Guangzhou Panyu Yuyin Mountain House Management Office

This guide to the Yuyin Mountain House in Guangzhou opens with an arithmetic problem: how a Qing scholar official named Wu Bin fit four halls, a bridge, a pond and hundreds of carved plaster ornaments onto a plot of barely sixteen hundred square meters. Home after passing the provincial exams and serving in the Ministry of Punishments, Wu built inward rather than outward, using latticed windows and screen walls to frame the pond and rockery in fragments. Notice how even the bamboo along the walls was planted between double walls, boxed in so its roots could not spread.