YANGZHOU GARDENS AND DWELLINGS

Social Science Front , Issue No. 3, 1978; first manuscript, August 1961; revised, November 1977

An old city with a hallowed tradition, Yangzhou of Jiangsu province was the richest place in its early years thanks to a succession of economic booms taking place on its land. The abundant economic and material resources thus accrued furnished favorable conditions for development in culture and art, and as a result, the city's gardens and dwellings acquired an inimitable style through a unique course of development.

The history of Yangzhou can be traced back to 486 BC, the thirty-fourth year of the reign of the King of Jing of Eastern Zhou (770-221 BC), when Fu Chai (?-473 BC), the last king of the state of Wu of the Spring and Autumn period (770-467 BC), built the city of Hancheng in what is present-day Yangzhou, and dug a rice-shipping canal that ran northeast to Lake Sheyang and northwest to the Huai River at Mokou. Hence the name of the canal, "Han Ditch." As Yangzhou occupied an area of strategic importance between the Yangtze and the Huai, it became a major political and military centre in southeast China toward the end of the Spring and Autumn period. Economically speaking, local fishery, salt-making, handicrafts and agriculture went a long way as Yangzhou gradually grew into a national distribution hub for grain, salt and iron. After the Sui-Tang period, it evolved into a trade and cultural centre for exchanges with the outside world. All this set the stage for the prosperity of Yangzhou.

By the Sui-Tang period Yangzhou had become a rich city of utmost importance to the nation. The reunification of south and north China after Yang Jian (541-604), or Emperor Wen (in reign 581-604) founded the Sui (581-618), offered good opportunities to tap the wealth of the Yangtze-Huai basin, and Yangzhou, centrally located in this area, was quick to hit the riches. When the second monarch of the Sui, Yang Guang (569-618) or Emperor Yang (in reign 569-618), came to town, he went on a binge of dissipation and debauchery while building imperial palaces and resorts in a big way. Yangzhou's prosperity peaked as a result, even though her wealth failed to grow substantially for one reason or another. The Grand Canal dug under Emperor Yang's reign turned the city into a pivotal link on this waterway that spanned south and north China and provided favorable conditions for economic development.

Advances achieved in architectural technology through exchanges between builders dispatched from north China by the imperial court and those from the Jiangnan area boosted the building industry in a big way in Yangzhou. Just as the Tang-dynasty poet Du Mu (803-852) ¹ writes in his poem "To the Chan Wisdom Temple of Yangzhou,"

Who knows when all's quiet on West Bamboo Road,

Yangzhou comes alive with notes of flute and ballad.

This line gives a glimpse at the glamour and prosperity of Yangzhou.

As early as the Southern and Northern dynasties, Xu Zhanzhi (410-453) ² of the Song (420-479) built the Wind-Bathing Pavilion, Moon-Watching Platform, Flute-Playing Terrace, and Lute-Playing Chamber at the foot of the Mountain-Level Hall. By the Zhenguan reign (627-649) of the Tang, Pei Chen's Cherry Garden was completed, offering fabulous sights with "multiple layers of lofts and pavilions with a refreshing and graceful flower culture," but it was outshined by the Hao's Garden before long. These gardens, alas, failed to survive war and turmoil during the last years of the Tang. New gardens emerged during the Song, including those attached to the prefect's yamen , the Aromatic Beauty Garden, Spring-in-Kettle Garden and Garden of Ten Thousand Flowers, whose views were based on waters and trees. When the Jurchen troops invaded south China, ³ Yangzhou sustained considerable destruction. As Jiang Kui (1154-1221) ⁴ says in his "Lyrical Poem to Yangzhou in Slow Tempo,"

After barbarian cavalrymen coveting the land in the south abandoned Yangzhou and crossed the Yangtze, the city wall and moat were reduced to shambles along with all the tall trees, and the local people abhorred the war more than anything else. When dusk fell, the dreary sound of bugles rose, reverberating around the deserted city.

The Grand Canal was silted up and no longer navigable during the Southern Song-Jin period (1127-1234), and waterway transportation gave way to offshore marine shipping by the early Yuan. The economy of Yangzhou went downhill as a result, which is why in Yuan history books only two or three gardens are recorded, including the Flat Wilderness Verandah and Cui Boheng's Garden. It was not until the early Ming that the Grand Canal was dredged and restored to become the major waterway between north and south China, and Yangzhou re-established itself as the salt distribution center for areas on both sides of the Huai. During the mid-Ming, Yangzhou came back into its own thanks to the emergence of capitalist economy in embryo, with the salt industry growing apace along with commerce and handicraft. The boom of Yangzhou reached its pinnacle during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the feudal ruling class indulged in extravagance and dissipation, the industrious and intelligent labouring people of Yangzhou created a unique school in garden-making and left a rich cultural heritage to posterity.

From the mid-Ming onward, merchants from Anhui flocked to Yangzhou alongside those from Jiangxi, Hunan, Hubei, and Guangdong provinces. They joined local people in running businesses, but the whopping profit they had made was not invested in reproduction. Instead, the lion's share of it was used partly to pay for a luxury lifestyle and partly for large-scale construction of gardens and mansions. Architects and constructors from Huizhou arrived on the heels of Anhui merchants, and blended their technical know-how into the Yangzhou style of architecture and garden-making. Local construction of buildings and gardens was augmented by artisans from nearby Xiangshan of Suzhou with construction materials brought in from various parts of the country through the area's convenient waterway shipping network. This gave rise to a host of landmark gardens, including the Plum Flower Ridge built by Prefect Wu Xiu during the Wanli reign (1573-1619) of the Ming, in which pavilions and terraces were built around rockeries.

The gardens owned by the four brothers surnamed Zheng ⁵ during the Ming-Qing transition—Yuansi's Five-"Mu" Garden, Yuanxun's Mountain-Water-Willow Shadows' Garden, Yuanhua's Propitious Trees Garden, and Xiaru's Leisure Garden—were extolled for their big sizes and distinct craftsmanship. The Mountain-Water-Willow Shadows' Garden, for one, was created by the renowned garden crafter Ji Cheng from Wujiang with the support of its owner, Zheng Yuanxun, who knew a smattering of the craft of gardens under the influence of local garden-makers. The literati-officials in those years vested their sentiments in mountains and rivers, and the artisans they employed stacked up rocks and dug ponds to conjure up limitless spectacles in limited spaces on the level ground of Yangzhou. Every fabulous garden thus made looked as if they were wrought through the divine hand of Mother Nature. Although these gardens were badly destroyed after Yangzhou was sacked by Manchu conquerors in 1645 and after, and only a fragmental impression of their architectural achievements can be gained from the few Phoebe nanmu halls that had survived the conquest, their legacies still furnished technical groundwork for large-scale construction of landscape gardens during the Qianlong reign (1736-1796) of the Qing.

In the early years of the Qing, local aristocrats came up with what was known as "Eight Famous Yangzhou Gardens": the Garden of Librarian Wang (in the Editorial Service of the Heir Apparent), the Bian's Garden, the Yuan's Garden, the He's Garden, the Spring Outing Garden, the Couth Garden, the Garden of Censor Zheng, and the Slim Bamboo Garden. During the Qianlong reign, the rulers went on a construction binge in which large numbers of pavilions, terraces, lofts and gardens were built in Yangzhou to satisfy the emperor's indulgence in comfort and pleasure on his repeated inspection tours of the south. ⁶ To curry favor with the imperial family, local gentries and merchants joined in the garden-making rush and built a lot of gardens. As a result, the area from the Slender West Lake to the Mountain-Level Hall ⁷ was clustered with the world-famous "Twenty-Four Sights" where

On both dykes flowers and willow cling to water surface;

Stretching all the way to hills are many a hall and terrace.

This scenery prompts Li Dou (1749-1817) to quote Liu Daguan (1753-1834) ⁸ as saying in his Record of the Painted Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou (Volume Six),

Hangzhou puts its name on the map with its lakes and mountains, and Suzhou does so with its markets and shops, whereas Yangzhou excels with its gardens. The three cities face each other like the legs of a tripod—there is no telling which city is the best.

This statement, indeed, hits the nail on the head. Availing themselves of the Qing emperors' repeated inspection tours of the south, the rich and powerful in Yangzhou lined their pockets with the wealth the populace had created with blood and sweat under the pretence of collecting "tributes" to the emperors. Local merchants stepped up ripping off their customers by hiking salt prices and drawing commissions from the so-called "wear and tear" cost. The emperors profited from manipulating the interest rate on loans granted to these merchants and from deducting commissions from salt sales in the name of the state treasury. As salt prices skyrocketed, local people found it increasingly hard to afford table salt as a daily necessity. Feudal bureaucratic merchants wilfully squandered the money they had embezzled and scrambled to build large gardens and sumptuous mansions for themselves. The ulterior motives and high-handed actions, with which the feudal rulers and local tyrants, evil gentry and rich merchants dealt with the gardens created by the labouring people, were natural reasons why these gardens could not be made to last. Xie Rongsheng (?-1790) ⁹ says of the upsurge in garden construction during this period in his preface to The Record of the Painted Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou ,

To build ranges, more rockeries are added,

So each family is in an emerald city dwelled;

To build canals, stagnant water is dredged,

All lofts and belvederes are in fog enveloped.

Garden-making became the order of the day wherever construction went apace. Apart from the gardens on the Slender West Lake, the other parts of Yangzhou were also studded with famous gardens. These included the Imperial Garden in the emperor's temporary palace near the Heavenly Peace Temple, the eastern and western gardens of the Dharma Purity Temple, the Literati's Embosoming Studio of the Salt Distribution Commission, the Kerria Garden of the Hunan Fellow Provincials' Guild, as well as the Nine Peaks Garden, the Qiao's East Garden, the Qin's Imagined Garden and the Lesser Exquisite Mountain Abode, not to mention so many ancestral shrines, academies, assembly halls, restaurants, brothels, and bathhouses. In these gardens, rockeries were built, water was channelled in, and flowers and bamboos were planted. Spotty ornamentation of this kind in courtyards seemed to have become an indispensible part of garden construction. As the Qing empire began to go downhill after the Qianlong reign, feudalism was falling apart after ruling the nation for two thousand years, and the succeeding emperors dared not go on inspection tours down south any more. Large-scale confrontations were fermenting as class and ethnic conflicts sharpened, Western powers increased their pressure on the empire, and the feudal society was shaken to the core. By Emperor Jiaqing's reign (1796-1821), monopoly salt sales in Yangzhou had been dwindling with each passing day. The signing of the Sino-British Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 in the aftermath of the Opium War (1840-1842) and the Treaty of the Bogue on July 3, 1843 that forced China to open Shanghai, Ningbo, Xiamen, Fuzhou and Guangzhou as new trade ports, plus the completion of the Tianjin-Pukou Railway in 1908 and the booming marine shipping—all these factors added up to strip Yangzhou of its importance to national economy and transportation.

In his "Postscript to The Record of the Painted Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou " in 1834, or the fourteenth year of the Daoguang reign, and in his "Second Postscript" to the same book five years later, the writer and thinker Ruan Yuan (1764-1849) ¹⁰ concludes after recounting every sign he sees of an empire on its last legs,

No guest can bear a loft or terrace deserted;

No wilting or fallen tree can stand faggoting.

These words, written nineteen years before Yangzhou was sacked in the Heavenly Kingdom Uprising in 1853, give the lie to the many records that unanimously blame the uprising army as the culprit for the destruction of the gardens around the Slender West Lake. After the emperors Xianfeng (in reign 1851-1862) and Tongzhi (in reign 1862-1874), Yangzhou enjoyed a short spurt of prosperity "staged" by local aristocrats and rich merchants who rose to power by quelling the Heavenly Kingdom Uprising in an attempt to prop up the delaying Qing empire, and then the city collapsed and local gardens were caught in the throes of massive devastation. By the Republican years (1912-1949), the national economy had been on the ropes after going through the rules of warlords and the Kuomintang reactionaries, and Japanese occupation and their puppet regime, and even more gardens and mansions in Yangzhou were reduced to shambles. Local salt merchants, having lost their profiteering opportunities with the abolition of monopoly salt coupons and eaten up their resources, were forced to tear down their homes and artificial mountains and sell the building materials and rocks thus acquired. Gardens and big mansions in the city fell into desolation. ¹¹

Sandwiched between south and north China, Yangzhou has fostered an original style in architecture, so much so that no study of traditional Chinese architecture would be complete without it. The architecture of Yangzhou is something of a compromise between the royal buildings in the north and what is native to the Jiangnan area, a compromise that had a lot to do with the south China inspection tours of the Qing emperors, the intermingling of merchants from across the country, and the convenient local road and waterway transportation, but the key lies in technical exchanges between artisans from various quarters. Qian Yong says in A Collection of Anecdotes in the Lü Garden (Volume Twelve),

It is certain that Yangzhou leads the country in the craft of house construction. There, like compositions written in different styles, no two buildings look alike. Even a building with a few rooms must have high and wide doors and windows, and the interiors must be sensibly convoluted.… Every hall or main room should be tidy and exude an aura that rivals a ranking official's mansion. The study and the backroom should be kept apart the way the pavilions in a garden are spaced, but neither one can do without the other. Only thus can a building be deemed a masterpiece.

Interior decoration in Yangzhou's buildings is no less ornate. According to the same book quoted above,

The Zhou's Principles [for interior decoration] are peculiarly Yangzhou's own. They were laid down by a man surnamed Zhou toward the end of the Ming. Hence the term.

The Zhou's Principles were also followed in the interior décor of major buildings in the Garden of Perfect Splendor in Beijing. ¹² Among the famous specialists in palace interior decoration were Gu Licheng and Cheng Lie, while Yao Weichi, Shi Songqiao, Wen Qi, Xu Lü'an, Huang Sheng, and Huang Lüxian's brothers Lühao and Lü'ang were also well accomplished in architecture and furnishing. According to The Record of the Painted Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou (Volume Two),

Yangzhou makes a name for herself with famed gardens; her gardens put their names on the map with stacked rockwork.

There was no lack of well-known artificial mountain builders active in Yangzhou as well. During the Ming-Qing period there were Ji Cheng (1582- c . 1642), who built the artificial mountain for the Mountain-Water-Willow Shadows' Garden; Shitao (1642- c . 1707) ¹³ , who crafted the Garden of Ten Thousand Rocks and the Small-Rock Mountain Abode; Zhang Lian (1587-1673), who constructed the mountain for the White Sand, Emerald Bamboos and Riverside Village; Qiu Haoshi (1723-1795), who built the Xuan Stone Mountain at the Hall of Mental Serenity; Taoist Priest Dong (1736-1795) ¹⁴ who piled up the Nine-Lion Mountain; Ge Yuliang (1764-1830), who built the Qin's Lesser Winding Gully; as well as Wang Tianyu ¹⁵ and Zhang Guotai. Among the latecomers was Yu Jizhi (1903-1961) ¹⁶ , who built artificial mountains for the Emerald Garden, the Mind Cheering Hut, the Gourd Hut, Li Weiru's Garden ¹⁷ and the Spring Outing Garden. Some of them were natives, and some came from other parts of the country. These rockery virtuosos often huddled together to compare notes for the ways and means to improve the craft of artificial mountains. With wisdom and diligence they have bequeathed a wealth of artistic mountains on posterity.

Apart from general histories and prefecture or county gazetteers, records on Yangzhou gardens and buildings are also found in such books as Grand Occasions of Southern Inspection Tours , Scenic Sites of the Jiangnan Area , Illustrated Interpretations of Temporary Royal Palaces , and An Illustrated Manual on Scenic Gardens and Pavilions , Cheng Mengxing's Records of the Celebrated Gardens of Yangzhou and A Compact Record of the Mountain-Level Hall , Wang Yinggeng's Records of the Mountain-Level Hall , Zhao Zhibi's An Illustrated Record of the Mountain-Level Hall , and Li Dou's Record of the Painted Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou, all of which were written during the Qianlong reign of the Qing. This list is followed by such later works as Ruan Heng's An Illustrated Record of Scenic Spots in Guangling , and Qian Yong's A Collection of Anecdotes in the Lü Garden , and Luo Zaitian's A Painting of Scenic Spots in Yangzhou during the Daoguang reign. More recent works include Wang Zhenshi's Records of Scenic Fascinations of Yangzhou and Dong Yushu's Nostalgic Memories of a City Deserted . Of all these works, The Record of the Painted Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou offers the most elaborate and truthful records, whose seventeenth volume, "Construction Specifications," draws on the Construction Regulations of the Ministry of Works of the Great Qing and the Engineering Specifications of the Garden of Perfect Splendor , and many of its accounts on construction work are backed up with extensive collations and allusions, something books produced prior to it failed to do.

Yangzhou sits opposite Zhenjiang from the northern bank of the Yangtze, with the Shugang Hillock to the north, the Dirt-Sweeping Mountain (known originally as Dogs-in-Heat Mountain) to the west, and the Grand Canal to the east. Its terrain is rather flat, with its northwest slightly higher than its southeast. Its soil falls in two categories: calcium-rich clay in the hilly area in the northwest, and sandy soil in the alluvial plain in the southeast, with a considerable part of its land lying under a layer of rubble. As to the climate, the city is in a north temperate belt in gradual transition to a subtropical zone, with temperatures averaging 30 degrees Celsius in summer and 1-2 degrees Celsius in winter. The wind from the sea in close proximity keeps the city cool in summer and a little cold in winter. Soil frozen depth stands at 10-15 centimeters, and annual precipitation above 1000 millimeters. As Yangzhou is situated in a seasonal monsoon region, its wind is mostly easterly in summer and northeasterly in winter, but the northeasterly is the dominant wind, and it is affected to a certain degree by typhoons.

With flat terrain, mild climate, ample rainfalls and fine soil quality, Yangzhou's natural environment is friendly to labour, production and everyday life. Its central location in a transportation network, well-developed commerce, and long years of prosperity combine to boost the local building industry. However, given its natural conditions, Yangzhou lacks such building materials as timber and stone and relies heavily on imports. Imported precious building materials are found in the former residences and gardens of aristocrats and rich merchants, including Phoebe nanmu , red sandalwood, mahogany, rosewood, gingko, marble, and exotic stones shipped in from Gaozi and Lake Tai in Jiangsu province, and from Lingbi and Xuancheng counties in Anhui province.

Yangzhou's gardens and former mansions were concentrated in city proper, whereas its largest buildings were mostly in the New City. In the past, the residents of the Old City were literati-officials and ordinary citizens, whereas those living in the New City were mostly salt merchants. Prior to the mid-Qing, most salt merchants lived in gardens in the area around Eastern Pass Street, including the Lesser Exquisite Mountain Abode, the Garden of Longevity Fungus or the predecessor of the Geyuan's Garden, the Belvedere of Hundred-Feet Phoenix Tree, the Garden Scraped Together and the Garden of Matchless Talent built at a later time. Adjacent to them were later buildings such as the Wang's Small Garden on Taoist Earth Official's Domain Lane and the Cangzhou Estate on Easterly Violet Rays Lane. And the cluster spread on, until it reached Garden Lane and Down the South River Street, such as the Sound-of-Autumn Mansion, the Loft for Reading with the Moon, the Small-Rock Mountain Abode, the Kerria Garden, the Small Meandering Valley, and the Whistling Scholar's Mountain Abode ¹⁸ . These gardens and mansions were surrounded with tall walls, and looked similar to those in the other cities of the Jiangnan area. The buildings in the Old City, whose simplicity is typical of the architecture style of northern Jiangsu, were mostly small and low, but its lanes and alleys were aligned in good order, a fact that is inseparable from the economic conditions of the local dwellers. Better residential quarters in the city are always found where road and waterway conditions are convenient or close to the Salt Shipping Administration and the shopping center.

In urban Yangzhou, thirty classical gardens of varying sizes remain relatively intact today, as exemplified by the Small-Rock Mountain Abode, the Geyuan's Garden, the Whistling Scholar's Mountain Abode, the Small Meandering Valley, the Garden of Matchless Talent, the My Half-"Mu" Garden, the Mind Cheering Hut and Li Weiru's Garden. These gardens are outnumbered by well-preserved mansions in different architectural styles, including those once in the possession of Lu Shaoxu (1843-1905) ¹⁹ , Wang Boping ( fl . 19th century), Zhao Haishan ( fl . 19th century) and Wei Cigeng ( fl . 19th century) ²⁰ .

In most cases, Yangzhou mansions are so judiciously put together with gardens that they look at once detached and attached, yet neither one can stand on its own without the other.

·Gardens

The Small-Rock Mountain Abode is found in the former mansion of He Weijian (1835-1908) ²¹ . Known also as "Twin Pagoda Trees Garden," it was Wu Jialong's villa before Wu Huimo ²² took over. The artificial mountain that remains of it was said to be wrought by Shitao, and, therefore, is celebrated as the only extant rockwork he bequeathed on humanity. The mountain faces south, and, judging from its plane, it is a wall-leaning rock formation with its width exceeding its height. Judging from its dynamic appearance, its main peak should have stood at its western end, its steep and verdant form rising up in the wind, nodding its fantastic head at the visitor while looking down upon a pond at its foot. As the visitor mounts the stone stairway by way of a bridge fashioned out of a single stone slab, he sees a wintersweet with well-spaced boughs and lush leaves while a narrow path threads its way up the cliff and terminates at the top.

Below the mountain there are two square rooms built of bricks, which is why the entire rockwork is called "Small-Rock Mountain Abode." As the mountain winds its way eastward, it leads to a deep and quiet cave, with all the component rocks integrated into a whole as if by heaven's divine hand. Unfortunately, the part of the mountain west of the cave has crumbled; gone, too, are the buildings atop it, making it impossible to see the original rock formation in its entirety. Judging from its layout, it follows by and large the Ming-dynasty tradition of artificial mountains. Its main peak and stone cave are accentuated so that what is primary is visibly told apart from what is secondary. Small though the space is, the layout appears natural, with density and spacing sensitively handled, and the rugged shapes of the component rocks give apt expression to the name of the work, "Small-Rock Mountain Abode."

The Yangzhou style of rockwork is marked for its clever use of small rocks. As Shitao had built an artificial mountain in the Garden of Ten Thousand Rocks, I surmise he must have done it by piecing and imbedding that many small stones with masterful expertise. Before he set about building the mountain in the Small-Rock Mountain Abode, he must have carefully picked the stones he wanted, with due attention to size as well as their horizontal and vertical veins and wrinkles. Only then did he put his raw materials together to come up with a lifelike mountain by applying the theory he had summarized in his book, Monk Balsam Pear on Painting ,

Only when texturing brushwork tallies with a peak being portrayed in a painting can the veins and wrinkles look like born of the peak.

Only in this way can one create a work in which, according to Shitao's colophon on "A Small Landscape Painting by Monk Balsam Pear,"

A single peak overlooks a sweeping stretch of ridges replete with ruptured chasms, with the vista shifting at every wink of the eye and appearing at once connected and disconnected.

For this reason, this rock formation with lofty peak and deep cave shows no trace of axing and chiselling. Instead, it is characterized by consistent texturing, compact layout and design, and methodical contrast between intangibles and tangibles. As A Collection of Anecdotes in the Lü Garden (Volume Twenty) puts it,

At Garden Lane in the New City of Yangzhou there is the Small-Rock Mountain Abode. At the back of its two halls water converges in a square pool on which a mountain built of Lake Tai stones stand fifty to sixty feet tall and looks very imposing and steep. Legend has it that it was Monk Shitao's work. The property is the former residence of a man surnamed Wu, which later came into the possession of a female matchmaker, who converted it into a noodle eatery that doubled as an opera house. For this purpose she remodelled the large sitting room and converted it into a theater at the Qianmen neighborhood of the capital city, but it looks unbearably vulgar.

The address mentioned in this quotation tallies with what is recorded in local gazetteers, but today, only a three-framed Phoebe nanmu hall remains of the aforementioned double halls. It should have been built during the Qianlong reign of the Qing. A "through house" with corridors on its four sides, large and tall enough for horses to trot through, still stands by the artificial mountain. The pool has long been levelled, but by tracing its Lake Tai stone-lined embankment, we can figure out what the water surface looked like in old days.

The Lake Tai stones selected to pile up the artificial mountain accord with what is described in historical accounts, and so does the height of the mountain peak that rises over the surrounding wall, even though its peak has collapsed. As to the cleverness with which the mountain was built, with a singular peak leaning against the clouds while casting its reflections down low in the transparent pond at its foot, it really deserves its reputation of being "fantastically steep," but most distinctive of all are its stone wall, stone stairway, and stone cave. Shitao's rockery construction expertise has a tremendous influence on posterity, and Ge Yuliang, a rockery master active during the reigns of Jiaqing and Daoguang after Qianlong, was counted among the finest successors to Shitao's craft. A Collection of Anecdotes in the Lü Garden (Volume Twelve) has this to say:

….If rocks large and small are hooked and connected in the same way as a chain bridge is built, [the rockery] can last for a thousand years. Only when the rockery is as sturdy and looks as natural as a real mountain or cave can the craftsman be deemed capable.

The artificial mountains in the Beauty-Encircled Mountain Abode of Suzhou, the Homecoming Swallow Garden of Changshu, and the Lesser Winding Gully in the Qin's Imagined Garden of Yangzhou were among the masterpieces of Ge Yuliang. The stone-hooked rock formations remain intact in the first two gardens.

Built by Huang Yingtai (1770-1838) ²³ , chief administrator of salt commerce of Huainan and Huaibei during the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns, the Geyuan's Garden with ten thousand bamboos planted in it at Eastern Pass Street derives its name from the owner's style name. According to Liu Fenggao's (1760-1830) "Notes on the Geyuan's Garden," the garden is built on the former site of the Garden of Longevity Fungus, whose original rockwork is said to have been built by Shitao, but there is no evidence to back it up. It is attributed to Shitao probably because the artificial mountain built of yellow stones in the garden resembles Mount Huangshan in Anhui, whose scenery Shitao was fond of portraying in his paintings. The original Geyuan's Garden was a bit larger than it is now. After the estate was renovated, only the central and eastern columns of residences on the premises are in existence, and both the front gate and the portico were destroyed. Only the brick carvings on the screen wall have kept its original exquisite looks. Each column of the residence consists of three rows of houses in interconnected courtyards. The two piedroits in the outer room of the hall on the central column were torn down so that the hall can double as an opera chamber. The hall in every row features a wing room and a tiny yard that contains parterres in different shapes to enhance the serenity of bamboos' shades and the aroma of flowers. The garden sits behind the residence, and entrance to it is by a fire lane beside the dwellings. The thick foliage of an old wisteria in it tosses rich shadows onto the ground, which the visitor finds mind-soothing and eye-pleasing upon stepping into the garden.

Take a left turn down the road, and one reaches a roofed two-storied walkway, with a parterre on either side planted with slender bamboos interspaced by stalagmites of different heights known in Chinese as "stone bamboo shoots," so that real bamboo couple with sham bamboo shoots to symbolize mountain wood in vernal sunshine. A moon gate opens into the wall behind the bamboos with the name "Geyuan's Garden" inscribed above it. Behind the gate stands the Osmanthus Hall, with osmanthus trees straggling in front of it and a pond behind it. In the north a seven-room loft, rising along a wall which connects artificial mountains with the walkway, is reposed in the peace and quiet of trees and flowers. The loft's top floor commands a panoramic view of the garden. To the west of the pond there used to be two painted land boats nicknamed "A Couple of Loving Birds," and standing opposite them is a hexagonal pavilion whose form is reflected in clear water to evoke a picture-perfect scene.

An artificial mountain built of Lake Tai stones sits to the west of the loft. Known as "Autumn Cloud," it is nestled in the shades of shapely trees, including a pine tree whose thick leaves take the form of an overhead canopy. At the mountain's foot, a stream empties itself into a cave down low. On the other end of a zigzagging bridge stands an unfathomably spacious and intricately dynamic cave built of Lake Tai stones of unpredictable shapes and featuring an outstretching ceiling; the greyish green color of the stones, coupled with the water flowing into its depth, makes the cave feel a lot cooler in summer. It is said that in the former days there were twelve caves on the spot.

The artificial mountain faces the sun squarely, and its component Lake Tai stones are studded with varied surfaces. The unpredictable shadows cast by sun, wind and rain onto these surfaces make the mountain look exceptionally bewitching in summer. Hence the name, "Summer Mountain." The space south of it is empty and wild today, but in its former days, it was a sea of bamboos whose rippling green waves were echoed by a susurrating stream that surrounds it. A stairway in the Lake Tai mountain leads to its top, where the visitor turns east to reach a giant yellow stone mountain before he goes past the seven-room loft and the sutra library through the roofed walkway.

The artificial mountain faces west. When its yellow stones are swathed in rosy sunset glow, its perpendicular cliffs shine forth in striking hues. The mountain rises up to a height of several dozen feet. High and steep in an image evocative of an autumn mountain painting, it makes an ideal place for mountain climbers in that season. Its designer makes this autumn mountain stand out distinctively the way he does the vernal and summer mountains by giving full scope to the component rocks' varying positions, directions and forms. The stoic contours of some ancient cypresses growing out of stone chasms serve to modulate the mountain's momentum, and their green leaves and gnarled boughs are set in contrast with the ochre rocks. Such deployment of cypresses as foils to enhance the depth of an autumn scenery, just like using bamboos to accentuate the spring view and pines to spruce up the summer sight, must have been intently hammered out.

The other arrangements, including building a stone stairway inside the cave, letting yellow stones hang down from its roof in the manner of an overhanging stalactite, and allowing skylight to penetrate holes in the rocks, are designed to catch the observer by surprise with the heightened effects of piled-up yellow stones and a three-dimensional trail system. The ingenuity of the designer is also manifest in inventions unseen in other gardens, such as building tiny yards, stone bridges and stone chambers into the artificial mountain. The pavilion standing atop the mountain not only puts all the other mountains at the foot of the spectator, but also incorporates into this garden a section of the city wall lined with green willows, the Slender West Lake, the Mountain-Level Hall, and the Avalokitesvara Mountain in the north—the clever garden-making craft known as view borrowing is obviously at work.

A loft on the southern slope provides access for those who want to climb up and down the mountain. Next to the loft is a hall that features a traditional roof with sloping eaves on both sides and gables sitting astride two opposite walls; a horizontal board hanging inside of the hall is inscribed with its name, "Wind Infiltratable and Moonlight Permeable" in the calligraphic handwriting of Yao Zhengyong (1811-?) ²⁴ . In front of the hall stands an artificial mountain of white quartz sandstones from Xuancheng, Anhui province; this is where dwellers sat around a fire in winter to enjoy fallen snow. The mountain is found at the foot of the southern wall to resemble snow yet to thaw—an arrangement which would have been impossible if the mountain were built to face south, for in this way the sandstone would glisten against the sun. This problem ought to be avoided when piling up white stones into artificial mountains. The vernal scenery on the other side of the wall can be borrowed into the courtyard through holes in the eastern wall to allude to the return of springtime to the world. A two-storied walkway atop the mountain that conducted and into the garden is nowhere to be seen today.

The Geyuan's Garden is famous for its exquisite craft of artificial mountains. The builder outwitted all his Yangzhou counterparts by applying different kinds of stones to make his mountains look different from each other. His brainchild, known as Four-Season Mountains, thus became one of a kind among all Chinese gardens. The same conception was applied to the Garden of Eight Stanzas at Greater Prestige Lane, but the artificial mountains thus built did not have obvious peaks. The Four-Season Mountains of the Geyuan's Garden seem to have summarized a renowned painter's conception that, in Guo Xi's ( c . 1000- c . 1080) ²⁵ words in The Lofty and Sublime Messages of Forests and Streams,

The spring mountain should be faintly rouged and smile demurely; the summer mountain should be so drenched in emerald as to drip with it; the autumn mountain should be bright and clean like a lady dressed up; the winter mountain should stay so pale and lethargic as to seem asleep.

The Four-Season Mountains stand out among all the gardens in Yangzhou because it also follows the principle that, as Dai Xi (1801-1860) ²⁶ puts it in his Colophons on Paintings of the Studio of Hard Practice ,

Spring mountains can be toured, summer mountains enjoyed, autumn mountains climbed, and winter mountains dwelled.

The Whistling Scholar's Mountain Abode at Garden Lane is known as the "Ho Family Garden." Built in 1883 by He Weijian, a circuit intendant under the Guangxu reign, and believed to be Yangzhou's last sizeable garden dating back to the Qing, it can be entered from the family's residence. Another door is opened for guests in the back of the garden at Diaos' Lane. The dwellings sport a Western style save for a hall built of Phoebe nanmu . Surrounded with a canopied two-floor walkway, the multi-storied buildings are laid out in horizontal rows while the halls are lined up in vertical columns—the plane is, as a whole, traditional Chinese despite the buildings' Western style. The brick-framed latticed windows in the wall of the last row of the residence offer a glimpse at a corner of the garden. To the north of the large pond in the center of the garden sits a sevenspan hall whose three central spans stick out slightly and two wings extend sideways with upturned eaves. As the entire building looks like a butterfly on the wing, locals call it "Butterfly Hall." Both ends of the hall are attached to the double-floor walkway that meanders its way around the garden, making those walking in it feel like being spirited away for a flight to the blue sky.

The same walkway also serves to keep the garden's central and eastern parts apart, so that the garden looks more spacious and airy and people can look through its latticed windows to see vistas on both sides. Here the Chinese landscaping technique of space segmentation designed to extend the view is at work in a spontaneous, yet very effective manner. A square pavilion surrounded by water stands in the east of the pond. As this is where people sit to cool themselves and compare notes on the vocal music of Kunqu Opera, the echoes from the water come handy to enhance acoustic effects. The encircling walkway is used to accommodate the audience. In the past, females could only sit behind a translucent curtain in the section of the double-floored walkway closer to the residence to watch what was performed in the pavilion through assorted hollowed windows in the wall. This technique of building a waterside deck to improve acoustics is still feasible today, but the practice of watching performances through a curtain behind windows should absolutely be abandoned. However, latticed windows remain an effective means to let in or out the views and increase the depth and variety of vista inside a garden, so that, as the saying goes,

Scenes and sights can hardly be locked up in the presence of a small open window.

The southwest corner of the pond is occupied by an artificial mountain, behind which is hidden the West Verandah, with a peony terrace to the south. The whole terrain undulates naturally in tune with the contours of the artificial mountain. Such an arrangement ought to be promoted in new gardens, for it is easily done, endearing to people, and free from pretentious artifice. A Lake Tai stone stairway conducts to a mystic-looking cave and a perpendicular mountain; though built of different kinds of stones, the stairway and the mountain can still twist and turn in delightful ways and be mixed and interwoven into an integral whole. There is something profound about the water-curtained cave at the eastern foot of the mountain, but the way the cave's other end connects with a pillar leaves something to be desired, and I would choose to regard it as an oversight on the part of its designer. The three-span loft south of the artificial mountain fronted with a craggy peak can be mounted by a trail that joins the double-floored walkway in the east to the residential part of the estate.

The double-floored walkway is a multiple construction whose roofs go up and down in line with the building's changing height, and some sections of it are segmented into double lanes. The estate is divided into central and eastern parts as a result. The large latticed windows in the walls are constructed by fitting finely ground bricks snugly together to form patterns at once succinct and tasteful. East of the walkway and opposite the three-span verandah, a hall with windows on four sides sits in a court where a green parasol tree leans against a rockery and blocks the sun with its thick leaves. The ground at the foot of the hall's stairway is paved with a mixture of cobbles and broken bricks and tiles in patterns that are becoming to the brick railings and benches in front of the hall, an unmatched combination that, like the aforementioned hollowed-out windows, is an unrivalled objet d'art exuding rustic native charms.

Behind the hall an artificial mountain leans upon a whitewashed wall without the least trace of bluntness in both its surface and its stone stairway. Small though it is, this rock formation is self-contained in good taste, with a tiny pavilion sitting at its crest and snuggling up to the wall under trees' green boughs. When the setting sun bathes the scene in its twilight, the entire stone stairway is covered with broken shadows, conjuring up a picture that teeters between real and surreal, an effect that belongs only to a scenery set against a white-washed wall in a traditional Chinese garden. The space is small, but the view seems ever changing—an arrangement that is indeed workable. The stone stairway northwest of the artificial mountain leads to a half-deck on the double-floored walkway. This half-deck, like the old one at this walkway's western end, is where the rise and fall of the moon are marvelled at. As to the disposition of vegetation, sweet-scented osmanthus trees are planted in the mountain in front of the hall, arboreous and herbaceous peonies in parterres, lacebark pines at the mountain's foot, parasol trees in front of the stairway, plantains at the corners, and all of them are arranged in groves that flourish in utmost beauty and color in spring, cast thick cooling shades in summer, hit the nostrils with heady fragrance in autumn, and remain green in winter. All these arrangements have rules to go by, and can be adapted to the nature of the plants and local conditions.

The garden in question is known for its extensive openness and masculine robustness. Waters and rocks are employed to complement buildings and set rockeries' color and water's light in fabulous contrast with majestic lofts, high belvederes, and the double-floored walkway. Buildings, however, are always kept in the limelight, which are now linked, now segmented by the canopied double-floored walkway and the artificial mountains—the arteries and veins are always there to bring about a threedimensional communication network and a garden enjoyable at multiple layers. The scenery is spread out around a pond of water. Walls with latticed windows present a constant stream of views, with lofts, terraces, flowers and trees shimmering within their frameworks. As this garden was built relatively more recently, its interior decoration abounds in new materials and patterns, with an additional gate erected to greet guests. Its layout is more spacious and smooth than those built in the past, which enables visitors to shift gradually from in-situ viewing to in-motion viewing. Its paths are labyrinthine at one place and straightforward at another, its sceneries now widely open, now sequestered in mystic solitude, and all these arrangements are imbued with the salient features of the Chinese garden as well as innovations in the craft of landscape gardening.

