A Study Of Development And Change Of Private Gardens In Taiwan During1830-1945

This research gathered data extensively relevant to extant gardens or those withremains in Taiwan and explored their construction history, gardening artistic conception,and garden living. Those gardens, seven from late Qing Dynasty (1830-1895) and fivefrom Japanese colonial period (1896-1945), included in this research are listed as below:Wu Garden, Returning Garden, Latent Garden, North-Gate Garden, Lin Garden,Xiao-Yun Village North Garden, Pleasure Garden, Humble Garden, Firm Garden, MuteGarden, Xiao-Yun Village South Garden, Introspect Garden. Literature review and fieldwork were the two methods applied in this research to present in-depth analysis of thesignificant cultural symbols, including history, landscape, and garden layout artisticconception. Regarding the garden artistic conception, the researcher analyzed gardens’locations, layouts, constructions, stacked stone mountains, water management, couplet,scenic framing, plants and animals, and miscellaneous. Further analysis of their gardenliving life and cultural connotations manifested their implicit cultural forms. Moreover,comparison between Taiwan Chinese private gardens and those in southern Min area,the eastern Guangdong and western Fujian area, Japan, and western countries revealsfactors affecting and changing the form and style of Taiwan private gardens.The research discovered only Latent Garden whose owner had traveled betweenBeijing and the southern part of China and Lin Garden whose owner was theacquaintance of the owner of Lingering Garden introduced the layout of Chinese garden.Other Taiwan private gardens were the creation of learning experiences from theconstruction either from Taiwan official gardens or other private gardens, accompaniedwith their unique style from individual underlying culture. In general, the majority ofarchitectural forms were also hampered by technical experiences of craftsmen. All thesecontributed to the traditional unique Taiwan private garden forms during late Qing.During Japanese colonial period, the impact of modern Western style and Japanesecultural on Taiwan private gardens was tremendous. From the explicit cultural symbols,e.g. the layout of the building, to the implicit underlying culture, e.g. garden living life,were all influenced by modern Western style and Japanese culture. The family temple, garden living life, poetry gathering, ritual, and liturgy stillretained Han Chinese culture, while the rest were modernized or replaced by Japaneseculture. Three approaches were adopted by Taiwan’s garden owners to face the changes:one is horizontal transplant of foreign culture and vertical adjustment of traditionalculture, another is imitation of foreign culture, and the other is mix of traditional formswith exotic forms. However, their implicit cultural still maintains tradition. Thereby thetransformation of Taiwan’s private gardens was in a form of keeping heritage andinnovation in parallel.