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The new bilingual version（Chinese and English）of Suzhou Gardens,with the full back-up of all my friends,has come to light.It is almost over half a century since the publication of the original version of the book.“I paint the wonderland with pride and joy,To let flowers flourish all over Suzhou”This is a poetic sentence from my father’s A Collection of Poems on Suzhou,expressing his great expectation for the future of Suzhou.It is our hope that the new book will uphold the cultural heritage of China and bring consolation to our dear deceased father.

Mr.Chen Congzhou,my father,was a master architect of traditional gardens of China.He used to be a professor of the Architecture Department of Tongji University.He wrote numerous books and articles on gardens,including On Gardens.Of all the writings,some have been published in English,Japanese,German,French,Italian,Russian and other foreign languages,and witnessed several printings or editions.But my father’s favorite book is Shuzhou Gardens,his first book,as he called it.This book is really a very unusual one.On one hand,it makes my father’s name nationwide,establishing his position in the history of garden construction and the field of art of traditional Chinese gardens.On the other hand,it brought him many unexpected troubles and inflicted great suffering on him.

In fact,the original version of this book was only a course book used in the Architecture Department of Tongji University.Since its publication,it attracted widespread attention in the society.Senior doyens of architecture history had a high appraisal of the book.The teachers and students loved reading it.It is said that when Mr.Ye Shengtao（叶圣陶）,the renowned scholar,had read this book,he wanted to see my father immediately.In Ye’s mind,the person who is able to write such a wonderful book must be a senior scholar.To Ye’s astonishment,he found when they finally met each other that my father was only a youth of over thirty years of age at the time of writing that book.Ever since,they became friends for dozens of years in spite of their age gap.

This book has deepened the awareness of China and the world of the gardens of Suzhou,though it was banished soon after its publication and then had a precarious fate.Through this book,the Metropolitan Museum of New York called on my father at the end of 70s of the last century to design the Ming Xuan（Ming Room,明轩,or the Astor Court）in the Museum,based on Dian Cun Yi（Late Spring Studio,殿春簃）in Wang Shi Yuan（The Master-of-nets Garden,网师园）.From then on Suzhou gardens made their name in the world.At the same time,my father struck up friendship of nearly twenty years with Mr.I.M.Pei（贝聿铭）,the world-famous architect.Mr.I.M.Pei said:“Mr.Chen Congzhou is a great master of his time in garden art.He is a benevolent gentleman and a good friend of mine.I got to know him in the 70s of the last century.I regret not having met him earlier.Every time I listen to his talk on gardens,on architecture,on pingtan（a form of story telling and ballad singing in Suzhou dialect）,and on Kunqu opera,I feel much enchanted and enlightened.Having such an intimate friend,I am immensely gratified.”

In the mind of my father,Chinese garden construction is not an isolated architectural art.It is not only involved with the historical background of politics and economy,but also related with painting,poetry and drama.Mr.I.M.Pei speaks highly of my father:“Mr.Chen’s understanding of Chinese garden art is thorough,profound and far above the pale of the average person.”

