Discover Suzhou
Lingering Garden
留园
A UNESCO-listed garden famous for its 700-metre covered walkway and its collection of grotesque Taihu limestone rocks, including the 6.5-metre Cloud-Capped Peak. Architecturally it is the most inventive of the Suzhou gardens.
The story
What makes this place special
Commissioned in 1593 by Xu Taishi, an official who had been impeached and then cleared, and laid out by the stonemason Zhou Shicheng as the East Garden. Liu Su bought it in 1798, renamed it Cold Green Village, planted the pine and bamboo and assembled its collection of scholar stones, and opened it to the public in 1823. Sheng Kang repaired Taiping Rebellion damage between 1873 and 1876 and gave it the present name Liu Yuan, a pun on the earlier owner's surname that also means 'to linger'. It was abandoned after 1911, used to breed army horses during the war with Japan, restored by the Suzhou government in 1954, and is one of the UNESCO-listed classical gardens.
What you’ll discover
At about 2.33 hectares it is a sequence of four linked areas rather than a single view. Buildings cover around a third of the site and are tied together by roughly 700 metres of covered walkway, which is the garden's real subject: you move along a corridor of framed openings, each one composing a different view, rather than standing and looking. The central section is the oldest, with a pond and a yellow-stone grotto; the eastern section is arranged around Cloud Capped Peak, a Song-dynasty scholar stone treated as a national treasure; the west is wilder, with an artificial hill and a penjing garden. The lattice and mother-of-pearl windows - the screens at the Small House by the Flowery Path, the inlaid windows of the Pellucid Tower, and the opening in the Stone Forest courtyard that reads as a mirror - are the detail to look for.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- Walk the covered corridor slowly and look through the windows rather than past them. Every opening is a deliberately composed picture; the garden is a designed sequence and walking it briskly destroys the entire effect.
- Cloud Capped Peak is the single most important object here and it is in the eastern courtyard, not on the main pond route. It is a Song-dynasty Taihu stone and arguably the most famous individual rock in China.
- This is the quietest of Suzhou's four big gardens because it sits outside the old city gate, away from the Humble Administrator's / museum cluster. If the Humble Administrator's Garden is mobbed, come here instead - it is the better experience on a busy day.
- It pairs with Tiger Hill and Shantang Street, which are on the same north-western side of town, not with the Pingjiang Road sights.
- Rain is an advantage. The 700 metres of covered walkway means you can see nearly all of this garden without getting wet, which makes it the obvious choice on a wet Suzhou afternoon.
When to come
Early morning on a weekday. Spring for the peonies and wisteria, autumn for the maples; rainy days suit it better than any other Suzhou garden because of the covered corridors.
Getting around
Reasonable by the standards of Suzhou gardens. The halls, courtyards and the long covered walkways are mostly flat paving, and much of the circuit can be done without steps, though there are raised door sills at hall thresholds and some short step runs between levels. The western artificial hill and the grotto paths involve steep irregular stone and cannot be managed in a wheelchair. A visitor with a bad knee can see most of what matters, including Cloud Capped Peak and the corridor windows.
Worth knowing before you go
Free live Kunqu and Pingtan performances are staged in the garden's theatre hall most mornings - ask at the entrance for the day's schedule.
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