Chinese characters take the essence from all natural things as their origin, carry the original intention of the ancient times, and carry the collective memory of the Chinese nation. Although Chinese characters have gone through changes from drawings to oracle bone inscriptions, gold inscriptions, seal scripts, official scripts, regular scripts, cursive scripts, and running scripts, the characteristic of using shapes to represent meanings remains unchanged. Every stroke of a Chinese character contains a vast and profound message, in which countless allusions are precipitated, and the essence of 5,000 years of civilization is condensed in a subtle, elegant and profound way, which has become an important feature of China's traditional culture and national spirit.

The thinking of Chinese characters is characterized by aesthetics such as imagery, poetry and perception. Lu Xun, in his Outline of the History of Chinese Literature, summarized the beauty of Chinese characters in terms of "three beauties": "First, the beauty of meaning to sensitize the mind; second, the beauty of pronunciation to delight the ear; and third, the beauty of form to move the eye." As an art, Chinese characters have become a beautiful scenic spots in Chinese gardens ——

The garden inscriptions in Chinese characters is the "soul" of the Chinese garden; the plaque in Chinese characters is the "face" of the garden architecture; the cliff inscription in Chinese characters represents the sound of the landscape to convey the emotion; the monuments in Chinese characters and the stone is the history of the calligraphy in the garden; the couplets, which have high requirements for the sound and words, are the "business card" of Chinese culture, and they carry the fragrance of Chinese culture through time and space to the Chinese people in the world and the East Asian cultural circle. In the garden halls, you can see the stretching of the official script and the stability of the regular script; in the pavilions by the water or flowers, you can find the round and soft seal script, the flying cursive script, and the flowing running script. Chinese characters are the civilized entities of poetic dwellings and the essential decorations of Chinese gardens.

The use of "allusion" is a reflection of the aesthetic theme of Chinese garden creativity. In Jianzhang Palace of Emperor Wu of the Western Han Dynasty, there are titles like "Myrtle Palace" from Chuang-Tzu, integrates Huishi's talent and spring scenery of the palace garden, and puts the humanities imagery in the architectural context. In the Wei, Jin, North and South Dynasties and the Tang and Song dynasties, most of the garden plaques are used in the former literati's elegant stories, and the archetypal imagery in the history and art, the development of the Ming and Qing dynasties is particularly mature.

For example, Suzhou Humble Administrator's Garden "Pine Wind Water Pavilion" hangs the plaque "Pavilion filled with moonlight and pine wind"; and Chengde Summer Resort has "Ten Thousand Gullies of Pine Wind", etc., they are specifically designed to listen to the pine breeze. The allusion here is borrowed from Tao Hongjing, "the prime minister of the mountains", "he especially liked to listen to the pine wind, planted pine trees in the courtyard, and every time the wind blew, he would be especially happy". In the Humble Administrator's Garden, there is a plaque on the second floor of the dry boat with the name "Huiguan"; in the Summer Palace in Beijing, there is "Huihuai"; in the Summer Resort in Chengde, there is "Huiguanzhai"; "Hui" and "Cheng" have the same meaning, and they allude to the famous painter Zong Bing's "experience nature by purifying the mind".

It is the soul of Chinese garden design to give thought to the garden through poetic plaques. Most of the core content of the "soul" originates from the "Chinese cultural texts" of the "Axis Era" of human civilization, i.e., Poetry, Books, Rites, Changes, Music, Spring and Autumn Period, the Six Classics, Laozi, Mozi, The Analects of Confucius, Zhuangzi, Mencius, and Xunzi, etc. According to historical and cultural scholars Jiang Linchang that these national cultural texts "laid down the cultural genes of the Chinese nation, constructed the spiritual characteristics of the Chinese nation ...... ultimately precipitated the unique cultural and psychological structure of the Chinese nation," and became the blood of Chinese gardens passed down from generation to generation and the spiritual core of Chinese gardens.

For example, in the name of the Summer Palace, "Yi" is the name of a trigram in the Book of Changes, and it is written in the Er Ya that "Yi means rest and recuperation", which refers to the fact that heaven and earth nourish all things according to the seasons and the sages should cultivate their own virtues in accordance with the rules of nature and society, so as to educate all things, gentlemen and people. Thus, the Summer Palace can be reflected everywhere in the harmony of man and nature. The title of the Canglang Pavilion in Suzhou is based on the "Canglang Song" from the Chu Rhetoric, in which Su Shunqin, a poet of the Northern Song Dynasty, built a pavilion and a garden by the water, incorporating his own political anguish at being dismissed from his post for no apparent reason. Yang Jie, a poet at that time, understood him so well that he wrote a poem called Canglang Pavilion, which says: "The song of Canglang is full of grievances, so Zi Mei built the Canglang Pavilion. The scholars in the pavilion get drunk every day, but the scholars by the lake are sober. The ancient and modern times have been different, Su Shunqin's poem deserves to be known as Li Sao". Wang Shimin, one of the "Four Kings" in the early Qing Dynasty, changed the ideal "Lejiao" in the Book of Songs into "Lejiao Garden", invited Zhang Nan Yuan, a skilled gardener, dismantled and changed the garden four times. It took many years before the pruning was completed, "the property was gone and the heart was tired". In the garden, "the water in the pond was very clear, and the surrounding area was covered by bamboo forests, as if it was created by heaven; the location of the halls and pavilions was also very suitable, and the trees and the houses reflected each other, which made the garden very beautiful! ". In this way, the Chinese garden space also becomes a "spiritual space" that carries the Chinese cultural classics.

