The courtyard has long been central to the concept of Chinese living, both as a way of ensuring family privacy, as we saw at the beginning of the book, and as a way of bringing nature into the home. The latter has deep philosophical roots, because in traditional Chinese thought things are considered in their entirety, which has led to the practice of representing the larger world in microcosm. This conception of nature affects the way that Chinese visualize the spatial structure of landscape, encapsulating a world-view in their physical representation of space. The works of many Chinese literati—scholars, poets, calligraphers and painters—bear witness to the power of landscape in the intellectual as well as aesthetic consciousness of the cultural elite, bearing witness to the interconnectedness of immanent life and the world.
The Chinese traditional garden and courtyard operate on several layers of significance in relation to the larger landscape, restructuring and reconstructing nature according to the human scale as well as ideological conditions. It largely consists of symmetries that define a center which, in turn, delineates motion, so that the experience of walking across or through a courtyard or garden replicates movement through the landscape. This, in turn, implies one’s progress to enlightenment or knowledge.
What was emphasized by the designers of the private courtyards and gardens was the appreciation and creation of natural scenery. They pursued the special pleasure of enjoying the beauty of nature without leaving one’s house. The spaces available in contemporary homes for reproducing nature in microcosm are generally smaller, but nevertheless today’s designers employ a wide variety of techniques in order to arrange and expand the visual space—winding and covering, hiding and revealing, closing and opening, separating and borrowing—to raise visitors’ awareness of the aesthetic use of space.
The courtyard garden of the old Suzhou Museum, a former palace, in Suzhou, the traditional center of Chinese culture, in particular of Chinese gardens, for which this city is famous.