Summer Palace, Beijing

The Summer Palace is a landscape painting made with water, earth and timber. Almost three-quarters of its 2.9 square kilometres is Kunming Lake, a body of water dug by hand, and the spoil was heaped up to shape Longevity Hill, about 60 metres high, along its northern shore. Halls, pavilions and temples climb the slope in a single composition, so that from the water the hill reads as one great stage set, crowned by the 41-metre Tower of Buddhist Incense, which Qianlong originally planned as a nine-storey pagoda. It is one of the supreme achievements of Chinese garden design: not a palace with a park, but a park in which buildings are placed like brushstrokes to frame views of water, hills and sky.

The gardens were laid out from around 1749 by the Qianlong Emperor, who dedicated them to his mother's sixtieth birthday and named them the Garden of Clear Ripples; they were completed in 1764 at enormous cost. In 1860, during the Second Opium War, British and French troops sacked and burned both this garden and the neighbouring Old Summer Palace. The Empress Dowager Cixi rebuilt the complex from the 1880s and made it her own residence and retreat, and it received its present name, Yiheyuan, the Garden of Preserving Harmony, in 1888. Much of what visitors see today, including the painted galleries, is her reconstruction on Qianlong's plan.

The details reward a long walk. The Long Corridor runs 728 metres along the northern shore between lake and hill, and its beams and ceilings carry more than 14,000 painted scenes of legends, landscapes, birds and figures from classical novels, so that a stroll along it becomes a picture book. West of Longevity Hill sits the Marble Boat, a 36-metre stone pavilion shaped like a ship that never sails, and across the lake the Seventeen-Arch Bridge, 150 metres long, leaps out to a small island. UNESCO inscribed the Summer Palace in 1998 as a masterpiece of Chinese landscape garden design.

Getting there

The Summer Palace lies in Haidian District, in north-western Beijing, about 15 km from the city centre. The simplest approach is Beijing Subway Line 4 to Beigongmen station, next to the north gate of the palace. The nearest airport is Beijing Capital International Airport (PEK), about 29 km away.