Yuan Ming Yuan - Garden of Perfect Brightness

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During the first - and only - free day in China during this business trip, I decided to pay a visit to the Old Summer Palace (or Yuan Ming Yuan - Garden of Perfect Brightness). This complex of ruins and lush park is all that is left from the “Garden of gardens” built by six generations of the most prosperous Qing Dynasty emperors from the 17th Century through the 19th Century A.C. It came to an abrupt end in October 1860 when the “civilized” British and French troops under the command of Lord Elgin at the closing of the second Opium War felt compelled to pillage the irreplaceable treasures contained in the magnificent palaces of Chinese and European influence and then systematically blow up and torch whatever was left. The Chinese government decided to preserve the extensive ruins as a “monument to China’s national humiliation”. There is a sense of sadness when you walk through the grounds but I felt that the site is more a monument to one of the worst British and French acts of barbarism in their colonialist history… I wonder if Lord Elgin or his superiors ever paid any price for their deed.

A few contemporary westerners (including French poet Victor Hugo) who had the privilege of seeing this wonder of the World before it was so mindlessly destroyed described the place as one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Evidence of this grandeur is at your feet as you walk through the various sections of the complex. Perhaps the best-preserved ruins are those of the European-style palaces that were built using carved stone materials. The Chinese wooden palaces on the other hand were complete casualties of the looters’ torches and left only the bricked foundations where they stood.

The Opium Wars were initiated by Great Britain in a quest to improve their trade deficit with China. Great Britain forced the Qing Emperor to allow British merchants access to the Chinese market, and to ensure that the balance was in their favor, they forced the Chinese emperor to allow opium trade that was produced massively by the British in India. Not important at all to the British was the fact that Opium consumption was illegal in China and it was creating a serious health and addiction problem among the Chinese, even to the point of poisoning some of them.

Most of Yuan Ming Yuan today is made up of the surviving artificial lakes and hills that were created for each of the one hundred landscapes and palaces that were in place at the height of the complex between 1850 and 1860. I was amazed by the high number of Chinese citizens that enjoy walking through the various areas since facilities are minimalist in areas other than the European Palace Ruins section. Park benches here and there and round Chinese gazebos in some of the hills near the lake are very popular with the visitors . In one of the sides of the European section, there was a complex of three separate galleries that contained paintings and miniatures of each Yuan Ming Yuan section, plus an ongoing TV presentation in a small auditorium in the third of the galleries (The program is in Chinese only!).

I also discovered that some areas of the park merge onto private residential areas and other non-park buildings. I once almost walked onto the backyard of a private residence before I realized that I was outside of the park boundaries. The locals must be used to this sort of intrusions because the house inhabitants did not pay too much attention to me, especially after I turned around and re-traced my steps to exit their property.

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