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Updated: June 8, 2025
Here were airy summer-houses, pavilions, bridges, rockeries, and ornamental sheets of water, as we see these things represented on lacquered ware, decorated China dishes, and fans. It was really very curious and amusing, and showed much of luxurious life, even a private theatre being contained in the establishment.
There was a great pigeon-house here, pulled down for the shooting-box, and the garden is still full of old carved stones, lintels, and mullions, and capitals of pillars, and a grotesque figure of a bearded man, with a tunic confined round the waist by a cord, which crowns one of my rockeries.
The hours they love best are the hours they can devote to opening up vistas, planting beautiful trees or flowering shrubs from distant lands, building up rockeries, forming artificial lakes, laying out lawns, and stocking their gardens with the choicest flowers. The effect of Natural Beauty upon man and of man upon Natural Beauty is immense.
"You people are not aware," Chia Cheng added with a smiling countenance, "that I've been, even in my young days, very mediocre in the composition of stanzas on flowers, birds, rockeries and streams; and that now that I'm well up in years and have moreover the fatigue and trouble of my official duties, I've become in literary compositions like these, which require a light heart and gladsome mood, still more inapt.
A porter stands in this vestibule ready to open the lofty triple gate which admits to the courtyard of the interior. Many Chinese mansions contain six or seven courtyards, each with its colonnade, drawing, dining, and reception rooms, and at the back of all there is a flower garden adorned with rockeries, fish-ponds, dwarf trees, and miniature pagodas and bridges.
Above all, the original church, hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood.
This procession was on its way to the great Temple of Inari, several miles distant. One morning we devoted to visiting two cloisonné studios and some curio shops. The first studio, Nakamura's, was very artistically arranged; one large room encircled a miniature garden laid out in true Japanese style with dwarf trees, rockeries, and a tiny little lake.
By each table was placed a teapoy. On these teapoys stood censers and bottles; three things in all. But small pots, about eight inches long, four to five inches broad and two or three inches high, adorned with scenery in the shape of rockeries, were also placed about. All of which contained fresh flowers.
They doubtless act as educational centres for refining the habits of the nation; exerting an influence that reaches and elevates the homes of the people, cultivating in them new perceptions of beauty and comfort; diffusing a taste for embowering even humble cottages in shrubbery; making little flower-fringed lawns, six feet by eight or less; rockeries and ferneries, and artificial ruins of castles or abbeys of smaller dimensions still.
In the absence of the master, who was away in the country reading with his tutor for the Hanlin degree, we were received by the caretakers, who showed us the handsome guest chambers, the splendid gilded tablet, the large courts, and garden rockeries. A handsome residence is this, solidly built of wood and masonry, and with the trellis work carved with much elaboration.
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