The Lion Grove Garden

 The last week-end in November was our last taste of Indian Summer in Suzhou.  The temperatures were in the mid-60s... and may have even broke 70.  The sun was out and the skies were clear.  So Theresa and I went to the old city, to the Lion Grove Garden.

 Suzhou has quite a few gardens and most folks say that if you've seen one then you've seen them all.  A student of classical Chinese gardens could talk for hours about the differences in design and architecture.  Your typical tourist is hugely impressed with the first one they see, but has trouble maintaining the same level of excitement for numbers two, three, four, and on and on.  I've heard tourists to Europe say the same thing about the Gothic Cathedrals.  "Cathedral overload", they call it.  "Garden overload" is a similar thing.

 The Lion Grove Garden is special treat for those suffering from "garden overload".  Though among the smaller gardens in Suzhou, it is one of the most loved because of its unique and playful use of rocks.  The "rockery", as they call it, includes maze of paths and puzzles for visitors to climb over and climb through.  It's like a jungle gym for adults.

 On the Sunday afternoon of our visit, the garden was packed with rockery climbers.  There were not a lot of tour buses in the parking lot and most of the folks looked to be locals.  Everyone, it seems, came out to enjoy a last chance at the warm weather and sun.

 The Lion Grove Garden takes its name from the rocks... in an indirect way that is so typical of the Chinese.  The rocks, they say, look like lions.  (I can't see it....but I'll trust them on that.)  The forest of rocks looks like a forest of lions.  So in Chinese the call it 狮子林园, which literally translates as something like "the forest of lions garden".  The tourism bureau must have decided that "Lion Grove Garden" as a more posh translation.

 The garden was initially built about 700 years ago by a Buddhist monk, as part of a monastery complex.  The limestone rocks come from hills surrounding nearby Taihu lake, where they were carved by the combination of time, water, and gravity.  In building the garden, the most exotically shaped rocks were chosen and carefully piled into even more exotic combinations.  Toss in a lake and some trees and some pavilions to go with the rock piles and you have the garden that you see today.

 During the hard years of the 1800s, the garden fell into disrepair.  In the early 1900's, the property was bought by a member of the wealthy Pei family, who restored the grounds and made the garden the home for his family.  Each summer, he would host his relatives from Shanghai, among whom was a boy named Ieoh Ming.  When the boy got older he went to the U.S. for university studies.  He must have tired of having his name mispronounced because he started using just his initials - I.M.

I.M. Pei went on to get a degree in architecture and to design a bunch of buildings that architects love to talk about including that silly glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris.  (I guess this also makes him complicit in the DaVinci Code conspiracy.)  Perhaps his time amidst the splendor of the Lion Grove Garden helped inspire his architectural genius...though there is nothing at the Lion Grove Garden that remotely looks like a glass pyramid. 

He did come back to Suzhou, in his twilight years, to design the Suzhou Museum.  The Suzhou Museum may be his final project, though I'm not sure.  He designed the courtyard of the museum as a modern echo of the classical Chinese garden - with greenery and rockery and water. (watery?)   Ironically, the museum is only a short walk away from where he spent his youthful summers - two blocks from the Lion Grove Garden.  So to say his career finished where it started is not just a metaphor; it is a geographical fact.