The Process And Significance Of Traditional Private Gardens' Transmutation In Modern Shanghai

Shanghai has been situated since 1860s in a multi-cultural era caused by foreigners residing in Shanghai's concession together with Chinese. The cultural collision between western world and China brought about by the introduction of western-styled park symbolizes the turn in the modern history of Chinese gardens. These parks originally intended to transmit colonial culture broke away in the layout and gardening elements from the classical private gardens characterized by reclusiveness and introspection, and thus becoming the paradigms of gardens in modern Shanghai and generating two main types of private gardens with both Chinese and Western features.Being a transitional form from colonial parks to Chinese-owned parks, the first one is the profit-oriented private garden whose open space, public entertainment and common facilities have already presented the spirit and functions for social and public entertainment of modern urban parks and which thus became an indispensable part in Modern Shanghai people's leisure life and played an active role in the urbanized development of modern Shanghai and the integration and generation of Shanghai citizen's awareness. The other type is the private gardens built by Shanghai's celebrities and noblemen. Beneath the miscellaneousness of Chinese and Western features lie two motives for building gardens: merely personal gusto with unique aesthetic orientation and the absorption and use for reference of Western gardening features due to their active admiration for the better.Although the existence of both the two types of gardens only accounted for fifty years (1880s-1930s) in the history of Chinese gardens, it was these historical productions under distinguished time background that took the lead in presenting the traits of "park" in the course of Chinese gardens transition from the classical to the modern. Meanwhile, the tentative practices of these gardens cast influences on the later parks built solely by Shanghai people.This thesis analyzes the vicissitude of these distinguished gardens in the transmutation of Modern Shanghai through expatiating and generalizing the gains and losses of the experience beneath the appearance of gardens' transmutation and expects to probe profoundly into double significance of the influences of their coming into being and existence on Modern Shanghai's gardens and society.