BEIJING, Sunday. I’ve managed to squeeze in three visits to the Yuanmingyuan while I’ve been in Beijing. The Yuanmingyuan was the garden complex where the Chinese emperor spent most of his time. It was a sort of amusement park filled with temples, pagodas, palaces, libraries, lakes, labyrinths, trees, flowers and rockeries. It was also the place where the emperor stored the precious gifts he received as tributes from visiting foreigners. The Yuanmingyuan was “the garden of gardens,” it was a vision of paradise, the best of what Chinese culture could produce. In 1860, French and English troops first looted the place and then burned it all down. I want to understand why.
There are fairly straight-forward answers to this question but also more subtle ones. Most generally put, the question becomes why Europeans ended up behaving like barbarians when their stated aim was to “civilize” the Chinese. There is a close parallel here to the recent Iraq War — and a lot of other wars fought by Europeans and their North American cousins. The Europeans want to save the poor from themselves. Too bad they first have to kill them.
The basic outline of the Yuanmingyuan is still there — the lakes, the canals and the paths — but there are next to no traces of the Chinese buildings. They only ruins are from the Versaille-style palace built for the Emperor by three Jesuit priests in the 18th century. Befittingly, the remains of the European-style building still reminds all visitors of what happened in this place some 150 years ago.
Despite this sad history, the Yuanmingyuan is a delightful place. Chinese people come here in droves to sit on blankets, eat lunch boxes and look at the lotuses that bloom in every lake. It is actually easy to imagine what it must have been like to wander around the garden at the time of its glory.
Anyway, here are some more photos.