Humble Administrator's Garden

9. Garden Waterway

The principal element in Zhuo Zheng Garden's layout is water, which accounts for three-fifths of its area. Most of the major buildings were built beside water. Notes on Zhuo Zheng Garden by Wen Weiming says, "In the northeast area of the prefectural capital between Loumen and Qimen gates lies a good deal of unoccupied land covered with ponds. These will be dredged and surrounded with trees." This tells us that the garden was designed in such a way as to make use of the original topography. Zhuo Zheng Garden, the largest of Suzhou's gardens, takes up more than 4 hectares of land and consists of three sections - east, middle and west.