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 .
129-508: The qilin ( English: / tʃ i ˈ l ɪ n / chee- LIN ; Chinese : 麒麟 ) is a legendary hooved chimerical creature that appears in Chinese mythology , and is said to appear with the imminent arrival or death of a sage or illustrious ruler. Qilin are a specific type of the lin mythological family of one-horned beasts. The qilin also appears in the mythologies of other Chinese-influenced cultures. The earliest mention of
258-459: A giraffe , are similar to qilin. Japanese art tends to depict the kirin as more deer-like than in Chinese art . Alternatively, it is depicted as a dragon shaped like a deer, but with an ox's tail instead of a lion's tail. They are also often portrayed as partially unicorn -like in appearance, but with a backwards curving horn. Girin or kirin ( 기린 ) is the Korean form of qilin. It is described as
387-469: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where
516-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and
645-510: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and
774-706: A French Jesuit who became court painter for the Qianlong Emperor from 1738 to 1768, described the Jade Terrace of the Isle of Immortality in the Lake of the Summer Palace: "That which is a true jewel is a rock or island...which is in the middle of this lake, on which is built a small palace, which contains one hundred rooms or salons...of a beauty and a taste which I am not able to express to you. The view
903-599: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
1032-543: A banquet in his garden, and wrote about the event himself: I have a country house at the torrent of the Golden Valley...where there is a spring of pure water, a luxuriant wood, fruit trees, bambo, cypress, and medicinal plants. There are fields, two hundred sheep, chickens, pigs, geese and ducks...There is also a water mill, a fish pond, caves, and everything to beguile the eye and please the heart....With my literary friends, we took walks day and night, feasted, climbed
1161-494: A book recording the event of the Orchid Pavilion Gathering , another famous poetry setting at a country retreat called the "Orchid Pavilion". This was a park with a meandering stream. He brought together a group of famous poets, and seated them beside the stream. Then he placed cups of wine in the stream, and let them float. If the cup stopped beside one of the poets, he was obliged to drink it and then compose
1290-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of
1419-615: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of
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#17327720946971548-714: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only
1677-576: A garden with a large lake called Lanchi gong or the Lake of the Orchids . On an island in the lake he created a replica of Mount Penglai, symbolizing his search for paradise. After his death, the Qin Empire fell in 206 BC and his capital city and garden were completely destroyed, but the legend continued to inspire Chinese gardens. Some gardens have a single island with an artificial mountain representing
1806-569: A hilltop viewing pavilion. Other lakeside pavilions were added, including a reverence hall, a recitation hall, and a special pavilion for watching the fish. Over the centuries it was much modified, but still keeps its essential plan. Another Song dynasty garden still in existence is the Master of the Nets Garden in Suzhou. It was created in 1141 by Shi Zhengzhi , Deputy Civil Service Minister of
1935-656: A level never seen before, and new gardens, large and small, filled the capital city, Chang'an . The new gardens, were inspired by classical legends and poems. There were shanchi yuan , gardens with artificial mountains and ponds, inspired by the legend of the isles of immortals, and shanting yuan , gardens with replicas of mountains and small viewing houses, or pavilions. Even ordinary residences had tiny gardens in their courtyards, with terracotta mountains and small ponds. These Chinese classical gardens, or scholar's gardens ( wenren yuan ), were inspired by, and in turn inspired, classical Chinese poetry and painting. A notable example
2064-490: A maned creature with the torso of a deer , an ox tail with the hooves of a horse . The girin were initially depicted as more deer-like, however over time they have transformed into more horse-like. They were one of the four divine creatures along with the dragon , phoenix , and turtle . Girin were extensively used in Korean royal and Buddhist arts. In modern Korean, the term "girin" is used for " giraffe ". In Thailand,
2193-576: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as
2322-592: A mountain to view the scenery, and sat by the side of the stream. This visit to the garden resulted in a famous collection of poems, Jingu Shi , or Poems of the Golden Valley , and launched a long tradition of writing poetry in and about gardens. The poet and calligrapher Wang Xizhi (307–365) wrote in his excellent calligraphy the Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion introducing
