The comments on the most-modern ending have been split 50:50 love:hate. My excuse is that the ending is preceded by a warning that it adds nothing to the story.

‘Chose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life’. ( Confucius)

老外 (foreigner) I may be, but is it not the case that residents of the 中国 (Middle Kingdom) make an important distinction between 山水 (shan-shui, mountain-water, landscape) and 园 (yuan, garden)? I think this is similar to the English distinction between garden and landscape. A garden is enclosed and a landscape is unenclosed. I do not think London is the the world capital with the highest landscape/scenic quality. In fact my hometown (Edinburgh) has this quality to a much higher degree than my adopted town.
It is sadly true that London is building many more apartments than houses with private gardens. Many of them are for imigrants who do not have the ingrained love of gardens. Only 45% of Londoners are ‘white British’. However, houses with ever-smaller private gardens continue to be built in large numbers. I guess they are a lower proportion of the new housing than in some other capital cities (Canberra?). I do not think this is affecting the popularity of gardens and my hope is that roof gardens and decently sized balcony gardens will, one day, become the norm in London.

It is good to have healthy competition between cities for the title of World Garden Capital – much better than sporty competitions between hunks of sinew and meat.

Among the advantages London has over Hangzhou are (1) London has many exhibits relating to the first 4000 yeas of garden history in the British Museum (2) London has more houses with private gardens, and garden-mad owners, than Hangzhou. But, having both cycled round the West Lake in Hangzhou and crossed it by boat (the water did not look clean enough to swim it), I can confirm that it is one of the world’s great exemplars of garden and landscape design – much pleasanter than Bejing. I would put it in the same category for scenic and historical importance as the the Domain of Amun, the area outside Florence, Kyoto, Agra, the Dessau-Wörlitz Gartenreich, the Ville of Versailles, what’s left of Isfahan and the area covered by the London Gardens Walk. Kaifeng, I believe, was buried by flood-borne silt, though a later garden exhibition makes it still an interesting place for the garden enthusiast to visit. It remains regrettable that the Song Dynasty was hostile to Buddhism and, in the interest of fairness, I can compare it to the anti-Catholism which survives in sections of the UK (notably Glasgow and Belfast) – and you still can’t be king or queen of Britain if you are a papist (to the regret of Prince Charles, it has to be said).