The Chinese city in mountain and water: shaping the urban landscape in Chengdu

Although natural features like mountains and rivers are widely recognised as key factors in developing ancient Chinese urban strategies, their active role in orderly-planned cities on vast plains has rarely been thoroughly examined. Further insight into this topic is critical to comprehending the formation of Chinese mountain-water-city imagery and its physical manifestation. Chengdu, an ancient plain-dwelling city encircled by mountains and rivers from afar, is an ideal example of this inquiry. This article explores the two-millennium history of how the city responded to its natural surroundings and incorporated the landscape imagery into the architectural and urban forms, which includes the alignment of the city’s orientation with distant and neighbouring mountains, the construction of waterway networks to emulate surrounding rivers, and the strategic placement of tower-pavilion architecture to integrate with the nature. Revealing the diversity and complexity of Chengdu’s urban-landscape experiences can enrich the intellectual framework of the Chinese mountain-water-city ideal.