Wisteria flowers in bloom at Saionji Temple.| Visual China
Suzhou is the most exquisite city in the whole of China, and the Suzhou garden is the most intuitive embodiment of this refinement.
In history, there are a total of 802 gardens in Suzhou, and the praise of "Bancheng Garden Pavilion" is not a lie.
It is not so much that Suzhou provides a place for the gardens to live, but rather that the gardens all over the city have created a Gusu city that is immersed in the warmth of Wu Nong's soft words.
In front of the door of the Gull Moon Cave in the art garden Zhu Yingjing
So what exactly is a Suzhou garden?
She is the Chinese's own "old money style", a kind of refinement that has soaked hundreds of years of wealth into the bones.
She is the spring flowers and autumn moon, the golden wind and jade dew, carrying the poetry and mind of the literati and artists.
With the completion of the Ming Xuan, a Chinese-style courtyard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the United States in 1980, which was built in imitation of the Spring Bun of the Master-of-Nets Garden, it spread the unique Chinese aesthetic elements to the world.
Schematic diagram of the distribution of gardens throughout the ancient city of Suzhou A fish
When spring arrives, the garden becomes a "world of flowers"
The most beautiful time of the garden is undoubtedly spring. Magnolia in early March, wisteria in late March, peony in late April......
"Peach first peach, plum begonia, apricot plum, second lilac", all kinds of flowers bloom one after another, decorating the Suzhou garden into a "flower world".
Even people who don't know anything about gardens can get the most intuitive sense of "beauty" from these blooming flowers.
In just three months, the spring is far from limiting the vigorous vitality of the sea of flowers in the garden.
From the first wax plum blossom in early January to the fragrance of golden cinnamon in early October, Suzhou gardens are in full bloom for more than three-quarters of the year.
Suzhou's climate and environment can be described as unique, whether it is the evergreen whitebark pine in the north or the banana tree in the south of the country, they can all coexist in the same garden, providing an unparalleled richness of plant landscape.
For those of us living in modern cities, we are no strangers to the landscape plants that accompany us every day and night and show the changes of the four seasons.
But in the Suzhou garden, the situation has become a little different: it is not the tree that serves the people, but the people who serve the trees.
Sometimes, a tree is older than the garden itself – it is the owner who takes a fancy to the tree and creates an entire garden that follows its natural path.
The plum blossoms in the Suzhou garden are in full bloom Visual China
The flowers and trees that are in the spotlight are the protagonists of the garden, and the humble grasses should not be ignored either.
The most common is a kind of bookgrass that resembles a leek leaf, which is evergreen all year round, and is not exposed when it blooms, and is willing to be the best "foil".
Even the moss in the corners of the walls is part of the landscape, just like the "moss" technique in landscape painting, which brings some life to the cold rocks.
From the level of flowers and plants, we can see the ingenuity and delicacy of garden design, and this delicacy starts from Suzhou City, which gave birth to gardens.
"A year of nothing to do for the flowers, win a few springs"| Yin Qimin
Why Suzhou, the most exquisite city in China?
The background color of Suzhou is, first of all, wealth.
The 800-year-old "paradise on earth", the "quite famous city" in Marco Polo's mouth, and even the Ming and Qing dynasties, "the most first- and second-class rich and elegant place in the red dust", and now "the first prefecture-level city in the world", are the unchanged labels of this city throughout the ages.
As the so-called "Cang Liao knows etiquette", hundreds of thousands of years of wealth have naturally given birth to prosperity in the field of culture and education.
In the 1,300 years since the birth of the imperial examination, Suzhou ranked first in the country with 56 champions, and during the Qing Dynasty, there were as many as 28 champions from Suzhou, accounting for a quarter of the total number of champions in the country.
So much so that during the Kangxi period, there was a group of Hanlin who gathered together to boast about their hometown specialties. Wang Wan, a native of Suzhou, said in "Versailles" that there are only two kinds of "local specialties" in his hometown, one is the children of the pear orchard who sing Kunqu opera, and the other is the champion.
