Traditional Chinese Gardens: Where Man and Nature Are One is the first sizeable English edition of writings garnered from Chen Congzhou' s encyclopedic oeuvre on classical Chinese gardens. In this book' s first section, “Aesthetics of Garden Making”, the author goes beyond garden-making per se to delineate the Chinese garden' s direct or indirect ties with classical Chinese poetry and prose, traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, Kunqu Opera, architecture and dwellers' everyday life. In the thirteen articles featured in the second section, “Where Man and Nature Are One”, a scholarly Chen Congzhou turns himself into a consummate tour guide, as he shows his readers around some of the nation' s best gardens, ushers them into fascinating scenes and sights in certain deep recesses or along a serpentine corridor or trail while reeling off one anecdote after another about people, history or events off his finger-tips and reciting legendary poems and quoting beautiful prose passages, but all the while he goes on with his soliloquy on such garden-making aspects as siting, layout, view borrowing, in-situ and in-motion viewing, rockwork, architectural structures, landscape paintings, calligraphic inscriptions, and so on.