Pania Yanjie Mu

Gebundenes Buch

From Temples to Garden Estates and Academies

Landscape Transformation of Suzhou During the 13th-16th Centuries and Beyond

Beschreibung

How did the temple-scape of Suzhou transform into garden-scape during the 13th to 16th centuries? This book investigates the landscape evolution of China during the Yuan-Ming socio-political transformation and provides a previously unrepresented Buddhist and hydraulic history of Chinese gardens.

Utilising historical GIS mapping and 3D architectural modelling, the research uncovers spatial strategies employed by monks, the gentry, and the government. It argues that by seizing hydraulic estates from Buddhists, the gentry and government rose as a landed class and cultural elites, establishing the literati garden. Yuan temples featured a mound-field-river topography which reclaimed urban wetlands. In temples such as Shizi Lin, scenes were crafted as Chan gong'ans to support Buddhist practice towards enlightenment, underpinning a monastic architectural transformation in the 14th century. In the Ming dynasty, the gentry and government exploited the hydro-topography while erasing Buddhist traces by converting temples into gardens. The book forms a theoretical model of triangulating the garden practice with socio-hydro spaces and advocates a new garden history enabled by historical mapping and modelling.

This book is aimed at students and scholars of East Asian history, temples and gardens, and landscape architecture and design.

Autor

Pania Yanjie Mu is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of East Asian Art History, Heidelberg University, Germany, and co-founder of P. M. Architects. She received her PhD from the Faculty of Architecture, the University of Hong Kong.

Produktdetails

• Routledge Research on Gardens in History
• Verlag: Taylor & Francis; Routledge
• Seitenzahl: 354
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. Januar 2025
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 235mm x 157mm x 24mm
• Gewicht: 640g
• ISBN-13: 9781032480572
• ISBN-10: 1032480572
• Artikelnr.: 71640725

Rezensionen

"This very welcome book contributes substantially to our understanding of the developing role of gardens in Yuan and Ming Suzhou. Its particular strengths lie in the provision of a very strong sense of change over time, of an actual history of garden spaces in the city, while integrating them into wider developments. The innovative modelling and drawing of these spaces is particularly valuable, and makes a major contribution to the clarity of the argument throughout."

Craig Clunas, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, University of Oxford