Huanxiu Villa

Now located in Suzhou Embroidery Museum (苏州刺绣博物) at 262 Jingde Road (景德路) in the city center. The construction history of Huanxiu Villa (环秀山庄) traces back to Wang's Brother in the Jin (晋) Dynasty (265 – 420 AD). They built Jingde Buddhist Temple inside their mansion here. During the Five-Dynasty Period, this had been Qian's family villa, called Golden Paddy Mansion. A litterateur from the Song Dynasty used it as a garden for Traditional Chinese Medicine, and it had been abandoned for quite a long period afterwards. In the Ming Dynasty, the villa at first was applied as a school, a food administration office, and then a private garden for wealthy people, for which this condition was until the early Qing Dynasty. During the reign of Qianlong Emperor of Qing, the villa was the residence of a prosecution official Jiang, who built Qiuzi House (求自楼) and beautiful rockwork and clear water flowing spring called "Flying Snow" which were situated at the back of the house with a pretty pavilion constructed in the center of the scenery. In later times the villa was continued the mansion for imperial officials. The descendants of cadre Sun asked a master in gardening at that time to redesign the garden, thus the rockwork became famous all over China.

It has 754 square meters in construction area, the garden scenery is mainly of mountainous terrain with water pools as accompaniment, to which grand landscape is achieved within a small area. The surreal rockwork stands in the middle of the garden lake has been honored as the best man-made mountain in China. Although the "mountain" is small, many typical shapes of natural mountainous scenery are seen.

Huanxiu Villa is one of the historical classical gardens in Suzhou and was listed in World Culture Heritage by UNESCO in 1997.