Transplanting a Chinese Garden Overseas
点击此处阅读本文的中文版。In 1981, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) unveiled the Astor Chinese Garden Court, a permanent installation modeled on a Ming-dynasty (1368-1644) literati garden (Figure 1) [1]. Designed by Suzhou-based architects, Astor Court includes a paved courtyard, rockeries, a water fountain, plants, a winding covered walkway (qu lang), a half pavilion (ban ting), and a main hall (xuan), now known as the Ming Room, which houses the museum’s collection of Ming furniture. Constructed using traditional materials, techniques, and labor imported from Suzhou, Astor Court was lauded by the museum as “the first authentic reconstruction of a Chinese Garden” [2].
Figure 1. Magazine spread of “Ming Garden for Manhattan,” Life Magazine, August 1980, 86-88.
Situated within the museum’s Far Eastern galleries, Astor Court serves as a real-life setting for exhibiting Chinese artifacts. Beyond its immediate institutional function, the garden reflects a broader transformation of traditional garden-making into modern-day architectural production. In doing so, it contributes to the canonization of a specific image of the “classical Chinese garden,” raising questions about authenticity, labor, and landscape in the context of transnational cultural transfer (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Like the Giant Pandas gifted to the National Zoo in Washington, DC, a Suzhou Garden was also a diplomatic exchange following the rapprochement of Sino-US diplomatic relations. Rossbach, Sarah. “Cultural Diplomacy: China’s Unique Gift to the Metropolitan.” Avenue, September 1979.
The idea for a Chinese garden at the Met emerged in the mid-1970s, at a moment of renewed Sino-US diplomacy. Following President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China and the signing of the Shanghai Communiqué, non-governmental cultural exchanges became a key aspect of bilateral engagement. Art, archaeology, and architecture quickly emerged as fertile grounds for diplomacy. Two American delegations to China were particularly instrumental in shaping the Met’s garden project: the American Institute of Architect’s 1974 delegation to China and a 1977 delegation focused on Chinese paintings. Chinese American architect I. M. Pei and art historian Wen Fong— both affiliated with the Met— served as cultural liaisons during these exchanges.
The museum’s publication A Chinese Garden Court highlights Pei and Fong’s contribution. In China, they met architectural historian Chen Congzhou, whose scholarship influenced their understanding of classical garden design. Recognizing Chen’s expertise, they brought Chen on board as the garden consultant for the Met. Together, the team selected the courtyard of the Late Spring Study (dianchun yi) in the Master of Fishing Nets Garden in Suzhou as a design precedent. Notably, Chen had restored the courtyard in the late 1950s, after it had served as a military barracks, according to the Gazetteer of the Master of Fishing Nets Garden (wang shi yuan zhi). His restoration re-aligned the space with Ming dynasty garden aesthetics, based on the seventeenth-century garden treatise Yuan Ye. The courtyard’s compact scale, spatial clarity and typological features made it ideal precedent for reproduction.
To ensure formal, material, and technical accuracy, the Suzhou Garden Administration constructed a full-scale outdoor mock-up in Suzhou. This prototype, rarely discussed in existing scholarship, functioned as a rehearsal space, allowing the American team (curators, architects, and engineers) to assess the proportion, materials, and spatial qualities before authorizing the fabrication for the Met’s installation (Figures 3, 4, 5).
Figure 3. View of the half-pavilion in the courtyard of the Late Spring Studio in the Master of Fishing Nets Garden in Suzhou (historic precedent). Photo by the author, 2023.
Figure 4. View of the half-pavilion in the mockup garden in Suzhou. Photo by the author, 2023.
Figure 5. View of the half-pavilion in Astor Court. Photo by the author, 2022.
Material and technical authenticity were essential to this project. Rare hardwoods (e.g., Phoebe zhennan) were logged from remote forests in southwestern China. An Imperial kiln in Suzhou was reopened to fabricate traditional tiles and bricks. Taihu rocks of the project, it is rumored, were salvaged from other historic Suzhou gardens. These prefabricated materials were shipped to New York, where the Chinese team collaborated with American architects and engineers for on-site installation. The 1983 documentary Ming Garden recorded the construction process, highlighting traditional Chinese tools and techniques while framing the collaboration as a symbol of the friendly relationship between Chinese and American people.
Upon arrival in New York, the Chinese craftsmen were subject to local building codes and safety regulations. Their straw hats and cloth shoes were replaced by hard hats and steel-toed boots. Construction drawings in the Beaux-arts tradition mediated both the technical communication and legal permitting, even though much of the construction continued to rely on the embodied knowledge of traditional artisans. Architects represented and oversaw a range of specialized trades, including masonry, carpentry, brickwork, tile work, plastering, and horticulture, often without direct expertise in those crafts.
Where historical gardens evolved through generations of land acquisition, building, maintenance, and iterative changes, Astor Court was realized through a streamlined process typical of modern architectural production: schematic design, design development, construction documentation, mock-up, and installation. In the process, garden-making—once a generational, improvisational, and site-specific practice—was transformed into a bounded project of modular production. In this sense, the Astor Court project participated in what David Gissen has described as “late-modern global urbanity,” where architectural rationales of the late twentieth century reframed the intersections of architectural design, environment, and institutions. This shift reflects broader changes in global architectural practice: the professionalization of design, the outsourcing of craft, and the conversion of labor into standardized procedures. The project thus not only reproduced a Chinese garden but also recast it through late-twentieth-century architectural rationales. Notably, this Sino-US architectural collaboration was bidirectional: at the same time, I.M. Pei was designing the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing in collaboration with Chinese architects, engineers, and gardeners.
