This Chinese garden is a masterpiece of traditional architecture, zen spaces and China’s native flora – but it’s in California

Imagine sitting in a splendid 15-acre Chinese garden such as might be found in the ancient city of Suzhou, sipping jasmine tea in a shaded pavilion and listening to a young woman plucking the strings of a guzheng. Then imagine you’re also in the heart of Southern California and can see on the horizon the purple-hued ridges of the San Gabriel Mountains, towering palms and the terracotta-tiled rooftops of Spanish-style houses.

Liu Fang Yuan (Garden of Flowing Fragrance), located at The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in the city of San Marino, is a newly built masterpiece of Chinese flora, stone and wood. The Huntington features different types of gardens, including rose, Japanese and cactus. But its Liu Fang Yuan is its grandest endeavour on the grounds. In addition to Chinese pavilions, the Chinese Garden also showcases rare books in its extensive library, artworks and exotic plants, and invites poets and speakers to perform, recreating a surround-sound experience of 2,500-year-old Suzhou’s famous garden culture.

At its cultural height, Suzhou, in eastern China, was the country’s undisputed centre of the lettered arts, a place of great refinement and high ceremony.

Liu Fang Yuan took three decades to conceptualise and build and came at a cost of US$54.6 million. More than 20 benefactors gave US$1 million or more each, according to the donors’ wall erected just outside the garden’s moon-shaped gateways, and most of them have Chinese surnames.

So why exactly was this grand, multimillion-dollar, mega-Chinese garden – one of the largest outside China – so important to build? In some ways, Los Angeles County might seem like a strange home for it. Even the climate is vastly different – Suzhou’s humid subtropical climes are in contrast to San Marino’s Mediterranean dryness.