The Yan Garden is located at Xinfeng Lane in the urban area of Changshu City and was listed as a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level by the State Council of China in 2013.
In the forty-fifth Year of the Reign of Emperor Qianlong in the Qing Dynasty (1780), Jiang Yuanshu, the surveillance commissioner and education administer of Taipeng District, Fujian Province built this garden and the name means returning of swallows. In the late Qing Dynasty, Zhang Hong, the vice minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs bought it and repaired it greatly; therefore, it is also called Zhang Garden.
When Yan Garden was first built, the palace halls built on four directions were surrounded by rivers as well, covering an area of 4 Mus (Chinese acre), about 2,700 square meters. It was in the shape of a rectangle, 96 meters from the south to north and 32 meters from the east to west. When Jiang Yuanshu first built it, it has sceneries such as 4-window-sided halls, 72 stone monkeys and platform in western style. The rockery “Yan Valley or Swallow Valley” is situated in the south of Wuzhi Hall, which is connected to three graceful rooms in the southeast, and Green Gallery and a small attached house in the west. After the twenty-sixth Year of the Republic of China (1937), some of the sceneries in Yan Garden have been ruined and stayed in a disrepair state for a long time. From 1984 on, the “16 sceneries” in the garden have been repaired successively.