Welcome to Yu Garden. This is a Ming dynasty private garden1, and it was begun because a son wanted to please his father. In 1559 an official named Pan Yunduan started building it for his father Pan En, who had just stepped down from a senior post in Beijing. Work went on and stopped and went on again for nearly twenty years, and by the time it was finished Pan Yunduan had spent most of what the family had. The name says the whole story. Yu means to give pleasure to elderly parents, so Yu Garden is the garden that makes the old folks happy. The whole place is about two hectares, which does not sound like much, but walls, water and rockeries divide it into six zones, and you never see all of it from anywhere. That is the central trick of the Jiangnan garden, making a small site feel like one you cannot finish walking.
欢迎来到豫园。这是一座明代的私家园林，起因是一个儿子想让父亲高兴。1559 年，一位叫潘允端的官员开始为父亲潘恩造这座园子，潘恩当时刚从北京的高位上退下来。园子造造停停将近二十年，等到落成的时候，潘允端已经把家里的积蓄花得差不多了。名字就把来历说尽了。豫是让年迈的双亲开心的意思，豫园直译过来就是让老人家高兴的园子。全园大约两公顷，听着不大，但造园的人用墙、水和假山把它分成六个景区，你在任何一处都看不到全貌。这正是江南园林最核心的一招，把不大的地方做出走不完的感觉。
The first hall inside the gate is the Hall of Three Ears of Grain. In Pan Yunduan's day this was the main hall of the garden and carried another name. The building you see was put up in 1760, when the rice and grain guild of Shanghai bought this part of the garden and used the hall for their meetings. They renamed it after an old harvest omen3, a single stalk carrying three ears of grain, which was taken as a sign of a good year. Grain prices for the city were settled in this room. Look up at the two plaques. One reads City Mountain Forest, four characters that claim a wilderness inside a town, and that phrase is as good a summary of the whole garden as you will get in four words.
进门第一座厅堂是三穗堂。潘允端在世时这里是全园的主厅，用的是另一个名字。各位看到的这一幢建于 1760 年。那年上海豆米业公所买下园子这一部分，把厅堂用作议事的地方。他们照一个老的丰年吉兆给它改了名，一根稻茎上结三个穗，被看作年成好的征候。全城的米价就在这间屋里议定。请抬头看那两块匾，其中一块写着「城市山林」，四个字宣称城中有野，这四个字概括整座园子，比什么说法都准。
We go out the back and along the covered walkway east of the Yangshan Hall. Stop at the west wall here. There are two pieces set into it. One is a brick carving of a scholar winning first place in the military examination. The other is a clay sculpture called Plum Wife and Crane Son. It refers to a Song dynasty poet, Lin Bu, who never married and never took office. He lived on a hill by the West Lake, planted plum trees and kept cranes, and said the plums were his wife and the cranes were his children. Putting him on the wall of a garden built by an official who had left office is not an accident. In front of the walkway stand two iron lions, cast in the Yuan dynasty, so they are older than the garden by more than two hundred years. The male on the left has a paw on a ball for authority, the female on the right has a paw on a cub for a flourishing line of descendants.
我们从后面出去，走仰山堂东边这道游廊。请在这面西墙前停一下，墙上嵌着两件东西。一件是砖雕，刻的是武举夺魁。另一件是泥塑，叫梅妻鹤子。说的是宋代诗人林逋。他一生不娶不做官，住在西湖边的山上，种梅养鹤，说梅就是妻，鹤就是子。把这个人放在一座辞官者所造园林的墙上，不是随手安排的。游廊前立着一对铁狮，元代铸的，比园子早了两百多年。左边雄狮爪下踩球，象征权威，右边雌狮爪下踩幼狮，象征子孙昌盛。
Now the piece Pan Yunduan spent the most on. This is the Great Rockery2, built of yellowstone quarried in Zhejiang and stacked by Zhang Nanyang, the finest rockery master working at the time. It stands about fourteen metres. Walk the path up and you will notice it is deliberately narrow and dark, with the sky closed off overhead, so that the view when you come out on top arrives all at once. From the summit pavilion Pan could see the Huangpu River and the sails on it. He cannot now, because the city stands in the way, but the intention is still readable in how the path is cut. Look along the wall tops as you come down. Dragons run over the tiles. There are five such dragon walls in the garden, dividing one courtyard from the next, and every dragon has its head turned back to look at where it came from.
