Verweil-Garten (Liu Yuan)

The Lingering Garden is one of the four great classical gardens of China and a key property within the UNESCO Classical Gardens of Suzhou World Heritage inscription. Its present form dates from the late nineteenth century, when the garden was rebuilt and greatly enlarged after the destruction of the Taiping era, but its core layout preserves a continuous design lineage going back to a sixteenth-century Ming dynasty garden built by the official Xu Taishi. Of all Suzhou's gardens, the Lingering Garden is the one most often cited for the elegance of its architecture.

The garden is laid out in four sequential sections, central, eastern, western, and northern, each organized around a different element. The central section is the most classical, with a long pond at its heart, ringed by halls and pavilions whose names, including Clear Distant Pavilion and Small Hill and Cassia Pavilion, sketch out a literary landscape. The eastern section is dominated by architecture, with a sequence of ornate halls, among them the celebrated Linquan Qisou Hall, said to be the largest hall in any Suzhou garden. The western section is a quiet artificial hill planted with maples, and the northern section is given over to a more rural landscape of bamboo, peach trees, and vegetables.

Two features distinguish the Lingering Garden from its peers. The first is its use of Taihu lake stones, the strange water-carved limestone rocks prized by Chinese gardeners, and in particular the Crown of Clouds Peak, a six-and-a-half-meter standing stone that is one of the most celebrated rocks in any Chinese garden, along with the nearby Auspicious Cloud Peak and Mountain Cloud Peak. The second is the garden's architecture of windows and corridors: a six-hundred-meter covered walkway threads the entire property, and along its length open more than three hundred lattice windows, each cut into a different pattern, so that as visitors move they are presented with a continuously changing sequence of framed views.

For first-time visitors, the Lingering Garden is perhaps the most rewarding Suzhou garden for close observation. Its scale is more manageable than the Humble Administrator's Garden, and the sophistication of its architectural detail, including carved lintels, painted beams, moon gates, and the long corridor, makes it easier to see how the garden functions as a sequence of composed pictures. Allow time to stop at each lattice window and watch the view shift.