2451-543: A pagoda. The 16th-century Chinese writer and philosopher Ji Cheng instructed garden builders to "hide the vulgar and the common as far as the eye can see, and include the excellent and the splendid." Some early Western visitors to the imperial Chinese gardens felt they were chaotic, crowded with buildings in different styles, without any seeming order. But the Jesuit priest Jean Denis Attiret , who lived in China from 1739 and
2580-677: A poem for each scene in the garden and commissioned a famous artist, to paint scenes of the garden on the walls of his villa. After retiring from the government, he passed his time taking boat trips on the lake, playing the cithare and writing and reciting poetry. During the Tang dynasty, plant cultivation was developed to an advanced level, with many plant species being grown by means of plant introduction , domestication , transplantation , and grafting . The aesthetic properties of plants were highlighted, while numerous books on plant classification and cultivation were published. The capital, Chang'an ,
2709-588: A poem. The garden of the floating cup ( liubei tang ), with small pavilions and artificial winding streams, became extremely popular in both imperial and private gardens. The Orchid Pavilion inspired Emperor Yang (604–617) of the Sui dynasty to build his new imperial garden, the Garden of the West , near Hangzhou . His garden had a meandering stream for floating glasses of wine and pavilions for writing poetry. He also used
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#17327720946972838-407: A qilin depicted with one horn may be called a "one-horned qilin" in Chinese. Nevertheless, the mythical and etymological connections between the creatures have been noted by various cultural studies and even the Chinese government, which has minted silver, gold, and platinum commemorative coins depicting both archetypal creatures. Kirin, which has also come to be used as the modern Japanese word for
2967-542: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate
3096-508: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin
3225-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with
3354-631: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct
3483-575: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
3612-671: A view of the lake and the mountains. In 1271, Kublai Khan established the Mongol -led Yuan dynasty in China. By 1279, he annihilated the last resistance of the Song dynasty and unified China under Mongol rule. He established a new capital on the site of present-day Beijing , called Dadu , the Great Capital. The most famous garden of the Yuan dynasty was Kublai Khan's summer palace and garden at Xanadu . The Venetian traveler Marco Polo
3741-602: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
3870-548: Is a mixture of various animals, which come from differing elemental environments, representing elemental magical forces present within each personified creature. Many of the Himapant animals actually represent gods and devas of the Celestial Realms, and bodhisattvas , who manifest as personifications which represent the true nature of each creature deity through the symbolism of the various body parts amalgamated into
3999-768: Is a model of Chinese aesthetics, reflecting the profound philosophical thinking and pursuit of life of the Chinese people. Among them, Chengde Mountain Resort and the Summer Palace , which belong to royal gardens, and several the Classical Gardens of Suzhou in Jiangsu Province , which belong to private gardens, are also included in the World Heritage List by UNESCO . Many essential elements are used in Chinese gardens, and Moon Gate
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4128-638: Is admirable... Their construction and improvement consumed a large part of the imperial treasury. Empress Dowager Cixi famously diverted money intended for the modernization of the Beiyang Fleet and used it to restore the Summer Palace and the marble teahouse in the shape of boat on Lake Kunming . Both the Summer Palace and Old Summer Palace were destroyed during the Boxer Rebellion and by punitive expeditions of European armies during
4257-615: Is believed to have visited Xanadu in about 1275, and described the garden this way: "Round this Palace a wall is built, inclosing a compass of 16 miles, and inside the Park there are fountains and rivers and brooks, and beautiful meadows, with all kinds of wild animals (excluding such as are of ferocious nature), which the Emperor has procured and placed there to supply food for his gerfalcons and hawks, which he keeps there in mew. Of these there are more than 200 gerfalcons alone, without reckoning
4386-801: Is built around a pond, with the Longevity Pavilion on the north side, the Fry Pavilion on the east side, a dramatic rock garden on the south, and the creator's study, the Humble House, to the west. The Qing dynasty was the last dynasty of China. The most famous gardens in China during this period were the Summer Palace and the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. Both gardens became symbols of luxury and refinement, and were widely described by European visitors. Father Attiret,
