Chinese gardens

Chinese garden
This picture of the Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai (created in 1559) shows all the elements of a classical Chinese garden – water, architecture, vegetation, and rocks.
Simplified Chinese	中国园林
Traditional Chinese	中國園林
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Zhōngguó yuánlín Wu Romanization Tson平 koh入 yu入 lin平
Chinese classical garden
Simplified Chinese	中国古典园林
Traditional Chinese	中國古典園林
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Zhōngguó gǔdiǎn yuánlín Wu Romanization Tson平 koh入 gu去 di平 yu平 lin平

The Chinese garden is a landscape garden style which has evolved over three thousand years. It includes both the vast gardens of the Chinese emperors and members of the imperial family, built for pleasure and to impress, and the more intimate gardens created by scholars, poets, former government officials, soldiers and merchants, made for reflection and escape from the outside world. They create an idealized miniature landscape, which is meant to express the harmony that should exist between man and nature.

A typical Chinese garden is enclosed by walls and includes one or more ponds, rock works, trees and flowers, and an assortment of halls and pavilions within the garden, connected by winding paths and zig-zag galleries. By moving from structure to structure, visitors can view a series of carefully composed scenes, unrolling like a scroll of landscape paintings.Records of the 21st conference of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, describing Classical Chinese garden design and the gardens of Suzhou China.

The earliest recorded Chinese gardens were created in the valley of the Yellow River, during the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BC). These gardens were large enclosed parks where the kings and nobles hunted game, or where fruit and vegetables were grown.

Early inscriptions from this period, carved on tortoise shells, have three Chinese characters for garden, you, pu and yuan. You was a royal garden where birds and animals were kept, while pu was a garden for plants. During the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BC), became the character for all gardens. The old character for yuan is a small picture of a garden; it is enclosed in a square which can represent a wall, and has symbols which can represent the plan of a structure, a small square which can represent a pond, and a symbol for a plantation or a pomegranate tree.

A famous royal garden of the late Shang dynasty was the Terrace, Pond and Park of the Spirit (Lingtai, Lingzhao Lingyou) built by King Wenwang west of his capital city, Yin. The park was described in the Shijing (Classic of Poetry) this way:

Another early royal garden was Shaqui, or the Dunes of Sand, built by the last Shang ruler, King Zhou. (1075-1046 BC). It was composed of an earth terrace, or tai, which served as an observation platform in the center of a large square park. It was described in one of the early classics of Chinese literature, the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji).