In 1932, when Aw Boon Haw started construction of the Hong Kong mansion and gardens, public parks were nonexistent for Chinese. Before China became a Socialist country in 1949, people of lesser means had to make pilgrimages to Buddhist and Daoist monasteries to enjoy nature. The rich, however, enjoyed pleasure gardens built in imitation of imperial parks for hundreds of years.
Garden building was as much a spiritual activity as an artistic one; garden builders spent decades constructing their gardens through a cycle of sitting, listening, observing, and adding elements. Wealthy amateurs, such as Aw Boon Haw, directed craftsmen skilled in building, sculpting, and arranging landscape to create gardens.

When Aw Boon Haw built his mansions, pleasure gardens were integral to his plans. That his were more ostentatious--or as some called them, vulgar--than most was pragmatic. His gardens would serve more purposes than their more traditional counterparts: his would educate, serve as public parks, and promote his products. Aw Boon Haw's gardens provided both cool resting places from summer heat and blatantly recounted folklore and moral lessons. The mystic qualities of Daoist retreats lay in the sculpting of the landscape, the vistas revealed, and intimate spaces discovered only by traveling a circuitous path. Here these features are conspicuous, however, with a caricature brashness more along the lines of Disneyland than untamed nature. The grottoes, tableaux, and architectural elements render the gardens an amusement park. Colors reminiscent of Tiger Balm packaging distinguish these gardens from other more traditional ones. It's no accident that balustrades feature "AW" in their lattice designs and tigers appear throughout the gardens. After all, these imprinted the product line and family name in the minds of visitors.

There are no rules in Chinese gardens; only a duty exists to pay attention to the important elements of the landscape: mountains, water, architecture, and temporal change.

Chinese gardens draw from poetry and painting for inspiration. They create a theatrical representation of nature. In fact, early garden designers often were painters. Like a series of paintings, a garden unfolds into carefully orchestrated scenes to which the viewer is directed by winding paths. Each scene exists in careful contrast to the previous and next ones. Contrasting delights and horrors keep the visitor alert. Moods are created. All senses are played to: enclosed and open vistas challenge the eye, wind and water channeled through stone startle and soothe the ear, fragrant plants titillate and bite the nose, and burnished and rough surfaces stimulate the fingers and feet.

To the Western eye, the gardens often seem jumbled, as if too many things are crammed into too small a space. There is no clear vantage point from which the entirety of the garden may be seen. This is deliberate, done to imitate the complexity of nature. No lawns interrupt the landscape. Grassy areas are traditionally regarded as weedy and a waste of space.

Chinese gardens are built, not planted. Structures such as bridges, walls, pavilions, galleries, and pagodas provide touchstones to reality by linking the fantasy of the garden to a sphere the visitor can grasp. These elements, with walls, decorative doors, and windows, are placed to complement the landscape and provide a familiar frame of reference to the journey through a garden.

The gardens represent a small engineering miracle. No written plans were made for these gardens; rather, the construction plans were cultivated in Aw Boon Haw's imagination and transmitted verbally to the craftsmen. Except for peeling paint and broken, delicate plaster features, these gardens have withstood over fifty years of blistering sun, torrential rain, and human contact. The honeycombed Blue Mountain shows no fatigue from supporting the hundreds of tourists who explore its recesses every day of the year.

From inside the mountain, windows in the caves frame landscape "paintings" Aw Boon Haw saw: a finely shaped rock, a piece of a railing, the house, the opposing hillside, a tiger, the harbor. Up close as the concrete surfaces undulate and change colors, the visitor is transfixed by the magic qualities the rocks seem to possess. The concrete rocks mimic in wild caricature the elaborate shapes of rocks thrust from the earth. The sense here is of being inside a painting. Ledges that form rocklike benches provide rest stops for quiet meditation. the caves represent a personal magic too: in nature the tiger (Aw Boon Haw) and leopard (Aw Boon Par) needed caves to ensure the security of their territory. At the foot of the mountain, a tiger atop a rock pedestal conspicuously stands guard.

Past this mountain, a series of grottoes retell legends and proverbs. As if on a monk's journey, where truths are to be discovered from nature, these grottoes tucked in the hillside present history and moral lessons for the traveler to digest. Aw Boon Haw's placement of figures in reference to each other exactly matches the stories, but it is the liveliness of the statues' gestures that brings the stories to life and makes their messages pertinent today. Every available inch of land is encrusted with some feature or scene, and the views are infinite in this jam-packed space.

Guarding the neighborhood from the top of the site is the Tiger Pagoda. Until high-rise building were built in Hong Kong in the 1960s, the Tiger Pagoda was one of Hong Kong's tallest structures and a key site. Because the pagoda was so impressive, some have tried to attach special significance to it. Rumors that the pagoda housed a relic of the Buddha or ashes of monks and nuns were popular but untrue.