Most of us know it as the wall. Four metres of plaster on the corner of Rattray and Cumberland, the thing you walk along on your way to Toitu without once wondering what is on the other side of it. What is on the other side was drawn in Shanghai, built there in full, taken apart, shipped here in more than forty containers and put back together by artisans working seven days a week.
The Corner We All Walk Past
Four Metres of Wall on Rattray Street
There is a wall on the corner of Rattray and Cumberland that most of us have never actually looked at. Four metres of it, running the block opposite Queens Gardens and hard up against Toitu. We walk past it on the way to the museum or the railway station and register it the way you register a fence.
Behind it is a full Chinese scholar’s garden, one of only a handful outside China and the only one of its kind in this half of the world.
The wall is not an accident of the site. It is the whole point. A scholar’s garden is built to shut the city out so the city can be forgotten for an hour, which means the blankness we walk past is doing exactly the job it was drawn to do. Lan Yuan has been there since 2008, and plenty of us went once that first year, with relatives visiting, and never went back.
What the Name Actually Means
The sign says Lan Yuan, and the name does more work than names usually do. Lan is the orchid. It is also the third character in niu xi lan, the Chinese name for New Zealand, and it sits inside the name of the Yulan magnolia, the flower associated with Shanghai, Dunedin’s sister city. One syllable, carrying the flower, the country and the sister city at once. The garden’s booklet translates the full name as the Garden of Enlightenment.
That layering sets the terms for everything inside the wall. Nothing here is only itself – a rock is a mountain, a pond is a lake, a window cut into a wall is a painting you are meant to stop in front of. Once you know the name has three meanings you start hunting for the second meaning in everything else, which is the intended effect.
Why Dunedin and Not Somewhere Else
Chinese Dunedin is not a recent addition to the city. Cantonese miners came to the Otago goldfields in the 1860s, about fifteen years after the city was founded, which makes that presence almost as old as the streets it happened on. Something over two per cent of Dunedin is of Chinese descent, and the mayor who saw the garden through to its opening, Peter Chin, was one of them.
The idea surfaced in 1997, while the council worked out how to mark the city’s 150th the following year. A committee formed under Dr James Ng, a site was found beside the Settlers Museum, and foundation stones went down in March 1998.
Not everyone wanted it. A small and vocal group objected, and there was real concern the corner would prove too windy for a garden built around still water. It took another decade of fundraising, much of it public donations, plus $3.75 million from the government in 2006, to cover a seven million dollar build.
Built in One Country, Assembled in Another
Eight Years of Drawings
Between the foundation stones and the first visitor sat eight years of design, which sounds excessive until you see what was being attempted. Lan Yuan is a late Ming, early Qing scholar’s garden, a form with rules as tight as a sonnet – the sequence of views, the ratio of water to rock, the placement of a window so it frames one branch and not two.
Three people led the work: Cao Yongkang of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Chen Ling of Tongji University and Tan Yufeng of the Shanghai Museum. They worked from the classical gardens of Jiangnan, the region around Suzhou that produced the style, and produced it on small urban sites – which is precisely the problem a Dunedin street corner sets.
That is the wrinkle in the shorthand we all use. The garden’s lineage is Suzhou. The drawing boards, the workshops and the supervising museum were all in Shanghai.
A Trial Run in Shanghai
Then they built it. Not here – in Shanghai, on a site laid out to the same dimensions as the corner of Rattray and Cumberland, so the whole garden could be assembled once, checked, and taken apart again. Every piece was numbered, crated and shipped to the other end of the world to be put back together a second time.
The contents of those containers is the part that gets people:
– 380,000 roof tiles, made by hand
– 130 tonnes of granite paving, finished by hand
– 280 tonnes of sand
– bricks, carved timber and lattice screens, all of it made over there
Four things in the garden did not come from China: the water, the fish, the plants, and the concrete – 560 cubic metres of it, poured here because nobody was shipping that. Stand in the courtyard and almost everything you can see or walk on made a sea voyage to get there.
