Moon Gates

I have always had a thing for doors, you know those kind of doors that make you stop and go wow that’s a beautiful door. Well when I travelled through China last year I fell in love with Moon Gates. A Moon Gate is a traditional architectural element in Chinese gardens, and each part of the gate from the tiles to the shape has different spiritual meanings. The purpose of these gates is to be an inviting entrance into gardens of mostly only rich upper class Chinese, traditionally they were only found in the gardens of wealthy Chinese nobles. Now days you can find them all over the world, in replica Chinese gardens. There’s even one in my local park, as it has a Chinese garden section.

The picture above is from a small southern China town called Jianshui, which was an ancient trading town that not many tourists visit. The gate itself was the entrance to a beautiful Chinese garden (Zhu Family Garden)  and was one of the best I have ever seen too. You can get a 360 degree view of the garden here. So I trawled the net for some more beautiful specimens. I found some very tradional ones as well as some modern interprations of them. Feel free to email me your own Moon Gate pictures. Enjoy.

 

Love & Light,