The Small Meandering Valley at Big Tree Lane. Zhou Fu (1837-1921) ²⁷ , who was appointed viceroy of present-day Jiangsu, Anhui and Jiangxi provinces in 1904, the thirtieth year of the Guangxu reign (1875-1908) of the Qing, and became viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi in 1906, rebuilt the garden on an estate he bought from Xu Naiguang (1859-1922) ²⁸ in 1897. Refurbished in the early Republican years (1912-1949), the garden, situated in the eastern part of the estate, has its name "Small Meandering Valley" engraved above a moon gate by the side of its main hall. Judging from its brushwork style, the inscription seems to be in the handwriting of Chen Hongshou (1768-1822) ²⁹ , one of the eight founding fathers of the Xiling Seal Engravers Society at the West Lake, Hangzhou. Its three-bay parlor facing an artificial mountain sports a façade in the shape of a carpenter's square. When the visitor finds his way to the back of this parlor, a pond brimming with clear water flashes into his eyes, and his vista brightens and opens up all of a sudden. A belvedere sitting astride the stream beside the parlor is attached to a meandering walkway, a combination that is in striking contrast with the rockeries and the ambiguous form of a partitioning tracery-topped wall on the other side of the pond. Such contrast between buildings and scenery is common to the Chinese gardens. In front of the walkway sits a zigzagging bridge that conducts to a mystic cave on the opposite bank of the pond. The cave is so spacious that a chess table is put in it, with natural light penetrating the apertures in the cave's ceiling.

A door is created in front of the water, where one can take a flight of stone stairs to reach the pond. Stepping stones planted in the pond to the left of the cave in lieu of a bridge combine with a mountain trail to provide access to the parlor in the rear. A stone stairway is available in front of this parlor for those who want to climb up the artificial mountain. This is where a nice entrance is provided to the valley, as an inscription in the rock says, "The water flows therefrom to where the clouds are." The mountain cave is wide open, yet it has no lack of twists and turns—a fine example of cave construction indeed. Leaving the cave through an exit to the right, one enters a tiny yard where a meandering corridor runs directly to the Wind-Bathing Pavilion atop the mountain, which provides a vintage point to gaze at the views of the eastern and western parts of the garden. The eastern part is in ruins, but is now under restoration. Entrance to it is by a peach-shaped door whose lintel is inscribed with two Chinese characters that stand for "Clustered Verdure." The hall in the shape of a carpenter's square to the north of the pond has been rebuilt with an amended plan. The lofty but rugged shape of the artificial mountain there earns itself the name "Mountain of Nine-Lion Picture." Over nine meters in height, it was damaged slightly during a refurbishment in the early Republican years, but can still be countered among the best in Yangzhou. Rockwork, the pond and buildings are handled in a lump, and striking contrasts are achieved on an otherwise cramped piece of land between buildings and rockeries, between rocks and white-washed walls, between rockwork and the pond, between frontal courtyards and posterior garden, between mystic depth and extrovert openness, and between high-rising and low-lying sceneries, turning the whole garden into a veritable fairyland.

Thanks to flexible segmentation by way of tracery walls, the foothill, the wall-leaning mountain, stepping stones and the ravine's inlet are aptly positioned, so that the steep cliff appears like a body of three-dimensional verdure, its rugged peak overlooks the stream, with water and rock in perpetual harmony, and all of them are combined to become an integral whole—a garden-making feat accomplished through the artistic approach of "using the few to triumph over the many." Though there are no tall buildings and double-floored walkway on the premises, the rooms are not elaborately appointed and all the timber appears in natural colors, this does not prevent the property from becoming a serene and circuitous garden of many splendors. With its artificial-mountain construction technique comparative with that of the Beauty-Encircled Mountain Abode of Suzhou—the Small Meandering Valley is, without a doubt, a certain master drafter's masterpiece. The Sequel to the Gazetteer of Jiangdu County (Volume Twelve) compiled under the Guangxu reign of the Qing, says of the SmallRock Mountain Abode,

This garden excels in its Lake Tai rockery in the images of nine lions, images that are matchless examples of exquisite craftsmanship and dynamic portrayal. ³⁰

Judging from an analysis of the composition of the artificial mountain in the Small Meandering Valley, it seems to have been copied from the Small-Rock Mountain Abode while assimilating other fine works. The Record of the Painted Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou (Volume Two) says,

The Nine-Lion Mountain piled up by Taoist Priest Dong from Huai'an is the talk of town.

The same book adds in its sixth volume,

Behind the Sutra-Chanting at City Wall sits the Rolling Stone Cavern…. From an old water-bound artificial mountain of Lake Tai stones, [the Taoist master] sought out those stones riddled with cavities, drilled new holes into them, and arranged them in the images of nine lions. Then he shifted the whole thing into the pond, crowned them with a pavilion-capped bridge, and gave the product of his labour its present name, "Rolling Stone Cavern."

A colophon by Zang Gu (1834-1910) ³¹ on the hanging scroll "Nine-Lion Mountain" in the Yangzhou Museum collection points out that the painting is a likeness of the Nine-Lion Mountain at the Rolling Stone Cavern, but he does not specify that the mountain was wrought by Taoist Priest Dong.

According to the former owner Zhou Xian (1891-1984) ³² and his nephew Zhou Xuliang (1905-1984) ³³ , the artificial mountain of the Small Meandering Valley had been known as "Mountain of the Nine-Lion Picture" for a long time, and they surmise there must be some evidence behind it. Therefore I believe there might be more than one nine-lion mountain in Yangzhou, but the one at the Rolling Stone Cavern is the best known. Taoist Priest Dong was renowned for his construction of this type of artificial mountains, which gradually emerged as a school in its own right. Evidence shows that this mountain's peak, cave, mountain trail, mountain-leaning wall, stepping stones and ravine inlet all belong to his time, that is, under the Qianlong reign. The horizontal board inscribed by Chen Hongshou was not too distant from that age. Therefore I assume that even if this mountain were not originated in the Taoist priest, it must be an imitation of his work.

The Lesser Winding Gully in the Qin's Imagined Garden, situated at Bathhouse Lane near the Old City's south gate, was a miniature yellow-stone mountain built after Qianlong's reign by the renowned garden crafter Ge Yuliang from Changzhou, but it is in nonexistence today. A Collection of Anecdotes in the Lü Garden (Volume Twelve) writes,

A Changzhou native by the name of Ge Yuliang has come to the fore lately, whose rock-piling skill exceeds many others.

This indicates that Ge came to the fore later than Priest Dong. Judging from its ruins, the Qin's Lesser Winding Gully exuded feminine elegance under a plain and simple surface, whereas the Small Meandering Valley in question stands tall and steep in majesty and masculine vigour. Both crafters were in Yangzhou at the same time, and it was precisely with their respective masterpieces that they stood neck and neck between them as garden-makers.

To the west of the Geyuan's Garden at Eastern Pass Street there is an estate built by Li Songling (1871-1937) ³⁴ . Upon entering its front gate, one comes upon an octagonal gate ³⁵ , with the name, Garden of Matchless Talent, engraved in the lintel. Turning left, one sees the property's residential section. The octagonal gate opens into a slender and straight corridor. An artificial mountain twists and turns circumspectly against the eastern wall, forbidden-looking and in striking contrast with the tile latticed windows on the top part of the wall. Beside the mountain there is a bed of peony flowers which, when in full bloom, seem to be embroidered on a piece of brocade. At the northern end of the mountain, a half pentagonal pavilion clings to a wall with a mirror-like crystal clear pool at its foot. There, facing south, stands a three-span parlor exquisitely decorated and elaborately appointed, and the ceiling of its corridor is carved all over with patterns in bas relief.

Behind the parlor there is a three-span verandah with an eastern wing and a western corridor, and flowers, trees and exotic rocks are placed in the front. Its back is attached to a small yard which, at the first glance, is often mistaken for a mere wooden wall because its door is always shut. A stone stairway provides access to a double-floored loggia that takes a turn at the back of a loft before disappearing into a neighboring garden. The garden is linked to the dwellings behind it by the roofed walkway and rockeries. In the northwest corner, facing west against a rockery, there is a three-bay loft with its spiral staircase winding from top floor down to ground floor. By the side of the loft a trellis of wisteria with entangled weather-beaten branches adds to the fascination of the scene by showering greenness all over the stairway. This garden is akin to the Twisted Garden of Suzhou in that it is laid out by filling every space of a small lot in the shape of the carpenter's square with tiny scenery, but it does so more cleverly with its vistas "woven" up and down in intricate ways. Using a method to "deliver a vista unexpectedly from an impasse," the garden's designer knows how to transit the sight in a tiny yard into the neighboring garden to ensure continuity of the entire scenic view. Such a practice is by no means a rarity; on the contrary, it is a defining feature of Yangzhou gardens.

The Mind Cheering Hut at Ji Family Cove, as a component part of the parlor in the mansion of a money-shop owner by the name of Huang Yizhi, is the work of Yu Jizhi, a rockwork specialist who is also well-versed in floral art and particularly good at gracing small gardens with fantastic rockeries. The parlor in the Mind Cheering Hut consists of two rows of buildings. The front and back of the first row are linked respectively with a tiny yard. The eastern and southern side of the courtyard are lined with a corridor, and a white stone rockery tucked away in an osmanthus grove at the western side. The back of the first row has two wings, and the parterres in its tiny yard are planted with stalagmites and bamboos whose swaying twigs and quivering leaves seem to be dripping wet with greenness. To the west of the parlor stands a latticed wall, whose moon gate opens on to the internal court of a suite of chambers, an arrangement that makes people wonder, "How deep would this deep courtyard really be?" Thanks to views borrowed from an external court, the otherwise small internal court looks bigger. At work here is also a space-expanding method in Chinese architecture, that is, to make a residential courtyard look bigger through segmentation or spatial grouping. The back row of the parlor with all its three bays facing rockeries features another suite of chambers in its own yard. The Mind Cheering Hut is small, and judging from its plane, there is nothing surprising about it. Nevertheless, its buildings and yards are proportionate to each other and its interior décor is accentuated as a rule with horizontal lines so as to yield just enough room to have rockeries erected and flowers planted. Large and small yards are so impeccably grouped and mixed that the scenes and sights are always well spaced even in places seemingly crowded, and that in the peace and quiet of the entire estate there are plenty of delightful surprises. All this speaks volumes for the importance of greenery and spatial grouping to small architectural projects.

On Guangling Road there is My Half-"Mu" Garden, originally known as "Back Garden of Longxi." It was built by a salt merchant surnamed Liu on an old garden on this spot during the Guangxu reign (1875-1908) of the Qing, hence its other name, "Liu's Manor." Because this was the venue of the Yida Money Shop, the local people generally call it "Yida Garden." Located behind its residential area, the garden is divided in two yards. The frontal yard contains a south-facing hall with some houses attached to its western side, as well as a parterre built of Lake Tai stones and two lacebark pine trees at the foot of a wall. In the backyard, slender bamboos are planted at its western end, and a yellow-stone artificial mountain by the side of the wall features a flight of stone stairs leading to the upper floor of a building. In the eastern yard, a loft facing north overlooks a pond with a rock formation on it, whose Lake Tai stone mountain against the wall is the pick of the entire garden.

The Li Weiru's Garden, 6 Billows Lane Cove, whose entrance is by a door at its southeast corner. In the center of the garden stands an artificial mountain among rattans and cypress trees that, though age-old, still exude emerald, leafy luxuriance. This mountain looks tiny against the wall, but it still offers a cave to be explored and a peak to be marvelled at, and it looks awe-inspiring when observed from inside the hall in the north. There are canopied walkways at the eastern and western sides, and a water gazebo sits in the southwestern corner with a dainty and refreshing fish pond at its foot. Sparse though the scenery is, this small garden is still decorated in good taste.

By the side of the Li Weiru's Garden is the Yang's Tiny Nook, a small garden that takes up just a corner originally belonging to a studio that opened onto a two-bay parlor. The small yard in its front is strewn with a smattering of rocks, bamboos and trees, and segmented by a latticed wall. A diagonal corridor reaches up to a small belvedere. A pool lying between rocks in front of the belvedere is just large enough for a fish bowl to be placed in it to collect water, yet the whole assemblage looks rather becoming. The garden's owner was deft at cultivating orchids, and this is why potted orchids are the stars of this tiny nook. Beautiful flowers and trees are avoided, lest the dominance of orchids and their heady aroma be undermined. Though the Yang's Tiny Nook is too small to be called a garden, yet it has all the makings of a legitimate one. Thanks to a well-conceived segmentation scheme, no visitor would feel cramped upon arriving at this tiny place; instead, they would look left and right and be immensely delighted with its sceneries so resourcefully created.

The garden-owners in Yangzhou were mostly rich merchants. Apart from the material wealth they had obtained through business dealings, they often donated in return for a nominal official title as a status symbol. Insofar as designs are concerned, their gardens are somewhat different from those in the possession of bureaucratic landlords, and the most striking difference lies in their unquenchable quest for luxury and extravagance to advertise their richness and pretentious "elegance" and "refinement." During the Kangxi (1662-1723) and Qianlong (1736-1796) reigns of the Qing, some of them went so far as to copy certain aspects of royal gardens with the hope to hit the windfall, that is, the emperor's award of position and wealth. For this purpose, they would run after what was the best and most sumptuous, be it a garden's configuration, building size, or the variety of building materials. Halls and lofts should have as many as seven bays; buildings should have multiple floors and double-floored walkways; an artificial mountain should be big and built of famous rocks, and the Geyuan's Garden and the Garden of Eight Stanzas have peaks fashioned out of different kinds of stones to represent the four seasons. Soil and rocks were piled up to build gamecock arenas, one of which is found in the Kettle Garden. As the majority of rich merchants in Yangzhou were natives of Anhui, gardens were often built to represent the landscape of south Anhui.

