Yu Garden

The story

In 1559 Pan Yunduan, son of a high official of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), began a garden beside his family house in Shanghai, then a small walled county town. He called it Yu, "ease" or "contentment", because, as he wrote, it was meant to please his ageing parents. It took him almost twenty years. His father died soon after it was finished.

The family declined, and in 1760 merchants of the town bought the ruin and joined it to the City God Temple next door as its "West Garden". Since then it has lived through Shanghai's whole modern history: British soldiers in 1842, a rebel headquarters in 1853, painters' gatherings, war damage, and a careful restoration from 1956 that opened it to everyone in 1961. Today it is a small garden, about two hectares, packed with rooms, rocks and water, surrounded by the noise of the bazaar.

What is here

The garden is behind its own wall and has its own ticket. The bridge and the teahouse stand outside it in the bazaar; the City God Temple next door has a separate small ticket.

If you have one minute

In front of the Exquisite Jade Rock

This grey limestone, about three metres tall and riddled with holes, is the treasure of the garden. Chinese collectors judged such rocks by four qualities: thin, open, leaky and wrinkled. This one has all four. Look through it and the sky shows through a dozen openings at once.

Then turn round. Across a small pond is the Hall of Jade Splendour, Pan Yunduan's study, set exactly so that he could sit and look at the rock.

Things people often get wrong

"The teahouse and the zigzag bridge are Yu Garden." They stand in a pond of the bazaar, outside the paid gate. The garden itself is behind the wall.

"It is all ancient." Much was rebuilt after the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, mainly in 1956–1961 and again in the 1980s. The Grand Rockery and the Jade Rock are the oldest things here.

People who stood here

We searched Chinese sources first for this list, then English ones.

• Dong Qichang (painter and calligrapher, 1555–1636)The greatest painter-critic of the late Ming, from the Shanghai area, he wrote poems and boards in the garden while the Pan family owned it.
• Wu Changshuo (painter, 1844–1927)In the late Qing (1644–1912) the garden's Book and Painting Tower was where Shanghai's painters met and sold their work; Wu Changshuo and Ren Bonian were among them, and the Shanghai school of painting grew from such gatherings.
• Guo Moruo (writer, 1892–1978)He visited after the garden reopened in 1961 and wrote a short poem ending: "Yu Garden has a history to last a thousand autumns."
• Chen Congzhou (garden scholar, 1918–2000)The author of "On Chinese Gardens" twice directed the garden's repairs, in 1982 and 1987, and gave it much of the look it has today.
• Queen Elizabeth II (1926–2022)On 15 October 1986, on the first visit of a British monarch to China, she took tea at the Huxinting teahouse and then walked across the zigzag bridge into the garden. The teahouse still keeps her table.

Go deeper: six stops from the bridge to the opera stage7 stops · about 2 min to read

The paid garden takes an hour and a half. Start at the bridge outside, enter at the north gate, and walk south through the garden to the exit at the Inner Garden.

1. The zigzag bridge and the teahouse

Merchants built both in 1784 on the site of a pavilion of the old garden. In 1855 the pavilion became Shanghai's first teahouse, and it still serves tea upstairs and down. The bridge turns nine times: a straight path, people said, lets evil spirits through.

2. The Grand Rockery

From the Hall of Three Ears of Grain and the Hall for Viewing the Mountain, look across the water at a mountain of yellow stone, some fourteen metres high. It is the work of Zhang Nanyang, the great rockery maker of the Ming, and is said to be the only one of his works that survives. Climb to the little pavilion on top: in Pan's day, it is said, you could see the Huangpu River from there.

3. The dragon walls and the old ginkgo

The garden is divided by walls whose ridges are dragons: a scaly body undulating along the top, a head with open jaws at the end. In front of the Tower of Ten Thousand Flowers stands a ginkgo said to be more than four hundred years old, which may have been planted while the Pans still lived here.

4. The Hall of Heralding Spring

In September 1853 the Small Swords Society, a secret society allied in spirit with the Taiping rebels, seized Shanghai's walled town and made this hall its headquarters. They held the town for seventeen months, until French and Qing troops drove them out in 1855. A display in the hall tells their story.

5. The Jade Rock and the Hall of Jade Splendour

Here is the rock of the one-minute visit. Stand in the hall and look out: Pan Yunduan designed the whole court around this view. Next to it, the Book and Painting Tower is where late Qing painters met, the cradle of the Shanghai school.

6. The Inner Garden and the opera stage

The Inner Garden was built in 1709 as a separate garden of the City God Temple and joined to Yu Garden later. Its old opera stage has a ceiling that spirals up in carved and gilded wood, said to help carry the singers' voices.

The garden and the same years elsewhere

Pan Yunduan began his garden in 1559, the year Elizabeth I was crowned in London. Four hundred and twenty-seven years later, the second Queen Elizabeth walked into it.