Have Gardens Gone Out of Style? *Glimpses of Gardens in Eastern China*, 50 Years in the Writing, Is Back — and Its Subject Is More Than Taste

The author Tung Chuin once complained: “Foreigners actually think Chinese gardens came over from Japan.” “I want to write something about this. We have too few books on the subject and Japan has far too many, so Westerners assume Chinese gardens were influenced by Japan — which gets it exactly backwards.”

“What meets the eye is only one part of the whole. As the visitor presses forward, the scene unfolds step by step; inscribed poems stir the imagination, and boundless views invite endless reverie.”

That is how Glimpses of Gardens in Eastern China, published in November, describes walking through a Chinese garden. Its author, Tung Chuin, held that against the “monotony” of gardens made by a France that “prizes reason and insists on logic,” Chinese gardens “spare no cost to avoid rigid geometry and stereotyped order.” Their air of “spontaneity and abandon,” he wrote, matches the philosophy of the Chinese literati exactly.

Tung Chuin belonged to China’s first generation of architects. He graduated from the senior division of Tsinghua School in 1925 and left that same year on a government scholarship to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where Yang Tingbao, Liang Sicheng, and Chen Zhi were his classmates. He returned home in the autumn of 1930 to teach architecture at Northeastern University in Shenyang.

After the Mukden Incident of September 18, 1931, Tung Chuin left Shenyang in haste. Two months and several detours later he reached Shanghai and began a new career in a culture he barely knew. There he founded Allied Architects with Chen Zhi and Zhao Shen, and within a few years the firm completed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building in Nanjing, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, and the Grand Shanghai Theatre. When the Battle of Shanghai broke out in 1937, he followed the Nationalist government’s National Resources Commission to Chongqing.

In those six short Shanghai years Tung Chuin finished the most important scholarly work of his life, 《江南园林志》 (A Record of the Gardens of Jiangnan), the first modern Chinese book to treat garden-making as a subject for scientific method. In the same years he began publishing, in English, the material that would become Glimpses of Gardens in Eastern China.

At the start it was a book of popular explanation written for Western readers. The world then knew Asian gardens through Japan, and to correct that Tung Chuin began publishing a run of essays on the subject. 《长夜的独行者》 (The Lone Walker of the Long Night) quotes him: “Foreigners actually think Chinese gardens came over from Japan.” “I want to write something about this. We have too few books on the subject and Japan has far too many, so Westerners assume Chinese gardens were influenced by Japan — which gets it exactly backwards.”

From 1936 to 1938 he wrote three English essays a year for T’ien Hsia Monthly, introducing the world to China’s new modern architecture and to Chinese culture. One of them, Chinese Garden, ran in the October 1936 issue. In 1944 he wrote two sections, Chinese Painting and Chinese Garden Design, for Chinese Culture Series, an English volume assembled by a group of scholars in Chongqing. The book never appeared.

Only in 1981, drawing on English essays written piecemeal across 50 years, did he assemble 《东南园墅略》 (An Outline of Gardens in Eastern China). In March 1983, from his sickbed, he dictated the closing pages and the manuscript was done. Two weeks later he died. Not until 1997 did Glimpses of Gardens in Eastern China reach print, published for the anniversary of the architecture department at Southeast University.

Through the 1930s Tung Chuin spent nearly every weekend among the gardens of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai. They looked nothing like they do now. Houses had fallen in, rockeries stood abandoned, weeds grew everywhere. “That sense of urgency is probably why he kept at garden research, without a break, for the next 50-odd years,” writes Tong Ming, translator of the new edition, in his preface to another of Tung Chuin’s books, 《论园》 (On Gardens).

Tung Chuin treated the garden as a building form with a cultural life of its own, and argued that its layout answers first to rhythm and harmony. Consider only the plants: besides those grown for flowers, fruit, and leaves, some are grown for the ear — leaves rustling in the wind, rain pattering on water-lily pads, birds and insects chirping. In the end, “Western gardens please the eye; Chinese gardens please the mind.”

Most architectural history approaches gardens through records, surveys, textual research, and the reading of images. Tung Chuin, with an architect’s eye, went instead for their delight. “Here delight counts for far more than technique or method,” he wrote. That delight embodies the “leisurely life of a country gentleman” the literati were after. And the winding path to a hidden corner carries the Chinese garden’s real theme, concealment and discovery: “pleasure delayed is pleasure doubled.” To wander at random through a garden built like a kaleidoscope is a form of mental rest — “visions multiply, the maze never ends.” For the general reader, Glimpses of Gardens in Eastern China is a book about how to look at a garden.

For the specialist, says its translator Tong Ming, it is also a work of theory with real depth, in which Tung Chuin takes apart how a garden is actually made. Wang Shu, dean of the School of Architecture at the China Academy of Art, who was deeply shaped by Tung Chuin, has read the book through six times. A Pritzker Prize winner, Wang has been credited by foreign scholars with “inventing an architectural language bound up with the movement of the eye.” Wang traces that to Chinese landscape painting, and says his own grasp of landscape painting “was first provoked by the questions inside Mr. Tung Chuin’s Glimpses of Gardens in Eastern China.” Tung Chuin’s reading of garden delight, in Wang’s view, “became more or less the possible starting point for a theory of architecture.” He came to see that “making a garden does not start from theory, is not ruled by method, and has nothing to do with importance. What matters most is one word: delight.”

In 2018 Tung Chuin’s grandson, the Tongji University professor Tong Ming, retranslated the book and Glimpses of Gardens in Eastern China was republished. Unlike the 1997 first edition, the new translation takes the form of parallel prose — but without the ornate diction that form usually carries. The wording is plain. Tong Ming says the choice made itself. He told QDaily: “If you are discussing gardens, you naturally discuss them in the language the object itself carries.” The cadence of classical Chinese carries a poetic charge that drops the reader straight into the garden.

The new edition also keeps Tung Chuin’s original English text. Because he wrote it for Western readers, it is full of comparisons with Western and Japanese garden theory and practice. Tong Ming: “It stands above the categories of civilization, nation, and region, and takes a whole view to compare why people make gardens, how they behave, what techniques and habits they use, how their tastes differ — and out of that the character of the Jiangnan garden appears.”

Tung Chuin was not arguing that Chinese gardens beat European ones. He saw the garden as a deep and universal conversation between people and nature, the highest thing a regional civilization produces. It is through all that comparison that the Jiangnan garden comes into focus.

Tong Ming, translator of the new edition, is Tung Chuin’s grandson and a professor at Tongji University’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He took his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture at Southeast University and his PhD in urban planning theory and design at Tongji in 1999. He is also the principal architect of TM STUDIO, whose work includes the Hehe Courtyard, the Zhou Chunya Art Studio, Suquan Garden, and the renovation of the small old-town park in Luqiao.

We also talked with Tong Ming about the book, about gardens, and about modern architecture.

Q: QDaily

Tong: Tong Ming

Q: Wang Shu writes in the preface that you are not an interesting person and that back then you did not even like architecture. Yet you went on to put in enormous effort and have edited nearly everything Mr. Tung Chuin wrote. How did your passion for architecture build up? And how did you first come to gardens?

Tong: Two separate things. First, the interest in architecture — nothing strange about it, it is quite natural. When you study architecture at school, you study it in the abstract. You do schemes, designs, drawings, and none of it has much to do with an actual building. As a student there is no way you can really put up a house. So you only get into architecture properly once you start building. As an architect you conceive it, give it form, then construct it and see it through. Then you watch people moving about inside the thing you imagined. That is an entirely different experience — your thinking set solid. It is roughly in that setting that an interest in architecture comes on its own.

The other question, the interest in gardens: honestly, I still find it hard to say clearly, even now. Treating gardens as a research object and feeling a genuine passion for them are two different things.

Q: So which is it for you — research object or passion?

Tong: Both. It also depends on the state you are in. If a garden reaches you only as text to be handled, it is abstract and cold. If it is something solid you can walk into and inhabit, it has warmth, and that is a different matter altogether. Back in 1996, when we were preparing the first edition of the book, we had to add a lot of plan drawings, which meant visiting a great many gardens. The Suzhou ones go without saying, but there were also gardens in Jiaxing, Haiyan, and Pinghu, even the Shuihui Garden in Rugao, in northern Jiangsu. Some were very hard to get to; you took long-distance buses. No private cars, no expressways. In 1996 even seeing the Qiuxia Garden in Jiading was difficult — it took a whole day.

Q: Could you get the plans on site, or did you have to draw them yourselves?

Tong: We drew them ourselves. Some gardens took two or three trips. So to produce that first edition we basically retraced Tung Chuin’s own route through the region’s gardens.

Q: The new edition has no plans. Were they dropped?

