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Abstract:

The term“Anglo-Chinese garden”(jardin anglo-chinois) first emerged in 18th-century European literature. Currently, its earliest documented appearances are primarily concentrated in two sources: the multi-volume engraving collection Les Jardins Anglo Chinois published by Georges-Louis Le Rouge starting in 1775, and Horace Walpole’s annotations on William Mason’s Satirical Poems, which were compiled and published only in the 20th century. The aesthetic core of the Anglo-Chinese garden is not a simplistic imitation of nature—a pursuit that instead defines the native English landscape tradition from William Kent to Lancelot Brown, which evolved from the pictorial interventions of painting to the design of natural scenery in its most minimalist form. Standing in stark opposition to the geometric, regulated French garden, the essence of the Anglo-Chinese garden is anchored in the Chinese aesthetic doctrine of“artificial creation resembling natural spontaneity.”In practice, Le Rouge subsumed the prevailing European garden styles of his time under the conceptual framework of the“Anglo-Chinese garden.”Walpole, as the pioneer of the Gothic novel, defended Kent’s English landscape garden while echoing the Chinese irregular aesthetic of Sharawadgi—originally

introduced in William Temple’s“Upon the Gardens of Epicurus”—and imbuing it with a Gothic sensibility. Ultimately, William Chambers, through his seminal works“Of the Art of Laying Out Gardens Among the Chinese”and A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, infused the style with the Romantic aesthetic of the sublime, establishing a solid theoretical and practical foundation for the Anglo-Chinese garden. The historical significance of the Anglo-Chinese garden transcends both the Anglo-French rivalry in landscape design and local debates within Britain. It belongs not only to Britain and France, but to the entire world.

Key words: Anglo-Chinese garden, Georges-Louis Le Rouge, Horace Walpole, William Temple, William Chambers, imitation of nature, aesthetics of Chinese gardens, English landscape garden