My father studied painting under Zhang Daqian（Chang Dai-chien,张大千）.He learned gonbi（a traditional Chinese painting method featured by fine brush work and detailed description）at first.And then he turned to the painting style of freehand brushwork.In the 40s of the last century,he held his personal painting exhibition and had an album of paintings published.One of the paintings entitled“A Thread of Willow,A Length of Tenderness”once enjoyed high reputation in Shanghai.The painting features a pair of fledgling little birds perching on a thin willow branch and chirping sweetly to each other.To watch my father in the act of painting is indeed an enjoyment of beauty.He started by rubbing an ink stick against an inkstone,spread a large piece of Xuan paper and dipped his brush into the ink.After a little pause,he began to wield his arm in the air and let the tip of his brush sliding swiftly on the paper.Then he dipped his brush again into the ink and brought it back to continue its dancing on the paper.The bending orchid,the upright bamboo,the giant palm leaves all magically emerged on the paper.Finding that the ripe grapes on the painting seemed to burst,he hastened to bring a burning cigarette near them to dry up some overspreading ink water.Mr.Wen Zhenming,a famous painter of the Ming Dynasty,did numerous paintings for Zhuo Zheng Yuan（The Humble Administrator’s Garden,拙政园）.In the same way,my father appraised and appreciated gardens from the angle of Chinese landscape painting.He held that“without knowledge of the mechanism of Chinese painting,no comments on Chinese gardens are justified.”　In the construction and reparation of gardens,he also resorted to the methodology of painting.He emphasized that“A garden excels in its landscape and landscape prides in being distinctive.”and“there is no ready-made formula to follow in building a garden though there are some general guide lines to go by.”　In fact,he did not stick rigidly to the blueprint.And instead he often adapted his measures in light of local situations or made impulsive improvements at the sight of actual scenes.He advocated“garden is embedded in both poetry and painting”.He scrawled and splashed the sketch of a scene on paper and even sprinkled lime lines on the ground as dictated by flights of imagination.This way of designing seemed unusual but accorded with his own principles and procedures.

My father was keen on photography.The pictures he shot were full of import.The modern technique of photography gave full play to his profound understanding of Chinese painting.When I learnt picture-taking,my father taught me how to use small aperture and long exposure to display the details of things I shot.In order to turn out the charm of garden buildings,my father often put up the tripod and clicked the shutter.And then he sat down,lighting up a cigarette and quietly waiting for the end of exposure.In those years,my father used a German-made 120 film twin-lens reflex camera given him by my uncle Mr.Song Boqin when the latter left Chinese mainland.All the 196 pictures carried in the book Suzhou Gardens were produced by this camera.Mr.Ye Shengtao regarded these pictures as“all fine pieces of art and an pioneering undertaking in the fields of architecture and photography”.

My father is diligent and well-grounded in literature,as he studied humanities at Zijiang University under Mr.Xia Chengxi.Inspired by the sentiments of a man of letters,he inscribed his pictures with words ingeniously and painstakingly selected from Song ci（poems of the Song Dynasty）.His choice of poetic words came from wide-ranging sources and sometimes two consecutive sentences were quoted from two different Song poems in order to enhance their expressiveness.Occasionally he replaced one or two particular words to bring the poem and the picture to life.These recreated words matched the pictures of the book to a charm and attained the acme of perfection.

My father was fond of Kunqu opera.When he was in a happy mood,he could even sing a few stanzas.He was a skillful player of Xiao（a vertical bamboo flute）.In the day of yore,when the night was deep and quiet,the melodious music of the flute and the ballad often took my younger brother and sister and I into the sweet dreamland.In the eye of my father,gardens and Kunqu opera grew up from the same root.There were elements of drama running between the lines of his works on gardens.Music should be enjoyed when listened with bated breath;gardens should be appreciated when observed quietly and calmly for their best aesthetic effect.Melody and landscape are inseparable.It seemed to him that the hills,trees,pavilions and pagodas in a garden are just like the poses,movements,words and tunes of the stage art.In the same way,the undulating rhythm of gardens synchronizes with Kunqu opera.With this understanding in mind he upheld all along the idea of“decoding music with the aid of gardens and reading the gardens by means of music.”

In this way,my father’s solid grounding and talents in art and literature were brought into full play in modern garden architecture.It was with the sensibility of a painter,the rigor of a scholar,the diligence of an archeologist,the version of modern garden architecture and the style of Chinese classic literature that he brought the book Suzhou Gardens into the world.Mr.Li Gefei of the Song Dynasty wrote a book entitled An Account of Loyang Gardens.My father,on the strength of his love for Suzhou gardens,wanted to learn from Mr.Li and to write a book An Account of Suzhou gardens.But in the end his efforts landed the present book Suzhou Gardens.This is an update monograph on the history of architecture.The complete set of survey drawings of the gardens carried in the book are hand-made by the teachers and the students of the Architecture Department of Tongji University under the guidance of my father.

