Old Summer Palace (圆明园)

Why Go

What Is Left, and Why It Is European

1. The stone arches everyone photographs

The image associated with this site worldwide is a group of carved white stone arches and columns standing in a field. They are the remains of the Western Mansions, a set of European buildings and fountains built in the eastern garden in the middle of the eighteenth century, designed with the involvement of Jesuits at the Qing court: Giuseppe Castiglione, who spent most of his life as a painter for three emperors, and Michel Benoist, who engineered the waterworks.

They were a small part of the complex and they are almost all of what you can see now, for a simple reason. Chinese garden architecture was timber on masonry platforms; European architecture here was cut stone. Fire removed the first entirely and left the second standing in pieces. The ruin field is therefore a very misleading sample of what the garden was.

2. The zodiac heads

Benoist’s fountain at the Haiyantang had twelve bronze animal heads on human bodies, one for each of the Chinese zodiac, each spouting water for two hours of the day so that the group worked as a clock. The heads were taken in 1860 and dispersed.

Their subsequent history is still going on. Several have returned to China by purchase or donation over the past few decades, two were auctioned in Paris in 2009 in a sale that made international news, and several have never been located. The site displays those it has and replicas of the rest, and the account of where each one is forms part of the exhibition.

Orientation

Three Gardens, One Ruin Field

The complex is three linked gardens. The ruin field of the Western Mansions is in the eastern one, Changchun Yuan, and is furthest from the main entrance. If the stone arches are what you came for, use the east gate and buy the separate ticket for that section.

The rest is a large park: lakes, restored bridges, a few reconstructed pavilions, and the excavated foundations of some of the Chinese garden buildings marked out on the ground. A model in the museum shows the original layout, and it is worth ten minutes before walking.

Context

The Sequence, With Dates

Construction began in 1709 and continued for a century and a half. By the middle of the nineteenth century the three gardens covered several square kilometres and functioned as the working residence of the Qing emperors for much of the year, with administration, libraries and collections on site rather than in the walled palace in the city.

In October 1860, during the Second Opium War, British and French forces reached the gardens and looted them over several days. On 18 and 19 October the complex was burned, on the order of Lord Elgin, the British high commissioner, following the deaths of members of a negotiating party taken prisoner earlier. The Summer Palace nearby was also damaged and was later rebuilt; this complex was not.

Further losses followed: damage during the events of 1900, and the removal of cut stone and timber for building through the first half of the twentieth century. The decision in the modern era has been to stabilise and present the site as a ruin rather than to reconstruct it, and that decision is itself part of what visitors are looking at.

What the ruin means is argued about in China and this page does not enter that argument. The dates above are the part that is not in dispute, and they are what a visitor needs in order to read the ground.

Where to Base

Beijing (北京)

The site is in Haidian in the northwest, next to the Summer Palace and within walking distance of Peking and Tsinghua universities. The metro reaches both gates and the district is an easy half day out from the centre.

The pairing that teaches the most is this site in the morning and the Summer Palace in the afternoon: one garden kept as a ruin, one rebuilt twice, two kilometres apart and burned in the same week.