接下来是潘允端花钱最多的一处。这是大假山，用浙江采来的黄石堆成，叠山的是当时最好的名家张南阳。假山高约十四米。顺路往上走，各位会发现山道故意做得又窄又暗，头顶的天被封住，为的是让登顶后的视野来得突然。当年潘允端从山顶亭子上能看到黄浦江和江上的帆。现在看不到了，城市挡在中间，但路怎么开的，这份用意还读得出来。下山时请顺着墙头看，龙在瓦上游走。园里有五道这样的龙墙，把各个院落隔开，每条龙的头都回望着来处。
Through the double corridor now. It is one walkway with a wall down the middle and a path on each side, and the wall is punched with lattice windows4 of different shapes so that the same garden looks like a different painting from each opening. The small pavilion straddling8 the stream is the Fish Joy Pavilion. Lean on the rail and the carp come up. Beside it grows a wisteria6 over three hundred years old, twisted and still flowering white every spring. Ahead is the Ten Thousand Flowers Tower, rebuilt in 1843 on the site of a Ming shrine to the flower goddess, with clay sculptures of plum, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum at the four corners below, one flower for each season. The ginkgo in front of it is older than the tower by a long way, more than four hundred years, tall enough that Pan Yunduan may well have watched it planted. Past the tower, the wall between us and the Dianchun Hall carries the Cloud Piercing Dragon, the one whose body dives into the tiles and comes out again further along.
现在穿过复廊。这是一道当中砌墙、两边都能走的廊子，墙上开着形状各异的漏窗，同一片园景从每个窗口看出去都像另一幅画。跨在溪流上的小榭是鱼乐榭。凭栏一站，鲤鱼就浮上来。旁边那株紫藤三百多年了，枝干扭曲，每年春天照样开白花。前面是万花楼，1843 年在明代花神阁的旧址上重建，楼下四角有梅兰竹菊四组泥塑，一季一花。楼前那株银杏比楼老得多，四百多年，高到潘允端很可能亲眼看着它栽下去。过了万花楼，我们和点春堂之间那道墙上是穿云龙，龙身扎进瓦里，隔一段又钻出来。
The last stop is the one people photograph. The tall porous5 stone in front of us is the Exquisite Jade Rock, one of the three famous rocks of the Jiangnan region, along with the Cloud Crowned Peak in Suzhou and the Crinkled Cloud Peak in Hangzhou. Chinese connoisseurs7 judge a rock on four qualities, wrinkled, holed, slender and see-through, and this one is held to have all four. Light a stick of incense at its foot and the smoke comes out of every hole. The hall facing it is the Jade Splendour Hall, and this was Pan Yunduan's own study. He placed the rock where he could see it from his desk, and it is still in that line of sight today. Standing here you are looking at the two things the man cared about most, a stone and the room he read in. We have about forty minutes. Take your time, and I will wait by the Nine Lion Study at the top of the hour.
最后一站是大家都要拍的一处。眼前这块高而多孔的石头是玉玲珑，江南三大名石之一，另外两块是苏州留园的冠云峰和杭州的绉云峰。中国人相石看四个字，皱、漏、瘦、透，这一块被认为四样都占。在它脚下点一炷香，烟会从每一个孔里冒出来。对着它的那座厅堂是玉华堂，潘允端自己的书房。他把石头摆在从书桌上抬眼就能看到的位置，今天这条视线还在。站在这里，各位看到的是这个人最在意的两样东西，一块石头，和他读书的那间屋。我们大约四十分钟，请各位随意走走，整点我在九狮轩那边等。