A PARADISE LOST: The Imperial Garden Yuanming Yuan
By YOUNG-TSU WONG
Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001. 227 pages, $60 (hardcover), $29.95 (paperback)

John R. Finlay

The story of the Yuanming Yuan, the fabulous Qing-dynasty imperial garden-palace that once lay northwest of Beijing, looms large in the history of Chinese art and architecture as well as the history of China's relations with the West. Looted and burned by British and French troops in 1860, it still casts a long shadow across Chinese politics and popular culture today. Pursuing a long-standing interest, Young-tsu Wong, professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, has written a general study of the Yuanming Yuan, taking advantage of the burgeoning number of recent publications, including archival documents related to the site.
The Yuanming Yuan-the name derives from a Buddhist term and can be translated "Garden of Perfect Brightness"-was by far the largest and most elaborate of all the so-called "summer palaces" of the Qing era. The appearance of the Yuanming Yuan is best documented in the Qianlong-era imperial album Forty Views of the Yuanming Yuan, dated 1744 and currently in the Biblioth¨¨que Nationale, Paris. These forty large-scale paintings (which were part of the French loot from 1860) depict in fine detail a few of the Chinese-style structures in their garden settings, giving us a hint of the magnificent ensemble of buildings surrounded by water, trees, and fantastic rocks. The Yuanming Yuan once contained private imperial residences, pleasure pavilions, pools for goldfish, Buddhist temples, halls for the official functions of government, a military training ground, a vast imperial ancestral shrine, canals and lakes for pleasure boating, a miniature Chinese town where members of the court played at being ordinary citizens, an aviary for rare birds, studios for artists of the Painting Academy working under close imperial supervision, and numerous other amenities for the emperors' private enjoyment. Located within an easy day's journey of the Forbidden City, the Yuanming Yuan was the preferred residence of the Yongzheng (reigned 1723-35), Qianlong (1736-99), Daoguang (1821-50), and Xianfeng (1851-61) emperors.
Construction in the garden and the annexation of adjacent land for more building continued throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Qianlong emperor even added a group of European-style palaces designed by Jesuit missionary-artists serving in the Qing court. In addition to a set of twenty engraved views of these astonishing hybrid rococo-Chinese buildings, there exists a substantial body of photographs of their ruins taken after the destruction of 1860. Remnants of these buildings remain on the Yuanming Yuan site. The interest in this particular area of the garden-palace points to what becomes almost inevitably the central question in studies of the Yuanming Yuan: the role of Europe in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China. Wong's title, A Paradise Lost, signals that for him, as for both Chinese and Western scholars, the destruction of the Yuanming Yuan is the central fact of its history, and the last chapters and the epilogue of A Paradise Lost focus on this.

Chapter 7, "The Sacking," recounts in somewhat confusing detail the events that led to the looting and deliberate burning of the Yuanming Yuan by British and French troops in 1860. The European powers had sent an expeditionary force to Beijing to force the Xianfeng emperor to sign a treaty, but the emperor fled to the summer palace at Chengde, north of the Great Wall. Ignorance, incomprehension, greed, and revenge are the background to the disaster. Wong makes the crucial point that Lord Elgin, the British high commissioner in China and commander of the foreign troops, intended to punish the Xianfeng emperor personally for his perceived failings. (This is the eighth Lord Elgin, son of the man who brought the sculptures from the Parthenon-now known as the Elgin Marbles-to England.) But the Chinese soon perceived the looting and burning of the Yuanming Yuan as a punishment inflicted on the Chinese nation by the Western allies. The political implications of the Yuanming Yuan have undergone several transformations since 1860, but they continue to haunt the Chinese view of the West to the very present.
Chapter 8, "Repairs and Final Blows," and the Epilogue, "The Yuanming Yuan Ruins Park," emphasize, for Western readers, especially, that the ultimately fruitless late-Qing attempts to rebuild what had been tragically lost have become a potent image for China's often bitter relations with the West in the nineteenth century. (Construction did continue, however, at the Yihe Yuan, the Summer Palace familiar to modern visitors to China, which lies to the west of the Yuanming Yuan site.) Modern plans to rebuild the Yuanming Yuan-given contemporary economic and cultural realities-provide a cautionary tale for everyone concerned with museums and cultural or historical sites.
Unfortunately, A Paradise Lost is marred by errors, which the editors certainly should have caught before putting the book into print. The text is too often redundant or disorganized, and there are typos and mistakes of grammar, as well as a number of misspelled names. Combined with the all too frequently inaccurate citations of sources, these errors remind the reader to approach the book with caution. Nevertheless, Professor Wong's study contains much of value, including an extensive bibliography. If nothing else, his work points to the many avenues of research on the Yuanming Yuan that may be fruitfully explored in the future.

John R. Finlay is curator of Chinese art at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida.