The gardens in Hangzhou are widely known for their scenic beauty. The rippling West Lake, the green wooded hills lying north and west of the lake, the mist-shrouded trees, the distant peaks rising one above the other, the many deep and secluded caves and caverns and the many water scenes such as deep pools, brooks, canals, ponds and mountain springs scattered here and there that are generally marked by gentleness, limpidity and quietude—all these add to the aesthetic appeal of the scenic gardens in Hangzhou.And the many ingeniously designed semi-decorative garden buildings are all sited and constructed to underscore the most appealing features of their environs, using many of the traditional design ideas in Chinese gardening art such as proper embellishment, view-borrowing, setting scenes off each other, partitioning, etc. so that a certain scenic sight can remain both self-contained and a part of the overall scenery.
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| Pagodas, Pavilions and Bridges |
The rules applied in the deployment of scenic resources include what may be called ordered disorder, alternation of void and solid, balance of denseness and sparseness, now up and now down, now rising and now falling, emphasis on openness side by side with emphasis on seclusion, combination of what is grand and what is cleverly small, etc.
By applying these rules, all types and forms of semi-decorative garden buildings such as towers, open halls, halls with windowed balconies, waterside pavilions, shrines and temples, etc. are so deployed as to accentuate the dominant qualities of well-designed gardens, that is, a gentle and quiet elegance and a refreshing ease and refinement.
It is no exaggeration to say that the beauty of such a garden can never be overrated. Of the tens of different types and forms of semi-decorative garden buildings,the most noteworthy are perhaps pagodas, pavilions and bridges.
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