Gardens of the World

Gardens of the World in Berlin follows eighteen shipping containers of stone that arrived in 1997 to build a classical Chinese garden inside a Cold War-era park in Marzahn. The guide traces the site back to 1987, when East Germany carved a modest garden show out of fields on the edge of a divided city, and forward to the 1994 partnership between Berlin and Beijing that brought workers from China to build the garden stone by stone. Along the way it follows the Taihu limestone, worn hollow by centuries underwater, that workers carried in from a Chinese lakebed.