Lingering Garden is the best garden in Suzhou, it covers an area of 23,310 square meters. It is recognised for its artistic way of dealing with the spaces between various kinds of architectural form.
The whole garden possesses 42 rooms and halls , a 670-meter-long roofed walkway, 200 lattice-windows of different kinds, 44 parallel stone carvings, 373 steles, and 17 such valuable old trees as gingko, southern wisteria, etc.
The garden is divided into four sections: artificial hills in the west, pastoral scenery in the north, hall and pavilion structures in the east and hills and waters at the center. A winding corridor of over 1,000 meters links them.
The western part of the garden is a fine example of beautiful earthen hills studded with yellow stones and covered with maple trees. An artificial hill made of rocks from Taihu Lake is the major component of Suzhou garden.
In the central part of the garden stands a man-made mountain and a shore of an artificial lake, also it is possible to find and see a long scroll of traditional Chinese painting, this work was realized by more than hundred calligraphers of the different dynasties as Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing, which describe and tell the evolutionary course of Chinese calligraphy of 1,000 year.
In the southwest part of the garden exist many attractive buildings such as the Hanbi Moutain Villa, the Pellucid Tower, the Green Shade Pavilion, the Zigzag Stream Tower, the Hao Pu Pavilion, and the Refreshing Breeze Pavilion by the lake.
In the oriental part of the garden exists formations of twisted Taihu limestone rock formations, bordered by beautiful meandering paths decorated with mosaics of animals and birds. Also it is possible to observe that in the western side of Yuan Liu's garden mimics a woody glen.
A small entry of the garden drives to several spaces of calmness such as: The admirable Crane House, the Small Garden of Stone Forest, the Return-to-Read Study in the east with the Celestial Hall of Five Peaks as the chief structure are laid out in such a way that the indoor spaces have been brought into perfect harmony with the outdoor spaces. With an evocation of infinite, which were satisfactorily done to be labyrinthine.
Situated outside the Cang Gate of Suzhou city, the garden was built in 1583 of by Xu Taishi, a bureaucrat of the Ming court, as his private residence.
Named The East Garden; this garden has magnificent houses of several floors with corridors that join them and a scale artificial impressive mountains of stone, all of them resembling a long scroll of landscape painting. The garden was built by the well-known master Zhou Bingzhong.
Later, in 1794, the garden became a property of the Liu family. After being expanded and renovated, it was renamed "Hanbi Villa", which was popularly known as "Liu Garden".
The unrest and battles in 1860 set a big fire to the Suzhou city, but the Cold Green Garden survived the damage. In 1873, it was purchased by the Shengs, and again renamed as "Lingering Garden," since "lingering" in Chinese sounds the same as "Liu", the surname of the former owner.
Lingering Garden is characteristic of the classical gardens in the south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze region and in 1961 it was listed as a cultural relic of national importance. And Suzhou's ancient gardens were added to the list of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites starting in 1997.