4515-435: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
4644-498: Is fully or partially scaled and often shaped like an ox, deer, or horse, or more commonly a goat. They are always shown with cloven hooves. While dragons in China (and thus qilin) are also most commonly depicted as golden, qilin may be of any color or even various colors, and can be depicted as bejeweled or exhibiting a jewel-like brilliance. The qilin is depicted throughout a wide range of Chinese art, sometimes with parts of their bodies on fire. Legends tell that qilin have appeared in
4773-603: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
4902-437: Is one of them. 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. The earliest recorded Chinese gardens were created in
5031-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate
5160-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
5289-546: Is still visible today. Despite the Mongol invasion, the classical Chinese scholar's garden continued to flourish in other parts of China. An excellent example was the Lion Grove Garden in Suzhou. It was built in 1342, and took its name from the collection of fantastic and grotesque assemblies of rocks, taken from Lake Tai. Some of them were said to look like the heads of lions. The Kangxi and Qianlong emperors of
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5418-407: Is sufficient to support, though perhaps not confirm, the hypothesis of an etymological connection", and also notes a possible connection between Old Chinese and Mongolian (*) kers ~ (*) keris ~ (*) kiris "rhinoceros" ( Khalkha : хирс ). Qilin generally have Chinese dragon -like features: similar heads with antlers , eyes with thick eyelashes, manes that always flow upward, and beards. The body
5547-489: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,
5676-501: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because
5805-500: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
5934-552: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it
6063-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while
6192-753: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system
6321-513: The Couple's Retreat Garden (1723–1736) and the Retreat & Reflection Garden (1885), both in Suzhou. A Chinese garden was not meant to be seen all at once; the plan of a classical Chinese garden presented the visitor with a series of perfectly composed and framed glimpses of scenery; a view of a pond, or of a rock, or a grove of bamboo, a blossoming tree, or a view of a distant mountain peak or
6450-560: The Garden of the North ( Beiyuan ) and the Garden of the South ( Nanyuan ), both belonged to Shen Dehe , Grand Minister to Emperor Gaozong (1131–1162). The Garden of the South was a classic mountain-and-lake (shanshui) garden; it had a lake with an Island of Immortality ( Penglai dao ), on which were three great boulders from Taihu. The Garden of the South was a water garden, with five large lakes connected to Lake Tai. A terrace gave visitors
6579-541: The Humble Administrator's Garden , was a little over ten hectares in area, with one fifth of the garden occupied by the pond. But they did not have to be large. Ji Cheng built a garden for Wu Youyu, the Treasurer of Jinling , that was just under one hectare in size, and the tour of the garden was only four hundred steps long from the entrance to the last viewing point, but Wu Youyu said it contained all
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#17327720946976708-428: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in
6837-710: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with
6966-595: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
7095-690: The Qing dynasty each visited the garden several times, and used it as model for their own summer garden, the Garden of Perfect Splendor , at the Chengde Mountain Resort . In 1368, forces of the Ming dynasty , led by Zhu Yuanzhang , captured Dadu from the Mongols and overthrew the Yuan dynasty. Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the Yuan palaces in Dadu to be burned down. The most famous existing garden from
7224-701: The Somali merchants along with zebras, incense, and various other exotic animals. Zheng He's fleet brought back two giraffes to Nanjing and they were mistaken by the emperor for the mythical creature, with geri meaning giraffe in Somali . The identification of qilin with giraffes has had a lasting influence: even today, the same word is used for the mythical animal and the giraffe in both Korean and Japanese. Axel Schuessler reconstructs Old Chinese pronunciation of 麒麟 as * gərin . Finnish linguist Juha Janhunen tentatively compares * gərin to an etymon reconstructed as * kalimV , denoting " whale "; and represented in
