For more than one hundred years, the Japanese Garden at the Huntington has served as a bellwether for the West's engagement with Asian culture. With its distinctive moon bridge, wisteria arbors, koi-filled ponds, bonsai courts, bamboo forest, and historical Japanese House, this nine-acre garden has captivated visitors so much that it has become one of the most photographed spots in Southern California. This lavishly illustrated volume explores the garden's history, from its development for the Huntington estate as a display of fashionable, cultivated taste, to its quiet deterioration and neglect during World War II, to its resurgence in the 1950s as a showcase for Japanese culture and garden arts. Just before its centennial, the garden and its Japanese House underwent a comprehensive renovation. The highlight of its new features is a ceremonial teahouse, Seifu-an (Arbor of Pure Breeze), set within a traditionally landscaped tea garden. Contributors: Kendall H. Brown, James Folsom, Naomi Hirahara, Robert Hori, Kelly Sutherlin McLeod, FAIA

One may visit famous gardens in Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka—or one may visit Japanese-styled gardens in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Berlin, London, Paris, São Paulo, or Singapore. We often view these gardens as representative of the essence of Japanese culture. Christian Tagsold argues, however, that the idea of the Japanese garden has less do to with Japan's history and traditions, and more to do with its interactions with the West. The first Japanese gardens in the West appeared at the world's fairs in Vienna in 1873 and Philadelphia in 1876 and others soon appeared in museums, garden expositions, the estates of the wealthy, and public parks. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese garden, described as mystical and attuned to nature, had usurped the popularity of the Chinese garden, so prevalent in the eighteenth century. While Japan sponsored the creation of some gardens in a series of acts of cultural diplomacy, the Japanese style was interpreted and promulgated by Europeans and Americans as well. But the fashion for Japanese gardens would decline in inverse relation to the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, their rehabilitation coming in the years following World War II, with the rise of the Zen meditation garden style that has come to dominate the Japanese garden in the West. Tagsold has visited over eighty gardens in ten countries with an eye to questioning how these places signify Japan in non-Japanese geographical and cultural contexts. He ponders their history, the reasons for their popularity, and their connections to geopolitical events, explores their shifting aesthetic, and analyzes those elements which convince visitors that these gardens are "authentic." He concludes that a constant process of cultural translation between Japanese and Western experts and commentators marked these spaces as expressions of otherness, creating an idea of the Orient and its distinction from the West.

China’s vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose written by keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth century, however, standard practice did not include deploying a set of diagnostic tools using a common terminology and methodology to identify and describe new and unknown species or properties. Ordering the Myriad Things relates how traditional knowledge of plants in China gave way to scientific botany between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, when plants came to be understood in a hierarchy of taxonomic relationships to other plants and within a broader ecological context. This shift not only expanded the universe of plants beyond the familiar to encompass unknown species and geographies but fueled a new knowledge of China itself. Nicholas K. Menzies highlights the importance of botanical illustration as a tool for recording nature—contrasting how images of plants were used in the past to the conventions of scientific drawing and investigating the transition of “traditional” systems of organization, classification, observation, and description to “modern” ones.

From the Lake of Reflected Fragrance to the Pavilion for Washing Away Thoughts to the Isle of Alighting Geese, this gorgeously illustrated volume explores the Huntington's Chinese Garden—Liu Fang Yuan, or the Garden of Flowing Fragrance—one of the largest such gardens outside China. With the first phase of construction completed, the garden opened to visitors in early 2008. It resembles those created in seventeenth-century Suzhou, offering awe-inspiring views and architecture and evoking an era when scholars sought quiet, intimate gardens in which to retreat, write poetry, and practice calligraphy, among many other pursuits. The contributors to Another World Lies Beyond discuss the challenges of constructing the garden in Southern California as well as the cultural traditions and aesthetics of Chinese garden design, especially the ways in which the plants and structures engage the imagination of visitors. Inscribed poetic couplets, literary allusions, botanical motifs, and evocative names for structures reveal layers of symbolism for exploration and interpretation. The volume's final essay describes how plants that originated in China—such as the chrysanthemum, the plum, and the camellia—have shaped that country's ancient botanical heritage and have enriched the gardens of both East and West.

When she was a girl, Lisa See spent summers in the cool, dark recesses of her family`s antiques store in Los Angeles' Chinatown. There, her grandmother and great-aunt told her intriguing, colourful stories about their family`s past - stories of missionaries, concubines, tong wars, glamorous nightclubs, and the determined struggle to triumph over racist laws and discrimination. They spoke of how Lisa`s great-great-grandfather emigrated from his Chinese village to the United States, and how his son followed him. As an adult, See spent fives years collecting the details of her family`s remarkable history. She interviewd nearly one hundred relatives and pored over documents at the National Archives, the immigration office, and in countless attics, basements, and closets for the initmate nuances of her ancestors` lives. The result is a vivid, sweeping family portriat that is att once particular and universal, telling the story not only of one family, but of the Chinese people in America - and of America itself, a country that both welcomes and reviles its immigrants like no other culture in the world.

Race riots. Labor strikes. Women's battle for the vote. The aftermath of the Great War. The transformative events and harsh realities of the year 1919 still reverberate a century later. Nineteen Nineteen, published to accompany a centennial exhibition of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, explores the institution and its founding through the lens of this single, tumultuous year. The fully illustrated catalog features works from The Huntington's vast collections of books, manuscripts, photographs, ephemera, and art, many of them never exhibited or published before.

This book focuses on the woven arch bridge, an arch-shaped structure that is one of the most extraordinary timber building traditions of the world. The woven arch bridge exists widely in different cultures and its specific nature is conceptualized by the author as a kind of “universal uniqueness,” challenging widespread viewpoints on its origin and genealogy. Taking this argument as its main thread, the book traces the histories of different woven-arch-bridge-cultures and investigates in particular the woven arch bridge in the mountains of Southeast of China from three angles, using both archaeological and anthropological methods. Resting upon these case studies, a definition of typology and a new theory of structural evolution are established, while the book also draws comparisons between western and eastern timber building cultures and offers new insights on the differences between East Asia and Europe. The book also provides a large number of examples and illustrations of the bridge, and will be of great value and inspiration for architects and scholars studying the history of architecture, bridges, and construction, while also appealing to general readers interested in historical bridges and traditional construction technology.