As to building materials, Phoebe nanmu was the choicest, square bricks were reserved for flooring purposes, and marble was mixed with pebbles and porcelain shards to pave floral-patterned grounds in the courtyard. With regard to the sumptuous interior decoration and furnishing in Yangzhou gardens, other than meeting the same designing purposes as in Suzhou gardens, that is, to serve garden owners' need to enjoy the poetic and picturesque connotations of landscaping sights and to show off their corrupt lifestyle, they were also adopted to satisfy these owners' obsession to turn their gardens into socializing venues that could accommodate as many guests as possible. Such an obsession is manifest in such big Yangzhou gardens as the Geyuan's Garden and the Whistling Scholar's Mountain Abode. The Yangzhou school of verse and prose, and the Eight Eccentrics' styles of painting are more untrammelled and profound than those of Suzhou; this has influenced and enhanced the Yangzhou craft of gardens. No study of the Yangzhou gardens can be complete without clarifying the material resources and spiritual needs of their former masters, because such resources and needs had predetermined the requirements and principles for garden designers and impacted the conceptions and styles of these gardens.

Natural environment and building materials can affect garden styles to varying degrees. With a level terrain, mild soil humidity, climate and precipitations, and with the best south and north China conditions converging in the city, Yangzhou's natural environment is salubrious for flowers and trees, with arboreous and herbaceous peonies growing particularly well—a fact that furnishes indispensable condition for the construction of posh gardens. Yangzhou's huge fleets of salt-shipping boats enabled local gentries and merchants to ship in more varieties of stones for artificial mountains than Suzhou from as near as Zhenjiang, Gaozi, Jurong, Suzhou, Yixing, Wuxing and Wukang and as far as Xuancheng, Lingbi and Hekou of Anhui and Jiangxi, over and above rocks of exotic shapes and images or unusual qualities from southwestern China.

The Chinese garden is always built in light of local conditions, which is particularly the case in water-bound and hilly areas. Different from what is available in Suzhou and Hangzhou, the topographical and scenic conditions characterized by the Yangtze-Huai basin's low water level and wide open land are, simply put, uniquely Yangzhou's own. That is why most large gardens in Yangzhou feature a pond in the center while halls are architectural centerpieces—the relationship between ponds and halls must be well coordinated. The scenery in large gardens, as exemplified by the Geyuan's Garden and the Whistling Scholar's Mountain Abode, is segmented with walls, rockwork and trees to conjure up multilayered and variegated views, while exotic rocks are erected by the pond, pavilions and belvederes are scattered but ultimately connected by a circuitous walkway. Medium-sized and small gardens in Yangzhou, such as the Small-Rock Mountain Abode and the Small Meandering Valley, are compactly structured, in which an artificial mountain clings to a wall with a pond rippling at its foot, while a winding corridor or water-front gazebo puts the finishing touch to the entire scene.

In Yangzhou's courtyards, a few peak-shaped rockeries are deployed and a small fish pond sits by a gazebo, but they can also sport an arboreous peony terrace or a herbaceous peony garden. The possession of a minimal number of scenic elements often makes a courtyard look bright, clean and cozy, and the Li Weiru's Garden and the Yang's Tiny Nook are good examples in this regard, but the Garden of Matchless Talent is another outstanding case in that its narrow space in the shape of a carpenter's square is properly fitted to a layout to pull off a rich variety of pleasant surprises.

Generally speaking, Yangzhou's gardens feature level and tidy layouts, and offer views for both in-situ and in-motion viewing. Their success, however, is attributed to their three-dimensional road structures and multi-layered sightseeing routes. That is to say, their roofed double-floor walkways, lofts, belvederes as well as artificial mountains replete with cavities, caves, abodes or stone chambers are interconnected up and down and brought within reach, resulting in plenty of scenic changes. However, these gardens have still left something to be desired. For instance, the roles of water surfaces, rockwork and buildings are yet to be better coordinated; most water surfaces' shorelines look too straight for lack of bends and twists and turns; and rocks projecting over a pond or foamy rapids tumbling over stones are almost nowhere to be seen. But all these are, if anything, blemishes in an otherwise perfect scene.

The Small-Rock Mountain Abode, the Small Meandering Valley, and the foothills of the Garden of Matchless Talent and the Autumn Cloud Mountain in the Geyuan's Garden are studded with laudable delights. There are also instances in which a water-less garden is made to look like water-bound. In the Yuan's Loft of Two-Thirds Bright Moonlight, built during the Daoguang reign of the Qing on Guangling Road, the ground lies low while the hall with windows on four sides sits upon a raised yellow-stone foundation to look as if it were perched on an isle—thus water presents itself in imagination in a garden with little water. The same conception seems to be at work in the back of the Rosy Autumn Clouds Garden in Jiading, Shanghai, but the effect is not as striking. The approach to "giving wings to imagination where brush strokes cannot reach" belongs in the Chinese art, and it is admirable for our clever artisans to apply it with such success under relatively unfavorable natural conditions. The bridges built over water surfaces in Yangzhou gardens come in two types. First, beam bridges, most of which are zigzagging ones, and the flying stone beam bridge of the Small-Rock Mountain Abode is among the best of its kind for its unaffected simplistic and classic looks and its affinity to the mountain abode's wooded mountain views; second, stepping stones, those adopted in the Small Meandering Valley are the most congruously arranged. If the bends in a zigzagging bridge over a low-level water surface look too stiff, it would rob people of the feeling as if they were treading waves, a problem that should be avoided at the designing and construction stage. The designer of the bridge at the Small-Rock Mountain Abode seemed to have blazed a new trail in addressing this problem with the adoption of a flying stone beam.

The Yangzhou school of gardens has all along been extolled for its rockery building techniques. Most of the city's extant artificial mountains are built entirely of rocks except for the one in the Qin's Lesser Winding Gully, which is a combination of earth and stones but it is in ruins. As Yangzhou is located in a place where no stone is produced, the rocks needed for rockeries are shipped in from elsewhere and, for transportation purposes, they come in small sizes. Artificial mountain peaks are mostly built by putting together small rocks in light of shapes, colors, veins, textures and quality on frames propped up with stone slabs, and reinforced with iron fastenings and braces—bricks are also used, as is shown in the Ming-dynasty artificial mountain in the Qiao's Garden in Taizhou—a method which also applies to rock embankment around ponds. All this costs a great deal of manpower, and with the passing of time the component rocks tend to break loose and fall, and the peaks crumble as a result. This is why even the finest rock formations cannot last forever. Such problems, however, cannot tarnish Yangzhou's achievements in the craft of artificial mountains, and the ones in the Geyuan's Garden are deemed grand and majestic to the utmost: its yellow stone mountain stands about nine meters tall, and its lake stone mountain about six meters. As huge constructions, they are not without their oversights on the part of their designers, but on the whole they can still be reckoned as fine works of art of a high order. The artificial mountain of the Small-Rock Mountain Abode stands out for its rugged rocks and steep cliff, the one in the Small Meandering Valley twists and turns in unadorned grace, and the one in the Garden of Matchless Talent brims with feminine beauty, and all of them are excellent structures. The stalactite hanging down from the roofs of the Kerria Garden's winding cave is unseen elsewhere in Yangzhou, and the stone stairway for the artificial mountain in the Whistling Scholar's Mountain Abode are good examples as well. However, what the artificial mountains in Yangzhou gardens excel the most are those leaning against walls; with thrift use of materials and judicious employment of space made possible through first-rate wrapping and inlaying techniques, they look natural and lifelike, and better than their counterparts in Suzhou. Such walls are found in many Yangzhou gardens, including the Small-Rock Mountain Abode, the Small Meandering Valley, the Whistling Scholar's Mountain Abode, the Garden of Matchless Talent, and the My Half-"Mu" Garden, a fact which makes me wonder if the wrapping and inlaying techniques were invented and first used in Yangzhou as early as the late-Ming.

During the Qianlong reign, Taoist Priest Dong and Ge Yuliang made even bigger strides in the craft of artificial mountains by carrying forward the legacies of Ji Cheng and Shitao. All the artificial mountains cited in the foregoing embody the notion that different shapes of mountains should be built with different kinds of stones and give expression to Shitao's rule of painting that "when the interior texturing brushwork tallies with the peak, the texture shall look like born of the peak." With their lofty and awe-inspiring images, the Yangzhou artificial mountains stand parallel with their Suzhou counterparts marked for lucid grace and far-reaching vistas. As to the use of different kinds of stones on different peaks or of mixtures of stones on a single peak, these are measures of expediency to make up for the short supply of a particular variety of stones. The rock-piling techniques employed in Yangzhou and south Jiangsu are more or less the same. The best artificial mountains are always produced with flexible application of the same principle, that is, "Let water encircle a mountain, so that the mountain comes to life on account of the water." The glue used to hold the stones together in a rockwork during the Ming was made by lacing lime with fine sand and glutinous rice juice; as this glue turns pinkish when coagulated, it is often applied to artificial mountains built of yellow stones. During the Qing, the glue was whitened by adding grass ashes to it, so that it could also be used for Lake Tai stone mountains like the one in the Small-Rock Mountain Abode. The crevices between the stones are filled in a way to make the concomitant wrinkles visible while the mortar filled in between the stones is concealed. This method, when applied to yellow stones, produces lines that look like natural cracks and accentuate the ruggedness of surfaces; when applied to Lake Tai stones, brings out the integral wholeness of an artificial mountain. However, it is easier said than done. Perfect examples are few and far between nationwide.

Concerning the treatment of walls, as the traditional gardens of Yangzhou are mostly part of a residence in urban areas, they are enclosed behind high walls built of finely ground bricks and graced with gate towers built of engraved bricks, so that they appear rather tidy and straight. The external walls of Yangzhou gardens are as a rule exquisitely crafted and decorated with tile-latticed windows, and, different from the simplistic and rustic surrounding walls of the Suzhou gardens which like all the gardens in the Jiangnan area were in the possession of landed bureaucrat owners, were instrumental in showing off their owners' wealth. Both the external and internal walls of Yangzhou gardens are white-washed in sections where the effectiveness of reflections or of flowers' shadows under moonlight need be enhanced. The tall surrounding walls make it impossible to see the outside views. With the exception of the Geyuan's Garden, whose yellow-stone mountain rises higher enough than its walls to borrow vistas from the northern part of the city, all the gardens in Yangzhou have to employ opposite views to make their sceneries appear more changeable behind such walls. The sceneries framed by the latticed windows of the Whistling Scholar's Mountain Abode are indeed picturesque and sublime in facilitating mutual view borrowing between the garden and its dwelling area. The views seen through the moon gate in front of the Osmanthus Hall of the Geyuan's Garden are mesmerizing as well. Moreover, the views framed in the windows seem to be changing all the time when one shifts his footsteps. In terms of view contrasting techniques, they are basically identical to those employed in south Jiangsu gardens, as most of the gardens in Yangzhou set their buildings in contrast with wall-surfaces and rockeries in a variety of ways, such as contrasts between extravert and introvert views, between visibility and invisibility, high and low, proximity and distance, deep and shallow, large and small, and between spatiality and density—the Small Meandering Valley is exemplary in this regard. The Whistling Scholar's Mountain Abode, on its part, succeeds in giving the visitor a complete and distinct sightseeing experience by keeping the general goal in view as far as the arrangement of walls is concerned.

In the field of architecture, the Yangzhou gardens distinguish themselves by making the most of multistoried structures. This is a matter of course for large gardens, but small ones also employ it to advantage. The Loft of Two-Thirds Bright Moonlight, for example, goes so far as to erect a seven-bay building in its precinct. As the parlor is rather big in most cases, and the double-floored walkway extends without a letup, so the small gazebos and waterside verandahs along the walkway are set off agreeably with the tall building. Such an arrangement, as compared with the subdued gracefulness of Suzhou gardens, is evocative of the heroic verve generated by chanting Su Shi's ³⁶ "The Great Yangtze Flows East' to the musical accompaniment of copper pipa and iron clappers. Visitors can make a circuit of the Whistling Scholar's Mountain Abode following its two-storied walkway, and the same is true with the Geyuan's Garden when in its prime. In such a garden, the visitor may lose his way while reaching a pavilion by way of a mountain stairway or arriving at a cave through an archway in the artificial mountain. These three-dimensional sightseeing gimmicks, though different from Suzhou gardens' one-dimensional trail that conducts surreptitiously through maze-like dense willows to bright flowers, lead to the same result. Thus Yangzhou and Suzhou gardens are neck and neck once again in this field.

With regard to structures and details, the buildings in Yangzhou gardens are hybrids of south and north China styles. An independent building's base above ground is built of blue stones in early periods and white stones in later periods, with the staircase made randomly of natural rocks. Plinths may take the form of an "ancient mirror" in the northern tradition or a "stone drum" in the southern tradition; pillars are thick and tall, with the proportion between diameter and height being a compromise between southern and northern traditions. In most cases windows are detachable ones, and balustrades are thick and sturdy. Ridge ends always assume a half-moon shape with an up-turning minor hip-rafter at the front, but in angles lower than those in south Jiangsu.

