Chinese Classical Gardens Research Articles

VR and Physiological Assessment Technologies Applied on the Touring Perception of Chinese Classical Gardens

This paper reviews on the research status and new progress in the field of Chinese classical gardens by the application of new technologies including virtual reality and physiological measurements. Firstly, it introduces the background and significance of current research in the field of spatial creation in Chinese classical gardens. Then, this paper combs relevant literature on the application of VR and physiological research methods on landscape and architectural studies in recent years. Finally, the possibilities of applying physiological data and virtual reality in the exploration of the spatial perception of Chinese classical gardens is discussed. The results could provide inspiration sources and technical references for the empirical studies of future landscape research on Chinese classical gardens.

Literature, painting, and Chinese garden: intertextuality in the translation of “footnotes to yu mountain”

ABSTRACT Yu Garden (寓園) in Shanyin (山陰) (present-day Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province), is one of the few private gardens of the Ming Dynasty to be situated far from a city. It was constructed on a piece of family-owned land on Yu Mountain developed by the garden owner Qi Biaojia (祁彪佳1603–1645) in 1635. Although the physical dimension of this garden has long since disappeared, Qi Biaojia left behind a large quantity of related textual resources, including the garden record, related poems, verses, letters, and diaries, providing a fairly complete non-physical dimension of the garden. The garden record (Yuan ji 園記) is vital evidence in the study of Chinese classical gardens, especially for those gardens that disappeared in their physical dimension. This paper takes Duncan Campbell’s two translations of the garden record named “Footnotes to Yu Mountain” (Yushan zhu 寓山注) as an example, exploring the interdisciplinary study of Chinese gardens through spatial experience, literature, and image. Campbell proposes that the character Yu (寓) should be translated into the term “allegory”, but this paper argues that this translation doesn’t fully capture the concept expressed by Yu. This discussion is closely linked with the essential understanding of this garden and the integrity of Chinese terms in cross-culture comparisons.

Sustainable micro renewal and renovation of arts town in China: Intermingling design of contemporary art and Chinese classical garden

<p>The gardening philosophy of Chinese classical gardens is an integral part of China’s rich traditional culture, reflecting ancient scholars’ understanding of nature and humanity and embodying aesthetic and philosophical values. With the progression of time, integrating the principles of Chinese classical garden gardening into contemporary space design has emerged as a critical issue in contemporary public space design. This study uses the Butong Arts Town in Qinhuangdao as a case study, focusing on applying Chinese classical garden gardening concepts in public space design and regional micro-renovation. Special attention is given to nodes that simultaneously serve interactive and recreational functions. In the micro-renovation of the Butong Arts Town area, Chinese classical garden gardening principles can be employed through greening, landscaping, and other means to enhance the quality of the space. Additionally, by integrating local cultural characteristics, it is possible to create public spaces with distinct regional features, providing a comfortable and pleasant environment for artists, designers, planners, and tourists. The design methods used in this study explore the behavioral characteristics and usage needs of various groups from multiple perspectives, aiming to optimize activity spaces. This research identifies the main issues within the target areas and proposes corresponding improvement measures to enhance the functionality and aesthetic quality of the space. The aim is to integrate people’s growing spiritual pursuits with public activity spaces, providing new references and ideas for future sustainable space design.</p>

Rockery morphology based on quantitative analysis of shading

The rockeries of classical Chinese gardens are masterpieces of classical Chinese garden art and form a key element of garden heritage. Consequently, a quantitative study of “rockery shadows” is of considerable importance to the study of “rockery forms.” In this study, we selected the representative North Rockery in Zhanyuan Garden of Nanjing and Ruiyunfeng, Guanyunfeng, and Yulinglong as the objects of the study. This study aims to explore the shadow images of rockeries using image extraction and targeted quantitative analysis methods. Macroscopically, the overall shape of rockery shadows was described using fractal dimensions; microscopically, the aspect ratio, angle, and refinement indexes of each shadow based on each observation angle of the rockery were measured using the PAT-GEOM plug-in in ImageJ software. SPSS Statistics was used for the normal distribution test of the angular distribution data. Consequently, the shadow data of the North Rockery in Zhanyuan Garden and Ruiyunfeng, Guanyunfeng, and Yulinglong, respectively, were analyzed and compared, and four rockery-shadow laws were derived. Finally, the results were applied to the design of the rockery morphological translation based on quantitative analysis of the shadows. The approach presented here will enhance landscape design, support environmental planning, and preserve cultural heritage.

