Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan)

The burnt-out remains of the Qing imperial garden destroyed by Anglo-French troops in 1860. Substantial ruins, lakes, and the famous Western-Style Mansions stone fragments.

Yuanmingyuan — the Garden of Perfect Brightness — was the principal imperial residence of the Qing emperors from Yongzheng onward, expanded through the 18th century into a complex of three interconnected gardens covering 350 hectares. It was, by the accounts of European missionaries and diplomats who saw it, one of the most elaborate and beautiful landscape gardens ever created: an archipelago of artificial lakes, islands, pavilions, and landscape compositions drawing on Chinese classical garden tradition and, in one corner, on European Baroque architecture.

The European Baroque structures — known as the Western-Style Mansions (Xiyang Lou) — were the most unusual element. Designed by Jesuit architects Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoist for the Emperor Qianlong in the 1740s–60s, they consisted of a series of marble fountains, arcaded galleries, and baroque façades overlaid with Chinese decorative details. Nothing like them existed elsewhere in Asia. In October 1860, during the Second Opium War, a combined British and French force looted and then systematically burned the entire garden complex over several days — an act of deliberate cultural destruction ordered in reprisal for the torture of British prisoners of war. The gardens were never rebuilt; the ruins were subsequently quarried for building materials. The Western-Style Mansions are the only surviving structural remnant, a field of shattered marble columns, fountain basins, and archways that has become the primary image of historical injury in Chinese national consciousness.

The 350-hectare site is now a public park. Most of the lakes, paths, and former island positions are accessible. The Western Mansions ruins require a separate through-ticket and are in the northeastern corner; budget at least an hour there alone. The broader park — walking the causeways, seeing the scale of the former lakes — takes a half-day. The adjacent Summer Palace is a 20-minute walk or short bus ride.