Study On Garden Art Of East Lake, Shaoxing, China

Developed from an ancient quarry, East Lake is known as "the last remnants of national territory" scenic area. The first construction wave came to East Lake in Late Qing Dynasty, even though the records towards it began in Han Dynasty. Due to its own rugged, steep, deep appearances together with natural characteristics, history influences and regional culture, East Lake including some other similar gardens in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province has a distinguished feature which varied with Suzhou Private Gardens.This paper is aimed at exploring East Lake gardening philosophy and spiritual relationships with social culture, then connecting theories and practice though analyzing and summarizing the gardening skills in East Lake based on previous researches.Firstly, rethink about the insufficiencies existed in previous Chinese traditional garden research methods though region, typology and logic aspects, secondly do case studies to recognize the locality (Shaoxing District), property(scenic area) as well as man-made landscape(quarry). Thirdly to focus on summary of the transmissions between various landscape elements, modern landscape art and other traditions. What’s more important is to introduce some unbeknown but excellent landscape gardens which were built in Ming/Qing Dynasty which will eventually enrich Chinese traditional garden researches.