In the last few years of his life, Tong Jun suffered from a cancer relapse, and this left him in despair as it meant he could not complete the work he had set out to do, says his grandson.

Tong Jun and his aesthetic analysis of classical Chinese gardens influenced many important architects.

According to Wang Shu, China's first Pritzker Architecture Prize winner (widely considered the Nobel Prize for architecture), Tong Jun's argument that "taste, be it emphasized, counts here much more than mere know-how", and that's a key point in his own architectural theory. Wang says, inspired by Tong Jun, he was able to break the boundary between architecture and gardens in his designs.