While many of Wuxi's most famous gardens are along the shores of Lake Taihu, one of the city's most beautiful sights, the Jichang Garden and Qin family mansion, are located in the north of the city, between two hills. The garden was first created when an official from Wuxi, Qin Yao, was pushed out of the imperial bureaucracy by a rival political faction. Tired of the treachery and backstabbing of political life, he retired to Wuxi and devoted his energies to creating a beautiful family home and garden. In fact, the Emperor Qianlong visited the garden several times, and was so impressed by it that he had a copy of it constructed at his imperial palace in Beijing. Today both the buildings of the Qin mansion and the Jichang garden have been beautifully preserved and restored and still have their classical style and atmosphere. You enter the Jichang garden through a courtyard, decorated with the calligraphy of imperial visitors so stuck with the garden's beauty they left their appreciative comments for posterity. From the east of the entrance hall, you enter into the main garden, and wind your way through to the most beautiful section, the Converging Splendor Pond. The name is very appropriate - a small pond is the center of a beautiful arrangement of pavilions, trees, strangely shaped rocks, all framed by the hills and pagodas outside the garden. The two ends of the long pond curve away and are screened off by trees and buildings, creating the illusion that the pond is part of a long, winding watercourse. From the main pond, the most interesting route back to the family compound is through the Eight-Sound Gorge. A tree shaded passageway carved out of the rock, a thin groove was carved in the rock floor so that flowing water would produce sounds evoking the eight musical sounds of classical China. Especially after the spring rains, the flow of water really does sound quite harmonic. Wuxi style gardens have a different style and mood than those in Suzhou. Although gardens in both cities use many of the same elements, such as strangely shaped rocks, pavilions, ponds, and small groves of trees, the main difference between the two is in their approach to the environment outside the gardens' walls. In Suzhou, the garden is meant to be a miniature and self contained world, a microcosm of nature with rocks and ponds to evoke mountains and lakes. In Wuxi gardens, the garden is laid out so that outside hills and pagodas seem to be part of the artificial landscape within the garden. This makes the Wuxi gardens seem much larger, appearing as if they extended all the way to the far-off hills and temples. For example, in the Jichang garden, from the main viewpoint over the central pond, a pagoda topped hill rises up behind the garden, making it appear the hill is within the garden, instead of the garden being at the base of the hill.