Research on the restorative effects and perception of privacy driven activities in Chinese classical gardens-Case studies of three Suzhou gardens.

The need for privacy, recognized as a fundamental psychological requirement, has garnered increasing attention as researchers explore the restorative effects of privacy driven activities (PDA). This study employs quantitative experiments and analyses to assess the restorative benefits of PDA within three classical Chinese gardens, demonstrating their superiority over conventional leisure activities in promoting emotional recovery, reducing stress, and restoring attention. The experiment quantifies the restorative effects of PDA versus standard leisure activities using a classic restorative scale and physiological indicators reflecting emotional relief. Regression analyses then identify five key factors influencing the occurrence of PDA, derived from preferred locations and behavioral tendencies observed in the three gardens. Further analyses reveal significant differences in the impacts of these five environmental feature dimensions on the evaluation indicators of "preference for privacy-oriented activities" and "restorative effects". Among these dimensions, "spatial scale and accessibility" has the greatest impact on the "preference for privacy-oriented environments", while "spatial atmosphere" and "activity facilities" have the most significant impact on "restorative effects". The findings suggest that behavioral activities mediate the relationship between environmental factors and restorative effects, highlighting the potential of PDA as a mediating variable for a comprehensive investigation into the pathways and mechanisms influencing restorative environments in research and design.

Effects of scenery frame on visual depth perception in classical Chinese gardens: A case study of the Lvyin Pavilion in Lingering Garden

Visual depth (distance) perception is a fundamental aspect of environmental cognition, as it allows people to judge the spatial scale of their surroundings. However, estimating the depth of classical Chinese gardens is challenging, especially from static viewpoints that frame the scenery. Previous studies have examined how the internal components of the scenery frame affect depth perception. Still, the role of the frame and its peripheral information as environmental background have been largely overlooked. This study investigates how depth perception at viewpoints is influenced by viewing position displacement, frame geometry, and environmental context. The authors created nine stimulus materials in a cave virtual reality environment (three image treatments × three positions). Seventy-one participants were asked to evaluate depth perception using the magnitude estimation and adjustment methods. Their eye movement behavior was also recorded using an eye-movement instrument (SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) eye-tracking glasses, 120 Hz). The results showed that participants could perceive spatial depth differences between viewing positions even when the internal viewpoint displacement was small; frame shape did not significantly affect depth perception and gaze behavior; and peripheral visual information of the frame enhanced depth perception significantly. Moreover, the form of the environmental background, especially the position of the scenery window, strongly guided the participants’ gaze. These findings suggest that ambient visual information significantly impacts environmental experience, which landscape designers should consider.

The Garden and Its Walls

This essay examines the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver through a sociocultural lens. Positioned in Chinatown within Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), the garden is the first authentic Ming Dynasty-style scholar’s garden outside of China. Operating as both a public park managed by the Vancouver Park Board, as well as a paid garden managed by a nonprofit organization, the garden symbolizes an intersection of Canadian and Chinese cultures, offering a distinctive lens for analyzing cultural interplay. The concepts of the «contact zone» as well as assemblage theory are central to understanding the garden’s role in facilitating cross-cultural dialogues. Influenced by scholars like James Clifford and Mary Louise Pratt, the garden serves as a physical and conceptual space where cultures converge, fostering interpersonal dialogue among visitors of varied backgrounds. Philipp Schorch’s expansion of the contact zone to museum spaces offers a framework for analyzing the garden as representing Chinese culture in Vancouver as well as tying the garden to its locality. The analysis of the garden extends beyond its own confines and over its walls, exposing and exploring the complex relationship the garden has to its surrounding space, the DTES, and Chinatown.

