Dynastic History | Shikinaen 識名園, Naha — The Garden Built for Guests the Kingdom Paid to Feed

Shikinaen 識名園 was completed in 1799, in the reign of Shō On, on a hill south of Shuri. It was not a retreat. Its purpose was the reception of the 冊封使 — the envoys sent from the Chinese court to invest a new king of Ryukyu with his title. Shō On's own investiture came the following year, and Zhao Wenxiao and Li Dingyuan were received in the new garden.

Twenty-two such missions reached the islands between 1404 and 1866, the last of them for Shō Tai. Studies of the missions put an embassy at several hundred people, staying four to eight months, with Ryukyu carrying the cost: lodging, provisioning, banquets, and the music and dance the court kept officials on the payroll to arrange. The same scholarship describes the hosting as one of the heaviest recurring charges the kingdom bore. The ceremony conferred recognition; the revenues of a small island state absorbed the bill for it.

The garden was laid out to be walked through with guests — a pond in the shape of the character 心, an arched limestone bridge, a hexagonal pavilion on an island in the water, and a low residence in an idiom that mixes Chinese and Okinawan work.

Almost all of it was destroyed in the fighting of April 1945. Naha City puts the restoration at 1975 to 1996 and 780 million yen. The garden was raised from Place of Scenic Beauty, which it had been since 1941, to Special Place of Scenic Beauty in 2000, and inscribed with the other Ryukyuan properties on 2 December that year. The city's management office runs it: ¥400, and the path makes a full circuit of the pond.

📸 Cover: The pond, the arched stone bridge and the residence beyond, 663highland, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons