Old Summer Palace
— — the ruin the empire left where the palace had been.
Not only on a wall.
“The Yuanmingyuan, the Garden of Perfect Brightness, stood northwest of Beijing for a hundred and fifty years as the chief residence of the Qing emperors. Anglo-French forces sacked and set fire to it in October 1860 at the end of the Second Opium War. The ruins of the European-style stone pavilions, designed under the Qianlong Emperor in the eighteenth century, still stand in the park where the wood-and-tile halls have not.
Old 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 Yuanmingyuan covers about 350 hectares in Beijing's Haidian District, north of the Tsinghua and Peking university campuses and east of the surviving Summer Palace at Yiheyuan. It is laid out as three interconnected gardens, Yuanmingyuan proper, Changchunyuan, and Qichunyuan, with lakes, canals, and artificial hills. The site was developed from 1707 under the Kangxi Emperor and expanded through the eighteenth century under Yongzheng and Qianlong. It operated as the main court of the Qing emperors for much of the year, with the Forbidden City reserved for ceremony.
The Xiyang Lou, or Western Mansions, is the surviving fragment most photographed today. The complex of European-style stone pavilions and fountains was designed by the Jesuit court artists Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoist for the Qianlong Emperor between 1747 and 1783, in a Baroque idiom adapted to Chinese siting. Almost all the wood and lacquered halls of the gardens were lost in the 1860 sack. The carved marble façades of the Xiyang Lou, of harder Western stone, were left as ruins and have been deliberately preserved in that state since the 1980s as a national memorial.
On 18 October 1860, under the orders of Lord Elgin, British and French troops looted and set fire to the Yuanmingyuan over three days at the end of the Second Opium War. The Qing court under the Xianfeng Emperor had already fled to the summer palace at Chengde. An estimated 1.5 million objects were carried off, many now held in European and North American collections. The site was reopened as a public park in 1988 and remains, in Chinese public memory, a marker of the century of humiliation.