Songjiang’s Fangta: A Pagoda in a Modern Garden

Fangta Garden stands in Songjiang, southwest of Shanghai’s central districts. The site was part of the busy center of ancient Huating, a historical name associated with this region. Today the garden’s defining structure is the square pagoda, but the surrounding landscape makes clear that Songjiang’s history cannot be reduced to one monument. The park gathers buildings and traces from different centuries around the tower.

The pagoda is a Northern Song structure, while the nearby Wangxian Bridge is also dated to the Song period. Other landmarks belong to later moments: a large brick-carved screen from the Ming, and buildings such as the Tianfei Palace and Chen Gong Shrine from the Qing. Seeing them together is like reading a compact timeline in architecture. Their proximity does not make them contemporaneous; the garden’s layered arrangement is precisely what makes the old city legible.

Fangta Garden itself is a twentieth-century design. Landscape architect Feng Jizhong led its design work beginning in 1978; the garden opened in 1982, with construction completed in stages through 1988. Rather than imitate an ancient garden, the plan uses walls, steps, bamboo, paths and planted ground to set the historic monuments into a new public landscape.

A low wall can make the pagoda feel taller; a turn in the path can hold back the view until the visitor reaches a clearing. The garden places old objects in an intentional sequence, balancing open ground with enclosed passages. Its design allows the tower to remain the visual center while other relics appear as separate chapters. The setting is modern, and that modernity is part of the heritage: it shows how people in the late twentieth century chose to conserve and present earlier architecture.

The pleasure of Fangta Garden comes from noticing the gaps in time. A Song pagoda, a Ming screen, Qing buildings, mature trees and modern paths do not all tell the same story. Together, they make a walk through Songjiang feel less like visiting a single ruin and more like moving through a sequence of decisions about worship, public space, craft and preservation.

The garden was created at the former heart of Huating, but it is not a frozen reconstruction of that city. It is a contemporary frame for surviving pieces. As you pass from tower to screen and then toward a hall, notice how the paths change the scale of each object. Fangta’s quiet lesson is architectural: an old city can be encountered through fragments, provided the spaces between them are designed to let each fragment speak in its own period.