Tong: Yes, dropped. Plans are no longer a rarity — they appear in all sorts of books, and many gardens are open now. Take the Mo Family Garden in Pinghu. When I went it was still shut, and they barely let anyone in. Now it is a well-known sight and easy to reach. So there was no need to spend more ink on introductory matters. For the new edition the effort went into the text, because beyond the introductory material I think the book’s greater value lies in its theory.

Q: By theory do you mean what Mr. Tung Chuin wrote about understanding Jiangnan gardens aesthetically?

Tong: Yes — how to understand the Jiangnan garden.

Q: Is that also what most sets the book apart from other books on gardens?

Tong: Yes, you could put it that way. The Jiangnan garden is a very particular thing. Unlike gardens in many other places, it is bound up with daily life. It sits in the middle of a busy town, conjuring a stretch of wooded mountain out of a few square feet. That involves a mood. Step outside Suzhou into the countryside and you can find that wild woodland feeling almost anywhere. Building it inside a crowded street quarter is extremely hard.

Which raises a more basic question: how was it built? That is what interests us, and what puzzles us — how did they make it? Even the Humble Administrator’s Garden, huge as it is, is minute next to a natural landscape. Yet it opens onto a vast world for you. A great deal of thought and craft sits behind that.

Q: Are there other architectural forms in the world that also sit inside a crowded town like this?

Tong: There are, but not so distinctly; there is not much you can set beside it. In medieval Western Europe, for instance, there were the cloister gardens behind the monasteries — gardens for contemplation, sealed off from everything outside, an enclosure of inner walls, fit for meditation. The Chinese garden is not quite that. It too is ringed by high walls, but it is not so austere. It is packed with delight. It is a place of pleasure.

Q: The new translation adopts parallel prose as its form but keeps the wording plain, rather than the ornate diction that style usually calls for. Wang Shu called it “a new experiment in prose for understanding gardens.” What was your thinking, and how do you see the new translation’s style?

Tong: It seemed entirely natural to me. If you are discussing gardens, it is more fitting to discuss them in the language the object itself carries. It is spare, and its cadence runs deep. Think of the “With Whom Shall I Sit” pavilion in the Humble Administrator’s Garden, named for Su Dongpo’s lines: “Idly I lean on my folding couch; beyond Lord Yu’s tower, a thousand peaks. With whom shall I sit? The bright moon, the clear breeze, and I.” A resonance is born there, and every thought can be poured into the scene the garden creates. It is a complete synthesis — not only material, but largely a product of the mind.

That, I think, is the richness a garden offers at that level. And classical Chinese belongs to exactly that register. It is simple too; a lot of it is just nouns stacked up. But what matters is the flavor thrown off when word collides with thing, and that aftertaste never runs out. Our language today is different — too wordy, too much of it, until there is no poetic corner left to work in. It is stiff and flat, inefficient, and short of that kind of space. So I think carrying this treatise over in something closer to classical prose is probably the most fitting way to do it.

Q: The book’s type is large and unlike ordinary publishing — it feels like the typeface in school textbooks, like studying classical Chinese as a child. Was that deliberate?

Tong: We wanted to slow the reading down. Skimming ten lines at a glance, you miss a great deal. Of course we now read through mountains of useless information, so you have no choice but to skim. But in classical Chinese the character count is small. Like many passages in the Records of the Grand Historian — every one of them forceful, every character worth chewing on for a long while. That is the power of language. And that power suits the subject of gardens, because gardens work the same way.

Q: One chapter of the book takes up the “comparison of East and West.” In your reader’s guide to On Gardens you note that Mr. Tung Chuin was a northerner educated abroad, so he began his research from a position of near-total unfamiliarity. Can I read that as looking back at Eastern gardens from a Western vantage point? What do you make of that angle?

Tong: I would put it slightly differently. Tung Chuin, and his generation as a whole, were not simply looking back at the East through Western eyes. By his own account he looked at his own culture, at the qualities he had inherited, with a universal eye. He called it a cosmic basement — a cosmology, a worldview. It stands above the categories of civilization, nation, or region, and asks from a whole view what making a garden actually is.

That is why he made so many comparisons: the differences in purpose, behavior, technique, habit, and taste with which people in different lands and civilizations make gardens. The character of the Jiangnan garden emerges from that. It only shows up through contrast and comparison, not in some murky monologue.

Q: Are the gardens in the book still what we call gardens today? How has the word changed? Has the idea of the garden turned into the idea of urban public green space?