Harmony in Nature: Exploring the Multisensory Impact of Classical Gardens on Individuals' Well-Being.

Objectives: Chinese classical gardens, designated as a vital world cultural heritage, embody a lasting legacy transcending generation. Despite the cultural importance of these gardens, a notable research gap exists in deciphering the nuanced emotional and physiological responses triggered by individual elements within classical garden landscapes. Our research question aims to uncover the specific emotional and physiological impacts of key garden elements-plants, architecture, waterscape, and rockery-on visitors, with a particular focus on the Humble Administrator's Garden. These elements serve as the primary subjects for video capture at four sites. Study Design: A within-subject design experiment was used. Methods: Videos were recorded at these sites, encompassing visual, auditory, and tactile elements. Ninety-five participants watched these videos in an indoor setting. While viewing, we measured participants' physiological responses, including heart rate variability, skin conductance, and skin temperature, will be monitored alongside subjective assessments obtained through self-reported questionnaires such as the Emotional Perception Scale and State-Trait Anxiety Scale. Results: Findings suggest that while all landscape types evoke positive emotions, natural elements exert a more profound influence. Additionally, the Large Rockery emerges as a focal point, indicating enhanced emotional relaxation through auditory and tactile stimuli, particularly among younger individuals. Conclusions: This research contributes to the broader understanding of how classical gardens impact human emotions and well-being, offering insights that can inform future landscape design and promote mental health in diverse cultural contexts.

Digital improvements in the design and construction process of classical Chinese garden rockeries: a study based on material digitization

Rockeries have a complex and significant role in classical Chinese garden designs. They present distinct artistic characteristics and spatial hierarchies and are crucial to garden heritage conservation. Craftsmanship in rockery construction is a significant part of China’s intangible cultural heritage. Rockeries are primarily composed of naturally occurring rocks chosen for their uniqueness and complex shapes and textures. These rocks present challenges as nonstandard elements within the traditional Chinese garden context, as it is not easy to depict them using conventional blueprints and models. This complicates the design, adjustment, display, and construction of rockeries, which lacks tangible bases for reference. Consequently, the preservation and restoration of garden rockeries is difficult, and the perpetuation and dissemination of rockery construction skills face numerous challenges. This study introduces a method that combines laser scanning and photographic measurements to digitize precisely nonstandard elements of rockery stones. This approach presents an innovative design and construction workflow for rockeries by refining design processes, showcasing real effects, and resolving assembly issues. The results demonstrate that the combination of three-dimensional laser scanning and close-range photogrammetry can accurately replicate the complex forms and textures of these nonstandard elements. The stone coding and digital management system devised based on the logic of construction effectively satisfies the design and building requirements of rockeries. Correspondingly, the proposed digital construction workflow enhances the accuracy of rockery design, presentation, and evaluation, thereby contributing to the protection and restoration of rockery heritage sites and the transmission of rockery construction techniques.

The Restorative Effects of Unique Green Space Design: Comparing the Restorative Quality of Classical Chinese Gardens and Modern Urban Parks

The Restorative Effects of Unique Green Space Design: Comparing the Restorative Quality of Classical Chinese Gardens and Modern Urban Parks

On the Implications of the Mood of Classical Chinese Gardens for Modern Landscape Design and Evaluation

On the Implications of the Mood of Classical Chinese Gardens for Modern Landscape Design and Evaluation

Quantification and analysis study for the morphological characteristics of urban waterbodies: Evidences from 42 cases in China

