“…a masterpiece of Chinese landscape garden design.” UNESCO
The Summer Palace is an imperial complex of gardens and lakes covering an area of 290 hectares on a site that dates back to the Jin dynasty (1115–1234) which took advantage of a natural spring. In 1291 it was dug out into a reservoir named the Kunming Lake. However it was not until 1749 under Emperor Qianlong that the current incarnation began to take shape. He drew inspiration for his Garden of Clear Ripples (as it was called in his day) from imperial visits to southern China. A hundred thousand workers further expanded the lake to imitate the West Lake of Hangzhou. Excavated earth was stacked on an existing hill to form Longevity Hill in celebration of the emperor’s mother’s 60th birthday. Its south face is dominated by the Tower of Buddhist Fragrance. A covered, wooden promenade was also added along the lake’s northern shore. This 700 meter Long Corridor is adorned with over ten thousand paintings depicting scenes from Chinese literature and history.
Much of the palace was destroyed by foreign troops during an invasion of 1860, but re-built under the direction of the Empress Dowager Cixi in the late-nineteenth century. It was raised to the ground and rebuilt again in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion, becoming a haven for the Empress, to escape Beijing’s oppressive summer heat.
At the main eastern entrance lies the Hall of Benevolence and Longevity where the empress would receive officials. The hall connects directly with three main residential complexes occupied by the empress and her nephew Guangxu. Much of the Palace grounds were given over to ‘recreation’. On the north of Longevity Hill a reproduction ‘Suzhou Market Street’ was built so Qianlong and later the empress could ‘play shop’, bargaining with courtiers dressed as merchants. A giant unsinkable marble boat takes pride of place at the western end of the long corridor. The structure which is “neither marble nor a boat,” is a traditional recreational fixture in some Chinese gardens and intended as an aide-mémoire for rulers. A Tang dynasty official once pointed out to the emperor that water could float a boat and also capsize it – the emperor was the boat and the people the water. The palace fell into disrepair after the 1911 revolution only to be resurrected to its former glory in the 1980s. In 1998 it became a World Heritage site, marking the zenith of Chinese imperial landscape gardening.