Lion Grove Garden狮子林.doc

Lion Grove Garden狮子林 Lion Grove Garden is located in the northeast of Suzhou, which is a city with profound cultural background and convenient developmental advantages. Lion Grove Garden is one of the four most famous representative gardens of ancient classical style in Suzhou city. Built in 1342 during the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) by monk Tianru and a group of Zen Buddhist disciples as a memorial of their master-monk Zhong Feng, Lion Grove Garden has changed hands and renamed the number of times. Also there are many rocks grotesque in shapes in the garden resembling lions. Lion Grove Garden has been a popular center of literati’s and Buddhism activities. Many paintings and poems were inspired by the garden at this time. The Lion Grove Garden is perhaps the most distinctive of all of Suzhou’s gardens, and probably the most fun to visit. The highlight of the garden is its huge, strange labyrinthine rocks, which was mostly made of the limestone from Taihu Lake in Wuxi city. Reputed as the “kingdom of rockery”, the rocks were piled up skillfully and ingeniously and most of them look like lions in different postures and verves: playing, lying, fighting, sleeping, or even dancing. The core of the Lion Grove Garden is a path surrounded with its entire landscape constructive entirely of these exotic shaped rocks. Lower hills and carefully arranged the amounts of rocks, laying three sides of the small pond. There are all together 9 paths and 21 caverns cross among the steep peaks, sharp crags and narrow valleys made up by countless grotesque rocks. Walking through those numerous wide pathways and caverns of the anfractuous stone forest, one could easily lose one’s way. With all kinds of cypress trees, the whole landscape represents scenes of real mountains and forests.