Garden touring-space representations in classical Chinese literature

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Classical Chinese literature preserves experiential evidence of how gardens were entered, traversed, paused in and viewed. We analysed 360,091 Tang–Qing works and 428,912 work–term relations for twelve architectural terms. DeepSeek-V4-Flash classified all relations; the researcher adjudicated 43,807 boundary cases, while two 20,000-record audits achieved 98.38% and 99.13% agreement. The final dataset contained 185,894 valid relations. Viewing interfaces were semantically most stable. Co-occurrence and action patterns linked windows and balustrades to the conversion of movement into viewing, corridors, steps and bridges to traversal, and fang to shore–water transitions. Several raw diachronic differences weakened or reversed after adjustment for term and genre. We therefore model waterborne touring as a node–interface–mobile-platform–textual-memory continuum and outline applications to heritage interpretation, route planning and evidence registration.</p>