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History of the Peking Summer Palaces under the Ch’ing Dynasty

Malone, Carroll Browne

"To speak of the "Summer Palaces" of Chinese emperors is to recall the well-known lines of Coleridge: "In Xanadu did Kublai Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea." Xanadu, or Shang Tu, as the Chinese call it, is a forgotten, grass-grown ruin in Mongolia, about two hundred miles north of Peking, for Kublai was a Mongol, and, although he rebuilt and beautified the Peking which his grandfather had destroyed, he loved to spend the summer days in the wide, free world of his ancestors. The Manchus, too, had many parks and forest reserves in which they sought pleasure "far from the madding crowd." One of these was the hunting lodge at Jehol, four days journey northeast of Peking, where massive buildings in imitation of Lhasa's Tibetan lamasery were surrounded by many square miles of woodland. It was there that Chia Ch'ing was killed by lightning and there that Hsien Feng died after being driven by British and French armies from Peking in 1860. To those who have lived in Peking the mention of "Summer Palaces" at once recalls a vision of rare loveliness, the Wan Shou Shan, or Hills of Long Life, the summer home of the great Empress Dowager, Tz'u Hsi, who built it with funds raised ostensibly for the creation of a modern navy: -a placid lake of limpid water, lying at the foot of the Western Hills, high-arched bridges of white marble, beautiful gardens, palaces with roofs of golden-colored tiles, a temple for worship, and a theatre for entertainment. Near this enclosure on the northeast are the ruins of the far-famed Yuan Ming Yuan looted by French and British troops in 1860 and destroyed by the British in reprisal for the torture and murder of prisoners taken under a flag of truce. These two pleasure gardens and others now in ruins are described by Dr. Malone. Today Peking is no longer the capital. To assist us in forgetting its proud past, we are asked to call the place "Peip'ing," one of the many names by which it was known in the centuries gone. The palaces are deserted and emperor and courtiers are fled into obscurity. It is well that there should be preserved some record of the beauty that once delighted the eyes of mighty monarchs. The future historian will be indebted to Dr. Malone for the painstaking labor with which he has collected the information stored in this volume." foreword by Edward Thomas Williams, University of California.

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