Ideas of Chinese Gardens: Western Accounts, 1300-1860

Publisher’s description, from the book cover: “Europeans may be said to have first encountered the Chinese garden in Marco Polo’s late medieval narrative of his travels through the Mongol Empire and his years at the court of Kublai Khan. His account of a man-made lake abundant with fish, a verdant green hill lush with trees, raised walkways, and a plethora of beasts and birds took root in the European imagination as the description of a kind of Eden. Beginning in the sixteenth century, interaction between Europe and China became more common, and Jesuit missionaries and travelers recorded in letters and memoires their admiration of Chinese gardens for the seeming naturalness. In the eighteenth century, European taste for chinoiserie reached its height, and informed observers of the Far East discovered that sophisticated and codified design principles lay behind the apparent simplicity of the Chinese garden. The widespread appreciation of the eighteenth century gave way to rejection in the nineteenth, a result of tensions over practical concerns such as trade imbalances and symbolized by the destruction of the imperial park of Yuanming yuan by a joint Anglo-French military expedition." The book is an edited and annotated collection of Western accounts of Chinese gardens written by travelers to and residents in China. It is accompanied by an extended introductory chapter that discussed the phenomenon of Chinese influence on Western garden culture and the changes of Western perception of the gardens of China over time. The volume is part of the series "Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture"