Museum of Chinese Gardens and Landscape Architecture

Located at the foot of Yingshan Mountain in Fengtai District, Beijing, the Museum of Chinese Gardens and Landscape Architecture is China’s first national museum dedicated to gardens and landscape architecture. It showcases the history, culture, and art of Chinese gardens through various exhibitions and collections.

Planning your visit

Chinese garden design is a distinct art form with its own theory, and this museum in Fengtai District is the first national institution devoted to it. Classical Chinese gardens were not planted displays but constructed landscapes — borrowed scenery, framed views, deliberate concealment and revelation, rocks selected for their strangeness, water, and buildings positioned as viewpoints and as objects to be viewed.

The museum explains that vocabulary through models, relics, drawings and reconstructed garden sections, tracing the tradition from imperial hunting parks through the scholar gardens of Suzhou to modern landscape architecture.

Reconstructed courtyards and full-scale garden fragments let visitors experience the principles rather than only read them, and the surrounding grounds form part of the Garden Expo Park.

Anyone planning to visit the Suzhou gardens, the Summer Palace or Beihai will get considerably more from them having spent time here first.

It sits well outside central Beijing.

Bookable options include reservation tickets. Current availability is shown below.