7353-569: The Spring and Autumn period (722–481 BC), in 535 BC, the Terrace of Shanghua , with lavishly decorated palaces, was built by King Jing of the Zhou dynasty . In 505 BC, an even more elaborate garden, the Terrace of Gusu , was begun. It was located on the side of a mountain, and included a series of terraces connected by galleries, along with a lake where boats in the form of blue dragons navigated. From
7482-471: The garden of the legendary Yellow Emperor and in the capital of Emperor Yao ; both events bore testimony to the benevolent nature of the rulers. It has also been told that the birth of the great sage Confucius was foretold by the arrival of a qilin. In modern times, the depictions of qilin have often fused with the Western concept of unicorns. Qilin ( 麒麟 ) is often translated into English as "unicorn";
7611-423: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded
7740-542: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at
7869-764: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Chinese gardens The art of Chinese garden integrates architecture , calligraphy and painting , sculpture, literature , gardening and other arts . It
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#17327720946977998-460: The Chinese garden. There were two periods of the Song dynasty , northern and southern, and both were known for the construction of famous gardens. Emperor Huizong (1082–1135) was an accomplished painter of birds and flowers. A scholar himself, he integrated elements of the scholar garden into his grand imperial garden. His first garden, called The Basin of the Clarity of Gold , was an artificial lake surrounded by terraces and pavilions. The public
8127-416: The English romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge . When he established his new capital at Dadu, Kublai Khan enlarged the artificial lakes that had been created a century earlier by the Jurchen-led Jin dynasty, and built up the island of Oinghua, creating a striking contrast between curving banks of the lake and garden and the strict geometry of what later became the Forbidden City of Beijing. This contrast
8256-424: The Han Dynasty is the first known garden built with the complete set of the three remaining Bohai Shenshan mountains. Since then, the Yichi Sanshan (Chinese: 一池三山 ) system of one pond with three mountains has been a main model of royal gardens. Another notable garden of the Han period was the Garden of General Liang Ji built under Emperor Shun (125–144 AD). Using a fortune amassed during his twenty years in
8385-416: The Han dynasty dictionary Shuowen Jiezi describes qi as single-horned, and it can sometimes be depicted as having a single horn . The translation, however, may be misleading, as qilin can also be depicted as having two horns. In modern Chinese, "one-horned beast" ( 独角兽 ; 獨角獸 ; Dújiǎoshòu ) is used for "unicorns". A number of different Chinese mythical creatures can be depicted with a single horn, and
8514-490: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though
8643-445: The Ming dynasty is the Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou. It was built during the reign of the Zhengde Emperor (1506–1521) by Wang Xianchen, a minor government administrator who retired from government service and devoted himself to his garden. The garden has been much altered since it was built, but the central part has survived; a large pond full of lotus blossoms, surrounded by structures and pavilions designed as viewpoints of
8772-438: The Qing dynasty, twelve tall limestone rocks were added to the garden, symbolizing mountains. The most famous was a picturesque rock called the Auspicious Cloud-Capped Peak, which became a centerpiece of the garden. A third renowned Ming era garden in Suzhou is the Garden of Cultivation , built during the reign of the Tianqi Emperor (1621–27) by the grandson of Wen Zhengming , a famous Ming painter and calligrapher. The garden
8901-470: The Southern Song government. It had his library, the Hall of Ten Thousand Volumes, and an adjacent garden called the Fisherman's Retreat. It was extensively remodeled between 1736 and 1796, but it remains one of the best example of a Song Dynasty Scholars Garden. In the city of Wuxi , on the edge of Lake Tai and at the foot of two mountains, there were thirty four gardens recorded by the Song dynasty historian Zhou Mi (1232–1308). The two most famous gardens,
9030-415: 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 ). According to the Shiji , one of the most famous features of this garden was the Wine Pool and Meat Forest (酒池肉林). A large pool, big enough for several small boats, was constructed on the palace grounds, with inner linings of polished oval shaped stones from
9159-454: The center of his garden he had constructed an artificial mountain a hundred meters high, with cliffs and ravines, which he named Genyue , or "The Mountain of Stability." The garden was finished in 1122. In 1127, Emperor Huizong was forced to flee from the Song capital, Kaifeng , when it came under attack by the armies of the Jurchen -led Jin dynasty . When he returned (as a captive of the Jurchens), he found his garden completely destroyed, all
