Jichang Garden

Jichang Garden is a Ming dynasty scholar garden at the foot of Huishan in Liangxi District, Wuxi, Jiangsu province, within the Huishan Ancient Town. It was laid out in the early 16th century as a private retreat by the official Qin Jin and was later developed by his descendants of the Qin family, whose name remains attached to the property. The garden is among the best-known surviving examples of the Jiangnan school of garden design and is notable for its use of borrowed scenery: the pavilions and pond are composed so that the pagoda and slopes of Xishan appear to belong to the garden itself. The Qing emperors Kangxi and Qianlong visited the garden during their southern tours, and Qianlong admired it enough that the Xiequ Garden in the Summer Palace at Beijing was modelled on it. The central feature is a pond ringed by rockeries, bridges, covered corridors and pavilions, with a stone-lined stream known as the Octave Valley that runs across a hillside rockery and is said to evoke the sound of a musical scale as water falls over its stones. The Ming-era layout has been preserved with later Qing alterations, and the garden was repaired and opened to the public in the 20th century after a period of neglect. Wall inscriptions, couplets and carved stone tablets record visits and poems. The garden is compact, and a visit follows a loop around the pond with changing views across the water to the hill, making it a quiet counterpart to the busier ancestral-hall streets of Huishan Ancient Town beside it.