After reading Maggie Keswick's sensitive study one is tempted to run off to Suzhou using The Chinese Garden as a spiritual guidebook.
   --Far Eastern Economic Review

[Keswick] shows, in a complex and even exhilarating argument, how the gardens are contrived with enormous subtlety to look like accidental snatches of nature.
   --New York Times

Chinese gardens are high among the wonders of Chinese art, but they do not receive the attention they deserve...The late Maggie Keswick's well-received original volume of the same title was a tour-de-force of insight, which this update enhances.
   --J. O. Caswell, Choice

Twenty-five years ago, at the prompting of her husband, Charles Jencks, British designer Maggie Keswick set about explaining to Western readers the ancient logic and symbolism of Chinese gardens. She did it with rare empathy. The only child of Sir John Keswick, chairman of a trading company with roots in the Orient going back to the Opium Wars, she had spent much of her childhood in and out of China. The Chinese Garden was so enlightening it was reissued...giving Keswick a crack at a new generation...Her introduction to this strange and beautiful world was so good, her touch so light, one could only nod, smile and turn the page for a fresh delight.
   --Los Angeles Times

Maggie Keswick was educated in Shanghai and Hong Kong and at Oxford University; she was married to the architectural critic and historian Charles Jencks, who contributed to this book.

Alison Hardie is a lecturer in Chinese studies at Newcastle University. She has done extensive research into Chinese gardens, specializing in Chinese garden design in the later Ming dynasty, and is translator of the classic Chinese garden text The Craft of Gardens (Yuan Ye) by Ji Cheng. She first met Maggie Keswick in China twenty years ago, and it was following Maggie's lead that she embarked on her study of Chinese gardens.