The Awareness Garden of Wang Shiheng in Yizhen

摘要

In China, the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) was a period particularly rich in garden culture, especially in its last 150 years or so. Not only were many gardens constructed in different parts of China, an enormous amount of writing on gardens was also produced in the form of prose descriptions of specific gardens, poems about gardens themselves or about the social events that took place within them, and a wide range of comments on garden features, the appropriate way to behave in a garden or how gardens should be designed. As a result of warfare, economic instability and the essential transience of gardens, no gardens survive from the Ming period in their original form, though there are some sites still occupied by gardens that were also the sites of gardens in the Ming. The gardens themselves have all been completely reconstructed, though in a few cases certain Ming Dynasty features may survive, such as the large rockery 'mountain' in the Yu Garden (Yu yuan) in Shanghai. For our understanding of the nature of Ming gardens, therefore, we are almost entirely dependent on written evidence and visual images such as paintings or woodblock prints from the period.