3月30日，摘抄

In China's past, every garden owner strove to imitate the garden of the scholar.The rich anc the parvenu spared no pains to make their cit villas and country estates look scholarly and refined. They would feel greatly flattered if they were commended not for their opulence but their taste. Such a garden as a sign of“Conspicuous waste”, served well to enhance itowner’s status in cultivated society and the dolce-far-niente crowd, besides providing him with a refuge in his“Rus in Urbe”(城市山林)from mundane worries and everyday struggle Even the emperor, mighty and magnificent though he was, felt sometimes the urge to fle from his city palace, in order to live the life of ;country gentleman of leisure in one of the imperial garden estates.Here he imagined himself to be Wang Wei, or some other poet, painter or recluse, and indeed, could hardly resist the temptation to adopt a “nom deplume”. A different condition was to be found in the seventeenth century in France, where the “Garden Monarch” used Versailles not for seclusion and meditation but for the most elaborate entertaining and amusement. Decidedly, compared with the vastness of Versailles all other palace gardens of the worlc appeared cramped, and Louis XIV could hardly be blamed for his flight to the country. In the Chinese garden, on the other hand, be imperial or humble, crowds were not only out of place but also out of the question. Its intimate quality hampered the flow of traffic and defied the presence of multitude.