Roof ridges are graced with latticed brickwork all along, and thicker and heavier than in south Jiangsu. Latticed windows and gates in walls are elaborately crafted, and come in a variety of patterns and integral structures, which are different from the soft and delicate style of south Jiangsu. Lintels are generally made of marble or stones quarried from Gaozi in Zhenjiang across the Yangtze, and engraved bricks are seldom used, which is apparently different from the Suzhou tradition. Architectural details are terse and tidy, with a few twists and turns at skintles and corners, all of which looks straightforward, with gentleness contained in tasteful sturdiness. All the timber retains original colors, and exterior walls are not white-washed, which has something to do with the arid weather, but is also intended to display craftsmanship on raw materials. Timber constructions are all formed with methodically prepared round and straight beams, though rectangular beams are occasionally used. The round ridges over the façade of a building are as sumptuous as possible because of their conspicuous positions. The interiors are floored with square bricks and partitioned with latticed screens and latticed doors fashioned out of red sandalwood, mahogany, Phoebe nanmu , gingko, and little-leaf box, or lacquer carvings either inlaid with precious stones and mother of pearl or panelled with gauze. Furniture and screens and couplets are also elaborately built; those made of mahogany, different from their Suzhou and Guangzhou counterparts, are in an elegant and vivacious style peculiarly Yangzhou's own. (For further details, see the following section on dwellings.)

The buildings in Yangzhou gardens come in a limited variety, including halls, multi-storied buildings, belvederes, pavilions, gazebos, painted land boats, double-floored walkways and corridors, and are more regularly grouped than those in south Jiangsu. The multistoried building is often positioned conspicuously at the end of a garden. The hall is often the centerpiece, but has to be built at the end of a garden if it takes the form of a loft. Land boats and gazebos are water-bound, with verandahs and belvederes nestled against mountains; pavilions may be placed beside a pool or atop a mountain. A half loft, half belvedere or half pavilion can be built on sites too cramped for space; examples like these are few, but they are adapted to the circumstances as a rule, or adopted to break monotony or uniformity in a layout. These methods also apply to roofed walkways, which may be made to wind or run up and down a terrain, or contain double floors or lanes, but most of them follow a circulating route, and some of them are built to serve viewsegmentation purposes.

Halls fall into miscellaneous types, and are handled in original ways, as is shown in The Record of the Painted Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou . Among the common types today are those with floor-length windows on all four sides, those sporting a hip and gable roof, and those consisting of multiple floors. Their purlin trusses are mostly of the turtle-shell type, whose ridges are not round. A lot of halls are built of Phoebe nanmu , the most precious of all species of timber, and those built of cypress are rarely seen today. The ground in gardens are mostly paved in patterns with pebbles and porcelain shards, and stones are occasionally used when one of the cracked-ice pavement patterns is chosen. What merits attention in architectural treatment is that the interiors of a Yangzhou garden are always made to twist and turn unpredictably, whereby suites, lofts, covered walkways, small courts, artificial mountains and stone chambers are grouped in a variety of ways to create a bewildering maze—a salient feature of the Yangzhou style of garden architecture that can still be seen in the Garden of Matchless Talent.

Horticulture is yet another major aspect of garden-making. Indigenous traits of flowers and trees bring about varied styles to gardens in which they are planted. Owing to climatic and geographical differences, the same species of flower or tree growing in Yangzhou would look different in color and shape than if it were planted in north or south China, but the trees and flowers indigenous to Yangzhou generally look sturdy and elegant. Trees that are commonplace in Yangzhou gardens include pine, cypress, juniper, elm, maple, pagoda, gingko, broad-leaf privet, parasol, and little-leaf box. Weeping willows are all but extinct in south Jiangsu gardens built in later periods, but they are often found thriving in Yangzhou gardens with distinct local characteristics: tall and sturdy on trunks whose lower part is never oversized, their twigs so slender and well-scattered as to exude picturesque flavor—all of them are totally domesticated in Yangzhou.

Yangzhou's parasol trees are marked for their speedy growth rate. Whether they are planted in a garden or a courtyard, they never fail to shield people from the high-noon sun with their green trunks and coolness-gathering foliage, and they join weeping willows to steal the limelight of the city's scenic beauty in summer and spring. Yangzhou's flowering trees include osmanthus, crabapple, yulan magnolia, camellia, pomegranate, wisteria, plum, wintersweet, flowering peach, banksia rose, rose bush, China rose, and azalea. Osmanthus, crabapple, yulan magnolia and crape myrtle are often planted in front of a hall or verandah. Maples and elms are laid out where they are needed, mostly by the side of a pavilion or gazebo. Arbours and flowering trees are most becoming to buildings; in Yangzhou, the former provide cooling shades and the latter become the feast of the eyes, but arbours become the choicest primarily for their impressive contours and flowering trees for their color and aroma. An artificial mountain's rugged and weathered looks are best accentuated amidst a cluster of pines and cypresses, while a few weeping willows can work wonders on the scenery when planted on a pond or brook's shore.

Plantain, bamboo and nandina add a picture-perfect touch to the scene wherever they are—inside a small court or a clearance in a big garden, in the corner of a wall or walkway, under the eaves, or in combinations with wintersweet or chrysanthemum. The "book-binder grass," or the dwarf lilyturf, if planted beside a rockery, tree, stairway, or road, keeps the ground green in all four seasons, and looks like white balls when cocooned in snow in winter; like the begonia thriving in stone crevices, it also offers a needed sprinkle of decoration wherever it strikes root, and it can also improve an artificial mountain's appearance by covering up its drawbacks the way dots of moss do to a landscape painting. The peony, whether herbaceous or arboureous, are household favorites. According to Kong Wuzhong's ³⁷ Compendium of Herbaceous Peony cited in the Random Notes of "That Can Also Be Changed" Studio ,

The herbaceous peony of Yangzhou is renowned under heaven. I praise it not simply for its abundance. Yes, it is plump and big, but at the same time, it is daintily beautiful and cleverly clustered—with all these traits it outshines those in other cities.

In "Seeing Meng Haoran off to Guangling at Yellow Crane Tower," Li Bai writes of the herbaceous peony,

West to Yellow Crane Tower I bid my pal goodbye;

Oars to Yangzhou in flowery March mist he will ply.

From these lines you can imagine the pomp and pageantry of the peony's flowering scene. For this reason peony beds and nurseries are ubiquitous in Chinese gardens. Such a parterre or herbal nursery either assumes the natural appearance of a piled-up rockery, or is built of bricks and white stones; no matter what the pattern or shape, they are products of ingenious garden designers. When springtime sets in, these beds and nurseries would be carpeted with peony flowers, whose brocade-like exuberance stands comparison with the peony gardens in Luoyang, native home to arboreous peonies in the country.

As complements to garden scenery, trees are planted individually or in clumps. The trees growing in the same grove may come of singular or mixed species, which is determined by the garden size and landscaping design. Small gardens are suitable for trees individually planted, but their postures and contours should be carefully chosen. Large gardens may have a lot of tree clumps, which should be deployed by bringing into consideration the images of rock formations and the elevation and size of the terrain, so that the groves can be separated or linked, scattered or congregated. If an artificial mountain is not tall enough, trees cannot be planted on its top. To set off the mountain's primitive and steep looks, trees must be planted on low-lying spots at the mountain's shady side, so as to keep the mountaintop higher than all the treetops—only thus can the garden resemble a wooded mountain. This principle for tree planting pertains to the building of pavilions as well. In the relationship between pavilion, tree and artificial mountain, it is essential to decide which one should stand taller than the others and what distances should be kept between them. There are cases in which a pine tree is set to lie prone over a water surface at the foot of an artificial mountain, which is after all a nice approach to bring about a congenial vista. Wisteria may be arranged to hang down a rockery, and a water surface may be dotted with lotus flowers, but the quantity of such vines and flowers should be limited to the point where the pictured vision is brought about and the desired scenery created. Because every garden has its own sunny and shady sides, the environmental adaptability of the trees to be adopted should also be brought into account. For example, camellia, osmanthus, pines and cypresses are suitable for shady places, whereas bamboo can bring a scene to life wherever it finds itself.

Yangzhou's artistic potted plants and miniature landscapes differ from those of Suzhou and Hangzhou in that they are exceptionally sturdy, dynamic and resistant to wind and frost. Using deft cutting and binding skills, local horticulturists can train dwarf trees into "knots," "cloud sheets," or "bends" to bring about distinctly varied shapes, but it takes time to train a tree or plant into a potted scenic masterpiece. Pine, cypress, little-leaf box, chrysanthemum, camellia, azalea, plum, bitter orange flower, jasmine, kumquat, orchid, and hui orchid ³⁸ are ideal themes for miniature landscapes, which are potted in earth or water, a treatment, indeed, uniquely Yangzhou's own. Yangzhou's sweet flags, which are verdant all year round growing purely in water contained in bowls fashioned out of palm sheaths, are unseen elsewhere, and the potted asters developed by local floriculturists are a fabulous local specialty as well. These potted dwarf trees and miniature landscapes provide ideal finishing touches to a garden's scenery. As artificial mountains in a garden are often set under the foliage of arbours, flowers can hardly survive in them; this is exactly where potted plants and landscapes come handy to spruce up the scenery. Such an arrangement, in use as early as the Song, can also be applied to a pond; in fact, most lotuses growing in Yangzhou's ponds are potted. Garden horticulture in this country as a whole cannot do without potted plants and miniature landscapes.

The themes for the Yangzhou school of traditional Chinese painting are dominated by flowers, and those commonly seen in Yangzhou's gardens naturally become the prototypes. As local painters wielder their brushes with facility and abandon, flowers leap into many a painting to become celebrated masterpieces, from which one gains some idea about the impact of flowers on Yangzhou gardens. On the other hand, the way local painters graft red upon white, prune and reshape the plants in the pictures composed by them has inspired local horticulturists to improve their skills to some extent. Goldfish in which Yangzhou also abounds, birds that make Yangzhou home, and caged birds bred by locals—these have also contributed immensely to the fascinations of Yangzhou gardens.

To sum up, there are set rules but no hard-and-fast formulae for garden-making. Only through a myriad changes can new conceptions come about one after another. Gardens win with scenery; scenery differs from one garden to another. The secret to their success boils down to high adaptability to circumstances and mutual borrowing of views. Only by judicious view accommodating and borrowing can a garden stand out in distinction. The reason why Yangzhou gardens can become a school in their own right, and why they can entail dainty gracefulness in magnificent bodies—or, in literary jargon, write subtle heartthrobs with a robust brush—is because local crafters through the ages know how to avail themselves of the strengths of southern and northern gardens. Peerless are the gardens of Yangzhou, what with their upright and spacious buildings, solid classical artificial mountains, thoroughly perforated and intricate latticed walls, as well as fairy flowers and grass endowed by nature and bred by local gardeners. Not to mention the artificial mountains, piled up with a broad variety of stones, pieced together and imbedded with numerous smaller stones, with peaks distinguished with different kinds of stones, and the water-less gardens made to look water-rich. These Yangzhou inventions, achieved by putting materials to best use and humouring the circumstances, are still of immense value for garden crafters of today. Their only drawback lies in the lack of changes among their ponds, so much so that they have failed to bring the role of water in permeating the environment and in interplaying with rockeries and buildings to bring a garden's attractions to sublimity.

Greeneries play a due role in keeping Yangzhou beautiful. Flowers and bamboos are not uncommon even in the city's ordinary courtyards, where tall trees provide much needed shades, and flowering trees, wisteria trellises, potted dwarf trees, miniature landscapes, and a few rocks are brought together to pull off dainty views. All these have long been part of the aboriginal Yangzhou tradition, which helps not only augment local residents' cultural life but also extend the city's greenery acreage.

·Dwellings

The Lu's Mansion, 22 Kangshan Street. Built during the Guangxu reign of the Qing for a whopping sum of seventy thousand taels of silver by Lu Shaoxu, a rich salt merchant from Jiangxi province, the Lu's Mansion is the largest extant classic mansion in Yangzhou. Its gateway is built of finely ground bricks with carvings and graced with a giant screen wall. Facing north behind the front gate is a converse room that sits opposite the main suite in the south. The second gate leading to the main court provides access to two rows of buildings each having a seven-bay hall divided by latticed wooden screens and floor-length lattice windows into three rooms—a three-bay central room and a pair of double-bay wing rooms that serve reception and reading purposes. Large latticed windows are built into walls to screen the central part of the courtyard from two side yards in which a flower bed built of Lake Tai stones is supplemented with trees to create quiet spaces in contrast with the airy and spacious central hall. Further north are two rows of seven-bay lofts which serve as the owner's residence. Behind the halls there are two more rows of five-bay rooms, where guests are lodged. The kitchen in the east is no more. Behind the residence there is the Imagination Garden. By the side of a pond in the northeast of the garden, two rows of buildings, including a study and a library, form an independent zone. A land boat sitting on the eastern shore of the pond is now in ruins. A pavilion with a helmet-shaped rooftop is seen leaning against the garden's southern wall, where a corridor winds its way up to the northern part of the garden. Arbours, most of which are sweet-scented osmanthus trees, occupy the clearances on the premises. Wooden structures in this mansion are all fashioned out of unadorned choice fir shipped in from the Hu-Guang region ³⁹ , and all the interior decoration and furnishing are made of delicately carved Phoebe nanmu . Tall and spacious, and magnificent in scale, the Lu's Mansion is representative of the luxury mansions built by rich salt merchants in the final stage of Chinese feudalism.

