The Old Summer Palace

Originally built in the Kangxi Period of the Qing Dynasty, the Old Summer Palace is a large imperial palace in China. It is located at Haidian, the western suburbs of Beijing and comprised of the Old Summer Palace, Garden of Everlasting Spring, and Garden of Blossoming Spring with a total area of 350 hectares. Emperor Kangxi named it in person and wrote a tablet for it. Here "Yuan" refers to excellent integrity and ethics of persons surpassing the average persons without any defects, "Ming" refers to outstanding political achievements, perfection and wisdom. Therefore, it can be said that the two Chinese characters "Yuan Ming" is an ideal standard of the ancient Chinese open-minded emperors.

Surrounded by rivers and mountains, the picturesque Old Summer Palace once carried the excellent garden creation art with a history of more than three thousand years in China, and gathered the famous sceneries in nationwide well-known gardens, so it was not only graceful and elegant as a royal building, but also as charming and attractive as the gardens in the south of the lower reaches of the Yangze River. Meanwhile, the Old Summer Palace also blended some architecture with styles in European Revival of Learning era and the Chinese Daoism architectures and perfectly integrates several different architecture styles into one.

The Old Summer Palace was also a comprehensive art treasure and a grand royal museum, because many celebrity calligraphy works, paintings, ancient books, bells and vessels, gold, sliver, jade and other cultural relic were collected and on display here, all of which concentrate China's several thousand years' splendid culture essence.

In the 19th Century, the Old Summer Palace enjoyed a high reputation at home and abroad for its grand scale, splendid building technique, exquisite building scene cluster, abundant culture collection, extensive and profound national culture connotation, and was reputed as "The Demonstration for the Garden Arts" and "The Garden of Gardens".

Unfortunately, the well-known Old Summer Palace was cruelly burnt when the Anglo-French Allied Army invaded Beijing in October 1860, later it suffered numerous destroys and despoliations, and finally it became a ruin. After more than a century, an Old Summer Palace Relic Park was built on the burnt relic, and the beautiful brilliance of the palace in those years can be faintly seen from the existing broken walls. The rise and fall of the Old Summer Palace witnessed the nearly three hundred years of the Chinese history, and the tragedy that it was burnt is a symbol for the humiliation the Chinese nation suffered. Therefore, in a great sense, the present Old Summer Palace Relic Park is a memorial place for reminding the Chinese people of never forgetting the national humiliation.