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Chinese history
PostMagLong Reads

Beijing’s Old Summer Palace: computer modelling brings back to life imperial garden destroyed by British and French troops

  • Virtual reality has recreated the pinnacle of Chinese imperial garden and palace design
  • Retired Tsinghua University architecture professor says digital recreation restores razed cultural landmark to former glory

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Old Summer Palace ruins, in Beijing, in China. Picture: Steven Ribet
Steven Ribet
In September 1860, during the second opium war, envoys of the British and French expeditionary forces were sent under a flag of truce to negotiate with representatives of the Qing dynasty’s Xianfeng Emperor in Beijing. They were captured and tortured, and 20 of them died. When their battered, unrecognisable bodies were returned two weeks later, the stage was set for the biggest single act of vandalism in modern Chinese history.
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The British high commissioner to China at the time was the 8th Earl of Elgin, after whom one of Hong Kong’s oldest streets is named. His decision regarding the emperor’s principal residence, the “Summer Palace” of Yuan Ming Yuan, was recorded in a dispatch.

“We have dreadful news regarding the fate of some of our captured friends. It is an atrocious crime, and, not for vengeance, but for future security, ought to be severely dealt with,” he wrote. “Having, to the best of my judgment, examined the question in all its bearings, I came to the conclusion that the destruction of Yuen-ming-yuen [sic] was the least objectionable of the several courses open to me.”

Yuan Ming Yuan, meaning “gardens of perfect bright­ness”, was the pinnacle of Chinese imperial garden and palace design. It took untold expense, the highest standard of artistry and 150 years to build. It took 4,000 men three days to burn it down.

“It was a sacrifice of all that was most ancient and most beautiful,” wrote Robert McGhee, a chaplain serving with the British expedition. “A man must be a poet, a painter, an historian, a virtuoso, a Chinese scholar, and I don’t know how many other things besides, to give you even an idea of it, and I am not an approach to any one of them. But whenever I think of beauty and taste, of skill and antiquity, while I live, I shall see before my mind’s eye some scene from those grounds, those palaces, and ever regret the stern but just necessity which laid them to ashes.”

Whatever Elgin’s feelings after the deed was done, he could not have foreseen how the ruins would be used a century-and-a-half after he left them. Some 8km northwest of Beijing’s Forbidden City, the carefully preserved remains in Yuan Ming Yuan’s 3.5 sq km have emerged as a centrepiece in a movement for “patri­otic education”. And in answer to a national debate on whether to rebuild the complex or not, digital technology has been combined with partial restoration in a clever solution.

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