In Qin and Han Dynasties, Shanglin Garden was excavated by Taiye Pool and piled into an island shape, symbolizing the sacred mountain in the East China Sea, creating a precedent for man-made mountains.

The architectural style of "Gaotai Li Palace" in the pre-Qin period has accumulated rich experience for the garden to build mountains with soil. In the ancient book Shangshu, there is a metaphor that "it is redundant to fall short", which comes from the practice of using hills. "Han Shu" has a record of "building mountains with earth, nine places in ten miles", which shows its long history.

The heaped mountains built by pure mounds can only be piled high if they occupy a large site. Moreover, the slopes are gentle, and the mountain shape is natural, which is a bit like Shan Ye. But it occupies too much land and is rarely used in small and medium-sized gardens. More is to use soil to shape the gentle slope terrain, so that the landscape presents natural ups and downs.

Function:

Rockery has many landscaping functions, such as constituting the main landscape or terrain skeleton of the garden, dividing and organizing the garden space, arranging the courtyard, revetment, slope protection, retaining soil, setting natural flower beds and so on.

It can also be combined with garden buildings, garden roads, sites and garden plants to form a varied landscape, so as to reduce artificial flavor, increase natural interest and make garden buildings integrate into the landscape environment. Therefore, rockery has become one of the characteristics of natural landscape gardens in China.