Interior View of Joyful Rain Pavilion (Yiyu Xuan)

Rain was used to refer to friends in ancient China given the Chinese saying that one should keep the guests longer when it rains. There are more dots in the Chinese character of “rain” seen around this pavilion than a correct one has, expressing the garden owner’s wish for more and more friends.
The ingeniously-designed stairs of this pavilion symbolize a meteoric rise in career, and the couplet on the pillars reads “with both the morning and the evening good for playing zither, (I’m happy to see) my old and new friends are here”. The transparent glass inserted in the surrounding walls gives visitors inside the structure an unobstructed view of the sceneries outside. The blue glass on the eastern and western walls was imported from France and had a value equivalent to gold back then, shedding some light on the wealth of the garden owner.