Nan Lian Garden

Architecture & Design

Nan Lian Garden is a public park built in the style of Tang Dynasty (618–907) landscape design, covering roughly 3.5 hectares of what was, until the late twentieth century, agricultural and squatter-settlement land at Diamond Hill, cleared for redevelopment before the garden’s construction began in 2003. Rather than the open lawns of Hong Kong’s colonial-era parks, it works on the classical Chinese principle of framed viewpoints, arranging rockery, water, and planting so that each turn in the path reveals a composed scene rather than a continuous vista. The timber pavilions and covered walkways are built using interlocking wooden joints and dowels, a construction method that uses no nails or glue anywhere in the structure — the same technique used next door at Chi Lin Nunnery, reportedly the largest hand-built timber structure of its kind assembled without a single nail. The garden’s centrepiece, the Pavilion of Absolute Perfection, is a gold-leafed octagonal structure set on a pond and reached by the Zi Wu Bridge; its layout deliberately echoes the golden halls of Tang-era temple architecture rather than any specific surviving building, since no full-scale Tang garden survives intact today for direct copying. The adjoining Chi Lin Nunnery, rebuilt in the same nail-free method in 1998, used roughly 228,000 pieces of imported Canadian yellow cedar, carved in mainland China and assembled on site using wooden dowels and interlocking brackets — its seven-hall layout is modelled on the Great East Hall of Foguang Temple in Shanxi, one of China’s few surviving Tang-era timber buildings, and on temple architecture depicted in the Dunhuang cave murals.

History & Economic Context

The garden opened to the public in 2006 after roughly three years of construction, at a reported cost of around HK$245 million, funded and built by the Hong Kong government’s Leisure and Cultural Services Department in coordination with the adjacent Chi Lin Nunnery, a Buddhist community that had itself rebuilt its own nail-free timber halls in the same idiom in the 1990s. The pairing of a government-run public garden with a working nunnery is unusual for Hong Kong’s park system, and the two sites are managed under different rules — the nunnery’s inner halls keep stricter visiting hours and dress expectations than the garden’s public paths. Locating a reconstructed Tang-dynasty landscape on reclaimed land above a working MTR line is itself a small piece of Hong Kong’s layered history: the site sits on ground that did not exist in any dynasty, built specifically to house a recreation of one.

Practical Information

Access is via the MTR Kwun Tong Line to Diamond Hill Station, Exit C2, following signage through the Plaza Hollywood shopping centre to the garden entrance. Admission is free, though the Leisure and Cultural Services Department caps how many visitors can be on the wooden bridges and pavilions at once to limit wear on the joinery. Within the garden, a vegetarian restaurant run in association with the nunnery serves Buddhist-style cuisine — dishes built entirely without meat, garlic, or onion, following monastic dietary rules — giving visitors a direct, edible link to the religious life next door rather than just an architectural echo of it. Photography is permitted throughout, but tripods are not allowed, a rule aimed at keeping foot traffic moving along the garden’s intentionally one-directional circuit.