An Oregon couple has donated $2 million to build a performing-arts pavilion on the site of the biggest Chinese garden complex outside Asia, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance near Los Angeles.

The gift from Judy Yin Shih and Joel Axelrod, who used to live near the Southern California site, will fund the Clear and Transcendent Pavilion, a lakeside structure to be built in an undeveloped part of the complex owned by the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

The 105-square-meter pavilion, a traditional Chinese structure, will be "one of the focal points of the garden's cultural life" through presentations of Chinese music, opera and dance, said Lisa Blackburn, spokeswoman for the Huntington Library.

The educational and research institution in San Marino, a small city in Los Angeles County, features galleries of European and American art surrounded by 120 acres (49 hectares) of gardens, including the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, or Liu Fang Yuan.

Shih, a former volunteer docent at Liu Fang Yuan, said she and Axelrod, her husband, wanted to share their good fortune with the community.

"We have always loved music and performing arts, and we wanted to contribute something that combined our mutual interests, our heritage and our desire to make a difference," she said in an interview. "Liu Fang Yuan embodies those elements for us."

Shih was born in Taiwan. Her father immigrated to the United States in the late 1950s and earned a PhD in agronomy and genetics before bringing his wife and two children to the US in 1962. Many of Shih's relatives still live in Shanghai and Shenyang, China. Her last family reunion was in 2004.

"Although I immigrated to the US at the age of 8, my parents were insistent that we speak Mandarin at home and they kept Chinese traditions in our home," she said.

Shih and her brother, both raised in the US, went back to Taiwan for college when their parents also relocated. Her father served as director of the Taiwan Sugar Research Institute for 17 years.

"During that time, we were exposed to more of the richness of Chinese culture," she said.

Shih, who was then working for a research consultancy, and her husband, a partner in a Los Angeles medical group, moved to San Marino in 2005. The busy professionals weren't aware of the city's sizable Chinese community and didn't have much time to spend with their neighbors until Shih retired in 2008.

That was around the time that the first phase of Liu Fang Yuan was being completed - a wooded tract that took up five of the planned garden's 12 acres and was dotted with small pavilions, carved granite bridges and a tea shop, all built by skilled artisans from China. More than 350 local and international donors financed the $18.3 million cost of the first phase, according to Huntington Library officials.

Inspired, Shih decided to volunteer to lead public tours of the garden.

Since the Garden of Flowing Fragrance opened five years ago, Huntington officials have worked with China's Suzhou Institute of Landscape Architecture Design in developing plans for the project's second phase. Work on the performing-arts pavilion, which besides the Shih-Axelrod gift has received more than $3.5 million from donors in the US and China, is tentatively set to begin this fall. Financing is still being sought for construction of a boat-shaped pavilion, a hillside-viewing pavilion and a terraced courtyard.

chenjia@chinadailyusa.com