Qushan Yue Garden Village

Qiushan Yue Pastoral Cultural Village is a rural-revitalisation project in Yucun, Huaguoshan area, on the outskirts of Qionglai, Chengdu, Sichuan. The site borders the Nan River and the Baihe Mountain forest park, backed by mountains with distant views of the snow-capped ranges of western Sichuan. As part of Qionglai's urban-rural integration strategy, the 1,600-mu village - of which about 300 mu is presented in this phase - is being developed into a new pastoral complex merging agriculture, commerce, tourism, culture, sport and wellness. On first arrival, visitors see layered terraces, dappled woodland and distant hills, a miniature of the Sichuan linpan settlement pattern. The site had been degraded by earlier farmhouses and greenhouses, and idle land had become a construction parking lot; irrigation channels were fragmented. The design team, Sichuan Ledao Landscape and Chengdu Lefandi Horticulture, took an ecological and plain-spoken approach: they repaired the farmland base, integrated fields, roads and canals, blurred boundaries, and added platforms and leisure nodes so that villagers and visitors alike can enter freely. The westernmost intact field pattern was preserved; the rest was reshaped following existing terraces and slopes into naturally edged, uneven block fields separated by traditional earth bunds planted with Dichondra repens. Some bunds were widened into stepping-stone paths for closer contact with the crops; existing trees and groves were retained. The restored farmland now functions again, re-employing villagers in two-season cultivation, offering residents a walking destination, and giving egrets a new habitat. An entry rockery flower border by Lefandi uses stacked stone and naturalistic planting; a field classroom pavilion of local Qiong bamboo has movable screens; and an over-dense former nursery was thinned into a public forest space. Three forty-year-old Phoebe zhennan trees in front of an old courtyard were preserved and dictated the design of a cafe that hovers above the fields and hides in the woods, reached by a raised boardwalk that minimises disturbance. Stone retaining walls built with local villagers reinforce the slope. A narrow-gauge train through rice paddies, woods, vegetable plots and a wisteria tunnel provides a full sequence of rural experience; shared farms, rented vegetable plots, seasonal transplanting and rice-field fish-catching events invite urban visitors to be farmers for a day, while art exhibitions, markets, performance stages and healing activities build identity between old and new villagers. At 200,000 square metres and completed in 2023, the project treats the future village as a layering of new life onto existing land rather than a restoration of a frozen past.