Tong: Yes, and that is a big problem — the word has been stretched thin. Look at the earliest origins, at the written character itself: it has an enclosing frame around it, and the frame is a ring of walls. The word for garden is kin to an old word for the plot where you grew vegetables or kept animals. And a garden is precisely a space bounded by human hands and filled with natural things — trees, rocks, water, all of it set within an artificial limit.

So the word has a specific sense, in the West as in the East. But now people use it far too loosely. The little flower patch behind a house is called a garden; a city park is called a garden. That has nothing to do with the garden we are discussing, which carries spiritual force, a claim on how a life is lived, and pleasure in the looking. Confusing and abusing the term this way causes a lot of our problems today.

Q: If we keep the concepts straight, are gardens still developing today?

Tong: Of course. The garden comes out of your life, your real world. As long as the real world does not die out, it will exist. Plenty of us still keep flowers and tend plants — and I do not mean growing a couple of scallions to eat. It is a spiritual pleasure, something to invest yourself in. Like keeping a pet: you keep a cat or a dog for no task at all, but for the pleasure of dealing with it.

A garden, then, can be understood as a man-made pet — a pet made of nature by human hands. It comes into communion with your temperament and your vitality. That wish is hard to extinguish in any era. Otherwise you would be a cold-blooded animal.

Q: So can I take it that only with that spiritual claim does something count as a garden today?

Tong: The first question is how we define a garden.

In A Record of the Gardens of Jiangnan, Tung Chuin gives an exceptionally sharp definition. Written in its full traditional form, the character for garden is an enclosing frame wrapped around a second element. The frame is a ring of courtyard walls. Inside, three parts stack up: “earth” at the top, a square “mouth” in the middle, “clothing” below. He read them as a diagram — the earth on top is a hill, the mouth in the middle is a pond, the clothing below stands for branches. The character is essentially a picture, and it matches the image exactly.

Note: The layout of a garden varies without end, yet its simplest requirements are all contained within the character for garden itself. Diagram the character: the outer enclosure is the garden wall; the element “earth” resembles the plan of a building and can stand for a pavilion or terrace; the “mouth” at the center is the pond; the “clothing” in front resembles rocks and trees. In the Japanese shinden-zukuri garden, the pond lies before the house and the hill before the pond — the intent is exactly the same. A large garden is many courtyards accumulated, and each single court and yard is again a garden in itself.

— A Record of the Gardens of Jiangnan

That is the object it names, and it matches a scene such as you find at the Lion Grove Garden or the Lingering Garden. If you are conservative and strict about it, the word “garden” cannot be thrown around.

Q: I read an article saying that “landscape gardening is a welfare phenomenon reflecting real life, providing people with places for recreation and rest.” Do you agree? What role does the garden play in contemporary life?

Tong: Put it this way: as something to be made, the garden can hardly be made under today’s conditions. It is a space, a narrow one inside a busy town, and it is the slow product of a long entanglement with an owner or a family. Take the Jichang Garden. It was begun roughly in the Jingtai reign of the Ming, and for more than 400 years that one family stayed much the same. Many gardens share a fate with a family or an owner. The Sui Garden in Nanjing, for instance: after Yuan Mei died it more or less fell apart. Its fate was tied to a man’s. From that angle a garden takes on a person’s character and his life; the two are one thing.

Today we can hardly manage that. In a city, life shifts so fast and the rules governing everything are so tangled that it is very hard to obtain a form so exclusive, so bounded. But that does not rule out its value as a way of reflecting on the world we live in; that value stands. We have in fact gone to the other extreme: the whole world is built as a purely material domain. The link between your housing and the idea of your family grows fainter. Your living environment has less and less to do with you. A person lives in a city like a vagrant, nothing around him quite fitting, drifting like a boat with no anchor. That is a turn of the age, a great change of our times.

And with it comes the question: do we need roots, some cultural ground under us? Do we still need something like the aspiration a garden expresses? It need not take the form of a garden. But as a person, or as a person with cultural roots, I think it is still worth thinking about.

Q: In Mr. Tung Chuin’s day Chinese gardens were badly looked after; many of them gave, in his words, a sense of “fragrant plants gone to weed, a beauty grown old.” Large-scale repair and restoration only came after the founding of the People’s Republic. How well are gardens protected now?

Tong: On the whole they have moved into an insulated environment, into a state like being kept in a safe. The Humble Administrator’s Garden and the Lion Grove Garden are not only nationally protected cultural sites but also World Heritage sites. That is gratifying, as far as it goes. From another angle, though, they have turned from living things into exhibits in a display hall, and that worries me. It means no extension, no change. The situation is entirely different. What you mostly do there is not what one ought to be able to enjoy in a garden; you stand there as a member of the audience looking at a show. The whole premise has changed.

