A lake held against a hill

Lake and hill as the frame About 10 kilometres northwest of Beijing, in Haidian, the Summer Palace uses two older facts of the land. Kunming Lake had been a reservoir of the Yuan capital. Longevity Hill rises on that water. Between 1750 and 1764 the Qing emperor Qianlong conceived a garden here and called it the Garden of Clear Ripples. Halls and pavilions for administration, residence, worship and pleasure sit inside one landscape of lake and mountain. The listed property is 297 hectares. The page’s point is 39°59′49″ N, 116°16′4.9″ E. The municipal culture bureau’s list places the scenic area in Haidian.

Ruined, then rebuilt on the same ground The short description says the garden was first built in 1750, largely destroyed in the war of 1860, and restored on its original foundations in 1886. The brief synthesis tells the same injury in different words: destroyed during the Second Opium War of the 1850s, then reconstructed by the Guangxu emperor for the Empress Dowager Cixi and given the name Summer Palace. It was damaged again in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, restored once more, and has been a public park since 1924. A Japanese paragraph on the same page gives 1869. That year is not used here. The English sentences are the ones that date the loss and the return.

Islands, one bridge, six more Kunming Lake holds three large islands, the garden’s version of a symbolic mountain set in water. The southern island meets the East Dike on the Seventeen Arch Bridge. Along the West Dike, six bridges use different styles. On the north side of Longevity Hill stand temples in Han and Tibetan forms, and the garden continues to the Garden of Harmonious Pleasure at the north-east. The State Council listed the Summer Palace among the first National Priority Protected Sites on 4 March 1961. UNESCO inscribed it in 1998 under criteria (i), (ii) and (iii). It is a place to be in, on the water and on the hill, not a second Forbidden City.