Borrowing scenery and the landscape that lends—the final chapter of Yuanye

Abstract

Borrowed scenery, in Chinese jiejing 借景, is an idea in garden design conceptualized by modernist architects in the course of the 1960s. The first to propose it, however, was the Chinese garden designer Ji Cheng in his Yuanye 園冶, published in or shortly after 1635, during the waning years of the Ming dynasty. In fact, the title of the last chapter of this book is the same word, Jiejing 借景. This paper examines the chapter ‘Jiejing’ from the perspective of a garden maker and suggests that it is an unambiguous, self-evident, and comprehensive conclusion of this book on garden making. Jiejing is then not borrowed scenery as a single design idea but the essence of landscape design philosophy in its entirety. As such, Ji Cheng's jiejing fits well into recent discourse on nature and environment. Translations of, and commentaries on, Yuanye in Western languages miss this advanced understanding, or fall into the trap of the architect's vision. The text of ‘Jiejing’ is provided here with the Chinese characters from the Ming original, to facilitate further discourse and research.