Yixing Yaohu town Qingyu Lake park

Qingyu Lake Park at Yaohu Town in Yixing is a roughly twenty-hectare leisure landscape designed by Chengji Landscape and completed at the end of 2022 in the Yangxian Eco-tourism Resort, a bamboo- and tea-terrace-covered area with eighty percent forest cover and over eighteen thousand negative ions per cubic centimetre, billed as the premier natural oxygen bar of East China. The team was invited to build a park that would become the core piece of leisure living in the new town. On first encountering the site, distant hills, tea fields and bamboo groves converged around a calm lake like a quiet sanctuary on the slopes. Rather than inventing scenery, the designers saw their role as that of a guide or a scenic magnifying glass, helping visitors discover what is already there. The site contains three water systems, an open lake, scattered ponds and a hidden wetland; slopeside bamboo; seasonal chestnut, dawn-redwood and tea terraces; rolling hills; and traces of earlier human occupation. The western valley, originally weed-covered, becomes arrival, parking and a forest rest stop linking the new commercial street to hiking trails, ending at an existing dam and water tower that acts as a lantern over the meadow. Behind the dam lies Qingyu Lake, a reservoir whose still surface mirrors the bamboo. The abandoned water tower, the site's only human relic, was structurally reinforced and fitted with a modern viewing deck to become Qingyu Tower, reaching upward as a contemporary counterpoint to the old structure and carrying forward the site's memory. Along the lakeshore, a free walking system follows the landform, bringing people close to the water. Planting was classified by zone, with forest paths, seating clearings and open camping areas inserted with minimal intervention; an abandoned horse shed was converted into public toilets and a farmhouse beside the tea terraces into a tea house. Local fired Yixing ceramic bricks and stone form the hard-material palette, while the dam uses mixed ceramic panels in varying tones, and the tower is clad in tensile fabric. Built in 2021-2022 for the Jiangsu Mingling Yayuan Tourism Company, the park reconnects nature with culture and past with present, offering residents and visitors a new destination and a design method that begins with complete honesty toward every blade of grass on site.