Infinity in a Bottle Gourd: Understanding the Chinese Garden

Once there was an immortal who lived in a bottle gourd and emerged each morning to sell medicine. Every night he returned to the bottle gourd to sleep. Curious about this strange behavior, a mortal followed him into the bottle gourd. There he found a spacious fairyland with landscapes of unearthly beauty. This story was told by Ge Hong, an important figure in the development of Taoism, in his fourthcentury biographies of the immortals, Sheng Xian Zhuan, and thus for the Chinese "the world in the bottle gourd" became a synonym for paradise. A similar bottle gourd space was described by the Tao Yuanming (365-427) in his prose poem Records on the Land of Peach Blossoms (Tao Hua Yuan ji). He told how a fisherman lost his way as he travelled along an unfamiliar