Influenced by the water design principle of Chinese classical garden, the design of urban waterbodies (lakes, ponds and wetlands) in China typically exhibits natural-like morphological characteristics, but what similarities and differences among these characteristics remain unclear. Also, the morphology of urban waterbodies is mostly designed with beauty and lacks quantitative research and methodological support, which is not favourable to the exploration of the correlation between waterbody morphology and ecology. In this study, 11 quantifiable morphological indicators are selected from water surface, shoreline complexity and water-land spatial morphology. A Grasshopper-based model for waterbody morphology quantification and analysis was constructed and applied to 42 cases in China. Combined with frequency, correlation and PCA analysis, the cases and indicators with higher composite scores generally showed more natural water surface morphology, island distribution, and diversified land and water spaces. The thresholds for the more representative indicators are 0.10–0.60 for the circularity ratio (C), 1.01–1.15 for the shoreline fractal dimension (D0), 1.58–29.42 for the island nearest-neighbour index (NN), 1.20–2.50 for the shoreline development index (SDI), 0.20–0.55 for the compactness ratio (Rc) and 0.30–0.85 for the unit water surface morphological difference ratio (ΔB). Focusing on these indicators, along with ΔB and I which describe spatial inclusiveness and island distribution, their regression equations and threshold ranges provide a primary basis for developing waterbody morphology designs and generative algorithms. This methodology has been experimentally applied in the design of a case waterbody in Suqian City Park. Overall, this study constructs and validates the feasibility of a Grasshopper-based algorithm for the quantitative analysis and morphogenetic design of waterbody morphology. It demonstrates the potential of this method for understanding complex waterbody morphology and water-land spaces, and supports a new digital methodology for the optimisation of waterscape design.

Framework restoration on Tang Dynasty garden as a multiple-histories environment: Regions, ecology, architecture, and human behavior

From a multiple-histories perspective, this paper attempts to restore the feature framework of Tang Dynasty gardens by describing the environment panorama of that era. Tang Dynasty gardens have their own unique and complex environment features, which is crucial for understanding Chinese classical gardens. This research developed a massive text mining method of historical-document to detect all garden-related elements in Tang poetry. By sorting out these elements, it has been restored the original appearance of Tang Dynasty gardens and summarized its feature framework. The resulting model included 199 factors, 173 of which are correlating with gardens. Among the 173 factors, 129 are risk factors and 44 are protective factors. This paper restores the feature framework of Tang Dynasty gardens from the following four points, namely regions, ecology, architecture and human behavior. Understanding the Tang Dynasty gardens would help understand the development context of Chinese classical gardens, and should provide new paths for contemporary environment creation.

Unveiling the dynamics of "scenes changing as steps move" in a Chinese classical garden: a case study of Jingxinzhai Garden

Chinese classical gardens are a significant cultural heritage in the history of world gardening, with their central architectural principle of "scenes changing as steps move" (步移景异) embodying traditional Chinese aesthetic ideals. This study employed the variation of visual complexity during a tour as a representation of this principle, using Jingxinzhai (静心斋) Garden as a case study. The visual environmental characteristics were quantified using the Fraclab box-counting, Canny edge detection, and DeepLab V3 + model, and the spatial distribution of fractal dimension and visual index of landscape elements were analyzed. Through partial correlation analysis, hierarchical regression analysis, and one-way ANOVA, the relevant factors (BVI, RVI, GVI, WVI) and influencing factors (BVI, RVI, GVI) and the differences among landscape element combinations of visual complexity were identified. Furthermore, the distribution patterns and causes of visual complexity in Chinese classical gardens were then discussed. This study proposes an effective method for quantifying the visual environmental characteristics of Chinese classical gardens and provides an explanation of the concept of "scenes changing as steps move" from the perspective of visual environment. It offers important references for a deeper understanding of Chinese classical garden design and planning.

Influence of virtual audio system on psychological restoration effects of soundscapes: Investigating water sounds of a Chinese classical garden

Various sound recording and reproduction methods were utilized to create virtual replicas of soundscapes and restoration effects of soundscapes were examined in studies. The reproduction quality of different virtual audio systems may impact the restoration effect of soundscapes. However, only a limited number of studies have conducted experiments to explore these influences. In this study, five water sounds from a traditional Chinese garden were recorded and reproduced using the monaural, binaural, and first-order Ambisonics technologies. The study evaluated the psychological restorative effects of both virtual and real-world soundscapes through the perceived restorativeness soundscape scale. Furthermore, the perceived realism and spaciousness of the virtual soundscapes were subjectively compared. The findings confirmed the relationship between fidelity and the restorative effects of virtual soundscapes. Binaural recording and playback using a dummy head and headphones proved to be the most authentic method for recreating restorative sound environments. Ambisonics also yielded relatively consistent rating scores compared to real-world cases, whereas the monaural scheme posed a risk of deteriorating the restoration effect of soundscapes.