Q: On Gardens says that “the Chinese garden is not a place of mass amusement… it is the product of a refined art,” and “this is not a place of diversion but a place of retreat and quiet thought.” Beyond leisure, what do you think it means to look at and appreciate gardens today?

Tong: Different people will see it differently. Given how gardens are presented at the moment, I find it hard to offer much more. Closing them to the public and keeping them as a setting for a cultured few would not be right either.

Q: Has the academic world come up with better ideas for how to present gardens? Or is it still searching?

Tong: Still searching. But the Kyoto system in Japan is worth learning from. The Suzhou gardens have become a park system — buy a ticket, and on public holidays they are packed and the mood of the place vanishes. Kyoto uses reservations; for some popular gardens you have to book one or two months ahead. Tickets are not necessarily expensive. That caps the number of visitors and preserves the feel of walking through a garden, and it also gives the gardens some breathing room for repairs. More important, the way of showing them is closer, more in keeping with the temperament of a garden.

Could Suzhou do the same? I think it is worth considering. The first big issue is that gardens have to be kept distinct from the wider system of parks and landscapes. They are national treasures, not the consumption venues of everyday life. They are a distillation of a culture and should not be casually swapped for something else.

Q: In the book, back in the 1980s, Mr. Tung Chuin wrote: “Western landscape architecture, now rapidly becoming a fashionable course in academies across China, is eroding the foundation of the classical Chinese garden — handed down through generations and already dangerously precarious. If we let it drift and fend for itself, the classical Chinese garden will, like traditional painting and the other traditional arts, sink into an archaeological relic.” Forty years on, where does research in this field stand?

Tong: The situation persists. He saw it precisely 40 years ago. Landscape studies is largely a subject taught as a subject: we think about producing a stretch of landscape — a housing estate goes up and we furnish it with scenery, what trees to plant, what paving to lay, what views to build. It is like a dish that needs a garnish on the side. But a garden is not that. A garden has a cultural life of its own; it grew from a particular source and carries a dense history. To treat it as decoration, or as visual entertainment, is plainly wrong for a heritage that precious. I think Mr. Tung saw that accurately as early as the 1980s. And his words are still sharp for people today.

In how we organize disciplines we have already lumped the two together — the landscape architecture major and so on. You can set them side by side as fields of study, but the things themselves point in opposite directions.

Q: Besides gardens, Mr. Tung Chuin loved Western modern architecture. The reader’s guide to 《新建筑与流派》 (New Architecture and Its Schools) notes that from his “journey to Europe” in the 1930s onward he studied modern architecture worldwide for decades. In that era he was already watching a modernist wave that had barely sprouted, and it shaped how he worked at Allied Architects. Forty-five years later he was still following the modernism surging through Europe and America after the war. In the book he is already asking how to cross the divide and find China’s own road to modern architecture. What did his love of Western modern architecture do to him? And what did it do to his study of Chinese gardens?

Tong: When we talk about modern architecture we usually mean what came out of the Industrial Revolution — modern technology, modern materials, new ways of thinking — a new architecture unlike anything before. It is what progress in an age looks like. In the broad sense, modern architecture means more than that. A traditional civilization expressed in contemporary terms is also modern. So there is more than one road to the modern. It is not only the modern that comes from technological change after the Industrial Revolution; a cultural renaissance is a form of modernity too.

At that level his thinking was a cut above most people’s. He did not confine what we ought to do today to a narrow idea; he thought from the root — what is the modern?

And can the things of our past become modern? For him the answer was yes. So his two lines of research look completely unrelated: one on a century of Western modern architecture, the other on the classical Chinese garden, or on cultural research with the garden as its emblem.

Put them together and his intent is perfectly clear: how can a cultural renaissance become a modernity? That goes past insight into materials and technique and reaches a deeper level.

Q: You were chief curator of this year’s exhibition at Shanghai’s PSA, 《觉醒的现代性——毕业于宾夕法尼亚大学的中国第一代建筑师》 (Awakening Modernity: China’s First Generation of Architects, Trained at the University of Pennsylvania). In the exhibition video you say: “Even today we may not have thought this question through fully or reflected on it thoroughly. In that condition, the discussion of modernity is extremely important.” Which modernity do you mean?

Tong: Modernity is a permanent question. What is modernity, what does the concept mean? The word “modern” usually calls up things that are fashionable, new, never seen before. But that is one side of it, a shallow reading.

