as I still walk it, in memory — told in the voice of I.M. Pei
Before I built anything, I inherited this
I was sent here most summers, away from the noise of Guangzhou, into rooms my family did not build but only received — arranged four centuries earlier by monks who believed a rock could be a lion, a wave, a mountain, if you only looked correctly.
Long before I ever drew a line for the Louvre, or set glass against a grey Boston sky, I was tracing my hand along limestone chosen — not carved, chosen — for the exact shape of a cloud. That is the first secret of Lion Grove Garden: nothing here is invented. It is only recognized.
The Circuit · 01 — 07
They call this the largest rock garden in China, and I believe them, because I was lost in it for entire afternoons at nine years old. Every stone had been pulled from Lake Tai and set here by scholars who saw a lion, a wave, a sleeping animal in what any other eye would call only rock. I did not yet have the words for it, climbing through tunnels the size of a boy — only the feeling that structure could be a riddle before it was ever shelter.
No garden wall in Suzhou is only a wall. Cut a circle through it and the wall becomes a lens, a frame, an invitation held open. I would stand at the threshold of a moon gate and watch the courtyard beyond arrange itself inside the circle like a painting that changed with the hour. Decades later, in Washington and in Paris, I was still asking the question these gates asked me first: what happens at the edge, at the cut, at the frame?
漏窗 — we call them leaking windows. Not for keeping a view out, but for letting it seep through, fractured, into wherever you happen to stand. Bamboo becomes shadow becomes pattern becomes bamboo again. I would later learn this lesson in French, in glass, in steel — but it was Chinese first, and it was here: a wall can still let the world through, if you only cut it with intention.
There was a corner of bamboo that turned the light the color of jade before it ever touched the ground. My cousins and I hid in it, the way children hide in anything tall enough to disappear into. I did not think of it then as material, or elevation, or plan. I only knew that some green is loud and some green is quiet, and the quiet kind stays with you the longest.
Stand at the right stone, at the right hour, and the pavilion above you is finished twice — once in timber, once in water. I have spent a life since trying to give a building that same permission: to be one thing, and its own reflection, and somehow more true for being both. Every atrium I ever built with light pouring down through glass owes something to a boy in Suzhou, staring at a pond, unable to say why it moved him.
A covered walkway here never runs straight for long. It bends, it pauses at a window, it releases you into a courtyard you did not know was coming. I think this is the truest form of hospitality in architecture — not to reveal everything from the entrance, but to let a place unfold at the pace of walking. I have tried, in glass and granite and steel, to build hallways that still remember how to bend.
At dusk the black tiled eaves cut the sky into shapes as deliberate as any rock below. I used to watch that line and think: someone drew this on purpose. Someone still had to draw the pyramid, decades later, on purpose too. I like to think the boy in this garden and the old man in Paris were, in the end, drawing the same line — only with different materials, and a great deal more courage the second time.
“A garden, like a building, does not need to explain itself all at once. It only needs a gate — and the patience of whoever walks through it.” in the voice of I.M. Pei, remembering 狮子林
Lion Grove Garden still stands in Suzhou, unchanged in its bones, still teaching the same lesson to whoever is young enough, or patient enough, to receive it.
狮子林 · Lion Grove Garden
Created by Ellen Shi — Jul 12, 2026