The Influence Of The Imperial Garden

Today, owning a garden is an example of patience, wealth and overall, a place solely for relaxation and leisure. Backyard beauty is a thing of the past, present and future, and having a garden of prestigious color, height and perfected sense of organization is the ideal. To create the perfect garden, one must start with committed intent and a passionate desire to live among nature and its overall grandeur. Famous gardens such as the garden at Drummond Castle in Scotland and the Boboli Gardens in Italy, require constant time, effort and of course, money. Thus, who better to construct a garden, but an emperor: a person of power, status and wealth. Well for the royal families during the Qing Dynasty, one emperor provided them with a royal escape.

Many of the imperial garden scenes and the building establishments of the garden exhibit an imperial love of nature. The scenes themselves imply the visitor’s participation in the “path” they follow along through the resort, transporting the visitor through the visual experience of the physical environment around them. As the visitor is immersed in the composure of nature and the liveliness of the perspectives the resort has created of man-made nature, they truly become one with the “way.” The scenes also show a distinction of abstracting nature, through the formulation of man-made lakes, streams, and hills; abstraction is typically a design principle of a Japanese garden or building yet it is infused here at the resort as well. Fortunately for the resort, none of the architectural elements – the temples, palaces or the pagoda – do not dominate or intrude on nature’s role, as they lie within nature rather then next to, or on top

The resort fully captures the sensation of being in a landscape opposed to viewing it, leaving the garden to act as mental space. Feng shui, as it is linked to Daoism, means establishing a harmony with the resort’s landscape and buildings is especially important when framing the scenic views as well. The dynamic positive, or negative, energy that flows through the qi can be found in a Chinese garden through the valleys, mountains, rivers, and its interaction with man-made structures, all of which the Chengde Mountain Resort features in its design. The relation of garden space to a temple’s building space in the resort had to be carefully planned out, not to inherit a negative flow of energy through a place intended for relaxation and