The cultural connotation and theme essence of Chinese landscape architecture is landscape culture. China's scenic spots (i.e. national parks) are "real landscapes" and "great landscapes"; Chinese classical gardens are "pocket landscapes" or "miniature landscapes" or "close to mountains and forests". Therefore, Chinese landscape architecture takes landscape nature and scenery as the main aesthetic object and performance object. It has a long history and is rich and colorful. Its wide distribution, high taste and great influence can be rated as the most in the world. Landscape culture played an important role in the process of Chinese civilization. Its radiation will continue to extend to the whole world.

Landscape culture is the artistic essence and cultural heritage of China's landscape architecture. Therefore, China's landscape architecture usually takes scenery and natural scenery, mountains and rivers as important landscape objects and aesthetic objects. We use the perspective of modern culture to examine the landscape culture, which can be viewed from both broad and narrow perspectives. In a broad sense, landscape culture mainly refers to all relevant cultures formed in the long historical process of human cognition, development, utilization and protection of natural landscape. Therefore, the broad sense of landscape culture includes not only natural landscape itself, but also various cultural phenomena and cultural forms created on this basis. In a narrow sense, landscape culture mainly refers to the sum of all spiritual cultures that take natural landscape as the material or object.

1. China has a vast territory and abundant resources. The natural resources of mountains and waters in our country are very widely distributed, and have a wide variety, excellent matching and flexible composition; The landscape human resources are extensive, profound and extensive; These factors are the important basic reasons for the formation of China's landscape culture.

2. The Chinese landscape culture emphasizes the innate unity of "mountain" and "water". If there is no water in the mountain, the mountain is dead, lacking the spirit of leaping; If there is no mountain in the water, it will be mediocre still water without surging vitality. In Chinese culture, "mountain" and "water" are a pair made in heaven, and their correlation and integration can reflect different artistic beauty.

3. China's landscape culture is based on natural resources and sublimated by human resources, both of which are indispensable. This is an important reason why European and American countries also have rich landscape resources but no landscape culture.  

4. Landscape culture has a very strong integrity. Although its main body is landscape, it is not limited to landscape. Chinese landscape culture attaches great importance to the integration of landscape and surrounding environment, and also pays special attention to the coordination and cooperation between landscape and local animals, plants, meteorology, and humanistic buildings.

5. Landscape culture has derived a very important cultural theory in China - Feng Shui theory. Fengshui is a unique cultural theory and view of natural events in China. "Burial Book" is an ancient book in China that specifically explains the methods and precautions for selecting burial environment. It was the first book to put forward the word "geomancy": "geomancy theory, water is the top priority, followed by hidden wind." It takes "water" and "hidden wind" as important criteria for selecting high-quality burial environment.

The form of Chinese landscape culture, viewed from three levels of human culture, can be divided into three major forms: material form, activity form and ideology:

1. Material form: material layer culture represented by buildings and stone culture;

2. Activity form: behavioral institutional culture marked by crowd activities (such as sacrificial activities, religious activities, Confucian activities, seclusion activities, war activities and folk activities);

3. Ideology: the surface culture with mountains and waters as the "spiritual food". Such as in religion, philosophy, aesthetics, literature and art and many other fields.

Chinese landscape culture has a huge cultural system with Chinese landscape as the carrier and performance object, which is a dynamic development process of continuous innovation and accumulation. The three forms and various categories are a dialectical unity with natural landscape as the center; Landscape culture originates from mountains and waters, beautifies mountains and waters, originates from the relationship between people and mountains and waters, and serves the relationship between people and mountains and waters.

China's "landscape aesthetics" began in the pre-qin period, popular in the Wei, Jin and Tang dynasties, since then, this tradition has continued. From Confucius' theory of "comparing mountains to virtue and water to wisdom", "benevolent people love mountains and wise people love water", to Zhuangzi's aesthetic feeling of "mountains and forests, land and land! Let me be happy and happy!", there is always a spiritual exchange, that is, spiritual output and endowments. In the future, the traditional culture or seclusion landscape or ambition landscape will create rich and colorful famous mountain culture in the communication with the natural world.

