Yuanmingyuan Beyond the Stone Ruins: The Right Gate, the Lost Garden and a Route That Fits the Scale

قراءة مقطع تمثيلي

The Old Summer Palace, better known in China as Yuanmingyuan（圆明园）, is an enormous archaeological landscape in Beijing（北京）, not a ruined palace surrounded by a compact garden. It is made from three connected imperial gardens: the Garden of Perfect Brightness（圆明园）, the Garden of Eternal Spring（长春园） and the Garden of Elegant Spring（绮春园）. At its height, the complex contained hundreds of halls, islands, waterways, pavilions and garden scenes. Most of its timber architecture disappeared after the Anglo-French destruction of 1860 and later decades of looting, salvage and neglect. What remains is a mixture of foundations, waterways, reconstructed planting, surviving religious buildings, stone fragments and a small concentration of European-style masonry.