The Difference Between Poetic and Prose Writing about Local Public Gardens: A Study of Liu Yuxi's Ten Poems on the Haiyang Lake

Liu Yuxi, as the provincial governor of Lian Zhou, continued the construction of the Haiyang Lake landscape which was started by his predecessor Yuan Jie. What was built was a local public garden, not a private garden. Liu Yuxi attached great importance to the political role of public garden in making the local people happy and the governor morally upgraded. He expressed in his prose the understanding of the political importance of public gardens, while his poetic writing about the Haiyang Lake was full of the reclusive mood, which was characteristic of the Tang poems written in reclusion and in the officials' spare time. There was no political thinking about the local public gardens in these poems. Yuan Jie and Liu Zongyuan were the same as Liu Yuxi in this regard. There was an obvious difference between their poetic writing and prose writing about local public gardens. The prose writing focused on the local public garden's political role, while the poetic writing focused on the reclusive mood. This phenomenon helps to understand the writing principles of Chinese landscape poetry.