What produces those brand-new, unprecedented, fashionable things? The quality of being contemporary produces them — the present moment. Right now is necessarily unlike anything earlier on the axis of time. In the here and now, what can you express? That is the question of the modern, a question about being here, about human existence, about the present. So it is a central question and an enormous, deep one. What ought our present to be?

Translated into an architect’s question: what should architects of this moment do? The answer certainly cannot be to haul over and copy what came before. Whether from the past or from somewhere else, that is not what modern means. The modern is something that sprouts, that grows. And the cause of the sprouting we usually put down to a technological revolution, a change in social structure, or a shift in the key a culture is playing in. Any of these is possible. The question has to be pushed further.

From that angle, Western modernization is the product of modernity showing itself. That consciousness first found expression in the Renaissance, which was in fact the moment modernity woke up in human history. Renaissance means something suddenly reborn; the consciousness appeared all at once. Against the magnificent legacy left by Rome, what should people of the present do? It took Roman art as its reference, yet it was absolutely a new cultural system built on reflection.

Painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture — all of it burst out at once in the Italian Renaissance.

The 20th century was the same. With new sources of energy, new materials and techniques, steel frames, concrete, all sorts of new functions, what should the architecture of the moment be? That was the question of that era. When it arrived in the 1930s, and this group came home to China and faced what was in front of them, the question they had to catch was: what should modern Chinese architecture be? So they naturally began thinking about it. What did these schools, all these technologies, the upheavals in every field, mean for architecture? They were strongly against carrying on with old traditional forms, and asked instead how to develop from the inside, from the source. Likewise with traditional culture: the point was not to copy an existing form but to draw out the thinking inside it and put it to work now. So it is a question of form and meaning — a discussion on a different plane.

Q: Does that discussion carry on today?

Tong: It does, but I think it goes deeper now, because the times have moved on and many new ideas have mixed together. The level of the discussion today should be much higher than it was then.

Q: I have looked at some of your studio’s work at TM STUDIO, and it seems to carry traces of the Chinese garden. What effect has traditional Chinese architecture had on your practice?

Tong: Mostly it works on you without your noticing. There is no need to distill it into a tangible method and then apply it. Nothing in this field is ever that simple. Giving form to convey meaning, moving from likeness of shape to likeness of spirit, is a permanent, deep-rooted difficulty in making art. Copy the form and you never arrive at the mood; you have to draw strength from what is sensed, from the spirit. Only then can you make tangible work with life in it.

It is a hard, large topic. Personally I do not think I have deliberately used garden methods to do anything. It is more that what I have taken in from gardens comes into my thinking about materials, about light and shadow, about how a thing connects to a meaning. At the very least it gives you judgment about what is good and what is not, and I think that matters.

As with so much else: designing a building, you face many choices. A very good architect always finds the most fitting and most poetic one, rather than a plain, pallid solution. That judgment matters a great deal.

Q: Does university teaching today offer anything in that kind of judgment?

Tong: No, very little. It is also very hard. What it really means is cultivating taste, or character.

Q: Do you think university teaching can produce it?

Tong: Impossible. It is always personal.

A university offers broad, general instruction, mass instruction — that is why it is called a university. University means mixing every specialized discipline together; it is general comprehensive teaching, not education proper. Cultivating a person’s way of thinking, intellectual character, and taste is always an individual matter. So the problem of education cannot simply be laid at the schools’ door; it has to be seen whole. The biggest problem of our era is that we have produced too many people trained to pass exams, and far too few who think for themselves.

Q: When I think of gardens being built now, a lot of them are guesthouses. They create something quite close to a garden atmosphere, with rockeries and so on. Does that count as the garden’s design practice in our time?

Tong: First we have to agree on what we are discussing. In the real world there is an enormous amount of construction — apartment blocks, guesthouses, houses. But what we have been discussing is architectural work, which, like a garden, is built with intention, with an aesthetic consciousness. That is a different thing, and the two cannot be judged together.

In this context we distinguish architecture from building. A building is a product of engineering, or of the economy. Architecture with a capital A is bound up with art. But what is art? That is a complicated question; it is largely a re-presentation of the human spirit. So the two cannot be cleanly pulled apart, because they differ and are obviously closely linked at the same time. It is not that simple. Which is why I would rather not explain this in a very simple way.

Cover image provided by Tong Ming, photograph by Zheng Kejun. Banner provided by Tong Ming; the long cover image is from Wikipedia