Yu Garden

Yu Garden (豫园, Yùyuán) is a classical garden in the old walled city of Shanghai, begun in 1559 as the private garden of a Ming official. It sits beside the City God Temple and the surrounding bazaar, but it is a separate garden with its own gate. It was opened to the public in 1961, and in 1982 it was listed as a national-level protected site.

Pan Yunduan (潘允端) began it to please his aged parents, and the name Yu (豫) carries that sense. Sources differ on the building timetable. Chinese Wikipedia says Pan was away in office and the garden was only finished near the end of the Wanli reign, after his retirement. English Wikipedia says that an appointment as governor of Sichuan delayed construction for nearly twenty years, until 1577. Zhang Nanyang (张南阳) is credited with the design and the rockwork.

The garden changed hands many times. It passed to Zhang Zhaolin (张肇林), Pan’s granddaughter’s husband, and then to other owners. In 1709 local gentry bought land east of the City God Temple and made the Ling Yuan, the East or Inner Garden. In 1760 merchants restored the old garden as the West Garden. In the nineteenth century the site was damaged more than once. In 1842, during the First Opium War, the Huxinting (湖心亭) teahouse was used as a British headquarters for several days, and from September 1853 to February 1855 the Small Swords Society used Dianchun Hall (点春堂), built in 1820, as its headquarters.

Restoration began in 1956. The East and West Gardens were merged under the name Yu Garden, with the gate moved to the southwest, and the repaired garden opened in September 1961. The teahouse, the zigzag bridge and the lotus pond were left outside the garden boundary.

Inside, dragon walls with undulating grey-tiled ridges divide the garden into sections, including those around Sansui Hall, Dianchun Hall, Huijing Hall and Yuhua Hall, and the Inner Garden. The Grand Rockery is a man-made mountain of yellow stone, said to be the oldest and largest of its kind in the Jiangnan region. The Exquisite Jade Rock (玉玲珑) is a porous rock about 3.3 metres tall, counted among the three famous rocks of Jiangnan. The Inner Garden has an old stage that was moved here from a banking guild hall in Zhabei.