Ｗｅｉ　Ｌｉｎｇ

The Plum Blossom Garden is a famed scenic spot in a suburb of Wuxi, a city in southern Jiangsu Province. The city sits in a plain crisscrossed by a thick network of rivers and punctuated by low-rolling hills. The scenic garden is located in one of the hills. Unlike the history of Wuxi, a city that goes back a of years, the garden was founded in 1912.

In 1912, the industrialist Rong Desheng and his two uncles decided to spend some money on building public facilities. One thing they wished to do was to build a scenic garden in the Eastern Hill area in Wuxi. It just happened that a real estate named Peach Garden left over by Xu Dian, a metropolitan graduate of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), had come up for sale. Rong Desheng bought the garden. In the following years, he purchased ten hectares of grain field in an adjacent valley and expanded the garden. He had 3,000 plum blossom trees planted on the land and had some villas and pavilions erected. The Plum Blossom Garden soon took shape.

Rong Desheng was a man with a passion for the plum blossom, a symbol in Chinese culture for moral integrity in the face of adverse circumstances. He inscribed the Plum Blossom Garden in calligraphy and named a stream at the eastern side of the entrance to the garden as “Heart-Cleansing Stream”.

When asked how one could cleanse ones heart, Rong Desheng replied that cleansing the heart referred to washing away the filth that might possibly accumulate in ones heart.

The garden became a resort for the Rong family. But it was also open to the general public. It became one of the vantage venues in this part of the country where scholars would come to appreciate the plum blossom blooming in the depth of winter.

One winter day, Kang Youwei, a scholar famed for his royalist reformation for the fallen Qing Dynasty, came to the garden. To his surprise, Kang found “Sea of Fragrant Snow” inscribed in his name. It turned out that a poet had written the inscription and faked the signature. Rong Desheng apologized to Kang and took the opportunity to ask Kang for an inscription. Kang, a preeminent calligrapher, gladly obliged. Kang also composed a poem in commemoration of the event.

The Plum Blossom Garden was later open to the general public as a park. And it was not the only public facility that the Rong family built in Wuxi. They built many similar public facilities in their hometown. These public facilities have served not only as places where people can hang out but also as goodwill advertisements for the family.□