Chengde Mountain Resort and the Temples Beyond Its Wall

The first thing the Chengde Mountain Resort asks a visitor to accept is a wall. It runs about ten kilometres around the compound and stands three metres high, and people call it the small Great Wall because it is shaped like the frontier line to the north. Inside, the ground falls into lakes, opens into grassland, then rises into wooded hills.

The main gate is Lizhengmen, built in 1754. Above the doorway the name is cut in five scripts: Chinese, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan and Uyghur. It was the first of the thirty-six views that the Qianlong emperor named.

Beyond the gate lies the palace zone, planned as a smaller echo of the Forbidden City in Beijing. A court in front received high officials, noblemen from the frontier and foreign envoys; the living quarters stood behind. The emperor's bedchamber, the Hall of Tranquil Waves and Refreshing Air, was built in 1711 and named by the Kangxi emperor for its height and for the air that moved off the water.

West and north of the palace, the garden takes over. The lake area borrows its buildings from gardens in the south, among them the Tower of Mist and Rain on Green Lotus Island, modelled on a tower beside Nanhu Lake at Jiaxing in Zhejiang. The plain is laid out like Mongolian grassland. The hills hold a stone pagoda seventy metres tall, finished in 1751, octagonal at the base, nine storeys of glazed tile beneath a gilded spire.

Construction began in 1703, the forty-second year of the Kangxi reign, and the resort was already usable by 1708. In 1711 Kangxi gave it the name it still carries and wrote the name board himself. Work went on under Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong and was largely finished in 1792: eighty-nine years, a compound of 5.6 square kilometres, more than 120 groups of buildings and over 100,000 square metres of floor space. It covers nearly half of Chengde's urban area.

The court moved here every year. The emperors usually arrived in the fourth or fifth lunar month and returned to Beijing in the ninth or tenth. For those months the resort was a second political centre, where frontier leaders, Buddhist hierarchs and foreign envoys were received. Kangxi spent twelve summers in the bedchamber; Qianlong spent fifty-two.

The temples outside the wall belonged to the same arrangement. Twelve were built around the resort; eight stand in the hills to the north and north-east, which is why the group is called the Eight Outer Temples even though the count is larger. Four more lie east of the Wulie River. All but two, founded under Kangxi, date from Qianlong's reign. The Lifan Yuan, the office that handled relations with Mongol and Tibetan subjects, administered them.

The contrast was deliberate. Inside the wall the buildings are plain and quiet; outside, the temples are gilded. In 1994 palace, gardens and temples were inscribed together as one World Heritage property.

The Hall of Tranquil Waves and Refreshing Air is the room most visitors remember, though not for its decoration. The Jiaqing emperor died there in September 1820. In October 1860 the Xianfeng emperor signed the Beijing Convention in its western wing; a stone outside the hall now marks the event as a national humiliation. He died in the same building in August 1861. Two imperial deaths and one treaty in a summer bedroom.

The larger argument the site makes is about landscape. The south-east of the compound is mostly water, the north-west mostly mountain, and between them lie grassland and forest, so that the garden holds the range of terrains the Qing state governed. That reading explains why the lakes imitate Jiangnan, why the plain looks like steppe and why the hills are left wooded.

It is a national key cultural relic protection unit, and Chengde is one of the first twenty-four historic cities named in China. In 2018 the frozen lake inside the wall held the Women's Bandy World Championship, a use that a garden of this size can absorb without changing its shape.

Conservation runs on two clocks. The palace zone is timber, tile and paint; the temples outside are gilding, plaster and glazed tile. Both belong to one World Heritage property, but the work is not the same work: a garden is kept in use, a temple is kept in repair. The wall around both is the plainest structure on the site and the one that sets its limits.