Career
The Jingu Yuan, or Garden of the Golden Valley, built by Shi Chong, an aristocrat and former court official, who in 296 completed a garden ten kilometers northeast of Luoyang. He invited thirty famous poets to a banquet in his garden, and wrote about the event himself: "I have a country house at the torrent of the Golden Valley...where there is a spring of pure water, a luxuriant woods, fruit trees, bambo, cypress, and medicinal plants. There are fields, two hundred sheep, chickens, pigs, geese and ducks...There is also a water mill, a fish pond, caves, and everything to distract the look and please the heart....With my literary friends, we took walks day and night, feasted, climbed a mountain to view the scenery, and sat by the side of the stream".
This visit to the garden resulted in a famous collection of poems, Jingu Shi, or Poems of the Golden Valley, and launched a long tradition of writing poetry in and about gardens.