“Stillness” and “View”: Research on Viewing-in-Stillness Caves of Private Garden Rockeries in Ming and Qing Dynasties

Cave is an important aesthetic and construction object in the building of traditional Chinese garden rockeries. Existing studies, limited by the cognition of garden remains, largely focus on the morphological features, spatial layout, and dynamic tour effect characteristics. Through detailed studies of the historical documents on private garden rockeries in the Ming and Qing dynasties, this research finds that there were a large number of viewing-in-stillness rockery caves in history. As illustrated in the documents, “stillness” constitutes the starting point of “viewing”. With people’s perceptual experience, such as listening to sound, smelling fragrance, appreciating shadow and watching Qi in the rockery caves, the aesthetic process took place from “stillness” to “viewing” and from “viewing” to “stillness”. For the cultural implications on such rockery caves, it discloses that there are Taoist ideas of emptiness and immortality, the reclusive thought of cave hiding, and the pursuit of sitting-on-stone and mountain-dwelling. Combining the historical document analysis and existing garden examples, this research explores the physical features of the viewing-in-stillness rockery caves so as to provide new ideas and methods for today’s garden rockery construction and aesthetics.