Active Cooperation and Legitimate Transgression: Yan Yonghua’s Interactions with the Couple’s Retreat Garden

In nineteenth-century Suzhou, an unusual garden challenged conventional design: instead of following the typical layout of a house in front and garden behind, the Couple’s Retreat Garden (Ouyuan) featured a distinctive arrangement with two parallel gardens flanking a central residence—a physical manifestation of its unique narrative theme of companionate partnership. While gardens were traditionally viewed as spaces of elite men’s self-representation in late imperial China, this study examines how the late Qing female poet Yan Yonghua (1836–1891), through both spatial practices and literary production, engaged with and reshaped garden culture. Drawing on Yan’s poetry collections, alongside local gazetteers, garden relics, and writings by other literati, this thesis demonstrates how she positioned herself as both a talented poet (cainü) and legitimate co-owner of the garden. While many female poets depicted gardens as sites of passive aesthetic enjoyment, Yan Yonghua’s poetry asserts her agency and ownership of Ouyuan. Her documented movements into the male-dominated eastern garden and creative repurposing of its structures reveal a deliberate negotiation of gendered spatial norms. A previously understudied garden stele, featuring Wang Wenzhi’s painting and poem alongside inscriptions by both Yan and her husband Shen Bingcheng, further demonstrates how she strived to engage equally in discussions ranging from literary appreciation to political reflection. Rather than serving merely as a passive consumer of garden aesthetics, Yan Yonghua participated actively in the shaping of Ouyuan’s physical and cultural identity. Her case highlights the unique potential of gardens as flexible and liminal spaces—neither fully domestic nor entirely public, neither natural nor wholly artificial—capable of enabling female agency and self-expression when supported by appropriate narrative frameworks.