Tiger Hill to the Gate of the East, ancient and modern in the same frame Visual China
Just like today's young people, doctors will inevitably produce their own "spiritual internal consumption", and the love of mountains and rivers has always been the biggest breakthrough for Chinese to relieve their bitter emotions.
Even migrant workers who are deeply tormented by "996" often seize the only rest time they have, go camping with tents on their backs, and enjoy a moment of comfort away from the hustle and bustle of the city - but for the scholars, their mentality is extremely "twisted".
These literati, who are active in middle school Chinese textbooks, have read the books of sages since childhood, and have been full of enthusiasm and hope to help the people, but they are often confined to the world and unable to achieve their wishes.
However, if they want to simply ignore the world and live in seclusion in the mountains and wilderness, they still can't forget the sense of social responsibility of "worrying about the king when they are far away from the rivers and lakes".
In the end, I had to move a side of the landscape to the city - "only the royal city is the most hidden, and ten thousand people are like the sea hidden", and a small world of their own is carved out in this red dust.
The crown of the Lingering Garden is the crown of the Taihu Lake stone in the world, and it is said to be the relic of the Northern Song Dynasty Flower Stone Gang, and it is the "best" sought after by literati and writers in the past dynasties Tao Yuan
As a result, Suzhou Gardens became the most favored "comfort nest" for literati and doctors, Su Shunqin, Wen Zhengming, and Yuan Mei...... These literary leaders in different eras have left their own marks.
Between the mountains and rivers, taste the muscles and souls of the garden
Suzhou people may never have thought that a "crazy stone" would become the fuse for the fall of the dynasty - about 900 years ago, the famous "artist emperor" Song Huizong sent a large number of "flower stone gangs" to transport all kinds of southern treasures led by Taihu Lake stone to the capital Kaifeng, and finally worked the people and lost money, causing public resentment to boil and smoke everywhere.
However, the people of Suzhou, which is adjacent to Taihu Lake, do not need to worry about this, and they enjoy this gift of nature before they get to the water.
Thanks to the continuous erosion of flowing water for thousands of years, these "thin and wrinkled" stones bring people infinite reverie space with their various shapes, more like the Chinese's own "Lego bricks", with the stacking combination of square inches to build infinite possibilities: or like the majestic atmosphere of Huanxiu Mountain Villa, the whole garden is laid out with a rockery alone, or like the lion forest shaped by a rockery, full of "karma" to assist practice.
The rockeries in the lion forest have different shapes, like all kinds of lions Visual China
The so-called "rockery" not only draws a clear line with the real mountain from the name, but also represents the meaning of "pretend": it integrates the majestic atmosphere of the real mountain, just like the landscape of the Song Dynasty that came out of the yellowed picture scroll, and it is rare to find a one-to-one corresponding landscape source, which is an artistic expression of "coming from life but higher than life", pointing to the ideal nature in the hearts of the literati.
Moving these majestic mountains in nature into a garden within easy reach is not a manifestation of "hills and ravines in the chest"?
If there are mountains, how can there be no water?
The mountains are thick and the water is flexible, and the two are like yin and yang, which are indispensable and accompany each other. Suzhou people's obsession with mountains and water has reached a level close to "obsessive-compulsive disorder": even if it is impossible to introduce flowing water due to natural conditions, it is inevitable to lay ice crack-shaped floor tiles around the rockery.
The Master-of-Nets Garden is full of spring Visual China
If the layout of these Suzhou gardens is intuitively displayed in the form of a floor plan, water definitely occupies the "C position" in it.
All kinds of buildings and landscape layouts revolve around the element of "water", and in the Humble Administrator's Garden, which is the largest garden area in Suzhou, the owner has given up about 70% of the area to ponds and streams that can only be seen from afar.
In fact, it is not only the garden, but also the water that gives Suzhou a smart soul.
In today's Suzhou City, there are 21,454 rivers and 323 lakes, with a total water area of 3,768 square kilometers, accounting for 44% of the city's total land area (8,488.5 square kilometers).