9288-690: The city of Luoyang , capital of the Northern Wei dynasty, had over 1,300 temples, mostly in the former residences of believers. Each of the temples had its own small garden. During this period, many former government officials left the court and built gardens where they could escape the outside world and concentrate on nature and literature. One example was the Jingu Yuan , or Garden of the Golden Valley , built in 296 by Shi Chong (249–300 AD), an aristocrat and former court official, ten kilometers northeast of Luoyang. He invited thirty famous poets to
9417-506: The city of Luoyang by Li Deyu , Grand Minister of the Tang Empire. The garden was vast, with over a hundred pavilions and structures, but it was most famous for its collection of exotically shaped rocks and plants, which its creator collected all over China. Rocks of unusual shapes, known as Chinese Scholars' Rocks, often selected to portray the part of a mountain or mountain range in a garden scene, gradually became an essential feature of
9546-517: The design of the Mythical creature. In Phra Aphai Mani , the masterpiece epic poem of Sunthorn Phu , a renowned poet of the 18th century. There is a monster that is Sudsakorn 's steed, one of the main characters in the epic. This creature was called "Ma Nin Mangkorn" ( Thai : ม้านิลมังกร , "ceylonite dragon horse"), it is depicted as it has diamond fangs, ceylonite scales, and a birthmark on
9675-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which
9804-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of
9933-528: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
10062-609: The ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of
10191-696: The features of botanical and zoological gardens, as well as the traditional hunting grounds. Inspired by another version of Chinese classic about the Isles of the Immortals, called Liezi , he created a large artificial lake, the Lake of the Supreme Essence , with three artificial islands in the center representing the three isles of the Immortals - Penglai , Fanghu , and Yingzhou. The park was later destroyed, but its memory would continue to inspire Chinese garden design for centuries. The Jianzhang Palace in
10320-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable
10449-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has
10578-618: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although
10707-646: The highest terrace, a view extended as far as Lake Tai , the Great Lake. An ancient Chinese legend played an important part in early garden design. In the 4th century BC, a tale in the Classic of Mountains and Seas described a peak called Mount Penglai located on one of three islands at the eastern end of the Bohai Sea , between China and Korea, which was the home of the Eight Immortals . On this island were palaces of gold and silver, with jewels on
10836-485: The imperial court, Liang Ji built an immense landscape garden with artificial mountains, ravines and forests, filled with rare birds and domesticated wild animals. This was one of the first gardens that tried to create an idealized copy of nature. After the fall of the Han dynasty, a long period of political instability began in China. Buddhism was introduced into China by Emperor Ming (57–75 AD), and spread rapidly. By 495,
10965-488: The island of the Eight Immortals. Other gardens have gardens featuring three Boshan Mountains - Penglai , Yingzhou, and Fanghu or Fangzhang. The Yichi Sanshan (Chinese: 一池三山 ) system of one pond with three mountains has been a main model of royal gardens. Under the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), a new imperial capital was built at Chang'an , and Emperor Wu built a new imperial garden, which combined
11094-601: The lake and gardens. The park has an island, the Fragrant Isle, shaped like a boat. It also makes good use of the principle of the "borrowed view," ( jiejing ) carefully framing views of the surrounding mountains and a famous view of a distant pagoda. Another existing garden from the Ming dynasty is the Lingering Garden , also in Suzhou, built during the reign of the Wanli Emperor (1573–1620). During
11223-508: The language isolate Nivkh and four different language families Tungusic , Mongolic , Turkic and Samoyedic , wherein * kalay(ә)ng means "whale" (in Nenets ) and * kalVyǝ " mammoth " (in Enets and Nganasan ). As even aborigines "vaguely familiar with the underlying real animals" often confuse the whale, mammoth, and unicorn : they conceptualized the mammoth and whale as aquatic, as well as
11352-586: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
11481-528: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
11610-538: 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 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
11739-413: The mammoth and unicorn possessing a single horn; for inland populations, the extant whale "remains ... an abstraction, in this respect being no different from the extinct mammoth or the truly mythical unicorn." However, Janhunen cautiously remarks that "[t]he formal and semantic similarity between * kilin < * gilin ~ * gïlin 'unicorn' and * kalimV 'whale' (but also Samoyedic * kalay - 'mammoth')
