Contextualize
The Chinese view of nature and its aesthetics have been influenced by a culture of distinctive spiritual and philosophical currents such as Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. The traditional Chinese landscape and the conceptions of the garden are a compilation of successive dynasties, social models, architecture, and techniques with also an understanding of the beauty of nature and the ability to symbolize it.
The triad of human beings, earth, and heaven is part of nature. A continuous cosmos of universal, dynamic, self-creative, spontaneous, and unpredictable order, The Dao. The basic and most pure expression of a patterned and harmonious act of nature.
In The Six Dynasties period, the motivations of garden creation were drawn by a spirit of evocation, the search, and capture of “essence” and “spirit resonance” of nature. Where the function of gardens pursues an aesthetic of contemplation and enjoyment, where people gather together in a representational scenario of nature.
Zhou (1999) talks about the Chinese thinking of "nature and principle of man and things" and how the conception of a unitary cosmos and the understanding of selves and parts acting by patterns is the strongest driving force that shaped the Chinese tradition in terms of ethics, politics, religion but also architecture and landscape form. What shaped the Chinese landscape was the integration of the object's understanding in terms of opposition, integration, harmony, and relationships.
Zhou, Weiquan (1999). Chinese classical landscape history. Beijing. Qing-Hua University Publishing.