From Temples to Garden Estates and Academies : Landscape Transformation of Suzhou during the 13th-16th Centuries and Beyond (Routledge Research on Gardens in History)

Mu, Pania Yanjie

Routledge（2025/01発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 328 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781032480572
• DDC分類 712.60951136

Full Description

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.

Contents

Introduction 1. Garden Estates: Transforming Urban Hydrology 2. Constructing the Temple-scape 3. Converting Temples into Literati Gardens 4. Converting Temples into Confucian Institutions 5. From Buddhist to Gentry Society. Conclusion: A New Garden History: Hydro-Social Transformation Illuminated by 3D Modelling and GIS Mapping