Wang's Small Garden, 14 Taoist Earth Official's Domain Lane, a mansion of the salt merchant Wang Taijie (1889-1935) ⁴⁰ . Expanded during the Republican years (1912-1949), it is the most complete of all large mansions in the city. Its buildings are laid out in three columns each containing three rows. The eastern and western parlors are furnished differently. Entrance to the eastern parlor is by a gate made of unadorned and simplistic woven bamboo strips. The parlor is built of cypress, whose interior is furnished with and divided into frontal and posterior parts by latticed screens and a floor-length screen embedded with six pieces of delicate marbles. All the screens are fastidiously carved. South of the parlor is a three-bay building that faces north, with rainwater streaking from an eave to fall on a Lake Tai stone artificial mountain in its court, where wintersweets and macrocephalums are planted. An eastern gate opens the yard onto a tiny clearance which serves the mere purpose to expand the space. A moon gate separates the western parlor from the yard in which there is an artificial mountain and a winding roofed walkway at the end of a boat-shaped verandah overlooking a tiny pool to the east, where a potted miniature landscape placed on a brick platform is reflected in the water. Looking out of the moon gate into the yard from inside the parlor, one sees a picture-perfect scene of well-spaced flowers and trees and rugged rockeries. A latticed wall with a moon gate in it divided the backyard north of the mansion into eastern and western sections; and a latticed screen cuts a six-bay northern parlor in the western section in two parts, with the western part being a three-bay study graced with stained glass windows. Between the study and the corridor in front of it, two crape myrtles arise to form an overhead canopy as if to shield the entire place from sunlight and to make the vistas on both sides look unfathomable. A peony parterre south of the parlor is built of rocks, but the flower deck in the west looks somewhat dull. When people look through the latticed windows and the moon gate built into the partition wall to see the other section, they will be impressed by the mystic, yet spirited quietness of the scene conjured up by way of view borrowing. Residential buildings dominate the mansion's precinct, with the garden itself playing a supplementary role at best. On account of its small size, it is extolled as "A Small Garden Where Spring Is Deep."

Zhao's Mansion at the Palace of Assisting Transforming Powers ⁴¹ , 33 Absolute Devotion Lane. The residence of cloth merchant Zhao Haishan consists of three rows of halls and chambers facing south, with the portal and kitchen kept outside of the enclosing wall. Its garden is separated from the dwellings by a tall wall, but can be entered directly from the portal to avoid mutual interference between garden and dwelling. The plane of this building is clearly segmented. There is a three-bay study in the garden's eastward front, which is separated from the back of the mansion with a winding walkway. The spacious size of the two-row parlor in the back of the garden is commensurate with the scale of the residence.

Wei's Mansion on Invincible Street. The former residence of the salt merchant Wei Cigeng is a medium-sized structure with its front gate facing west. Built on an irregular plane, it is cut sharply in two, with dwellings in the rectangular eastern part, and a garden taking up the irregular western part. The dwellings, including the southern rooms facing north, fall into four five-bay rows. The three-bay hall in the center is flanked on either side by a small yard with a suite of rooms inside of it. Such dwelling suites are connected with the living rooms but appear to be independent and free from disturbance. The small yards, in particular, play an efficient role in facilitating daylight and ventilation and in expanding indoor and outdoor spaces. The garden is narrow in its front and wide in its back. Close by the gate in the front part is a room for sundries. Its back is divided into two zones. In the front zone, sitting amidst rockeries, yulan magnolias, green parasol trees and a tiny belvedere facing the southeast corner, is the Flute-Playing Terrace, which is actually a hall with windows on all four sides, with its lintel inscribed with the line in Zheng Xie's (1693-1765) ⁴² handwriting, "Ancient Yangzhou Sung to the Accompaniment of Songs and Flutes." The back zone, serving as foil for the frontal zone, consists of two parts as well, in whose east part a land boat sits by a small belvedere, and a yellow-stone artificial mountain protrudes from a cluster of nandinas and little-leaf boxes at the foot of a latticed wall through which exterior views are subtly visible. Small as this garden is, it seems to have enough room to spare even with two big structures inside of it thanks to its latticed wall, which brings depth to the space while cutting the garden into sections that borrow each other's views—a method that is often used to handle empty space beside a house.

Liu's Residence, a small affair at 23 Abundant Benevolence Lane. Inside its front gate facing east, a row of rooms facing west sits in line with its portal, with a tall wall in front of it, and a narrow courtyard atrium helps ward the house off the scorching sun in summer and the frigid high wind in winter. With its wide open doors and windows, the residence receives plenty of cool breeze in summer despite its narrow space and tall wall. Behind the wall there is a south-facing hall three rows deep, with a secret room contained in the suite of rooms in the last row. Through a moon gate in the latticed wall beside the hall, one sees a parlor inside a small yard where rockeries and flowers and trees are arranged. This residence's architecture design is a good example in making flexible use of a piece of land oriented eastward.

Jia's Residence at Greater Armed City Lane, which was in the possession of Jia Yuan ⁴³ , a salt merchant during the Guangxu reign of the Qing. Its gate opens to the east, while its two columns of halls face south. The halls in its eastern part are ingeniously designed, each having a courtyard garden in which the parterres are planted with flowers and bamboos, and a pond and rocks are put together to form a tiny scenery encircled by a covered walkway whose walls sport sparsely latticed windows. Tidy and refreshing is the whole scene. There was a garden to the west of the residence, but it is in ruins today.

Toiler's Garden at Abundant Benevolence Lane was the mansion of Zhou Yifu. Entering the estate from its east gateway, one sees a row of rooms that face west, a common arrangement in handling a lot that faces east in Yangzhou. These rooms are part of a quadrangle that features a south-facing hall, eastern and western corridors, and a north-facing converse room. West of the hall is a parlor with a half-pavilion at its entrance and a study opposite it. The space south of the hall is divided up with a latticed wall, with a clearance about a foot wide left empty to form an imaginative scenery. An old flowering osmanthus drapes its boughs over the latticed wall, so that when autumn sets in, the courtyard is drenched in its fragrance, making one feel as if he were roving a realm heady with airy-fairy aroma. (The flowering osmanthus must be encircled with walls to retain its fragrance.) The back of the hall is opened in the west to a moon gate whose lintel is inscribed with the name of the property, "Toiler's Garden" centered upon a fish pond with a zigzagging bridge over it and a tiny pavilion by the side. With interior décor fashioned out of unadorned gingko wood, the parlor looks clean and elegant, and the ground in the front is paved smooth and level with mosaic white stones. Dwellings take up only a small portion of this property, and, as a result of repeated expansions, more space is devoted to greenery that brings manifold changes to the environment.

Hanhou's Hut, 7 Ornamental Stone Archway, used to be the residence of Wu Tingyang (1799-1870) ⁴⁴ during the Daoguang reign of the Qing. Its northern front gate opens into a courtyard, and its southern quadrangle is reached by way of a fire lane in the western end of the courtyard. In what is a typical Yangzhou way of handling north-facing houses, the main house is made to face side houses in the oblong courtyard paved all over with stone slabs.

Gourd Hut, 211 Sweet Spring Road, built by the capitalist Lu Dianhu (1876-1936) ⁴⁵ in early Republican years. By way of a west gate one enters its south-facing main hall whose southern end serves as the parlor. A yellow-stone parterre lies north of the main hall, and a Lake Tai stone rockery stands amidst luxuriant verdure south of it. A verandah to the right of the mountain is reflected clearly in the serene water of a pond whilst plantains' swaying shadows caress the windows. Beyond the western gate at the northern end stands a yellow-stone rockery, where a road threads through a door and conducts to the back of the main hall. In the eastern part of the residence, a winding walkway and a latticed wall run across a ground the shape of a carpenter's square. The southeast corner of the small pond is occupied by a square pavilion. A three-bay verandah on the other side of the pond is reachable by the walkway; though small, it looks compact in a subdued way. This residence is a good example of a south-facing main hall with a west-facing gate and an irregular-shaped lot for the design of a residence.

A compound at Ding Family Cove in which two residences—one in the east and the other in the west—share the same gateway. The eastern residence is a three-sided courtyard where a latticed wall divides its atrium in two, and all the rooms on the premises cover two bays. The western residence contains two three-sided courtyards each having two rows of differently aligned three-bay rooms. This type of residence makes it easy to adapt the plane to the lie of the land and provides plenty of leeway for space segmentation purposes.

Facing south at 2 Buffalo-Ridge Well is one of the smallest old residences in Yangzhou. Behind its front gate is a three-bay hall that forms a quadrangle together with two wing rooms and a north-oriented converse room on the southern side. The kitchen is found outside of the residence in what is a fundamental layout for residences in the Yangzhou tradition.

Present-day urban Yangzhou is encircled by the Grand Canal, while the Lesser Qinhuai River flows through the North City Gate to cut the municipality in two parallel sections: New City and Old City, whereas the Wenhe River runs parallel to the Lesser Qinhuai through Old City from south to north. Because these waterways run along straight courses, urban Yangzhou's roads and buildings are distributed in a fairly regular pattern. The Cross Avenue, which consists of an east-west road and a south-north road, provides thoroughfares to all four directions that are joined vertically by lanes and alleyways, a road pattern which is even more pronounced in Old City. Similar to the hutongs in Beijing, lanes in Yangzhou are numerically serialized. The layout of New City is somewhat in disorder due partly to the presence of a host of rich merchants and powerful bureaucrats' mansions and partly to a boom of modern commercial buildings, a disorder in which the impact of the cities in the Jiangnan area is keenly felt. Bay Street in New City, for example, becomes a shortcut because it functions like one of the slanting streets of Beijing. Quite a few streets are entangled with narrow alleyways, resulting in some "dead ends." However, despite its seemingly complicated structure, urban Yangzhou's road system is by and large orderly as it follows its own arteries and veins. In bygone years entrance to the city's large lanes was by archways that are a salient feature of urban neighborhoods in both north and south China.

Yangzhou's classical dwellings are adapted with a fair degree of flexibility to the direction of the street or lane in which they are located, and their interiors are labyrinthine and replete with changes. They usually face south, or at least have their north gates face south, because most of them are located in lanes and alleyways that run east and west. There are also houses that run south and north whose owners' favor for the southern orientation has given rise to houses whose main rooms face south and whose gates face east or west. The general gateway is a good invention with which a cluster of medium-sized or small houses with different floor plans can be enclosed to form an integral whole that allows for changes in its interiors. Such a gated community, concealing small units in large ones and bringing odds and ends of space into order, not only gives families a sense of security but also helps maintain a clanbased lifestyle, not to mention its contribution to keeping the city clean and tidy.

Many large and medium-sized mansions are still there in urban Yangzhou today. They are supplemented with gardens and courtyards of different sizes, which provide ample greenery to neighborhoods and brings about a cosy living environment.

The layout of such a dwelling generally takes the shape of a courtyard, and its centerpiece is a three-bay hall, but five-bay ones are not uncommon. As Notes on Sections of Construction Projects puts it,

If a hall has five bays, a floor-length window or an overhanging latticed screen ought to be set up to demarcate its wing rooms, so that despite having five bays, it looks like a three-bay structure. Hence the term, a "house that looks like three-bayed but actually contains five bays."

There are also halls having four or two bays, depending on the floor space of their foundations. There are also seven-bay halls, but they are actually a combination of a three-bay parlor and two two-bay wing rooms, like the one in the Lu's Mansion on Kangshan Street. A side lane, known as "fire lane," is built by the side of a large or medium-sized residence for female family members and servants entering or exiting the estate, but if a large residence has more than two "fire lanes," they become its main roads. The "fire lane" in a Yangzhou dwelling is more airy and straight than a Suzhou home's "avoidance lane." Known commonly as "auxiliary lane," according to Wen Zhenheng's On Superfluous Things (Volume One) such a lane serves to make the dwellers believe they are taking a tidy and clean road. Of all such lanes, the one in the Gong's Cangzhou Estate at Easterly Violet Rays Lane is the widest, so wide that it allows people to enter or leave the property in sedan chairs.

