Author: Zhihang Du

My love for Yuanming Imperial Garden (the Old Summer Palace) was absolutely not love at first sight. In fact, it took me 10 years to realize how aesthetically fascinating it is. Unlike other gardens which are showered with constant human care, Yuanming Garden is beautiful because it was once completely destroyed by humans. Now, only partly restored, its terrain, and plants recovering on their own, it tells a story of 300 years, a story of glory, of wars, and of resurrection.

10 years ago, I was in junior high, and I made my way to a nation-wide English speech contest in Beijing. For someone from a small town in Szechwan (southwestern China), going to Beijing means going to the capital, “the big city”, “the heart of the country”. My parents took 10 days off to accompany me. Though the contest was only three days, we planned to spend the rest of the week visiting the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Summer Palaces and eating Pecking Duck, just like any tourists.

Yuanming Garden is known as “the garden of the gardens, the beauty among beauties”, and it was obviously on our must-see list. Before we went to Yuanming Garden, the Old Summer Palace, we first visited the Yihe Garden, the New Summer Palace which was built 50 years later than the Old Summer Palace. New Summer Palace was said to be smaller than the Old Summer Palace, but we were still very impressed by its handsome architecture such as the seventeen-arch bridge made of white marble, and the red and green wooden corridor winding half a mile along a lake. Thus, we supposed that the Old Summer Palace, older, larger, with more lakes and hills, should be even more astonishing. So, like any tourists, on a sunny winter day 10 years ago, we eagerly entered Yuanming Garden for the first time. What we saw totally disappointed us:

Except all the bald grey trees, there was nothing standing on the ground.

Yuanming Garden was built during the peak of Qing Empire, around the early 1700s. 10 miles northwest of the Forbidden City, Yuanming was a space to relax in the summer, when it got hot in the city. In the following century, it was extended into three independent but adjacent gardens by three generations of emperors who built numerous pavilions, waterfalls and lakes on this 865-acre land. The three gardens have different names, but they are usually referred to as one entity and are called the Yuanming Garden. How do they look like? The famous French writer Victor Hugo’s description can be one example:

“Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze and porcelain, frame it with cedar wood, cover it with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there a harem, elsewhere a citadel, put gods there, and monsters, varnish it, enamel it, gild it, paint it, have architects who are poets build the thousand and one dreams of the thousand and one nights, add gardens, basins, gushing water and foam, swans, ibis, peacocks, suppose in a word a sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace, such was this heritage.” (1)

Such an architectural dream did not last long. During the Second Opium War in 1860, Yuanming Garden was ravaged and then burnt by Anglo-French troops. The garden was so large that it took three days and nights to burn it to ashes. In his letter to Captain Butler, Victor Hugo described the troops as “bandits” and “barbarians”. He wrote: “One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned…One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away.” (1)

In the following years, the Chinese emperor tried to reconstruct the Garden, but plagued by war and poverty, the country was no longer able to support such an ambition. The next century was chaos for China. Constant invasions by the Europeans and Japanese as well as civil wars permitted no attention to the Garden. Yuamming gradually degraded into a wasteland.

If Yuanming Garden is a beauty dead long time ago, what we see now is just her skeleton.

Right now, if you go to Yuanming Garden, what you can see is still its skeleton. China decided to learn from Pompeii, and not to rebuild any new architectures but to preserve the archeological sites as they are. So, restoration is mainly on discovering and maintaining the skeleton (or the frame) of the Garden, which are old lakes, streams, hills, docks, trails, and foundations for the buildings.

In the 1960s, after People’s Republic of China was established, there was a debate about whether to use the land of Yuanming Garden for other uses or to maintain it as a historical site. Indeed, part of this vast artificial plain had been turned into a middle school, rice fields, and residence of the farmers: it would be costless to divide it up and give it to local villagers. Luckily, Premier Zhou (first premier of People’s Republic of China) insisted that preserving this site would be beneficial to future generations, even though the country was too poor to really do anything at that time. Since then, no more civil acquisition of the land was permitted, and except the middle school (which already covered the site with concrete buildings), farmlands were gradually moved to other places.

By the time my parents and I went to Yuanming Garden, the lakes had been refilled, and some trails were reestablished. The stone bricks that survived the wars were now fenced (pic. here), which were still quite pretty.

Memories are vague from 10 years later, but I clearly remember one thing about our first visit to Yuanming Garden. After we finally got out of the Garden from a side gate, we sat on rocks by the road and searched our map (which was still printed on paper) for the bus stop. When we stood up from the rocks, I found the “rocks” that we just sat on had in fact huge carvings with delicate patterns on them. It could have been part of an archway or a handrail of a pavilion, but now it stood outside the gate, unnoticed, serving its new purpose as a bench.

Preserving the history is essentially a revival of memory. In the next four blogs, I’ll invite you to walk in my memory of Yuanming Garden in four seasons. In each season, I’ll bring you stories in the Garden’s history as well as my personal experiences of visiting it. If one day you go to Yuanming Garden, please say hi for me and tell it that I have missed it a lot.