Most of the buildings in the Humble Administrator's Garden revolve around the water Zhang Chaoyang
These hair-thin water nets form a complete circulation network along with the seven main rivers in the ancient city, which are all over the front and back of the houses of the people in Suzhou, and also organically weave together the various gardens, accompanied by the sound of oars and oars, to build the gentle muscles and bones of Gusu City.
Suzhou Garden,
How did it become the benchmark of Chinese aesthetics?
Compared with Western architecture, which favored stone, the ancient people on the mainland had a soft spot for delicate wood.
This is not a helpless move due to the lack of materials and technology, but the belief of the ancients that wood has vitality. The spring and autumn withering of trees is like the birth, old age, sickness and death of people, which is a cycle of life. The dwelling of living beings made of trees naturally has its own vitality.
Suzhou garden is the most intuitive embodiment of this vitality.
The brick carvings and magnolia of the Master-of-Nets Garden Miao Keqiang
The construction of the garden, like the construction of a church by Westerners, is extremely exquisite, and it is far from an overnight effort: it took 15 years to repair the western part of the Humble Administrator's Garden, and the Master-of-Nets Garden has been renovated for 22 years in the hands of the owner Li Hongyi, after two generations of father and son.
The history of the Canglang Pavilion, the most "time-honored" garden in Suzhou gardens, can be traced back to the Northern Song Dynasty, and then began in the Yuan and Ming dynasties, but most of the layout we can see today is a relic of the Qing Dynasty.
Generations of garden owners have brought their own preferences into the garden, and along with the growth of flowers and trees in the garden in four seasons, they have repeatedly given the garden a new vitality for each era - this is not only a masterpiece created by the owners and craftsmen, but also a model of "harmony between man and nature".
Canglang Pavilion in the mist Cao Xiaofang
If you take out the pavilions and pavilions in the garden and disassemble and analyze them according to the scale of the building, the result will inevitably be very boring: just a few ordinary houses, where are the magnificent palaces and temples dedicated to the emperor and gods?
The subtle Suzhou people have always been experts in "making a dojo in a screw shell", and people who don't like it often despise their petty family, but people who really understand Suzhou are full of praise for this exquisiteness.
For example, windows – in the West, windows are windows, which let in light and fresh air.
But for everyone in Suzhou, it is a picture frame, a beautiful view of the garden outside the window. The various styles of flower windows are naturally windows, the vase door and the moon cave door as far as the eye can see are windows, and even the pond is also a "window": water lilies and lotus flowers are carefully pruned and never connected to the shore, and the sky and clouds are reflected in the layers, and the mountains and forests are reflected in the pavilions.
From the flower window of the Humble Administrator's Garden, you can see the North Temple Pagoda in the distance Zhu Yingjing
Every garden owner must be a "Virgo" obsessive-compulsive maniac, who has supported the benchmark of Chinese aesthetics with the honor of "recreating the world within a short distance", and has become a window for the dissemination of Chinese aesthetics to the world.
When the Qili Mountain Pond, which was "a first- or second-class rich and elegant in the red dust", was destroyed in the war of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Lingering Garden miraculously survived in the rubble and ashes and remained in the world for a long time.
When the Republic of China was established and the west wind was blowing eastward, many old-fashioned windows in the Lion Forest and the Humble Administrator's Garden were also replaced with Western-style glass windows, like a classical and elegant maid, fashionably wearing a cheongsam and perming her curly hair.
During the Republic of China, the Lion Forest was the residence of I.M. Pei's family, and many stained glass windows were installed at that time Visual China
When the all-out War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression broke out and the flames of the Lugou Bridge burned all over the motherland, Zhang Shanzi, a painter who lived in the Master of Nets Garden, awakened the unyielding fighting spirit of the nation to resist to the end with the roaring tiger in his pen.
In the vicissitudes of the dynasty, Suzhou gardens have accommodated many ups and downs. But what remains the same is the extreme delicacy engraved in the bones.
Source: WeChat public account "National Geographic Chinese Network"
Editor: Star City
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