🪴Ji Cheng
Original nameJi Cheng
Author of the Yuanye, founder of Chinese classical garden theory
Another Set of Rules for Building the World · Eastern Building
Ming DynastyGardenYuanyeGarden Making
Who they are
A Ming-dynasty garden maker and painter who wrote the Yuanye, the first systematic treatise on garden design in China, indeed the world. What the Chinese classical garden (like the Suzhou gardens) pursues is not the geometric symmetry and grand openness of the Western garden, but simulating boundless natural landscape within a limited space — with rockeries, pools, pavilions, plants, winding paths, and lattice windows, so that a visitor "changes scene at every step" as if wandering in a painting. In the Yuanye, Ji Cheng systematically summed up the principles of garden making, and put forward the highest ideal: "though made by man, as if opened by heaven" — a garden, though man-made, must look as if born of nature itself. He distilled the aesthetic of the Chinese literatus — dwelling in the wild in spirit, making a world of nature within the city — into a subtle theory of art.
Primary sourcesJi Cheng, Yuanye (The Craft of Gardens)
Key stories
"Though Made by Man, As If Opened by Heaven"
In the Yuanye, Ji Cheng set the highest aim for the Chinese garden: "though made by man, as if opened by heaven" — the garden is plainly man’s own making, yet must look as if nature made it so, without a trace of contrivance. This is exactly opposite to the Western garden’s straight symmetry proclaiming man’s conquest of nature. The Chinese garden seeks "concealment" — to hide the artificial within the natural, to make a mountain-and-water world one can roam and dwell in, in the heart of the noisy city.
Echoes today
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.
"Though made by man, as if opened by heaven"The Yuanye is the world’s first systematic garden treatise, and its ideal of "though made by man, as if opened by heaven" distilled the aesthetic of the Chinese literatus making a world of nature within the city, still the key to understanding the Chinese garden.