Yu Garden

Yu Garden exists because a son wanted his aging parents to have something to look at. Pan Yunduan, a Ming-dynasty governor of Sichuan Province, began building it in 1559 specifically so his father could enjoy a garden in old age — an act of filial devotion, one of the core Confucian virtues, made permanent in stone and water. What should have been a modest project turned into an eighteen-year obsession: Pan kept expanding and refining the design well past any reasonable budget, and by the time it was finished in 1577, the family fortune that paid for it was largely gone. The garden's name, fittingly, translates to something like "Garden of Peace and Comfort" — the ambition, at least, succeeded even if the finances didn't.

The garden's centerpiece, the Grand Rockery, is a deliberately engineered mountain: a twelve-metre-high formation built from 2,000 tons of yellow stone hauled from Zhejiang province, each piece bonded to the next with a mortar of rice glue and limestone rather than modern cement, attributed to the renowned Ming garden designer Zhang Nanyang. Walking the grounds, you cross the Nine-Bend Bridge, a zigzagging path over a pond built on an old folk belief that evil spirits can only travel in straight lines — a bridge with no straight stretch is a bridge malicious ghosts supposedly can't cross, though garden historians also read the zigzag more simply as a device that forces visitors to slow down and actually look at the water instead of walking straight through it.

The garden's later history is rougher than its origin story. It changed hands repeatedly after the Pan family's decline, and in the nineteenth century it was pulled directly into conflict: British troops occupied it during the First Opium War in 1842, and a decade later the anti-Qing Small Swords Society used it as their headquarters during the Taiping-era uprising in Shanghai. What survives today is the oldest Ming-dynasty classical garden still standing in the city center — a rebuilt, restored version of a space that has been fought over almost as often as it's been admired.

Getting there

Located in Huangpu. Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport (SHA) is about 15 km away.