Characteristics Of Private Gardens In Jinzhong During Ming And Qing Dynasties

Due to violent social shift, the private gardens in Jinzhong had been seriously damaged during the past decades. By exploring how those gardens was exploited and what it meant and the relative information of social background and natural characteristics, it provided a way for increase understanding of the classic garden in China. Moreover, it will be helpful to push the designing of modern landscape with local features.Twelve existing private gardens built during Ming and Qing dynasty were selected. We depicted these cases from physical surveys to rethinking the importance of their art forms, the making of garden, to specifically literature, commercial status and religious. Finally, a contrast analysis between private garden in Jinzhong, Suzhou, and Beijing, dealing with the designed features in scholar gardens, in the same period was performed.The characteristics of private gardens that we have attempted to articulate were readable in many ways. The rising of private gardens in Jinzhong during Ming and Qing dynasty was closely relevant to the booming commercial activities during that time. Garden spaces were dominated with houses for daily living, attaching garden for leisure and recreation. A notion of traditional Confucianism characteristic was clear with a central axis existing in the spatial pattern. In garden style it appeared as a mixture of pragmatic feature and luxury decoration. The craftsman stressed that local ingredients be used, adjusting measures to differing conditions. That quite a number of native plants and water landscape with small scale in these gardens were evidence of the remarkable climate in the Loss Plateau. Overall, the traits of Jinzhong private gardens represented a series of spirit worship, including myth, religious, saint and ancestor, and wishes of longevity, wealth and honor.