China's Gardens
Chinese gardens have been appreciated and emulated by gardeners around the world for centuries.  Landscape gardening began in China two millennia ago when lesser nobles started imitating the private, enclosed imperial game preserves favoured by Han-dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) emperors. Toward the end of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), more than 1,000 years later, wealthy merchants, scholars, and officials were competing with one another to build the most beautiful and refined garden environments.

The basic objective of the classical Chinese garden was to simulate a natural environment in a limited space.  Amidst the crowding and confusion of the Chinese medieval city, the wealthy sought the tranquillity of nature, not the geometric formality of the gardens that became popular in Europe.  Chinese gardens, like Chinese landscape paintings, sought to avoid symmetry and to lead the eye sequentially through a variety of views.
Many of the gardens the tourist will visit will be ancient dynastic landscapes in which the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of the garden designer's art must be understood.  Visitors will also experience modern Chinese gardening and landscaping, with its emphasis on bringing greenery to the people, and will share with and learn from some of China's avid gardening hobbyists. Beijing, political and cultural centre of modern China, is home to ancient classical gardens as well as new people's parks and landscaping surrounding modern buildings.  In Hangzhou, visitors will visit West Lake, which was dredged and a causeway built in the eleventh century. Gardens were planted on the causeway and all around the diamond-shaped lake. In Suzhou, the garden city of China, visitors will visit the gardens of four dynasties (Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing).  In Shanghai, ancient gardens as well as modern market plots will be explored.