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Literary and Museum Newsletter , Museum of Nanjing, Issue No. 23, January 1976
I celebrate the Master-of-Fishnets Garden as the ultimate small garden of Suzhou, as one of the best gardens nationwide, and as a garden-making paragon in "prevailing over the many with the few."
The Master-of-Fishnets Garden at 11 Kuojietou Lane sprawls on the former site of the Hall of Ten Thousand Volumes built by Shi Zhengzhi (1119-1179) after he was dismissed as vice-minister of personnel of the Southern Song (1127-1279). During the Qianlong reign (1736-1796) of the Qing, Song Luru (1710-1779) purchased the property on which he built his own garden and named it after wangshi , meaning "master of fishing nets," which is analogical to fish and pronounced roughly the same as the lane's former name Wangsi Cove. After the garden fell into disrepair, it came under the possession of Qu Yuancun (1808-1876), who renamed it "Qu's Garden" after piling up rockeries, planting trees, and replacing old pavilions and houses with new ones according to his own plan. In 1795, the sixtieth year of the Qianlong reign, Qian Daxin (1728-1804) wrote an essay on the garden, 1 whose size has remained to this day. When Li Hongyi (1831-1885) took possession of the garden during the Tongzhi reign (1862-1874), he renamed it "Eastern Neighbor of Su Shunqin," 2 which was to be inherited by his son, Shaomei. 3 Da Gui (1860-?) had lived in it for some time. In the Republican years (1912-1949), the warlord Zhang Zuolin (1875-1928) bought the garden and made his mentor Zhang Xiluan (1843-1922) a gift of it. 4 Ye Gongchuo (1881-1968) 5 , and the two brothers Zhang Ze (1882-1940) and Zhang Yuan (1899-1983) had lived in this dwelling-garden as tenants. 6 Then He Yanong (1880-1946) 7 bought it and refurbished it in a small way. After the garden was taken over by the Municipal Bureau of Parks and Woods of Suzhou in autumn 1958, it was done over completely so that, "The legendary beauty Xishi puts on a new dress," in the words of Ye Gongchuo in his lyrical poem to the tune of "Effusing Aroma Court."
The dwelling part of this garden faces south, with a screen wall in front of it and an outer gate on its eastern and western sides respectively. A corridor behind the frontal gateway conducts to a sedan-chair hall, and an alleyway east of the hall conducts to another hall in the second row. Behind the sedan-chair hall stands the stately main hall, a five-bay structure consisting of a three-bay central room and two one-bay wing rooms, with an exquisitely engraved and thorough-carved brick arch atop its gateway. To the west is a studio whose portal enshrines a stone tablet inscribed with a record of the garden's history. Behind the sedan-chair hall stands the hall in the second row, a storied building of five bays whose wings are each fronted with a small yard of flowers and osmanthus trees which are at their sweet-scented best in autumn. A horizontal board hanging inside of the hall is inscribed with the name "Beauty-Garnering Loft" in the calligraphic handwriting of Yu Yue (1821-1907) 8 . Climbing upstairs and looking out westward, one sees the Tianping Mountain and Lingyan Mountain shimmering darkly before the windows. The back of the building is connected with the Five-Peak Study and the Gathering-in-Emptiness Chamber 9 . Going downstairs, one reaches the Verandah of a Twig Beyond Bamboos and gets a panoramic view of the garden.
Entering the garden by way of the sedan-chair hall's western end, the visitor finds himself under a lintel bearing the name, "Master-of-Fishnets' Tiny Court." A roofed walkway winds its way to a hall with glass and lattice windows on four sides, which, as the inscription on its horizontal board indicates, is none other than the Verandah of Osmanthus-Clustered Hillock, whose frontal boundary takes the form of a latticed wall, where the air is heady with the lingering aroma of osmanthus flowers growing in the peace and quiet of a small hill. A footpath to the east of the verandah brings the southern and northern parts of the garden together like a side alleyway. To the west of the verandah is the Lute-Playing Chamber and the Studio for Fostering Modesty and Amiability, where a roofed walkway turns this way and that dreamily along a wall. As the saying goes, "Tighten the reins before you let go of yourself, and hold your breath before you sing resonantly." This is why the scenery north of the Verandah of Osmanthus-Clustered Hillock is surrounded with a yellow stone wall known as "Cloudy Ridge." If one runs over the slope through the roofed walkway, he comes to the Pavilion of Moon Arriving and Breeze Coming, where a rock prepared for anglers projects into the air and a zigzagging painted bridge are silhouetted in a mirror-like pond, where tangible and intangible scenery mesh with the drifting clouds high up and the rippling waves down low to turn such a tiny space into a seemingly boundless landscape.
