Discover Suzhou
Lion Grove Garden
狮子林
A UNESCO-listed Yuan dynasty garden built around a maze of limestone rockeries riddled with caves and tunnels that you climb through rather than look at. Chinese families bring children here precisely because it is a playable garden.
The story
What makes this place special
Lion Grove was laid out in 1342 by the Chan monk Wen Tianru in memory of his teacher, Abbot Zhongfeng, as part of a monastery, and the lion-shaped Taihu rocks that give it its name were read as Buddhist imagery before they were read as scenery. It was rebuilt by the monk Mingxing in 1589, rebuilt again in 1771 by Huang Xi, and fell apart after 1850. In 1917 the Shanghai pigment merchant Bei Runsheng bought it and finished restoring it in 1926; he was the grandfather of the architect I. M. Pei, and the family gave the garden to the state around 1949. It opened to the public in 1956 and is one of the nine gardens inscribed by UNESCO in 1997.
What you’ll discover
This is the rock garden rather than the water garden: a grotto of piled Taihu limestone covering a bit over 1,150 square metres, with nine routes threading twenty-one caves on three levels, split east and west by the pond. You enter through the residential halls, come out onto the rockery, and then the visit is essentially climbing in and out of it - up onto Lion Peak, down into the caves, across the pond on the zigzag bridge, with the waterfall at the western end. Around the edges are the Lotus Hall, the Pavilion of Contrast and the True Delight Pavilion holding a tablet in the Qianlong emperor's hand, plus a dozen very old specimen trees.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- The rockery is a maze and that is the intended experience, not a flaw. Do not try to walk through it in a line - take a cave route, lose the path, come out somewhere unexpected. Children love it and adults who treat it as a corridor get nothing from it.
- It is the smallest-feeling of the big Suzhou gardens and it jams up fast. Of the four major gardens this is the one most worth being at on opening, because two coach groups inside the caves at once makes the grotto impassable.
- Pair it with the Humble Administrator's Garden and the Suzhou Museum - all three are within a few minutes' walk on the same street, and the museum is I. M. Pei's building, designed by the great-grandson of the man who restored this garden. Seeing them on the same morning is the point.
- The caves have low headroom and worn, uneven, often wet stone. Flat shoes with grip, and watch your head at the turns.
- Look for the rocks' names on the signs and then look for the shape. The garden was built to be read as a landscape of peaks in miniature, and the named stones are the whole conceit.
When to come
At opening, on a weekday. Late spring and autumn are best; after rain the stone darkens and the grotto looks far more like the mountain landscape it imitates, though it is then slippery.
Getting around
The halls, the main pond-side path and the courtyards are flat paving and can be done in a wheelchair, but the rockery itself - the reason to come - absolutely cannot. The caves involve steep, narrow, irregular stone steps, low ceilings, no handrails in most places and one-way squeezes. With a bad knee you can walk the perimeter path and look at the rockery from across the pond, which is a real version of the visit but not the main one.
Worth knowing before you go
Pair it with the Humble Administrator's Garden and Suzhou Museum - all three sit within a 10-minute walk of each other. The rockery passages are low and uneven; not for anyone with knee trouble.
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