Summer Palace
— — a long corridor painted with a thousand stories.
Not only on a wall.
“An imperial garden on the edge of Beijing, the size of a small lake district inside a city. Longevity Hill rises from the north shore of Kunming Lake; a covered walkway nearly three quarters of a kilometre long traces the water at its foot, every beam painted with a different scene from Chinese literature and landscape. The Qing court came here to escape the summer heat of the Forbidden City. Visitors still take the long boat across the lake to the marble bridge at the south end, the way the empress did on her birthday. — from the studio
Summer Palace, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Summer Palace, Yiheyuan in Chinese, lies in Haidian District in the north-west of Beijing, about fifteen kilometres from the city centre. The grounds cover roughly 2.9 square kilometres, of which about three quarters is the surface of Kunming Lake. Longevity Hill rises sixty metres above the north shore and carries the principal halls and the Tower of Buddhist Incense. The garden was rebuilt in 1888 by the Empress Dowager Cixi, who diverted naval funds to restore an earlier Qing pleasure ground destroyed by Anglo-French forces in 1860. UNESCO inscribed the Summer Palace as a World Heritage Site in 1998.
The Long Corridor runs 728 metres along the north shore between the Gate of Inviting the Moon and Shizhang Pavilion, carried on 273 sections of painted timber. Each beam and crossbeam carries a different scene, more than 14,000 in total, drawn from classical novels, historical episodes, and landscape painting. At the south end of the lake the seventeen-arch bridge crosses to South Lake Island; on the west bank the marble Qingyan Fang, the Marble Boat, sits where Cixi had it rebuilt as a stone reminder of the navy she had drained.
The east gate is the standard entry, reached by Beijing Metro Line 4 to Beigongmen or Xiyuan station. The park opens around 6:30 in the morning in summer and closes in the early evening; ticketing is split between a park-only ticket and a through-ticket that includes the named halls. Most visitors enter at the east gate, walk west along the Long Corridor to the Marble Boat, climb Longevity Hill for the view across Kunming Lake, then take the dragon boat back across the water to the seventeen-arch bridge.