Of course, it is not as a satirist, an aesthetician of landscape, or even as a masquerading orientalist that Sir William Chambers (1723-96) has been best known in his time and since: with Robert Adam, he led the British architectural profession virtually from the time he undertook his first commissions around 1757. The two buildings for which he is justly best remembered are the Chinese Pagoda at Kew Gardens and Somerset House, between London's Strand and Waterloo Bridge. Yet from that solid Palladian structure now housing the General Register Office it takes more than the dozen miles up Thames to reach the pagoda which in 1762 reared its eighty bright wing-displaying dragons on ten successive roofs, and from the height of fifty meters flashed its glazed tiles across suburbia. Chambers developed simultaneously and maintained through his career two contrasted sensibilities. The dignified town house he designed for his family in 1764 fronted Berners Street with a massive rusticated doorway, yet had interior chimney-pieces and a rear elevation modelled in "fanciful" papier-mache which his biographer John Harris supposes was painted and varnished chinoiserie. He made his way to the top of his profession and earned royal recognition through tectonic skills that absorbed him with Somerset House, for instance, during the last two decades of his life. But as early as 1752 he had ventured the striking practice--standard by the century's end through his pioneering and Adam's--of drawing elevations of a building proposed as it would appear if already conditioned by time, decaying and overgrown by vegetation.[2] Deciding what to make of his three publications on Chinese gardens will not be eased by polarizing his sources of inspiration or consigning his life into stretches during which the dominant interest was product or process, structure or affect. Here is no schizoid or frustrated Pre-Romantic--a Chatterton who somehow survived his suicide attempt to edit copy for the _Gentleman's Magazine_--but a consummate professional.[3] The mythic "Cina" of which this "Discourse" was Chambers' latest account grew and changed with him from his first-hand experience of Canton at the age of twenty, through his architectural training in Paris and Rome, and throughout his practice and success as the Establishment architect of his age in England.