The Chinese garden, also known as a Chinese classical garden, recreates natural landscapes in miniature. The style has evolved for more than three thousand years, and includes both the vast gardens of the Chinese emperors and smaller gardens built by scholars, poets, and former government officials. The classical Chinese garden is enclosed by a wall and has one or more ponds, a rock garden, trees and flowers, and an assortment of halls and pavilions within the garden, connected by winding paths and zig-zag galleries. By moving from structure to structure, visitors can view a series of carefully-composed scenes, unrolling like a scroll of landscape paintings.
The earliest recorded Chinese gardens were created in the valley of the Yellow River, during the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 B.C). These gardens were large enclosed parks where the kings and nobles hunted game, or where fruit and vegetables were grown.
Early inscriptions from this period, carved on tortoise shells, have three Chinese characters for garden, you, pu and yuan. You was a royal garden where birds and animals were kept, while pu was a garden for plants. During the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC), yuan became the character for all gardens. The old character for yuan is a small picture of a garden; it is enclosed in a square which can represent a wall, and has symbols which can represent the plan of a structure, a small square which can represent a pond, and a symbol for a plantation or a pomegranate tree.