Wang Shizhen's Yan Shan Garden essays: narrating a literati landscape

The practice of building gardens in China dates from at least the Han, and persisted throughout subsequent periods as a relatively minor aspect of the lives of members of the highest levels of the social and political elite. Representing gardens and other forms of humanly modeled nature became an element in the discursive flow of literati culture as well. In the Tang, for example, sojourns in gardens and parks owned by members of the imperial family became a popular theme for poets.1 In the Song, Luoyang became a famous venue for retired officials, many of whom built private gardens. Li Gefei's ‘Luoyang ming yuan ji’ (Record of the Celebrated Gardens of Luoyang) describes 19 of these, and provided an idealized model of the garden as the gentleman's retreat from the vicissitudes of public life.2 It was also during the Song that gardens began to be built in the Jiangnan region, especially during the Southern Song, when gardens were noted in Lin'an (Hangzhou), Wuxing, and the environs of Lake Tai.3