Chinese characters present artistic lines of beauty directly to people and express unique emotions. Hieroglyphics is the most primitive method in the principle of Chinese character construction. In order to convey information and express thoughts, human beings condense the shape and characteristics of objective things into graphic lines, which is precisely the way of grasping the world figuratively, and is a basic way of purification. The art of calligraphy shows the "beauty of image" of Chinese characters. Chinese character pattern decoration has become an important part of Chinese garden decoration, among which the common ones are Fuk, Shou, Hei, and the cross pattern, Yazi pattern and Renzi pattern of Chinese characters, which are widely used in the flower streets, flower windows and wood carvings of Chinese gardens. Blessing, longevity and joy are full of people's wishes for happiness and longevity, joy and happiness; the cross pattern and Asian character pattern represent sunshine, eternity and good luck; the human character pattern originates from the weaving pattern of the fishing and hunting era, which records the wisdom of the life of the Chinese ancestors.

Chinese characters are originally ideograms, the shape of which is closely linked to the meaning of the word, and they are objects abstracted and symbolized to a certain extent. Chinese characters condense the real and rich pictures of life in the distant past, and preserve the precious and distant memories of the Chinese nation.

For example, in the character "Ou" in Suzhou's Ouyuan Garden, "Lei" refers to a tool for turning the soil, while "Yu" means two sides and a corner. The combination of "Lei" and "Yu" means "two people on each side, with the agricultural tools in the center". The two people are side by side, using farming tools together, as depicted in the Analects of Confucius about plowing the land. The spatial layout of the Ou Garden highlights the characteristics of the two people: there are two gardens next to the mansion, with the East Garden as the main garden and the West Garden as the supplementary garden; there are mountains in the east and west, and ponds in the east and wells in the west. The picture of life behind the character "Ou" gives the "Ou Garden" an infinite charm, and it becomes a love poem written on the ground.

Through the combination of dots and lines, Chinese characters can express emotions with a high degree of freedom. In his book Unlocking the Mystery of Chinese Characters, An Zisuke says that every Chinese character quietly exudes the breath of culture and the fragrance of life, and represents endless symbolism and contains the philosophy of reality, so it can be said that "every stroke of the brush has a story, and there is a world behind every character". In the secret cloud cave in the back garden of Beijing's Prince Gong's Palace, there is a stone tablet called "the world's first blessing" of the word "blessing", written by Emperor Kangxi, in the writing style implies five kinds of characters, meaning "more children, more fields, more talent, more life, more blessings", it is the most auspicious and symbolic character of "five blessings in one", also known as "longevity blessing".

In addition to using glyphs to express meaning directly, Chinese characters also use phonetics to express meaning indirectly. Culturally, the Chinese are very sensitive to harmonic characters. Ancient people believed that human language had a kind of magic power, which could be used to talk to gods and monsters, and pray for blessings and get rid of evils. Chinese gardens use a large number of harmonic characters for good luck, homophonic or near-sound objects composed of imagery, i.e., the "abstract mind", transformed into real scenery, and real scenery conveys the meaning of the bearer, and the combines the art of the "mood".

In gardens, Chinese characters work together with other material elements to create a "beauty of mood". For example, a pond in southwest of Suzhou Canglang Pavilion large rockery, the cliff inscription on the side of the pond is written by the late Qing Dynasty master of the Park Yuyue, the  "flow jade" two words, not only on the pool of water for the descriptive style, describing the pool of water such as a piece of flowing jasper, but also shaped "a clear spring flowing on the stone". The Chinese character "Liu" is a metonymic character, the original meaning of which is the flow of water, and the seal script form indicates the rapidity of the water flow. The oracle bone character "Yu" looks like a rope wearing several pieces of jade; the gold and small seal scripts have only three horizontal lines and one vertical line, and the character "Yu" in the official script has a dot. Yuyue wrote the "Yu" character as if like two hanging clear spring flowing down the mountain stone.

Chinese characters are not only a symbol with a strong sense of picture, but also full of cultural connotation, which is associated with Chinese poetry and literature, making the expression of meaning of Chinese characters richer. Aesthetician Zong Baihua once said, "The realm of all art is basically to write reality, to convey the spirit, and to create a realm: from the portrayal of nature, to the communication of life, to the creation of meaning." Chinese gardens, as a "unique art created in our country", pursue the mood of "poetry and painting", therefore, Chinese characters become the best medium to communicate between people and things, people and the realm. After all, the landscape, architecture, flowers and trees have no thoughts, it isn’t art if we just put together the form of beautiful composition.

Originating from hieroglyphics, Chinese characters have accumulated the wisdom of thousands of years of Chinese culture, bringing together elegance, courtesy, dignity, upbringing and culture. In Chinese gardens, there is also a building called "Jingzi Pavilion", also known as "Xizi Pavilion", which is specially used to burn paper with characters, reminding us to respect and cherish Chinese characters, and not to throw away paper with characters written on it. In the Lin Ben Yuan Garden Residence in Banqiao, Taipei, the striking "Pavilion for Honoring Characters" still stands by the large banyan-shaped pond. It is often said that "respecting characters is like respecting people", which is an affirmation of the spirit of Chinese characters and respect for human character.

General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized that cultural relics and cultural heritage carry the genes and bloodline of the Chinese nation, and are non-renewable and irreplaceable resources of China's outstanding civilization. In Chinese gardens, Chinese characters have undoubtedly the most characteristics of China.