The Dilemma and Direction of Breakthroughs of Current Legislation on Conservation of Classical Chinese Gardens in Jiangnan Region

The Dilemma and Direction of Breakthroughs of Current Legislation on Conservation of Classical Chinese Gardens in Jiangnan Region

A multi-level quantitative analysis method on the scale, shape and quantity of rockeries in Chinese classical gardens: taking Wanfang Anhe rockery in the Old Summer Palace as an example

Currently, the use of digital technology for the protection and research of cultural heritage has become a trend in this field. Rockeries in Chinese classical gardens have become an important cultural heritage type because of their unique shape, ingenious skills and rich connotations. Based on relevant historical information and 3D digital technology, this paper puts forward a multi-level quantitative analysis method on the scale, shape and quantity of rockeries in Chinese classical gardens, aiming at exploring the objective description and quantitative analysis path of rockeries at different levels. This method develops four levels: overall, regional, hierarchical, and individual and their corresponding quantitative contents, which in turn enable data extraction and analysis of the rockery through the different levels. The proposed method was applied to seven different Chinese classical garden rockeries, and taking Wanfang Anhe Rockery in the Old Summer Palace as an example for objective and comprehensive quantitative analysis and verification. The results show that this method is feasible and effective for quantitative analysis of the scale, shape and quantity of rockeries, which can help understand the basic background of stone rockeries and enhance a refined understanding of stone rockery construction, thereby providing data for preventive protection and informatization management of stone rockeries. The 3D rockery model database based on the overall, regional, hierarchical and individual quantitative analysis and numbering method brings a good application prospect for preventive protection and informatization management of the rockery.

Construction of an Analytical Framework for Spatial Indicator of Chinese Classical Gardens Based on Space Syntax and Machine Learning

Construction of an Analytical Framework for Spatial Indicator of Chinese Classical Gardens Based on Space Syntax and Machine Learning

Healing Gardens from the Perspective of Oriental Gardens Therapeutic Landscapes

Healing gardens, originating from developed Western countries such as the United States, play a crucial role in enhancing both physiological and psychological well-being, as well as rehabilitation. Classical Chinese gardens inherently embody profound elements conducive to health, yet unlike Western Healing gardens, they have not formed a scientific research system. This paper delves into the literature and imagery to comprehensively understand the therapeutic concepts embedded in traditional Chinese gardens. Building upon the existing Western frameworks and the foundation of Chinese culture, it constructs a relatively comprehensive perspective of Healing gardens from the standpoint of Oriental gardens. Furthermore, the paper summarizes and anticipates the research on Healing gardens in China within this context.

Digital preservation of classical gardens at the San Su Shrine

Chinese classical gardens, an essential part of World Cultural Heritage, are well exemplified by Xishu Garden as a notable branch of this tradition. This research focuses on the San Su Shrine—a quintessential example of Xishu Garden—and explores the application of digital technologies in the commemorative research and quantitative preservation of these gardens. By integrating terrestrial laser scanning and terrestrial digital photogrammetry, we acquired quantitative data and constructed digital models to innovate upon the methodological approach to garden conservation. The innovation of this study is its analysis of Xishu Garden’s commemorative spaces through both temporal and spatial dimensions. 1) Temporally, this study examines the evolution and stratification of the garden's commemorative elements across various historical periods. 2) Spatially, it explores the interconnectedness of commemorative elements within the garden's buildings, rockery stones, water landscape and plant landscape. This dual-faceted approach yields novel insights and methods for assessing the universal value of the commemorative aspects of Xishu Garden. Moreover, it promotes the application of digital technology in the study and preservation of Xishu and other Chinese classical gardens.