The Rocks From Lake Tai
The heaviest thing in the containers was rock. Close to a thousand tonnes of it, out of Lake Tai near Suzhou, arriving in more than forty shipping containers.
Taihu stone has been the prestige material in Chinese gardens for a thousand years, prized for what the water does to it – the holes, the folds, the wrung-out shapes that read as mountains if you look at them the right way. Most of Lan Yuan’s went into the climbing mountain, the piled stone you can walk up. About a third of it lines the pond edge or stands alone, placed the way you would place sculpture.
It is worth knowing that the lake has paid for its reputation. Taihu has been quarried hard enough to damage the lake floor, and gardens like this one are part of the reason.
Forty People, Seven Days a Week
The reassembly was done by the people who had done the assembly. About forty workers, artisans and support staff came out from Shanghai on special work visas – two of them cooks – and stayed in a backpackers across the road from the site. Thirteen more arrived later to raise the Pai Lou gateway at the entrance and finish the courtyards, the mosaics and the lattice work.
The hours were half past seven in the morning until five, an hour for lunch, seven days a week, with one day off a month. They were paid at least the New Zealand minimum wage.
That sits a little awkwardly beside the finished thing, and it should. The courtyard mosaics are set stone by stone in patterns you have to crouch down to read properly. Somebody knelt on that ground through a Dunedin winter to put them there, six days out of seven, for as long as it took.
What It Is Like Once You Are Inside
The Lake, and the Way Round It
There is no view of the whole garden. That is deliberate, and it is the first thing you notice through the gate – the path bends, a rock blocks the sightline, a doorway shows you a slice of something you have to walk around a wall to reach. A scholar’s garden is built as a sequence, not a picture.
Everything turns on the water. The Chongyuan pavilion sits out over the middle of it, the climbing mountain half-pavilion is tucked into the stone above, and a study, an entrance hall and a square pavilion sit around the edge, each aimed at a different version of the same pond.
The fish are enormous and entirely unbothered. Wen Zhengming, the Ming painter the garden quotes, wrote that truly in the midst of a city there can be mountain and forest. Four metres of wall, a pond and a pile of rock later, he turns out to be right.
Tea, Dumplings and the Long Sit
The tea house is the part locals should be using more than we do. It pours Chinese teas properly and does steamed buns and dumplings, and it is a good place to sit for an hour with a pot and no plan. There is a gift shop attached, and the tower room upstairs gets hired out for functions and the occasional wedding.
The gate is open daily from 10am to 5pm, every day but Christmas. There is a free car park, which in that part of town is not nothing, and Toitu is next door, which is how most people end up doing both in an afternoon. Adults pay to get in, and the current rates and the events programme sit on the garden’s own site.
Go on a weekday morning if you can. Half the effect depends on there being nobody else in the courtyard.
Going Back in Different Weather
The garden was blessed in June 2008 in front of the prime minister, Helen Clark, and the Chinese ambassador, opened to the public the month after, and formally opened by Clark again in September. It has since been classified as a Garden of International Significance by the New Zealand Gardens Trust, which is the sort of line that ends up on a plaque and tells you nothing about what to do with the place.
What to do with it is go back. A garden built on framed windows and blocked sightlines is not the same in July as in November – the pond flat and black under a frost, rain doing what rain does to Taihu stone, low winter light over the wall. Anyone who has been once, in summer, with someone visiting, has seen about a quarter of it.
It is a ten minute walk from the Octagon. There is no good excuse.
The strange thing about Lan Yuan is not that it exists. It is that a city this size committed eight years, seven million dollars and forty visiting craftsmen to something whose entire purpose is to slow you down and make you look properly at a rock. Whether that was a sensible use of anyone’s time is a question the garden politely declines to answer, and after an hour inside you tend to stop asking it.