The Garden of Evening Mists

The Cameron Highlands are Malaysia's cool tea country, a hill station of mist, jungle and terraced estates high in Pahang. A survivor of a wartime Japanese camp comes here to build a garden for her dead sister and instead apprentices to a Japanese gardener, while the Malayan Emergency simmers in the surrounding forest. The map runs from the town of Tanah Rata out across the tea slopes to the mossy summit forest, with the frame narrator's Kuala Lumpur far below.

Teoh Yun Ling

Tanah Rata

Part One

Tanah Rata is the small hill-station town at the heart of the Cameron Highlands, the place travellers pass through on the way up into the tea country. The narrator, a former camp prisoner turned lawyer, arrives in this cool, mist-wrapped upland to pursue the idea of a garden and finds the war has followed her here.

Part One

explicit Tan Twan Eng names Tanah Rata; sited at the town centre of the main Cameron Highlands settlement.

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Teoh Yun Ling

Yugiri, Aritomo's garden

Part One

Yugiri, the Garden of Evening Mists, is the Japanese garden the narrator comes to learn as apprentice to its maker, a gardener once employed by the Emperor of Japan. The garden is fictional but rooted in the real geography of the highlands, tucked among jungle and tea slopes near Tanah Rata, and it becomes the ground on which the whole novel of memory and forgiveness is built.

Part One

inspired by Yugiri, the Japanese garden where the narrator apprentices, is invented. It is set in the highlands near Tanah Rata, beside a fictional tea estate; sited at a representative wooded point in that upland, not a mapped address.

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