Jiangnan Gardens · BBET10009
Humble Administrator's Garden
A garden of three parts whose middle part is led by its pool.
In the middle part of the garden, water leads and Yuanxiang Hall faces the pool from the south.
The Humble Administrator's Garden was begun in 1509, the fourth year of the Ming Zhengde reign, by Wang Xianchen, a censor who had fallen out of favor at court and returned home; he enlarged the old site of the Yuan-dynasty Dahong Temple into a garden. At the start it had thirty-one scenes of halls, towers, pavilions and studios, and it now has three parts: east, middle and west. It then changed hands several times: the east part passed to Wang Xinyi in 1631 and was named the Garden of Returning to the Fields; early in the Qianlong reign the middle part was called the Fu Garden and the west part the Book Garden; it became a Taiping prince's residence when the Taiping army entered Suzhou in 1860; and after repair the middle and west parts opened in 1952. It was listed among the first national key sites in 1961 and, with several other gardens, on the World Heritage List in 1997, and it stands as an example of a Jiangnan garden.1,2
The garden has three parts. The east part is open and bright, and in the course of repair its pools were dug, its rocks piled and trees and flowers planted. The middle part is the chief scenic area of the garden and is led by water. The pool of the west part is bent at a right angle. The main building of the middle part, Yuanxiang Hall, is a hall open on all four sides that stands on the south bank of the pool, and a small pool, a rockery and bamboo lie to its south. The middle part is laid out around the pool, with pavilions, towers and halls built right at the water's edge. From the second half of 1959 the east part was largely built anew, with a gate, Furong Pavilion, Hanqing Pavilion and Shuxiang Hall among the new buildings, and the work was finished in September 1960.1,2