YuanMingYuan
(Old Summer Palace)

The Old Summer Palace is often associated with the european-style palaces (Xi Yang Lou) that were built of stone. The designers of those structures, the Jesuits Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoist, were employed by Emperor QianLong to satisfy his taste for exotic buildings and objects.

Sometimes, visitors unfamiliar with the former layout of the Old Summer Palace are misled to believe that it consisted primarily of European-style palaces. In fact, the area of the Imperial Gardens at the back of the Eternal Spring garden where the European-style buildings were located was extremely small compared to the overall area of the gardens.

More than 95% of the Imperial Gardens were made up of essentially Chinese-style buildings. There were also a few buildings in Tibetan and Mongolian styles, reflecting the diversity of the Qing Empire.

In 1860, during the Second Opium War, the British and French expeditionary forces looted the Old Summer Palace. Later, on October 18, 1860, the British general Elgin - with protestations from the French (who in fact began the looting) - gave the order to set fire to the huge complex which burned to the ground.

It took 3,500 British troops to set the entire place ablaze and it took three whole days to burn. General Elgin, later Lord Elgin (James Bruce 1811-1863), was the son of the famous British lover of Greek art who stole the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon in Athens.

Empress dowager CiXi later built YiHeYuan (Garden of Nurtured Harmony), a new Summer Palace, near the Old Summer Palace, but on a smaller scale than the Old Summer Palace.

Only the european-style palaces survived the fire because, unlike the Chinese-style structures, they were made of stone. Some stone ruins still stand on the site today. This is maybe why unknowing visitors sometimes wrongly assume that the Old Summer Palace consisted only of european-style buildings.

A few chinese-style buildings in the outlying Elegant Spring Garden also survived the fire. The imperial court restored these buildings and tried to rebuild the whole complex of the Imperial Gardens, but it was impossible to muster the money and resources for such an immense task due to the difficult situation of China at the time.

However, in 1900, whatever buildings had partly survived or been restored were burnt for good by the Western expeditionary forces sent to quell the Boxer Rebellion. Many priceless artifacts were plundered and made their way to museums and private collections in Europe.

The ruins were further plundered by the warlords of the early republican period and further destruction of the ruins took place during the Cutural Revolution. After all this destruction, what was left was truely just an empty shell.

Most of the site was left abandoned and used by local farmers as agricultural land. In 1977, the Beijing Municipal government established a committee to oversee a renovation and in the early 1980s the site was reclaimed by the Chinese government. In 1984, half a million cubic meters of water was diverted from the Miyun Reservoir into the renewed FuHai Lake.

Under the order of Premier Zhou Enlai, YuanMingYuan became a park to remind the Chinese and the world of the destruction wrought by European colonial powers to a harmless and priceless cultural entity that rightly belongs to all mankind.