The halls fall into five types: firstly, those which are singlerow deep and have no wing rooms, nicknamed "Oldie's Head"; secondly, those attached on either side to a wing room to assume a carpenter's-square plan; thirdly, three-bay halls with wing rooms on both ends to form a three-sided courtyard; fourthly, those having wing rooms on both sides and a converse room to form a quadrangle; and fifthly, those without wing rooms but having an opposite hall. However, those three-bay halls with wing rooms attached on both sides, and those quadrangles, with corridors in four directions, high and spacious enough for horses to trot through, are called "Lofts Strung Together." Generally speaking, such a structure consists of a big hall in the front and an internal hall in the rear that contains the master's three-bay suite (two bedrooms with a sitting room), according to Notes on Sections of Construction Projects . A wing suite or secret room is often attached to the master's suite, such as the one in the Liu's Residence at Abundant Benevolence Lane.

The hall usually has a side door with a triangular top, an octagonal gate, or a moon gate that allows access to the parlor or study. Auxiliary buildings like the kitchen, the sundries room and the servants' dormitories are kept outside the wall to free the master's dwelling area from disturbance—an arrangement that reflects the class gap in feudal society. The numbers of suites and secret rooms are determined by the layout's degree of complexity. More twists and turns mean more such suites and rooms. Notes on Sections of Construction Projects has this to say,

Most halls consist of three bays, and those with five bays invariably contain eastern and western wing rooms. Known as "flatlet," such a wing room belongs in such categories as secret room, double room, attached room, or boudoir.…

A tiny yard with a parterre in it is often found in the front of such a suite to provide comfort in everyday life by allowing in refreshing cool air in summer and warding off frigid wind in winter. In old days such arrangements were agreeable to the secluded dwellings of Yangzhou. The study can be as small as one or two bays, or has three bays so that it is large enough to double as a parlor, and in front of it there invariably are rockery, pond, flowers and trees and bamboos, or at least a parterre or herbaceous peony nursery to bring about a quiet and clean ambience. A dwelling with south-facing main rooms and an eastern or western gate has secondary rooms for book-keepers, private school or sundries by the side of its portal. The narrow courtyard atrium in front of such rooms is used only to block sunlight and facilitate ventilation. Entrance to a residence with a north-facing front gate is by a "fire lane" that connects with the south-facing main house in the front.

A screen wall stands opposite the front gate of a medium-sized or large residence in Yangzhou in compliance with its owner's official or royal rank. A high-ranking screen wall features a splayed plane in the shape of the Chinese character "八"; a lower-rank one takes the plane of the Chinese character "一"; and a screen wall of the lowest rank is "built" by drawing the likeness of a square screen wall on the back wall of the opposite house belonging to another family. A luxurious screen wall, like the one in front of the Geyuan's Garden, is surfaced with finely ground bricks and engraved with bas-relief patterns, and the Chinese character "福" is embedded in the center. The exterior wall of such a residence is built of shale bricks, but finely ground bricks are put together seam to seam on elaborate ones. The gate towers are also built of bricks and ornamented with bas-relief brick carvings, while sumptuous portals assume the shape of the Chinese character "八," and feature corbel brackets and a caisson ceiling, like the front gate of the Kettle Garden at Eastern Loop Gate. Even ordinary gate towers can look compact and sprightly when surfaced with finely ground bricks. By the way, brick engraving is one of the eight engraving crafts for which Yangzhou are famous along with engravings on ivory, wood, stone, bamboo, lacquerware, jade, and porcelain.

Front gates, lacquered black and flanked by a red inscribed couplet, hinge on richly engraved stone gate piers whose sizes are determined by the rank of the dwellers. Rooftops consist of two slopes topped with a striking ridge built of tiles in latticed patterns, which, therefore, set off the gable walls with traceries running up and down their tops. Sometimes a row of latticed windows are opened in the upper part of the enclosing wall so that treetops and rattans and vines can be espied behind it and views in the neighborhood brought to life, which adds vivacity to the lane's vista.

The front gate opens onto a screen wall, brick-engraved with the likeness of a village god's shrine that looks so lifelike and in such accord with the gateway that it naturally becomes the most eye-catching part of the inner screen wall. The ground inside the courtyard is paved with bricks or stones. The second gate is similar to the front gate in both shape and specification. The main hall, tall and roomy, is propped up on a framework built of unadorned fir of the choicest type, but Phoebe nanmu , cypress, or spinulose tree fern described in the Notes on Sections of Construction Projects , are used on the halls of large mansions. The timber for such purposes is sometimes polished to look smoother and more well-rounded. Such giant wooden frames, deliberately kept simple to shun ostentation, are in accord with the style of the walls built of shale bricks.

The portal of a hall is decorated with flying eaves. Floor-length latticed windows are used on the central room, and detachable windows on side or wing rooms. But the windows in such rooms built in a later period are replaced with lattice ones on a short wall between two columns. The central part of an inner hall or parlor has only a pair of floor-length windows flanked by detachable windows. If the wall under the lattice windows of a storied hall is replaced with a balustrade, wooden plates are furnished to be removed in summer to improve ventilation. An internal yard is often divided with a latticed wall, and a gate is opened in the wall to facilitate traffic.

The ratio between a courtyard's length and the height of buildings in it is 1:1 to insure enough sunlight indoors in Yangzhou dwellings. In summer days, an overhead mat-awning is erected in the courtyard to provide cooling shade while the front and back gates and windows are kept open to let in the refreshing wind, but the breeze drifting through the gate in the wall feels a lot cooler. In winter, the gate is shut up so that when the stairway is bathed in sunshine, the dwellers will be warded off the subfreezing winter. Latticed walls and multiple layers of doors also add to the spaciousness and depth of the courtyard, so that small residences do not appear cramped for space and large ones do not appear deserted and empty. Thus aesthetic effects are achieved under the premise that all the needed functions are amply provided. The courtyard containing the central hall is invariably sidelong and sometimes features two wings or corridors designed to accentuate the position of the central hall. The internal halls in the second row have wing rooms and are situated in a square court. Their depths are usually shallower than those in south Jiangsu; some of them have no windows on their northern walls to keep the interior cool and cosy in summer and to prolong the warmth of the sunlight let in from southern windows in winter.

Indoor spaces should be kept at once apart and combined, twisted and turned moderately, and deployed flexibly to make those staying indoors feel that there is always a lot of room to spare. Thus the parlor must be segmented with overhanging latticed screens or floor-length windows to yield spaces that are at once attached and detached, that can be scaled up and down, and that are packed with changes while the main ones are clearly told apart from the minor ones. Examples like these are found in the Toiler's Garden at Abundant Benevolence Lane and the Wang's Small Garden at Taoist Earth Official's Domain Lane. The central hall in a large and deep residence may feature two flying frontal eaves, like the one in the Lu's Mansion on Kangshan Street. An inner room is both joined and disjoined with side rooms, and is separated from wing rooms with overhanging latticed screens or floor-length windows. The overhanging screen in most cases forms a round hollow in the middle and is exquisitely crafted, and sometimes covered with patterned gauze.

The interior of a study can also be segmented flexibly. All the halls go without ceilings or rough-frame superstructures (double roofs), but ceilings may be fixed in residential rooms. Round ridge may also be built inside a parlor. All the ground indoors are covered with square bricks whose four corners are propped up on as many overturned bowls so that the floors are elevated by one inch or so[see On Superfluous Things (Volume One)], and the hollow between floor and ground is filled in with yellow sand. Finely ground bricks are erected edgewise to keep the floor flat and off subterranean dampness. If such a brick floor is built in a bedroom, it is covered with a mobile wooden floor on legs in winter to keep warm and reduce the net height of the interior. In a posh loft, a raised brick floor is paved on rooms upstairs, with a removable wooden floor added to it to soften the noise of footsteps—a method that tallies with the saying in On Superfluous Things (Volume One) that walking in such a loft is "no different than [walking] in a single-story house." Such floors, of course, appear only in high-grade classical residences; those built in later periods are all covered with ordinary floors.

The interior and exterior walls are all built solidly of bricks. Baked shale bricks are ideal for posh residences, while tightly budgeted houses can also put on a tidy appearance by putting together bricks of miscellaneous sizes with mortar. The corners of exterior walls are cut off up to man's average height for traffic convenience. A corridor's walls are partly white-washed, while wooden wainscots are used to cover its internal walls, with bricks' original color preserved on other parts. A courtyard atrium is usually floored with square or rectangular bricks made to lie flatly or stand edgewise, but it can also be paved with stone plates in cracked-ice patterns, large square marble slabs or stone plates from Gaozi in Zhenjiang. Column plinths come as thin as an ancient mirror, but block stones are also used in buildings dating back to the Ming and early Qing periods. In large residences, "stone drums" are used, some of which are fixed on a stone base in the shape of an overturned basin; such "drums" and "bases" are made of Gaozi stone or marble as well.

All the columns in Yangzhou's mansions are straight ones. The capitals of extant pillars in Ming mansions are rounded off in entasis to look thick and sturdy, with a 1:9 ratio between diameter and height, like the one in the central hall of the Mao's Residence at Greater East Gate, but it ranges between 1:10 and 1:16 for most of those available today. The alignment of columns is identical to the saying in Notes on Sections of Construction Projects that the central column does not exist in halls but can be seen in dwellings. A full-length horizontal tablet or architrave is used in the central room of a hall, with two central bay columns removed in order that the view of the audience watching a performance onstage is not blocked.

The timber for building beam frames comes in three styles: firstly, oblong timber popular in south Jiangsu; secondly, straight and round timber popular in Yangzhou; thirdly, something between the crescent beam and the straight beam, made by rounding off the lower part of both ends of a straight beam in entasis, a structure that seems to come about under the influence of the Anhui tradition of architecture. Of these three styles, the second is representative of the Yangzhou style. The only example of it is found in the Wu's House at Down North River Street, which is wrought by an artisan from Ningbo, Zhejiang province, by using a sturdy log as the beam, with the mortise and tenon at the joints axed and chiselled with perfect precision. The beam frame in an ordinary hall consists of a five-purlin beam between the front and back columns, with short columns placed on it, and then a three-purlin beam and a small pillar are installed. However, square beams and underboarding are not used under the purlins, which should be a northern Jiangsu invention because it does not tally with the instruction in Notes on Sections of Construction Projects , and therefore is somewhat flawed in structure. Some parlors have six sets of round ridges with stairway-shaped gable walls round in the upper part. Some luxury halls are fixed with square pillars and beams, which belong to the "square hall" type illustrated in the Notes on Sections of Construction Projects . Round ridges over the façade of the building generally have rafters curving into the shape of crabapple flowers, water caltrops, or a crane's neck, but most of such rafters are in the shape of a boat awning. Rough-frame superstructure is only used occasionally.

The balustrades of the Yangzhou tradition are relatively tall, and their lattices are of the shaped reel pattern surrounded with convex moldings. The concise hanging fascias under the eaves are set in tune with the elevation of the entire building. Rooftop tiles are paved on top of sheathing tiles, and the tile ends for ornamental and drainage purposes become thick and sturdy. Ends of arched tiles are longer in the lower part and those of plate tiles are raised in the upper part.

Insofar as water supply is concerned, there is at least one well in every urban dwelling in Yangzhou except for those homes that draw water from the Lesser Qinghuai River and the Wenhe River. Such wells are found in courtyards, in front of kitchens, inside gardens, or in "fire lanes," There are also "hidden" wells indoors, which refers to wells without brandriths. Public wells are available in almost every neighborhood. Brick arches are built into the lower part of the walls beside wells (those in Hangzhou and Shaoxing are lined with vertical stone plates) to prevent the wall from sinking or caving in, which is something seldom seen elsewhere. In addition to washing and drinking, well water is also reserved for fire prevention purposes, and rainwater is also preserved in vats placed under the eaves to meet the same needs. Underground shafts are built in courtyards to connect with sewages outside the front doors. Fish bowls are placed in ponds for wintering golden fish.

Neat, tidy and thriving dwelling buildings have impacted the cityscape of Yangzhou to a certain degree. Few old cities in China can match Yangzhou's sheer number of methodically laid out residential quarters. Such dwellings are bright, clean and quiet, with large ones containing small ones that are integrated or separated with facility. In handling spaces, due attention is paid to segmenting courtyards and grouping wide and narrow spaces, and sunlight and ventilation problems are addressed efficiently. Buildings large and small come in proper proportions and allocated proportionately, and floor spaces are economically deployed for the comfort of dwellers and to the delight of visitors. The plan of every dwelling is adapted to the environment and arranged cleverly. Every building is made to face south no matter in what direction a particular terrain is facing; every dwelling has its spaces well grouped to meet various functional needs no matter how large or small its lot is. Their architectural precepts are a hybrid of southern and northern styles, with emphasis on polish and order. So much for the characteristics of traditional dwellings in the Yangzhou tradition.

The gardens and residences of Yangzhou are of uttermost values to the history of Chinese architecture. I believe that garden crafters of today could learn a lot from the achievements of the local labouring people in garden construction in ancient times. ⁴⁶ QTMUFMqw64CCAQ9fmJsoVJhsFutp1p8DKOHCz7BF1UjRDIvCGEOhyWby7SgWi6aN