Transplanting the East in Europe

William Chambers (1723-96) wrote in his landmark Enlightenment-era book, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772): "Such is the common scenery of the Chinese gardens … their artists never fail to improve upon its singularities: their aim is to excite a great variety of passions in the mind of spectators; and the fertility of their imagination, always upon the stretch in search of novelty, furnishes them with a thousand artifices to accomplish that aim."