In a special three-part virtual series for the Garden Conservancy this winter, Professor Andrew Hui explores the fascinating yet overlooked history of the Western Gardens at the Chinese Emperor’s Summer Palace in the eighteenth century. Over the course of three episodes, he will explore the unexpected story of how these vast gardens came to be designed by Jesuit priests and how they influence the development of Europe’s own gardens.

Part II: The Maze: Jesuits, Emperors, and the Invention of the Western Style Gardens in China: February 26, 2026, 12 noon 

In the early eighteenth century, Jesuit missionaries astonished the Qing court by designing a European-style maze in the Summer Palace. What began as a playful mimicry soon expanded into an entire quarter of Western-style gardens: fountains, cabinets of curiosities, and perspective vistas unlike anything in China before. This lecture tells the story of how Jesuits, armed with mathematics, hydraulics, and the technique of linear perspectives, became imperial garden makers—and how their creations embodied wonder, diplomacy, and power at the meeting point of two civilizations.

Andrew Hui teaches at National University of Singapore and is the author of three books: The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (2025), A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter (2019, translated into 4 languages), and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (2017). His newest project is The Emperor’s Maze: The Jesuits in China and the Making of a Global Age (under contract, Penguin Press). Andrew is an experienced public speaker who has lectured widely, including recent talks at Yale, Oxford, and Brown universities, as well as online for the Medici Archive Project, the Smithsonian, and the 92nd Street Y.

Date: Thursday, February 26, 2026 on Zoom.