Dunedin Chinese Garden

The Chinese Garden was a gift to the city, honouring the past, contributions the Chinese have made in the settling on Otago and the rest of New Zealand.

The garden’s design is based upon the private gardens in Suzhou from the 10th to the 19th centuries and in keeping with the Qing Dunasty 1644-1911, these gardens are small and informal in design. The Dunedin Chinese Garden was constructed in a traditional fashion, using almost entirely authentic materials imported from China. The gardens were built in Dunedinby 35 artisans from the Shanghai construction Company, in traditional fashion. In addition to the hand-made wooden buildings, the Garden features hand-made tiles, bricks and lattice-work and hand-finished granite paving stones. The result is a stunning, authentic garden.

The Dunedin Chinese Garden is an example of a late Ming - early Ching Dynasty Scholar’s Garden. It is surrounded by a four-metre wall. The Scholar’s Garden was traditionally the focal point of a family compound, which sometimes gathered several hundred family members and servants into a kind of ‘gated’ community. It was in the Scholar’s Garden part of the compound where guests and important visitors were received and entertained, and where the scholar himself - a highly regarded member of Chinese society - lived and worked. A Chinese Garden is more than just a garden in the European sense, where rocks, water plants and buildings are important, symbolic, elements.

The Dunedin Chinese Garden becomes the focal point of celebrations for Chinese New Year every year in Dunedin.  The venue runs a programme of events that involves local Chinese groups and associations and each year it gets better and better.  Two significant parts of the celebrations are the Dragon Parade where the main street of the city is closed off to allow the Dragons to stream from the middle of the city down to the Garden, accompanied by families and lots of red balloons. The most popular part of the celebrations is always the fireworks display which always goes of when a huge green tiger lights the night sky.