You will gain deep insight not only into the art of gardening in China, but into its historical significance within the context of gardening and landscape design worldwide.".

Suzhou, near Shanghai, is among the great garden cities of the world. The city's masterpieces of classical Chinese garden design, built from the eleventh through the nineteenth centuries, attract thousands of visitors each year and continue to influence international design. In The Gardens of Suzhou, landscape architect and scholar Ron Henderson guides visitors through seventeen of these gardens. The book explores UNESCO world cultural heritage sites such as the Master of the Nets Garden, Humble Administrator's Garden, Lingering Garden, and Garden of the Peaceful Mind, as well as other lesser-known but equally significant gardens in the Suzhou region. Unlike the acclaimed religious and imperial gardens found elsewhere in Asia, Suzhou's gardens were designed by scholars and intellectuals to be domestic spaces that drew upon China's rich visual and literary tradition, embedding cultural references within the landscapes. The elements of the gardens confront the visitor: rocks, trees, and walls are pushed into the foreground to compress and compact space, as if great hands had gathered a mountainous territory of rocky cliffs, forests, and streams, then squeezed it tightly until the entire region would fit into a small city garden. Henderson's commentary opens Suzhou's gardens, with their literary and musical references, to non-Chinese visitors. Drawing on years of intimate experience and study, he combines the history and spatial organization of each garden with personal insights into their rockeries, architecture, plants, and waters. Fully illustrated with newly drawn plans, maps, and original photographs, The Gardens of Suzhou invites visitors, researchers, and designers to pause and observe astonishing works from one of the world's greatest garden design traditions.

In The Classical Gardens of Shanghai, Shelly Bryant looks at five of Shanghai’s remaining classical gardens through their origins, changing fortunes, restorations, and links to a wider Chinese aesthetic. Shanghai’s classical gardens are as much text as space; they exist in art, poetry, and literature as much as in stone, rock, and earth. But these gardens have not remained static entities. Rather, they have been remodelled constantly since their inception. This book reflects this process within the constancy of traditional Chinese horticulture and reveals Shanghai’s remaining classical gardens as places representing wealth and social status, social and dynastic shifts, through falling family fortunes and political revolutions to search for a recovery of China’s ancient culture in the modern day. “Like a classical Chinese garden, this admirable and beautifully balanced book conjures up wider landscapes from within a small compass. It can be savoured on many levels: poetic and aesthetic no less than scholarly and intellectual. It is the next best thing to being guided through such gardens by Shelly Bryant herself.” —Lynn Pan, author of When True Love Came to China and Shanghai Style

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 38. Chapters: Chinese garden, Chinese scholar's rocks, Classical Gardens of Suzhou, Garden of Cultivation, Keyuan, List of Chinese gardens, Shuangxi Park and Chinese Garden, Sichuanese garden, Summer Palace, Yu Garden.