A place where beauty takes root

Other early visitors to China had similar stories. Francis Xavier, a Jesuit priest who arrived in 1552, was inspired, as was another Jesuit, Matteo Ricci, who arrived in 1601.

The English statesman and essayist William Temple didn't set foot in China personally but read extensively about its gardens and wrote in 1685 about the beauty without order found in Chinese traditional gardens. He coined the word Sharawadgi, essentially a lack of rigid lines, to describe the concept and it caught on among English gardeners at the time.

In 1696, Louis Le Comte, mathematician to the king of France, published his memoirs after visiting China and described an exaggeration of nature, but not an attempt to defy it.