Read Shanghai Through Gardens

Two pairs have well-documented journeys. The oldest, cast in iron, once stood outside a government office gate in Anyang, Henan — cast in 1292, during the Yuan dynasty — until Japanese forces looted them during the Second World War. They were recovered afterward but never returned to Anyang; they ended up here instead. Another pair, carved in the Ming dynasty, guarded a temple to the sea goddess Mazu near today's Henan Road Bridge; some accounts trace their history back further still, to an even older Mazu shrine on the same site. When that temple's hall was demolished for road widening in the 1980s, the lions came to Yu Garden while the hall itself was relocated to a different park entirely. At least seven pairs are scattered through the garden in total, and as far as records show, none of them were carved or cast for Yu Garden in the first place — the rest arrived over generations of renovation, their individual origins no longer traceable.

A “matching set” implies one moment of design. Yu Garden's lions are the opposite — accidents, wars and relocations spread across centuries, standing guard as if nothing happened.

In 1559, a young official named Pan Yunduan came home from Beijing having failed the metropolitan examination. To cope, he turned a corner of the family's vegetable patch into a small garden — piling rocks, digging a pond, planting bamboo. He passed the exam a few years later and left for an official post — and the garden sat mostly untouched for the next two decades, work starting and stopping in fits as his career kept pulling him away. He only returned to it in earnest after leaving office and coming home in the late 1570s, when he hired the celebrated rockery designer Zhang Nanyang to finally finish the job properly. What started as a consolation prize took nearly thirty years — most of them stalled — to become one of the most celebrated private gardens in southeastern China, finished late in the Wanli era.

Yu Garden wasn't commissioned as a monument. It grew, slowly and unevenly, out of one bad exam result and thirty years of starting, stopping, and not letting it go.

The garden's owner, a Qing dynasty official named Gu Dashen, wasn't naming it after the famous wine-loving poet. He'd been reading Su Shi's essay about a Song dynasty statesman who once built a similar pond-side hall in tribute to Bai Juyi's writings on retirement and quiet contentment. Gu, who saw his own career reflected in that same theme of retreat and quiet contentment, saw the parallel and borrowed the whole idea — the pond, the name, the sentiment. It's an easy mistake to make. Li Bai is the “drinking poet” everyone remembers. Bai Juyi is the one who actually wrote about sitting quietly by a pond — which is exactly what this garden was built for.

The name isn't about wine. It's about knowing when to stop chasing a career and sit down.

Architect I.M. Pei once put it simply: in the West, a window lets in light and air. In a Chinese garden, it's a picture frame — the garden is always waiting on the other side of it, ready to be composed into a view. These openings — fully open ones are called kongchuang, pierced-pattern ones are louchuang — turn an ordinary wall into a sequence of “paintings” that change as you walk past. No two are ever quite the same, even within one garden. It's a deliberate refusal to treat a wall as just a boundary. It's treated as an opportunity.

Once you notice it, you start looking for the frame in every garden wall you pass — and realise the garden was composing your view before you ever arrived.

It began in 1502, when a retired Ming dynasty official named Gong Hong built a small private garden on his family's land. Two neighbouring families, the Shen and the Jin, later built their own gardens right beside his — each with no intention of ever merging. A temple to the city god sat next door the whole time. In 1987, all four — three family gardens plus the temple — were finally combined into a single public park, nearly five centuries after the first rock was placed. Walk through it today and the seams still show: four garden “personalities” back to back, each with its own pond, its own mood, its own century.

Most classical gardens tell one family's story. This one tells three — plus a temple's — which is probably why it still feels like you're discovering a new garden every few steps.

The rock is called Mizhinang — it “weeps” a milky liquid on humid days, a natural quirk that made it locally famous long before anyone thought to protect it. Local memory holds that when Japanese forces occupied the region, a worker at the garden smeared plaster over its carved inscription and buried it under rubble, hoping to keep it from being looted like so much else nearby. It worked — almost too well. The rock stayed lost for roughly six decades, until a local stone collector rediscovered it in 2001 and cleaned the plaster away.

Sometimes protecting something beautiful means making it look, deliberately, like nothing at all.

Chenghuang worship started as something much simpler: an ancient tradition of honouring the spirit of a settlement's protective moat. Only later did each city's guardian get reassigned to a real, named person — usually a local figure known for integrity. Shanghai's is Qin Yubo, a Yuan-dynasty scholar-official who turned down repeated offers to serve the rebel leaders who toppled the Yuan — and then, when the first Ming emperor summoned him, went through the motions of accepting without ever taking up real duties. The emperor reportedly never forgave the snub. When Qin died in 1373, having still never truly served him, the emperor's response was pointed: since Qin wouldn't serve in life, he'd guard Shanghai's soil in death instead. Songjiang, a short distance away, has a completely different city god: a Ming loyalist militia leader who died defending the city gate against the invading Qing army. Every walled town in the region got its own version of this — a real death, reassigned an eternal desk job protecting the living.

The city god isn't a myth invented to scare people straight. It's usually a real local memory, formalised — sometimes loosely — into a permanent civic role.

Zhang Garden opened to paying visitors in 1885 — ticket price, ten cents — and quickly became the city's default venue for everything: political rallies, fireworks shows, hot-air balloon demonstrations, ice-skating, even one of Shanghai's first commercial photo studios. Because it sat on foreign-administered land, Chinese authorities had no jurisdiction there. That made it one of the only places in the city where large public meetings — including early reform and revolutionary gatherings — could happen without a government permit. By the 1910s, changing tastes and management trouble had emptied it out. It was sold and redeveloped into housing — dense, close-packed shikumen lanes that, unlike the garden itself, are still standing. That lane neighbourhood survived intact for another century, and in recent years has been the subject of a major preservation effort to restore and reopen it.

Long before the government built anything resembling a public square, a private garden with an entrance fee was quietly doing the job instead.

The architect, Feng Jizhong, deliberately painted the bamboo joints black wherever two pieces connected — not to decorate them, but to make them disappear. Structural joints are usually the heaviest-looking part of any building; hiding them in shadow makes the whole thatched roof read as lighter than it actually is. Every wall curves rather than runs straight, on purpose. One common reading: curves catch shifting daylight in a way flat walls can't, so the building's mood seems to change through the day without a single part of it physically moving. It was scaled, deliberately, to match the size of a nearby Qing dynasty temple hall — a modern building quietly measuring itself against a historic one, rather than competing with it.

It's proof that “modern” and “traditional” were never actually opposites here — just two vocabularies describing the same instinct for light, shadow and proportion.