Abstract:Qiong Garden is the earliest surviving Republican-era garden in Hainan, and continues the Chinese classical aesthetic in its artistic style. Often regarded as an annexe to the Five Ancestral Temple, its landscape design techniques and symbolic meanings remain under explored. Drawing on textual and visual historical materials, this paper reconstructed the spatial layouts of Qiong Garden across three phases: initial creation, fine-tuning, and restoration, from the early Republic of China to the late twentieth century. The findings reveal that: the spatial logic of Qiong Garden is closely tied to the two springs— Fusu and Xixin—with the Lihua Pond in front of Xixin Pavilion fed by the Xixin Spring. A core landscape comprising the pond, pavilions, and symbolic flora articulates the theme 'washing the heart and eliminating desires, and Confucian-Daoist integration'. Qiong Garden's enclosing walls once segregated Fusu Spring to distinguish between didactic, recreational, and ritual functions, avoiding the fusion of moral philosophy and folk belief. Zhu Weichao's reconstruction of the Five Ancestral Temple demonstrates an effort to reshape public moral space by embedding the philosophy of mind into the built environment. And he used the abbreviation of Hainan, Qiong, to name the garden, which hides the patriotic ideology and political beliefs of saving the country from extinction beneath its landscape.
