It is only in 1949 that the world of Chinese gardens we encounter today was opened to the public, ten centuries after it had been introduced to Japan and more than 2 centuries after the British bourgeoisie have had the first glimpse on them.

Chinese Versus Western
Unlike the gardens on the West, usually built attached to the house, open to the public, colorful with flowers, gardens in ancient China were built away from the house, closed to the public and surrounded by walls, without much colors and with no flowers at all.

Traditional Chinese gardens were not social places - a garden was a place to run away to, where one would come alone or only with close friends and lovers.

There were three kinds of gardens in the ancient China:
- Big and extravagant gardens that usually consisted of a few smaller ones and would belong to the emperor, very high officials and to wealthy traders
- Gardens attached to the monasteries and temples
- Smaller gardens that belonged to intellectuals and were a runaway place from the every day's life.

Philosophical Concept of the traditional Chinese gardens
No matter which of these categories a garden would belong to, it carry the same philosophy in its basis -garden symbolizes the entire macrocosms reduced into the microcosms - a perfect entity that neither lacks anything nor is superfluous in anything, no matter what its actual size is.

Even today the common word for garden is 圆 （'yuan ） - entire, perfect - the world for itself. Reaching that feeling of 'perfect' was possible only by keeping the balance between the big and small, light and shadow, revealed and hidden - every single thing in the garden was carefully planned to achieve that.

In most of the cases through out the history, garden designers and architects were painters that would try to paint and capture the nature while designing the garden.

Most of the gardens had reduced their size through history against the growing need for a private gardens and the emerging middle class, mainly consisted of merchants from Song dynasty (10-14th AD) and onwards. The result was a 'micro - garden', a compromise for the limited city property and the growing need for private gardens. Approximately from that time, developed the art of 'peng-cai' (bonsai in Japanese) - mini gardens that were made inside the bowl and were kept inside the house or in the already existing yard / mini-garden.

Main symbols in the traditional Chinese gardens:
Water - symbol of life and change - even today, lake is main focus in most of the gardens
Stones and rocks - stability and strength, mountains captured.

Buildings - pavilions and towers - bridge between man and nature and man's success in controlling it

Trees - renovation and prosperity, passing through seasons and changes.

Mirror - the metaphor used in almost all the aspects of the Chinese tradition and culture - in Daost tradition, it symbolizes the spirit of a sage - as clean as a mirror and without any 'spiritual dust'. In the Buddhist one, it is used to describe the awoken, clean spirit.
The traditional Chinese garden was considered to be a mirror of the human spirit and the individual that created it. It is also a mirror of the real nature that it presents. Garden is considered to be the place where more than anywhere man could be close to nature - the spirit and nature could reflect each other through garden - through the mirror. Water carried the main symbolism, the environment literally reflecting itself inside of it.

Corridors - Different realities- garden was the separate reality, separate from the existing world behind its walls. It was actually, the 'buffer reality' and the corridor to the third, imaginative reality. If built properly according to the architecture and philosophical rules, garden could serve as a bridge between the two realities, while being the reality for itself.
Gardens' gates were entrances to another world per se...

Walls - one of the main symbols of a garden. They served not only as a border, but also as introductions to different sceneries within the garden itself. They were meant to create the excitement towards the hidden behind it.
One of the common 'techniques' was called 'jie jing' ('scenery rental") - the holes -'windows' would be opened inside the wall and would serve as a frame for the scenery that could be seen through them.

Hills - every garden had a hill, in most cases at the very entrance. It was supposed to hide the scenery - without it, everything could be seen at once and it would loose it's magic.

Garden should be discovered step by step, and the climax was on the pavilion that was the highest spot in the garden and the main observatory point in the garden.
Good garden was made in a way that, once the visitor thought he have discovered everything and have walked all the paths, upon reaching the highest spot he would discover the place that he haven't reached while exploring the garden…