11868-421: The marvels of the province in a single place. The classical garden was surrounded by a wall, usually painted white, which served as a pure backdrop for the flowers and trees. A pond of water was usually located in the center. Many structures, large and small, were arranged around the pond. In the garden described by Ji Cheng above, the structures occupied two-thirds of the hectare, while the garden itself occupied
11997-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including
12126-514: The mountains. The most famous garden in Luoyang was The Garden of Solitary Joy ( Dule Yuan ), built by the poet and historian Sima Guang (1021–1086). His garden had an area of eight mu , or about 1.5 hectares. In the center was the Pavilion of Study, his library, with five thousand volumes. To the north was an artificial lake, with a small island, with a picturesque fisherman's hut. To the east
12255-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with
12384-508: The mythical qilin is in the poem 麟之趾 ; Lín zhī zhǐ ; 'Feet of the Lin'; included in the Classic of Poetry (11th – 7th c. BCE). Spring and Autumn Annals mentioned that a lin ( 麟 ) was captured in the 14th year of Duke Ai of Lu ( 魯哀公 ) (481 CE); Zuo Zhuan credited Confucius with identifying the lin as such. The bisyllabic form qilin ( 麒麟 ~ 騏驎 ), which carries
12513-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in
12642-731: The nineteenth century, but are now gradually being restored. In addition to the Old Summer Palace and Summer Palace, between 1703 and 1792 the Qing emperors built a new complex of gardens and palaces in the mountains 200 kilometers northeast of Beijing, to escape the summer heat of the capital. It was called the Chengde Mountain Resort , and it occupied 560 hectares, with seventy-two separate landscape views, recreating landscapes in miniature from many different parts of China. This enormous garden has survived relatively intact. Renowned scholar gardens which still exist from this period include
12771-410: The other hawks. The Khan himself goes every week to see his birds sitting in mew, and sometimes he rides through the park with a leopard behind him on his horse's croup; and then if he sees any animal that takes his fancy, he slips his leopard at it, and the game when taken is made over to feed the hawks in mew. This he does for diversion." This brief description later inspired the poem Kubla Khan by
12900-448: The other third. In a scholar garden the central building was usually a library or study, connected by galleries with other pavilions which served as observation points of the garden features. These structures also helped divide the garden into individual scenes or landscapes. The other essential elements of a scholar garden were plants, trees, and rocks, all carefully composed into small perfect landscapes. Scholar gardens also often used what
13029-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
13158-502: The park for theatrical events; he launched small boats on his stream with animated figures illustrating the history of China. The Tang dynasty (618–907 AD) was considered the first golden age of the classical Chinese garden. Emperor Xuanzong built a magnificent imperial garden, the Garden of the Majestic Clear Lake, near Xi′an , and lived there with his famous concubine, Consort Yang . Painting and poetry reached
13287-537: The pavilions burned and the art works looted. Only the mountain remained. While the imperial gardens were the best known, many smaller but equally picturesque gardens were built in cities such as Luoyang . The Garden of the Monastery of the Celestial Rulers in Luoyang was famous for its peonies; the entire city came when they were in bloom. The Garden of Multiple Springtimes was famous for its view of
13416-484: The province famous for its gardens was Suzhou , where many scholars, government officials and merchants built residences with gardens. Some of these gardens still exist today, though most have been greatly altered over the centuries. The oldest Suzhou garden that can be seen today is the Blue Wave Pavilion , built in 1044 by the Song dynasty poet Su Shunqing. (1008–1048). In the Song dynasty, it consisted of
13545-561: The qilin is known as " gilen " ( Thai : กิเลน ), and is a member of the pantheon of Thai Himapant forest mythical animals. It is most probable that the Gilen was introduced into the pantheon under the influence of the Tai Yai who came down from Southern China to settle in Siam in ancient times, and the legend was probably incorporated into the Himapant legends of Siam in this manner. The Gilen
13674-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
13803-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for
13932-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without
