Sengan'en
- Built: 1658
- Other Names: 磯庭園 (Iso teien)
- Japanese: 仙巖園 (Sengan'en)
Sengan'en is a formal garden in Kagoshima, containing within it the Iso Palace, a secondary villa (bettei) of the Shimazu clan. It is today associated with the nearby Shôkoshûseikan complex.
The garden, along with the Iso Palace, were constructed in 1658, by Shimazu Mitsuhisa. The site was used for the personal leisure of the daimyô, as well as for entertaining guests, including officials from the Ryûkyû Kingdom, and a pavilion said to have been a gift from the King of Ryûkyû still stands on the grounds. Notable elements within the garden include the pewter-roofed main gate, and a set of lanterns said to have been the first gaslamps in Japan. The garden uses the "borrowed scenery" technique to borrow Kinkô Bay and Sakurajima into its arrangement, with the intention of producing the illusion of the two being merely a small hill in a pond, just beyond the walls.
The garden is also home to the oldest kyokusui garden in Japan,[1] and a variety of Bakumatsu/Meiji period technological innovations, including a hydroelectric dam which powered not only the factories of the Shûseikan complex, but also electric lights within the Iso residence.
The Iso Palace became the chief Kagoshima residence of the Shimazu following the Meiji Restoration. Most of the compound was renovated in 1884, and about a third of the residence's buildings survive today.
The gardens were used extensively in the filming of the 2008 NHK Taiga Drama Atsu-hime, and a number of sites within the garden were named World Heritage Sites in 2015, as part of the umbrella category "Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining." These include the Sekiyoshi Sluice Gate of Yoshino Leat, a charcoal kiln, and the reverberatory furnace.
References
- Pamphlet available at Shôkoshûseikan.
- Signs on-site at Sengan'en.
- ↑ A style of garden designed to allow for imitation of the famous Orchid Pavilion Gathering organized by Wang Xizhi in 353, in which participants floated wine cups on a small stream within Wang's garden, and played a game of trying to compose a poem before the next cup passed them.