Despite its material authenticity, the garden had to be reimagined to fit the museum setting. Conservation protocols required the sterilization of soil to prevent the introduction of insects, fungi, mold, and other contaminants. While critical for preventive conservation, these measures further complicated plant survival in an indoor environment already challenged by limited sunlight, moisture, and air circulation. Over time, original plantings such as bamboo, crape myrtle, liriope, and Buddhist pine were replaced by tropical houseplants like philodendrons, Christmas ferns, Norfolk pines, and even artificial bamboo. The result is a garden typologically faithful to its Suzhou model but ecologically suspended: a static environment designed for preservation rather than growth.
Figure 6. Garden walls in Suzhou. Photos by the author, 2023.
This ecological stasis extends to the material surfaces of the garden itself. In Suzhou, garden walls are alive and expressive— marked by moss, lichen, insects, and weathering (Figure 6). Photographer Hélèn Binet has documented these painterly surfaces as “desirable landscapes.” In contrast, the pristine white walls of Astor Court reflect the museum’s emphasis on preservation and control. They also reinforce the modernist representation of Suzhou gardens as “white walls and black tiles,” an abstraction mediated through black-and-white photography and modernist architectural discourse. As a result, the museum’s pursuit of material authenticity displaced the ecological processes and interspecies interactions central to traditional gardens (Figure 7).
“Astor Court might be understood as a new typology—a hybrid space that is part architecture, part exhibition, and part abstraction.”
Figure 7. The garden wall in the mock-up garden, the weathered surface registers rainfall and moss. Photo by the author, 2023.
Astor Court, as a designed instantiation, became a model through which the “classical Chinese garden” was canonized. Rooted in Suzhou’s Ming gardens, the museum’s installation codified a selective set of motifs—lime-washed walls, black-tile roofs, calligraphy plaques, grotesque rockeries, pavilions, and winding paths—that were easily legible and widely circulated through architectural writing, popular literature, sketches, paintings, and photographs. In so doing, Astor Court not only signaled what could be considered authentic but also inaugurated a template for constructing Chinese gardens overseas. Subsequent projects in Vancouver, New York, Portland, and San Marino, drew on this template through collaboration between North American institutions and the Suzhou Garden administration.
One might argue that this “modular system of reproduction” is characteristic of how Chinese arts have historically been produced and circulated. By elevating one historical moment and regional form as normative, however, this “classical Chinese garden,” ignores the historical diversity of garden practices across China. It also reframes garden-making as a fixed, reproducible, and transportable aesthetic, a catalog of sorts, rather than an evolving, relational practice involving both human and nonhuman actors.
The involvement of Chinese craftsmen and the use of traditional materials lent the project credibility, yet these gestures obscured the extent to which the garden had been shaped by political, legal, institutional, and climatic conditions. Overseas Chinese gardens thus combined cultural spectacle with diplomacy, positioning the Chinese garden as both aesthetic experience and an apparatus of soft power. Authenticity here operated less as fixed historical accuracy than as a curatorial abstraction—a mediated interpretation shaped by transnational production and museological frameworks (Figure 8).
Figure 8. Distinction between the mockup and Astor Court. Left: View of the mockup with mature native plants and signs of weathering (2023). Right: View of Astor Court with pristine walls and tropical houseplants that are constantly been replaced (2022). Photos by the author.
Astor Court thus invites a reconsideration of authenticity in the context of translocated and transcultural heritage. If authenticity is expanded beyond visual and material forms to encompass ecological processes, relational practices, and interspecies entanglements, then the limits of the museum garden become clear. This critique is less about questioning the project’s intention or significance than about the frameworks that have defined and shaped cultural heritage. Museums often emphasize permanence, clarity, and control—qualities often at odds with the dynamism of gardens.
Seen in this light, Astor Court might be understood as a new typology—a hybrid space that is part architecture, part exhibition, and part abstraction. It foregrounds the tensions between architecture, artifacts, environment, labor, worldviews, and the politics of heritage. It is not merely a garden transplanted, but a garden negotiated—a product of contemporary cultural heritage practice. It demonstrates how “tradition” and “history” emerge as architectural projects: conceptualized, constructed, mediated, and given form through cultural institutions and transnational exchange.
Citation
Taro Zheming Cai, “Transplanting a Chinese Garden Overseas,” PLATFORM, October 13, 2025.
Notes
[1] Translator’s note: In the Chinese context, the project is conventionally referred to as “Ming Xuan,” with emphasis on the main architectural structure, whereas in the English context the focus is placed on the courtyard itself. To avoid conceptual ambiguity, this paper adopts the unified translation “Astor Court.”
[2] Elizabeth Hammer, Nature Within Walls: The Chinese Garden Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (A Resource for Education), A Closer Look (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 2.