14061-572: The same generic meaning as lin alone, is attested in works dated to the Warring States period (475 – 221 BCE). Qi denotes the male and lin denotes the female according to Shuowen Jiezi . The legendary image of the qilin became associated with the image of the giraffe in the Ming dynasty . The identification of the qilin with giraffes began after Zheng He 's 15th-century voyage to East Africa (landing, among other places, in modern-day Somalia ). The Ming Dynasty bought giraffes from
14190-452: The seashore. The pool was then filled with wine. A small island was constructed in the middle of the pool, where trees were planted, which had skewers of roasted meat hanging from their branches. King Zhou and his friends and concubines drifted in their boats, drinking the wine with their hands and eating the roasted meat from the trees. Later Chinese philosophers and historians cited this garden as an example of decadence and bad taste. During
14319-517: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by
14448-511: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language
14577-623: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
14706-425: The tongue. It was a mixture of horse, dragon, deer antlers, fish scales, and Phaya Nak tail, with has black sequins all over. Its appearance resembles a qilin. Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing') is a group of languages spoken natively by
14835-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in
14964-575: The trees. There was no pain, no winter, wine glasses and rice bowls were always full, and fruits, when eaten, granted eternal life. In 221 BC, Ying Zheng, the King of Qin conquered other rival states and unified China under the Qin Empire , which he ruled until 210 BC. He heard the legend of the islands and sent emissaries to find the islands and bring back the elixir of immortal life, without success. At his palace near his capital, Xianyang , he created
15093-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese
15222-458: 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
15351-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until
15480-465: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with
15609-438: Was a court painter for the Qianlong Emperor , observed there was a "beautiful disorder, an anti-symmetry" in the Chinese garden. "One admires the art with which this irregularity is carried out. Everything is in good taste, and so well arranged, that there is not a single view from which all the beauty can be seen; you have to see it piece by piece." Chinese classical gardens varied greatly in size. The largest garden in Suzhou,
15738-460: Was a garden for plants. During the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC), yuan 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
15867-494: Was a garden of medicinal herbs, and to the west was an artificial mountain, with a belevedere at the summit to view the surrounding neighborhoods. Any passer-by could visit the garden by paying a small fee. After fall of Kaifeng, the capital of the Song dynasty was moved to Lin'an (present-day Hangzhou , Zhejiang ). The city of Lin'an soon had more than fifty gardens built on the shore of the Western Lake. The other city in
15996-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
16125-577: Was a very cosmopolitan city, filled with diplomats, merchants, pilgrims, monks and students, who carried descriptions of the gardens all over Asia. The economic prosperity of the Tang dynasty led to the increasing construction of classical gardens across all of China. The last great garden of the Tang dynasty was the Hamlet of the Mountain of the Serene Spring ( Pingquan Shanzhuang ), built east of
16254-415: Was called "borrowed" scenery (借景 jiejing ) ; where unexpected views of scenery outside the garden, such as mountain peaks, seemed to be an extension of the garden itself. Chinese gardens are filled with architecture; halls, pavilions, temples, galleries, bridges, kiosks, and towers, occupying a large part of the space. The Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou has forty-eight structures, including
16383-485: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half
16512-435: Was invited into the garden in the spring for boat races and spectacles on the lake. In 1117 he personally supervised the building of a new garden. He had exotic plants and picturesque rocks brought from around China for his garden, particularly the prized rocks from Lake Tai . Some of the rocks were so large that, in order to move them by water on the grand canal, he had to destroy all the bridges between Hangzhou and Beijing. In
16641-935: Was the Jante Valley Garden of the poet-painter and civil servant Wang Wei (701–761). He bought the ruined villa of a poet, located near the mouth of a river and a lake. He created twenty small landscape scenes within his garden, with names such as the Garden of Magnolias, the Waving Willows, the Kiosk in the Heart of the Bamboos, the Spring of the Golden Powder, and the View-House beside the Lake. He wrote
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