The value of ancient Chinese landscape poetry lies in the spirit of spirituality. Based on the philosophy of "mountains and waters are one thing", examining mountains and waters means examining oneself, thoroughly understanding the purpose of "contracting with heaven and earth", and shaping the artistic realm of the unity of poet image and landscape image. Landscape poetry and landscape painting flourished in the Eastern Jin Dynasty and the Southern Dynasty, becoming independent poetic and painting styles, both of which have experienced transition. Xie Lingyun and Tao Yuanming are representatives of landscape poets, while Zong Bing and Wang Zheng are representatives of landscape painters. The landscape poems and paintings, which are devoted to describing landscapes, inevitably require corresponding new forms of expression to make them "integrate the exterior and interior". The artistic expression form of landscape poetry is the rhythm composed of mountains and waters by counting, enumerating and arranging, and the form of antithesis is the most obvious, achieving the picture effect of space-time unity; Landscape painting uses the scattered perspective management position, the perspective principle of "near large, far small", the "three far method" and various techniques of wrinkling, wiping, spotting and dyeing to solve the problem of space sense and the sense of breadth, depth and hierarchy of scenic spots on the screen. Both landscape poetry and painting take artistic conception as their soul life. "There is painting in poetry and poetry in painting" and "poetry is invisible painting and painting is tangible poetry" indicate that the artistic conception of landscape poetry and painting is interlinked. The common natural aesthetic appreciation of landscape poets and landscape painters is the root of the homology and growth of landscape poetry and painting.

1. China's natural resources of mountains and waters are widely distributed, rich in types, ingenious in composition, organic in unity, and diverse in types, extensive and profound in origin.

2. In the Chinese landscape culture, mountains and water are set off and integrated with each other, with moderate proportion, ingenious combination, surrounded by mountains and rivers, and complement each other.

3. Chinese landscape culture is the interdependence and integration of natural resources and human resources, which complement each other.

4. The Chinese landscape culture, with landscape as its theme, is closely integrated with the surrounding environment. The celestial phenomena, meteorology, animals, plants and religious buildings are coordinated to form an organic whole.

5. The ancient Chinese geomancy theory is also an important part of the landscape culture.

6. The collection of Chinese scenic spots is called culture (namely, "eight sights and ten sights culture"), especially one of the important components of Chinese landscape culture.

7. Professor Qian Xuesen, a famous scientist with outstanding contributions and a first-class hero model, proposed in 1990 that "socialist China should build a city with mountains and rivers".

Chinese gardens are the epitome of mountains and waters, and are "urban mountain forests". Whether it is a royal garden or a private garden, "mountains and waters, halls and buildings, and swallows and birds". The beauty of mountains and rivers has been read together since ancient times. Because of the popularity of visiting famous mountains and rivers, the art of gardening has shifted from natural mountains and rivers to freehand landscapes, which has also greatly promoted the trend of building gardens through the ground and mountains. Chinese classical gardens reflect China's deep-rooted awareness of farming and the aesthetic style of advocating nature, and reflect the cultural spirit of "harmony between man and nature". The garden is the spiritual home of the literati who are "poor and independent". In the garden, people can feel the emptiness of the universe, the sophistication of heaven and earth, and the endless growth of everything, making it a "philosophy garden on earth". The "landscape beauty" of landscape architecture is a spiritual value. It is the establishment and development of the aesthetic relationship between man and nature, and is essentially the token of the development of human civilization. In the history of China's cultural development, our ancestors went beyond "practical view" and "religious view", and looked at nature with "aesthetic view",

It is a long-term historical process of gradual development to take landscape as the aesthetic object 。

Chinese landscape architecture is a work of art that organically connects natural landscapes with Chinese landscape culture and endows them with Chinese cultural connotation. It is a typical materialization of matter, and natural landscape is its objective carrier; It is also a typical spiritual culture, and Chinese culture represented by landscape culture is its cultural connotation. Among them, the landscape culture is one of the unique cultural systems in China, which originated from the Taoist theory of "following nature" and developed into a cultural system in the evolution of thousands of years later.