Nanzhai Park the Day After Snow, and the Woods a Nursery Left Behind

In Taiyuan the snow comes at night in December.

It began late on the 11th, and by the 12th it had turned to moderate snow — the weather service warned of heavy falls in places, with a north-westerly wind at force four to six and gusts above seven, and a daytime high of −1°C. On the morning of the 13th I opened the curtains to a clear sky and a forecast of −10°C to −1°C, that is 14°F to 30°F¹. Indoors the radiators were holding the room above 18°C: Taiyuan’s statutory heating season runs from 1 November to 31 March, and this year the cold came early, so the whole city was switched on on 19 October, twelve days ahead of schedule². Thirty degrees between inside and outside. A gap like that makes sitting still difficult. So I went out to see Nanzhai Park under snow.

When I told a friend I was going to Nanzhai, the first thing he said was: what is there to look at there in winter? There is something. The hundred-odd species and nearly three hundred thousand plants in that ground do not disappear when winter arrives; they simply move into another register. Once the pretty season is over, the skeleton shows.

Boarding at Shengli Bridge East

Getting there is not hard. From Shengli Bridge East the 2, 36, 37, 907 and 841 buses all run out this way, along with several branch routes, and they stop at both the west and the north gates. I took the earliest one.

Half the snow on the bus window had melted, and water ran down the glass in threads, cutting the street outside into strips. The further north we went, the lower the buildings got, and the more the ground looked as though nobody had touched it: apart from the main road, everything was one continuous white. Just before my stop the bus turned west, and the park’s north wall slid past alongside the road, carrying a line of snow along the top of it, very long.

The Shape of the Place

Nanzhai Park sits at 133 Xinlan Road in Jiancaoping District — the same stretch of road is also called Datong Road, Nanzhai village section. Its predecessor was the Nanzhai Nursery, laid out in 1956: 250,000 square metres, with the ground falling from south to north³. In April 2005 the city decided to turn the nursery into a public park; work began on 28 June, finished in a hundred days, and the gates opened in early October that year. One very plain reason behind it: the north of the city had no general park at all. It has been enlarged since, and the parks department’s more recent figure for the total area is 361,000 square metres.

Its shape is not the usual park shape. A long east–west strip crosses a north–south rectangle at right angles — a letter T, or a corridor that ends by opening into a yard. The north gate is at one end of the corridor, and the pigeon square, the pond and the shaded path are all crowded near it; the rectangle in the south is the main body, and inside it run the peony garden, the herbaceous peony garden, the lotus pond, the rose garden, the herb garden, the vegetable garden. You cannot tell from the gate. You have to walk to the crossing point before the length of the place becomes clear.

Pigeon Square: Few People, Plenty of Pigeons

Not far in from the north gate there is a patch of concrete where the pigeons come down. In summer there is a fixed procedure: buy a bag of corn kernels, open your hand and cup it into a bowl, and a pigeon will come whirring over, hover, take one kernel and go. The bolder ones land on your fingertips, grip, and eat at leisure. The procedure is the same in winter. It just runs half a beat slower.

There were four of us in the square that morning, counting me. A thin cover of snow, and the pigeons had printed it with a fine scribble of tracks, as if somebody had scraped at paper with the tip of a knife. The kernels sank half out of sight the moment they landed. The birds look fatter in winter than in summer, all of them fluffed out — their own rough method of getting through: trap the air in the feathers and make a quilt of it. One grey bird ate two kernels and hopped away to the roof of the pigeon shed, where it stopped moving altogether, neck drawn down into its wings until only the line of its back was left.

The birds were not cold. I was. I took my gloves off for two photographs, and my fingers stiffened so fast I could barely hold the phone.

The Pond, the Geese, and a Plaque That Reads “Xiang Tian Ge”

South of the square lies a pond. A few white geese used to stand on the bank, bulky, swaying one step at a time, not much afraid of anybody. That day the surface was frozen, with snow lying on the ice, so white you could not see where water ended and bank began. The geese had retreated to the loose stones on the edge; the stones were frosted and slippery. One of them took two steps, failed to get its footing, flung its wings open to brace itself, then slid into the water slowly and awkwardly. Only one small patch near the bank, out of the wind, was still open. The flock crowded in there, necks bent, looking for something to eat.

Reeds grow in the pond — two metres tall in summer, packed so tight you cannot see through them. In winter they dry to the colour of straw, and when the wind comes past, the whole stand rattles, a sound as dry as paper. A zigzag bridge crosses the pond, and on the plaque at its head are three characters: xiang tian ge — “singing up at the sky”. From Luo Binwang’s poem about the goose, the one that begins with three repeated syllables. Not a deep reference. An accurate one.

