Here, a student of the 1990s generation realized his academic dream

--Narrator: Zhu Qiang, PHD candidate at the Beijing Forestry University School of Landscape Architecture

Many people would ask me, as a doctoral student born in the 1990s, why would you drill your way into the "Three Mountains and Five Gardens" (Three mountains and five historical gardens in Beijing) and ceaselessly devote your youth to it?

When I was 16, I went to the Ruins of the Old Summer Palace for the first time, and started exploring classical gardens. Now, I have become a doctoral student studying landscape architecture, and is the leader for the "Three Mountains and Five Gardens" student research group at the Beijing Forestry University.

In most people's eyes, the Old Summer Palace, Summer Palace, and Xiangshan Park are mutually independent tourist attractions. However, I see the "Three Mountains and Five Parks" as a human settlement system which consists of mountains, forests, water, fields, gardens, villages, and temple in the past. It is a world-class cultural-historical site, and it is extraordinary to conduct research on, protect, and promote it. As a young person who identifies with the cultural values of the site, I thus bonded myself with the “Three Mountains and Five parks.

In reality, doing research on the history of gardens and parks requires a lot of accumulation. The work seems dull and it is difficult to attain achievements, therefore most of my peers lack interest in it. Nevertheless, I always think of myself as being lucky, in that I had the support of my parents and teachers, and this allowed me to never change my aspiration while growing up.

The accumulation of historical data helped us to achieve significant progress on the Changchun Garden, which has almost completely disappeared. By using over 30 different image-text historical materials from the 16th to 21st centuries, we were able to recover the overall arrangement of the garden in two different historical periods, followed by textual research of the cultural connotation behind the plants landscape and inscribed boards. This filled up the academic gap on the park. In 2019, our team recovered 24 royal gardens with an overall size equating to 16 Imperial Palaces, and published an academic work offering a systematic introduction of the “Three Mountains and Five Gardens”, "Touring the Three Hills and Five Gardens——Landscape, Art and Life of Chinese Imperial Gardens".

In 2020, we focused on the global promotion of the “Three Mountains and Five Gardens”. After document research and repeated deliberation, our team constructed a preliminary comprehensive English terminology system, we collaborated with translation specialists and published the English version of the book. This is the first foreign-language work to comprehensively introduce the “Three Mountains and Five Gardens”.

My supervisor, Professor Meng Yaozhen, stated that: the research of “Three Mountains and Five Gardens” needs to preserve its integrity in order to innovate. "Preserve integrity" means to gather theories from historical facts, keep a foothold in our discipline's grasp of the artistic conception and the space of landscape and plants. "Innovation" means to fill up the gap or propose conclusions that are different from predecessors, and use new methods to present the results.

In the future, we hope to collaborate with more specialists and practitioners from different domains, to work together on the cultural excavation and renaissance of the “Three Mountains and Five Gardens”. To let its graceful environment and cultural art continue to nourish people, and allow this bright Oriental pearl to glow vividly in the history of human civilization.

Contributed by Dong Cheng, Zhang Jinghua, Reporters of Guangming Daily

Translated by Zhang Junye