Songjiang, in the south-western corner of the Shanghai municipality, was a prefecture town long before Shanghai existed as a city, and it holds the oldest of the area's classical gardens. Zuibaichi takes its name from a hall built beside a pond and dedicated to Li Bai - the name means roughly the pool where one bows to Li Bai - and the garden was laid out in the seventeenth century by a Ming official who retired there. It has been extended and repaired since, but the bones of the original composition are intact.
The garden
The plan is water-led: a long pond runs through the middle, with halls, pavilions and covered galleries arranged around its banks and joined by bridges and stepping stones. Rockeries of piled limestone sit at the water's edge, ancient trees lean over the paths, and the corridors that run along the southern side give a framed view of the whole thing at once - the one place in the garden where you can see it as a composition. Stone inscriptions and calligraphy tablets are set into the walls of the galleries, which is the usual way a scholar's garden carried its literary content.
Songjiang around it
The garden sits in the middle of Songjiang's old town, which retains a square pagoda, a Ming-era screen wall and a handful of streets with their original scale. The square pagoda - Fangta - is a Song dynasty brick pagoda with a rare square plan, and it anchors a small park a short walk away. Together with the garden it makes a half day that is unlike anything in central Shanghai, because Songjiang's history is genuinely older and its street pattern was not demolished in the twentieth century.
Practical notes
Songjiang is reachable on metro line 9, roughly an hour from the city centre, and the garden is a short taxi or bus ride from the station. Admission is charged and modest. Signage is largely in Chinese, so a translation app helps with the inscriptions. The garden is at its best in spring and early summer; the lotus season on the pond is the local highlight. Weekdays are quiet, and the surrounding old town is easy to walk in an hour or so.