Since its publication by the Course-book Press of Tongji University,the book Suzhou Gardens became well-known far and wide,but its circulation was limited.Later in 1983,the Japanese version of the book was published in Tokyo.This time we decide to have the whole book translated into English,in the hope that the new version might help people nowadays to better understand and appreciate the brilliant garden culture of Suzhou.

The new version is the brainchild of the pains-taking efforts of two generations.My father’s essays,like his paintings,are pithy,lucid and rich in meaning.Theessays are characterized by an urbane and graceful narrative style and occasional passages,big or small,of lyric expressions.These essays also feature large loads of technical words of ancient architecture and of allusions to historical figures and documents.Due to the wide coverage of fields such as history,architecture,literature,painting and so on,to have the book translated into English adequately and vividly is by no means an easy matter.Mr.Chen Wei did the translation of the book The Old Houses of Suzhou a couple of years before,but to translate the essay A Preliminary Analysis of Suzhou Gardens in the present book is still a challenge.His English version has been revised and polished by Prof.Zhu Wenjun of Beijing Language and Culture University.The finalized English version comes up faithfully with the original meanings,making the whole book a wonderful reading.Prof.Zhu worked for UNESCO for several years as a reviser.Last year he helped revise the English version of the second edition of my father’s book On Gardens.

The English version of Song ci attached to the pictures is worthy of particular mention.First of all,tremendous efforts were made to find out the sources of all those quoted Song ci sentences.Mr.Zhang Xi availed himself of modern network technique for this challenging job.In the end he succeeded in ferreting out all the sources from among nearly 30,000 Song ci,thus paving the way for the translation.Even more challenging part is the translation.Prof.Zhu revised his English version again and again in an attempt to perfect it as much as possible in meaning,sound and form.It is our hope that the readers may appreciate what has been done on our part and enjoy reading it.All the quoted Song ci sentences in the current version were transcribed by late Mr.Jiang Qiting,who had done the transcription for the whole text of the book On Gardens in its year 1984 edition.

It is also worthwhile to mention that the publication of this book is the fruit of concerted efforts and generous assistance of some experts and helpful friends.To them we express our heartfelt and sincere appreciation.Prof.Li Deling of UC Berkely,who translated Kunqu opera Peony Pavilion,wrote to me several times about how to proceed with the work.Mr.Zhang Xi not only sought out all the sources of the quoted Song ci sentences,but also made some textual research on a number of allusions in the book.Mr.Ma Hanpeng and his wife Mrs.Zeng Cheng visited almost all the gardens in Suzhou and collected all English names for scenic spots.They also took many photos on the spot to provide data and clues forlater reference.Miss He Fengcung of the Limited Company of Suzhou Institute of Garden Designing sent by mail a book Classic Gardens of Suzhou written by the Garden Bureau of Suzhou.Mr.Xu Zhengping took pains revising the Afterwords part.Even a 16-year-old Chinese-American girl by the name of Liao Huimin was involved at the beginning stage in the translation of Song ci.We tried our best to explain to her the poetic implication of the Chinese text and even went so far as to lead her into a garden to observe the way verdant willow sprigs and full-blown flowers waving and dancing in the breeze as indicated in those poems.In fact the first English version of the poetic came from the meritorious work of this young girl sentence by sentence.The translation process was at the same time an opportunity for her to receive an education in Chinese traditional culture.

It has been almost a decade since my father passed away.In honor of his memory,we have done several things such as the preparation of the Nanbei Lake Art Gallery of Chen Congzhou,editing Painting Album of Chen Congzhou,having The Old Houses of Suzhou and An Overview of Gardens published,and so on.Over half a century has elapsed from the original to the present new version of Suzhou Gardens.During this period of time China has undergone profound changes.The thought of recalling the history and reviving the culture has inspired us to edit and translate the book Suzhou Gardens.Two years of persistent and painstaking efforts have drawn us to our father’s side,to listen to his melodious flute and his enchanting stories about gardens.We feel so happy and so graceful to be nurtured again by his delicate sense of beauty.We are missing him so much.We will cherish the memory of our dear father forever.