Jing, the concept of scenery in texts on the traditional Chinese garden: an initial exploration

Abstract

China has a long history of garden-making. Historical surveys of Chinese gardens usually start with a time as early as the Shang dynasty (eleventh century BC—sixth century BC).1 Scholarly analyses of Chinese garden-making, however, did not begin until the twentieth century when ancient gardens prior to the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) had long disappeared or had been altered in later times. The lack of physical evidence has forced scholars to reconstruct a history of Chinese garden-making on the basis ofliterary sources scattered throughout a vast body of ancient documents, and the remaining examples of Qing gardens. This makes the Chinese garden an extremely difficult subject for scholars, and it has led to many problems in writing about Chinese gardens as a tradition.