It was built between 1986-1988 by Gutteridge Haskins & Davey, the Darling Harbour Authority, Imperial Gardens, Leightons, and Australian Native Landscapes.

[1] The land that would become the Chinese Garden of Friendship is in Cockle Bay and was progressively reclaimed and industrialised from the early years of the 19th century.

Industries included ship building and repairs around the edges of the water, while further inland predominant uses were engineering workshops, metal foundries and food milling factories.

[1] The Landscape Section of NSW Public Works, Government Architect's Branch, was directly involved in development and construction of the garden.

Tsang and the local Chinese community were able to secure from Wran a site adjacent to Chinatown in Haymarket and helped facilitate an intergovernmental relationship between the Province of Guangdong and State of New South Wales to jointly fund, design and construct the new garden.

[1] The relationship between Sydney and Guangzhou (historically called Canton in English), the capital of Guangdong province, is particularly strong because of trade and migration since the earliest days of colonisation.

[1] There is considerable documentation of the challenges with building the garden, from the initial Cantonese concept drawings, their conversion into Australian-style construction drawings, sourcing local trades people with the skills to undertake very unusual construction methodologies, finding suitable local building materials, importing special materials from China such as artworks, furniture, tiles and feature rocks, and the politics of Chinese working on the site within the strict union rules and regulations of the time.

[1] The garden is a designed landscape largely enclosed by a masonry wall, covering 1.03 hectares (3 acres) in area.

[1] Garden typologies created over the last thousand years from the Song to the Qin dynasty demonstrate many historical, philosophical and regional variations.

A 2004 feng shui assessment of the garden considered it as a reflection of these design principles and as an embodiment of the five elemental relationships between water, earth, air, wood and steel.

[1] This process of "translation", in which a Southern-style garden was recontextualised in the setting of the new Darling Harbour development, brought together a unique fusion of Cantonese and Sydneysider styles, materials, artisanship and horticultural practices.

The qi line has been marked since 2017 by a bronze strip across the stage in Tumbalong Park symbolically linking the garden with the parkland and the waters of Darling Harbour.

[1] The garden is host to a colony of Eastern water dragons (Physignathus lesueurii), a species of lizard endemic to south-eastern Australia.

[1] All traditional furniture pieces are a gift from Guangdong, while the recent addition of a display cabinet in the Water Pavilion was designed and built in New South Wales.

The waterfall rockwork is sprayed concrete over a wire formwork, similar to the technique used in the artificial grottoes in the animal enclosures at Taronga Zoo, Mosman.

[1] All general landscape rock is water-weathered fossiliferous limestone from an ancient river bed, excavated from Cumnock Station, in Cabonne Shire, NSW Central West.

[1] The Dragon Wall is a double sided, free-standing screen made of glazed terracotta from China, commissioned specifically for this garden and a gift from the government of Guangdong.

[4] Although many features of the gardens were changed or covered up as the movie was set in Japan – removal of all Chinese calligraphy and dragon motifs and a temporary pavilion built in the centre of the lake.

The collection's cross-cultural significance is enhanced by geometric timber tracery screens and open-sided pavilions copied from historic Sydney models as a conscious expression of Chinoiserie.

[1] The garden is a unifying element tying the larger scale of the new Darling Harbour and older, more intimate spaces of Haymarket's streets and lanes.

The garden provides continuity to a landscape rooted in the ever-more sophisticated Haymarket Chinatown of which it is now a distinct quarter.

It represents the successful collaboration of Cantonese and Sydney designers, technicians and tradesmen and the transfer of traditional skills and techniques.