Chengde was built as a summer capital by the Qing court in the eighteenth century, at the point where the road from Beijing enters the hills. The Mountain Resort combines lakes, plains and mountain forest inside one walled landscape; around it the eight outer temples were built in Tibetan, Mongolian and Chinese architectural idioms for the princes and lamas who came to the court. The prefecture reaches north into the Mulan hunting grounds and west to the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall.
Qing emperors left Beijing each summer for a walled valley in Chengde, where a palace, lakes and a grassland were laid out over eighty-nine years. Beyond the wall stand the Outer Temples, built in Tibetan, Chinese and mixed styles for the empire's frontier guests. Together they form one World Heritage property.
Between 1767 and 1771 the Qianlong emperor raised a temple north of his Chengde summer palace, modelled on the Potala in Lhasa. Its red platform, gilded roofs and white terraces were built to mark two imperial birthdays and to receive envoys from the empire's frontiers.
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Puning was finished in 1759, four years after Qing armies defeated the Dzungars. Its halls combine Chinese and Tibetan plans, and its main pavilion holds a gilded wooden Avalokiteshvara assembled from five kinds of timber, 110 tonnes in weight and more than twenty metres high.
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Jinshanling runs 10.5 kilometres along a ridge in Luanping County, Chengde, with five passes, sixty-seven towers and three beacon towers. Ming builders began it in 1570. Its first stretch has been returned to something like its original state; toward Simatai the wall is left to weather.
ReadThe Qing summer palace at Chengde, a walled landscape of lakes, plains and mountain forest with eight outer temples around it.
The 'Little Potala' outside Chengde, built between 1767 and 1771 for the visit of a Torghut leader from the Volga.
An outer temple of 1755 with a huge wooden Guanyin, built after the Qing campaigns in the Dzungar lands.
A restored and partly unrestored Ming wall section on the Luanping ridge, known for dense watchtowers and mountain views.
