Shanghai-style bonsai imitates nature, with a free and elegant style that breaks convention

  Shanghai-style bonsai consists of tree bonsai, landscape bonsai, miniature composite bonsai and more. Imitating nature, free and elegant, breaking convention - among China's traditional five major bonsai schools, only Shanghai-style bonsai lives up to these twelve words. Without seeing it in person, it seems hard to imagine: the largest is just over one meter, the smallest only a few inches. Within a single ceramic pot, there may be an ancient tree from the wild, or a whole landscape of mountains and waters, “hundreds of miles of layered mountains, all within a small pot”.

  From afar it has a magnificent momentum; up close it is full of lush branches and leaves. Three or five stones are piled up to form the corner of a cliff, and several large trees are arranged with a sense of density and clear layers. A small boat floats on the water, and the lone fisherman in his straw cloak tells the story that “even a farmer has moments of leisure”. In Shanghai Botanical Garden's “Clear Green Autumn Sky”, a Japanese white pine (Pinus parviflora) over 200 years old has been carefully tended by several generations of horticulturists; its aged bark is cracked piece by piece, yet it still stands with an otherworldly posture, as if it were not growing in a ceramic pot but standing alone deep in the mountains.

  Shanghai-style “palm-sized bonsai” is even more of a marvel. In pots only the size of a wine cup or even a seal, the branches are lush and the leaves abundant, fine fruit covers the branches, and it has even more the appearance of an ancient tree, which is astonishing. There is a set called “Small Scenes of Jiangnan”, in which seven “palm treasures” each have their own posture: there are horizontal-lying bonsai that seem to “burst into the world”, cliff-style bonsai like a “golden hook hanging upside down”, and flowering and fruiting bonsai with blossoms covering the branches.