ABSTRACT
The Cang Lang Pavilion of Suzhou is a renowned classical garden in China. This chapter examines the Cang Lang garden in four aspects – the origin of the watercourse, the development of scenery, the making of aura, and the construction of meaning. It aims to explicate how the garden has sustained a one-thousand-year history physically and a two-millennium history of cultural narratives; how the essence of a classical Chinese garden was retained through its interactions with culture, nature, society, and history; and how the garden traverses the realm of sentiment, scenery, aura, and meaning in specific manners and with underlying regularities.
