Miniature Garden with a Buddhist Temple, 18th cent.
Speaking about container gardens, Stein insists that "the ideal of assembling in one propitious site
specimen of all the curiosities from every corner of the universe is one of the most anciently attested
preoccupation's in China. (...) Most European authors explain the development of dwarfed vegetation as resulting
from lack of space...and from difficulties in traveling, which prevent them from leaving their homes to look at
natural landscapes...this is a simplistic view...In fact, the more altered in size the representation is from the
natural object, the more it takes on a magical or mythic quality.