As spring water trickles through stone stairs, let me dig a pool to bring in the moon, so that lacquered columns can sway busily and pink lotus flowers open themselves upside down inside of the pool.
The beauty of this airy-fairy sight is captured exactly by this pavilion's name.
West of the Cloudy Ridge stands the Hat-Ribbon Washing Belvedere, which overlooks a belt of water at its foot while beckoning on the Verandah for Seeing Pines and Reading Paintings across the water. In front of the main hall south of the verandah, a bunch of ancient trees make an ideal prototype for traditional Chinese painting, with coiled branches clinging to rugged trunks and vine-like root tresses curling over moss-clad stones. By the side of the verandah, a corridor makes a specific turn to connect with the Verandah of a Twig Beyond Bamboos. The "Ringtossing-at-Ducks Corridor" to the east turns out to be a half-pavilion, which echoes the Pavilion of Moon Arriving and Breeze Coming west of the pond, and whose balustrade offers an ideal site for the fun of in-situ viewing. There, as one looks down at the pond, its water seems to be rippling infinitely and its waves huddle together at one moment and drift away at another to no one knows where—a make-belief illusion that is improbable without the ingenious disposition of the pond's inlets together with its bends and boulders jutting out of the water. A zigzagging bridge lies low enough to hug the water, and stepping stones are strewn about the pond in the tradition of Ming-dynasty bridge builders, a tradition that shows no intention to divide up the water surface while the pond looks like branching out into the distance. The stairs built into the embankment and the boulders projecting out of water give the impression as though those who step on them were floating on water, whereas all the pavilions, terraces, corridors and gazebos are made to face the pond so that each seems to have water at its own disposal. A garden need not be big, a pool of spring water need not be broad, but they cannot do without each other. As Du Fu (712-770) puts it,
A famed garden invariably snuggles up to green water.
The meaning of this line, however, is not limited to a famous garden. From it we can also infer the law governing the treatment of water in landscape gardening, and get the key to the rock-piling success of the Beauty-Encircled Mountain Abode. The rocks around the pond in the Master-of-Fishnet's Garden are not as ingeniously arranged as those in the said mountain abode, but they are rich and varied enough in postures and affable and fascinating enough to appeal to visitors thanks to the fact that they are patterned after the White Lotus Pond at the Tiger Hill in the same city.
The Late-Spring Peony Lodge in the western part of the garden used to be a nursery where herbaceous peony was its last crop in spring, hence its name. In this small court of three bays with a small room attached to its western side, bamboos, rocks, plums and plantains are faintly rouged by the sunshine that penetrates the windows, behind which they conceal themselves to evoke a delicate painting. Of all the gardens in Suzhou, the courtyard that contains this lodge is the best conceived. Small as it is, it expands itself almost instantly by opening up to vistas all but in existence—nowhere else is the idea of "thoroughness" in penetration better applied. An artificial mountain in front of the lodge faces a winding roofed walkway to the west. In the southwest corner there is the Emerald Containing Spring, whose placid and refreshing water comes from the large pond in the center of the garden, which echoes the philosophy, "Invaluable is water that has an origin." A pavilion sits on the spring with its nameboard "Cool Spring" hanging in it, and a peak-shaped rock standing south of it offers the opposite view to the lodge. The clearance is paved with pebbles and broken bricks and tiles in smooth and tidy patterns. Within the courtyard, the same principle of arranging a large pond in the center of the garden is applied, which calls for setting water and land in mutual contrast. The difference is that in the center of the garden stones are set in contrast with a vast body of water, while in this court, a small body of water is set in contrast with the rocks. This arrangement, in variance with the garden's general idea of setting constructions against artificial mountains, is reminiscent of a singer's clever use of a new tune to avoid parroting a hackneyed one.
The natural grace and refined elegance of the Master-of-Fishnets Garden is comparable with what is described in literary parlance. As Yan Jidao (1038-1110) 10 of the Song says in his Xiaoshan's Collection of Lyric Poems ,
Tasteful is every delicate word,
And refined is every plain word.
The garden has just a few buildings and a limited number of rockeries, yet it can put wind and moon at its beck and call to impact the visitor's mood. Its sublimity would have been impossible without its creator's original craftsmanship. 11 It shows why garden-making should be called "garden-structuring," for it is not just about civil engineering or horticulture. The term "imagined realm," coined by Wang Guowei (1877-1927) 12 in his Poetic Remarks on the Human World , is the primary goal for landscape gardening. It can be said that the Master-of-Fishnets Garden has by and large attained all that this term entails.