid patterns, column bases, indoor and outdoor potted landscapes, goldfish tanks and paving, which were both decorative and complimentary to the whole garden, not only surpassed previous periods in their richness and diversity, but also included many pieces of exceeding beauty which was not to be paralleled in later times.
This period which lasted over three hundred years was the period of maturing in the development of China's classical garden. During this period, the government-compiled book Ying Fa Zao Shi described in detail the architectural concept "cai fen zhi", from which we get to learn the basic laws governing ancient architectural design. It is a highly perfected modulus system, which shows that China's wood structure architecture had already developed to a mature stage. From the paintings of the Song Period we can also see the great diversity of types and forms of architectural structures of this period. Their exquisite beauty and delicate style are entirely different from the grand and sweeping style of the structures of the Tang Period. |
