Monty's travels through the Far East are solely in China and Japan as he focuses on ancient gardens or those emerging from the ancient traditions of the respective countries, his ultimate goal to understand the zen gardens of Japan. In doing so, he first has to start in China, where he visits gardens in Suzhou and Beijing. While water plays a large role in these gardens, it is the hard surfaces of rocks and stones, in their natural state, that provide the greatest fascination to Monty. These features are meant only to suggest rather than mimic items and landscapes more familiar. Monty has some difficulty understanding the supposed beauty and meaning of especially some rockscapes in formal gardens, until he visits the Yellow Mountains in Anhui Province. His time in Japan is solely in Kyoto visiting specifically those formal zen gardens. They grew out of the ancient Buddhist traditions of the Chinese gardens already visited, the Japanese gardeners who took only those elements from the Chinese that met their sensibilities. Like the ancient Chinese gardens, the zen gardens are usually associated with temples and formal rituals such as tea ceremonies. The last garden visited, the Tofuku-ji Temple Garden designed in the early to mid twentieth century, may look like the traditional zen gardens of the past, but caused much uproar in the designer, Mirei Shigemori, taking the traditions and literally turning them on their side with modern elements including geometric features mixed with more naturalistic ones.
—Huggo