Fish Watching from the Bridge over the Hao River: An Analysis of Bridge Landscape of Zhiyu Bridge in Huishan Garden, Summer Palace

Fish Watching from the Bridge over the Hao River (pronounced as “Haoliangguanyu” in Chinese) is an essential allusion of Chinese classical culture and has become a classic theme in the construction of classical gardens. There were many bridges similar to the Bridge over the Hao River in the imperial gardens of Qing Dynasty, mainly represented by Zhiyu Bridge in Huishan Garden, Summer Palace. Existing research on Huishan Garden has achieved fruitful results in the garden’s history, landscape pattern, gardening art and comparison with Jichang Garden, while seldom analyzing the bridge landscape of Zhiyu Bridge. Through literature research and field investigation, this research finds that Zhiyu Bridge has terrific design in four aspects: bridge as the scenery, scenery from the bridge, scenery conversion across the bridge, and bridge forming the artistic conception. It also summarizes the form, location, environmental design and cultural implication of Zhiyu Bridge, all of which point to the core proposition of “fish watching”. Fanning out from point to area, the landscape design of Zhiyu Bridge integrates the overall view of cultural theme and physical environment, well reflecting the garden construction wisdom of the ancients, which can provide valuable ideas for contemporary architecture and landscape design.