page_title: Chinese garden
section_title: Artificial mountains and rock gardens
hierarchical_section_title: Chinese garden / Design of the classical garden / Artificial mountains and rock gardens
caption_attribution_description: English: The Gong Wang Fu (Prince Gong Mansion) in Beijing
context_page_description: The Chinese garden is a landscape garden style which has evolved over three thousand years. It includes both the vast gardens of the Chinese emperors and members of the imperial family, built for pleasure and to impress, and the more intimate gardens created by scholars, poets, former government officials, soldiers and merchants, made for reflection and escape from the outside world. They create an idealized miniature landscape, which is meant to express the harmony that should exist between man and nature.
  A typical Chinese garden is enclosed by walls and includes one or more ponds, rock works, trees and flowers, and an assortment of halls and pavilions within the garden, connected by winding paths and zig-zag galleries. By moving from structure to structure, visitors can view a series of carefully composed scenes, unrolling like a scroll of landscape paintings.
context_section_description: The artificial mountain (jiashan) or rock garden is an integral element of Chinese classical gardens. The mountain peak was a symbol of virtue, stability and endurance in Confucian philosophy and in the I Ching.  A mountain peak on an island was also a central part of the legend of the Isles of the Immortals, and thus became a central element in many classical gardens.
  The first rock garden appeared in Chinese garden history in Tu Yuan (literally "Rabbit Garden"), built during the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE – 9 CE). During the Tang dynasty, the rock was elevated to the status of an art object, judged by its form (xing), substance  (zhi), color (se), and texture (wen), as well as by its softness, transparency, and other factors. The poet Bo Juyi (772–846) wrote a catalog of the famous rocks of Lake Tai, called Taihu Shiji. These rocks, of limestone sculpted by erosion, became the most highly prized for gardens.
  During the Song dynasty, the artificial mountains were made mostly of earth. But Emperor Huizong (1100–1125) nearly ruined the economy of the Song Empire by destroying the bridges of the Grand Canal so he could carry huge rocks by barge to his imperial garden. During the Ming dynasty, the use of piles of rocks to create artificial mountains and grottos reached its peak. During the Qing dynasty, the Ming rock gardens were considered too artificial and the new mountains were composed of both rocks and earth.
  The artificial mountain in Chinese gardens today usually has a small view pavilion at the summit. In smaller classical gardens, a single scholar rock represents a mountain, or a row of rocks represents a mountain range.
caption: Rock garden at the Prince Gong Mansion in Beijing, complete with a grotto
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