Chinese Garden_puzzle

I am more fascinated by Chinese gardens than Chinese architecture, especially those small and delicate private gardens in the south of the Yangtze River.

Chinese gardens can be basically divided into two main categories – royal gardens (such as the Summer Palace in Beijing) and private gardens (such as the Lingering Garden in Suzhou). Different from the royal gardens with a grand scale and regular layout, private gardens often occupy a small area, but they are extremely ingenious, using various spaces and paths interspersed, organically integrating mountains, stones, water trees and artificial buildings, placing their affection on the nature of mountains and rivers, and reproducing the pursuit of the unity of nature and man.

Klotski(from Polish: klocki, lit. 'wooden blocks') is a sliding block puzzle thought to have originated in the early 20th century. 

Like other sliding-block puzzles, several different-sized block pieces are placed inside a box, which is normally 4×5 in size. Among the blocks, there is a special one (usually the largest) which must be moved to a special area designated by the game board. The player is not allowed to remove blocks, and may only slide blocks horizontally and vertically. Common goals are to solve the puzzle with a minimum number of moves or in a minimum amount of time.

——From Wikipedia

This work deconstructs a private garden in the Jiangnan region of China and incorporates Klotski (Huarong Dao in Chinese), consisting of a chassis (with detachable fences and a positioning lock block) and ten building components (chess pieces).

Chassis (with chessmen on it)

1. Cloud Wall: The top of the wall rises and falls like a cloud, and there are also variants to form a dragon body with a dragon head called a dragon wall (such as Shanghai Yu Garden).

2. Moon Wall: An inner wall with a moon gate. The Moon Gate is a common door opening in Chinese gardens, which generally does not have a door leaf, and is used to separate different spaces. It is named because the door opening is round and resembles a full moon.

3. Wall crossing the water: A kind of interior wall that blocks pedestrians without blocking the flow of water. It embodies the concept of gardening in harmony with nature and non-interference.

Similarly, you can find that in Chinese gardens, there are many white walls interspersed with gray and yellow mountain stones, which conform to nature rather than transform nature, which is reflected in this inconspicuous construction of stone and wall.

4. Positioning lock block: fill in the blank positioning, different opening settings will move the position left and right, and take it out after the opening.

1. Entrance: Unlike northern buildings, the entrances of southern garden buildings are usually very low-key, and they are rarely decorated to highlight their presence. It embodies the owner's life philosophy of indifference to fame and fortune and self-cultivation.

2. Bamboo corridor: It is a passage that connects various buildings and provides shade or rain at the same time. Often zigzags are used to break the pattern of straight walls, and the irregular spaces on both sides are set with greenery or rocks, in this case bamboo, which Chinese literati often used to describe their integrity.

3. Peach Blossom Pavilion: The pavilion is homonymous stop in Chinese, which means a building for stop and rest, mostly built on the mountainside or the top of the mountain. Peach blossoms are used on the rocks – in China, peach blossoms symbolize love and good luck.

4. Stone boat: It is a unique building in China, with a stone hull and a stone or wooden cabin on the top, fixed on the water and pretending to play on the water.

5. Pond: Fish farming and lotus planting.

6. Zigzag bridge: divided into columnar type and non-railing, and the columnless type is usually very close to the water surface. The same is true for the tortuous corridors, providing viewers with different perspectives and increasing the interest of the space in the constant turns.

7. Moon Bridge: Single-hole arch bridge, named because the reflection of the bridge hole and the water surface is combined to form a perfect circle like a full moon - in China, the full moon means perfection and reunion.

8. Rockery: In the Chinese garden, the rockery has an important position, especially the large and unique Taihu Lake stone. Most of these strange stones were mined by manpower from the bottom of Taihu Lake, which was extremely rare in ancient times when there was no diving equipment, heavy machinery and inconvenient transportation.

9. Waterfalls: Those small pieces of rocks are usually stacked into rockeries of different heights and combined with waterways to form streams and waterfalls.

10. The Spring Hall: The main building in the garden is a place for the host to receive guests or family members. The building adopts a verandah-style layout and a gable roof, and the name of the hall is taken from the building of the same name in Shanghai's Yu Garden, as a way to wish the opening of LEGOLAND Shanghai Park next summer.

The ratio of the length to width of the ten pieces is based on the standard game mode - 4 5x5 studs, 5 10x5 studs, and 1 10x10 stud. These pieces can be moved freely in the chassis, but cannot be removed, and the goal is to move the largest piece (The Spring Hall) to the exit (the gap at the bottom edge).

At the start of the game, the perimeter wall and lock block can be removed to make it easier to slide the pieces.

The opening arrangement in the work, "Spring Flows Eastward", takes 81 steps to complete, which is of medium difficulty.

Here are four other different difficulty openings and minimum moves to complete:

Among them, the opening 4 "Dock Entrance", the latest record of Klotski's race is 0.979 seconds set in May this year, yes, you read that right, not a second 🙃.

Finished product size 23.2x27.6x14.9studs (W-L-H), 1252parts.

It was a challenge for me to build a dynamic Chinese Jiangnan garden in a limited space, and to make sure that the modules were moved without interfering with each other, but it was also the fun of LEGO...

I believe it will be a fun and culturally rich work, LEGO ideas fans have contributed a lot of great works, but there are few Chinese culture and stories, I believe that LEGO is a language, you can tell different stories through different building pieces, and bring you a lifetime of fun!