Liebespaar-Garten

The Couple's Retreat Garden, also known as the Garden of the Spouses, is a small classical garden on the east side of Suzhou's old city, overlooking a bend in the inner moat. Of all Suzhou's surviving classical gardens, it is the one most explicitly organized around a love story. The property was first laid out in the eighteenth century under the name She Garden, but its present form dates from 1876, when the Qing dynasty official Shen Bingcheng and his wife, the poet Yan Yonghua, rebuilt the estate and renamed it Couple's Garden to commemorate their marriage.

The name works on two levels, both of which are intended in the original Chinese. The first refers to the layout: the property is shaped like a lotus root, with a central residential courtyard flanked by two symmetrical gardens, one to the east and one to the west, joined through the residence like the two halves of a single root. The second meaning is lovers' retreat, a reference to the eight years Shen and Yan spent living here in semi-retirement after Shen's political career was interrupted. The couple is said to have composed and inscribed poems together in the garden's pavilions, several of which are still preserved on the site.

The eastern garden is the larger and more scenic of the two, arranged around a long pond and backed by a tall artificial cliff of yellow stone. A pair of twin pavilions, the Pavilion of Listening to the Rain and the Tower of Connecting Hills, face each other across the water, designed as mirrored stations from which the husband and wife could enjoy the same view from opposite sides of the garden. The yellow rockeries, drawn from local Suzhou quarries rather than the Lake Tai limestones used in other gardens, give the eastern garden a distinctive warm-toned palette. The western garden is smaller and more restrained, organized around a single courtyard of old trees and bamboo.

In 2000 the Couple's Retreat Garden was added to the Classical Gardens of Suzhou UNESCO World Heritage listing as part of the extension that brought the total number of inscribed gardens to nine. Compared with the larger and more crowded headline gardens, it receives fewer visitors and preserves a quieter, more domestic atmosphere. For travelers interested in the social and marital dimension of Suzhou garden design, the garden as a setting for a shared life, it is the most evocative of the city's classical properties.