The Humble Administrator's Garden - Part II

After three weeks in Suzhou, Jeff Thrasher went home and Kathy Anderson Hansen came to start her three week tour of duty.  On her first week-end in Suzhou, we went to visit the Humble Administrator's Garden.  I had been there before but Theresa had not yet been. 

 My previous trip was in January, in near-freezing temperatures.  This visit, at the end of June, was a beautiful day in the mid-80s with hardly any humidity.  The plum rains had finished and a typhoon off the East coast had blown up a windstorm the night before which sucked all the stagnant air out to sea.

 In January, the water had a thin sheet of ice on it.  This visit, the ponds were choked with lotus plants, as you can see in the photos.  The lotus were not yet in bloom.  Beware...there will probably be more photos when that time comes.

 The Humble Administrator's Garden is considered the jewel in Suzhou's collection of tourist attractions.  The city knows a good thing when it sees one, and charges 70 RMB admission as compared to the 40 RMB to enter the Couples Retreat Garden.  Its size and it's variety make it well worth the price of admission...about 11 US dollars.

 The Garden dates back to the 1500s, though it has been renovated many times.  It suffered major damage during the Japanese occupation with World War II.  So though the buildings look old, I suspect many are modern restorations.  The rocks are, I suppose, as old as rocks.

 The name of the garden comes from the original owner some 500 years ago , a retired government administrator, and an obscure reference to an old Chinese poem. He retired his position to lead the life of a humble gentleman farmer.  Actually, there's nothing humble about this place.

 But the "Humble Administrator" name seems to have been romanticized in the English translation.  The local Chinese folks don't know it by that name at all.  To them it is 拙政园, which they pronounce Zhuō Zhèng Yuán.  If you plug that into an online translation site it automatically translates as Humble Administrator's Garden.  But that is because the combination of characters has been explicitly registered in the English dictionary as such.  If you break it down into the individual characters, the translation seems to be "stupid government garden".

Of course, the thing about Chinese is that it doesn't translate faithfully into English.  I suspect that to the locals "Zhuō Zhèng Yuán" is just a name with no deeper meaning.  Like Philadelphia or Detroit or Saint Louis.  (Who thinks of their literal translations...)  But still, you've got to snicker.

 More pictures than normal with this post.  And I've got tons of others that could bore you to tears with.  The Humble Administrator's garden is a beautiful place.  I can hardly imagine it being occupied by just a single, lonely humble administrator and not the hoards of tourists that visit today.