What this day is about
Shanghai is not thought of as a garden city, but it has two gardens of real consequence and they were made for different reasons. This day puts them together and uses the contrast as the point: one is a merchant's garden inside a walled town, the other was built by an official returning home and enlarged a century later by a different owner. Both are Ming, both are in the register of protected monuments, and neither can be understood without the other.
The morning is in the old city; the afternoon is out at Nanxiang in Jiading district; the car covers the distance between.
Yu Garden
Yu Garden was begun in 1559 and enlarged in 1577 by Pan Yunduan, then serving as a provincial administrator far to the west, who named it for the pleasure it would give his parents in old age. It was laid out by Zhang Nanyang, one of the great garden-makers of the Ming, and it takes its place in the tradition as a garden built to be lived in rather than merely viewed. The State Council listed it in the first batch of National Key Cultural Relics Protection Units on 4 March 1961 - the only garden in Shanghai so designated.
Of the seventy-odd mu it once covered about thirty remain, and within that area there are more than forty named scenes. The ones to give time to are the Hall of Three Rices, the Hall of Heralding Spring - which served as the headquarters of the Small Swords Society uprising of 1853 - the Hall of Ten Thousand Flowers and the great rockery of yellow stone. The jade rock known as Yulinglong in the courtyard is counted, with the Auspicious Cloud Peak in Suzhou's Lingering Garden and the Wrinkled Cloud Peak in Hangzhou, among the three celebrated garden stones of Jiangnan. Admission is about CNY 40 for an adult, reduced for students and seniors, and is payable locally.
Lunch and the tea ritual
Lunch is in the old city, and the afternoon opens with tea - a seated tasting rather than a demonstration, so that the group drinks the two or three styles that define the local habit rather than watching someone else do it. Where the group would prefer a formal tea ceremony with a host, we will arrange it; that is a separate booking, is subject to the venue's confirmation, and is charged locally.
Guyi Garden
Guyi Garden at Nanxiang was first laid out in the Jiajing period of the Ming, between 1522 and 1566, by Min Shiji, then an assistant prefect of Henan, and was originally called the Jie Garden. In the Wanli period it took its new name from a line in the Book of Songs about the luxuriance of green bamboo, and the carver Zhu Sansong - one of the three great Zhu of Jiading bamboo carving - is credited with its design. It passed to a graduate named Li Yizhi, and in 1746 a man from Dongting in Suzhou, Ye Jin, bought it, extended it and rebuilt it; because a dynasty had passed since it was first made, a character meaning old was added to the front of its name, and it has been Guyi Garden ever since.
It is a 4A graded site and a Shanghai municipal protected monument, and it is the largest classical garden in the municipality at close to ten hectares, arranged in four sections: the original garden, the flower garden, the crane-shadow stream and the bamboo-and-mist quarter. Because the site was occupied twice in the twentieth century - by Japanese forces in 1932 and again in 1937, when much of the building was destroyed - some of what is there now is reconstruction, and the guide will show you how to tell. Three older survivals sit inside it: a Tang dynasty stone sutra pillar, a Song dynasty common burial pagoda and a Yuan dynasty pagoda. The Corner-Missing Pavilion, built in 1933 by local men who deliberately left out its north-eastern corner in protest at the loss of the north-east, is the one structure everyone remembers. Admission is about CNY 12.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