Chairs Cut From Whole Logs

Coming back over the bridge, the path along the bank has a few straight-backed seats, some for one person, some for two. Up close you see how they were made: not bought and bolted down, but cut out of whole logs two metres long and as thick as your arms can reach, so that the backrest is simply the log’s own curve. Nobody sits on them in winter; the snow lies on the seats and does the useful work of drawing out the grain and the cut faces, thick where the wood was carved deep, sliding off where the bark was left on.

On the same walk stands the glass pavilion out in the middle of the water — six faces, with a long bridge reaching sideways to the shore. Glass is the first thing you notice in a snowscape, because it keeps no light at all; it gives everything back.

Further south, a few large millstones stand in a line up the central green strip. They are thick, taller than a person, and bored through the middle with square holes twenty centimetres across. The group has a name: tian yuan di fang, “round sky, square earth”. Not far off, in the lawn, stand two rectangular frames, one large and one small, called “the China frame”: step inside, have your picture taken, and the camera stamps it with Nanzhai Park’s own watermark. Both of these read better in winter than in summer. In summer the green buries them; in winter the snow draws their outlines. A circle is a circle. A square is a square.

The Woods the Nursery Left Behind

The trees are the part of Nanzhai Park that least resembles a park.

A nursery grows saplings, and its pruning habits accumulate over generations, which leaves the place stylistically mixed: poplars and willows grown very tall, shrubs trained into spheres, pines trained into umbrellas. None of these shapes are visible in summer, when leaves cover everything. In winter, with the leaves down, the work of the secateurs is exposed, line by line. Poplar branches against snow look like pencil underdrawing, every stroke straight; willow branches hang heavy with snow, dragging lower than they can really go; the umbrella pines take the weight and go white with bent shoulders.

The park’s own description of a Taiyuan winter — “the earth wrapped in silver, rime on the branches clear as crystal” — is not an exaggeration. Rime is thickest before ten in the morning. Once the sun is out it starts dropping, and every fallen piece leaves a small pit in the snow. Beside the wood stand a few spotted giraffes, heads up, eating leaves that are not there; snow settles on their necks, and half of each body has gone white.

In 2010 and 2011 a batch of trees was planted here: some fifty pines, including Huashan and creeping pines, more than thirty ginkgos, a dozen dragon-head cypresses, plus a large stretch of new lawn⁴. Those ginkgos should have trunks thicker than an arm by now. Their branches angle upwards, so snow will not sit on them; it slides off with a soft rustle.

The Southern Half: A Catalogue With Nothing In It

The rectangle in the south holds a run of specialised gardens, all named for seasons. In winter what remains is the signage and the beds.

The herb garden is the newest name on the list. In July 2024 it reopened after being enlarged to 800 square metres, and the parks department made it a place that is at once ornamental, instructive, knowledgeable and playful — the first of its kind in Taiyuan’s park system — planted with medicinal herbs suited to the local climate⁵. In summer you look at the flowers. In winter the stems and leaves are dead and only the wooden labels are left standing in the ground: name, family, the part used, its properties. In fact it reads better in winter, because words are all there is. Bupleurum and codonopsis, two of Shanxi’s signature medicines, are written on the labels nearest the path.

The “one park, one speciality” rural culture festival has been held annually for years. 2024 was the sixteenth; this summer should have been the seventeenth, and I came too late for it. The park’s traditional-medicine garden, farming-culture garden and science corner are all opened free of charge during the festival.

Coming in Winter Is When You Understand What This Place Was

Nanzhai Park has hardly any pavilions. It is not polished: the grass grows where it likes, the paths bend where they like, and the parks department describes its character as “plain, natural, with a hint of the countryside”. That is not a shortcoming. It is a record of where the place came from — a nursery has no need to be beautiful. A nursery needs to produce saplings.

The saplings raised on this ground in 1956 were meant to be dug up and carried off to other streets, other roadsides. The ones still standing here are the ones that were never taken away, and they have grown into the park’s frame. From 1956 to 2005 is forty-nine years. In four more years, this generation of trees will be seventy.

I cannot point to the one planted in 1956, but a few of them must still be here. They have seen the nursery and they have seen the park — two entirely different identities on the same ground. The people have changed over several times. The rings have not stopped.

On the Way Out

At half past three the sun dropped west, and the light coming off the snow turned from white to grey. I went back to the north gate to wait for the bus, took my hands out of my pockets to check the time, and found my fingertips had no feeling left in them; the sign announcing the next bus was still lit, at least.

The snow on the platform had been trampled into a grey layer. Looking back at the gate, it was white and quiet. All the summer names — reeds and rejoicing ducks, moonlight on the lotus pond, sea of loosestrife, boardwalk for flower-watching, willow waves — had been folded away and pinned to the guide map beside the north gate to wait for next year. I plan to come back in spring, when it will be the peony garden’s and the herb garden’s turn to open.