Mention the Yuanmingyuan and most people picture the same thing: the European-style stone facades that once stood along its edge, and the bronze zodiac animal heads looted from its fountains and scattered across foreign collections ever since. Few know that the old Summer Palace, a royal residence considered on par with the Forbidden City itself, was in fact 98 percent Chinese in its architecture and gardens. For five generations of Qing emperors, from Yongzheng to Xianfeng, it was where the business of governing, the life of the family, and the calendar of court festivals actually took place — a garden built, in effect, to hold everything the throne understood about the world.
This past March, the Hong Kong Palace Museum opened an unusual exhibition devoted to the Yuanmingyuan: "The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Imperial Garden Life in the Qing Dynasty." It set out to recover the Chinese garden aesthetic that has been overshadowed for so long by the ruins' European facades, and to do it by focusing on people — the everyday, and often surprising, lives that several generations of emperors led inside the garden's walls. We went to see the show and spoke about it with Dr. Louis Ng Chi-wa, Museum Director of the Hong Kong Palace Museum, and Dr. Yang Xu, Associate Curator and the exhibition's curator.
Contributing writer: Huang Xirui. Editor: Deng Kaili. [Installation view, "The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Imperial Garden Life in the Qing Dynasty," Hong Kong Palace Museum, 2024.] Walk into the galleries and the first thing you see is the show's own subtitle — Garden Life — spelled out on the wall, four characters that announce exactly what kind of exhibition this is going to be: one built around people. It gathers 104 major objects — paintings, calligraphy, architectural drawings, scale models known as tangyang, seals, decorative objects — and rounds them out with a multimedia reconstruction of the garden in its entirety. Many of the pieces trace back to four emperors: Yongzheng, Qianlong, Jiaqing, and Daoguang.
These were men who spent much of their lives inside the garden's walls — some were born there, grew up there, and eventually died there too. It's the family stories embedded in the place, as much as the art itself, that have drawn crowds to the show.
[Installation view, "The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Imperial Garden Life in the Qing Dynasty," Hong Kong Palace Museum, 2024. Image courtesy of the Hong Kong Palace Museum.] [The Yongzheng Emperor Enjoying Flowers at the Peony Terrace, Yongzheng reign (1723–1735), Qing dynasty, collection of the Palace Museum. Image courtesy of the Hong Kong Palace Museum.] "One of the stories in the show touches on something historians of the Qing have argued over for a long time," Yang Xu told us. "In the sixty-first year of the Kangxi reign, 1722 — the last spring of Kangxi's life — the emperor accepted an invitation from his fourth son, Prince Yong, who would later become the Yongzheng Emperor, to come view the flowers at Yuanmingyuan. The banquet was held at the Peony Terrace.
It was there that Kangxi met his grandson Hongli for the first time. The boy was still in his teens, and Kangxi took to him immediately, deciding to keep him close by his side," the curator told us. Kangxi had only a few months left to live, and those weeks with his grandson turned out to be among the last, and most treasured, of his life. A story later took hold — that Kangxi's fondness for Hongli was the real reason he passed the throne to the boy's father, Yongzheng.
[The Yongzheng Emperor Enjoying Flowers at the Peony Terrace (detail), Yongzheng reign (1723–1735), Qing dynasty, collection of the Palace Museum.] "The story is recorded in this painting," Yang said. "The figure seated at the center, already emperor by the time the painting was made, is Yongzheng. Some scholars believe the boy to his right, dressed in yellow with a gold sash at his waist, is Hongli." Kangxi himself is nowhere in the picture — and yet, Yang pointed out, the whole composition is really a coded reference to that meeting at the Peony Terrace.
By the time Hongli took the throne as the Qianlong Emperor, he renamed the hall at the Peony Terrace Jienyantang, the Hall of Gratitude for Imperial Favor, in memory of his grandfather. [Seal with entwined-dragon knob, "Seal of the Hall of Gratitude for Imperial Favor," Qianlong reign, Qing dynasty, private collection. Image courtesy of the Hong Kong Palace Museum.] This white jade seal on view, along with a run of calligraphy on the same theme, keeps that grandfather-and-grandson story alive. The largest painting in the show, meanwhile, is a portrait titled Consorts of the Qianlong Emperor with Yongyan.
In it, a small boy in red reaches out one hand; beside him a woman in blue court robes rests her hand gently at his side — likely his foster mother — a tender scene of maternal closeness that's rare to find in court painting. [Consorts of the Qianlong Emperor with Yongyan, Qianlong reign, Qing dynasty, collection of the Palace Museum. Image courtesy of the Hong Kong Palace Museum.] [Detail, same painting.] "That's the future Jiaqing Emperor as a child, maybe four or five years old," Yang said. "He was the first emperor actually born at Yuanmingyuan — his birthplace was the Nine Continents in Peaceful Repose, a complex within the garden — and he spent his childhood at the Hall of Five Blessings.
The woman is thought to be Consort Qing. The painting has a pronounced sense of perspective, which suggests a European court painter had a hand in it, bringing with him the vanishing-point techniques of classical Western painting," Yang told us. Unlike the hanging scrolls most visitors expect, mounted with rollers top and bottom, this one lies flat, as though pasted directly onto a wall.
"That's because the painting was originally a tieluo — a work made to be pasted straight onto an interior wall as decoration," Yang explained. "It's kept that original format rather than being remounted as a hanging scroll," which lets visitors see it much as it once hung, on the wall of the Siyong Studio in the Garden of Eternal Spring.
[Installation views, "The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Imperial Garden Life in the Qing Dynasty," Hong Kong Palace Museum, 2024. Images courtesy of the Hong Kong Palace Museum.] "The Daoguang Emperor loved living at Yuanmingyuan more than any other emperor," Yang said, laughing. "Records show he spent an average of more than 260 days a year there. In the thirtieth year of his reign, that figure reached 354 days — he barely went back to the Forbidden City at all. Yuanmingyuan was, essentially, his home."
[Joy Overflowing the Autumn Courtyard (detail), He Shikui (d. c. 1844), Daoguang years 13–14 (1833–1834), Qing dynasty, collection of the Palace Museum.] Which is why the painting on view here, Joy Overflowing the Autumn Courtyard, shows a court painter's rendering of Daoguang's family enjoying exactly that kind of domestic life inside the garden.
"Seated in the center is the Daoguang Emperor, with his consorts and children around him," Yang said, pointing out the figures one by one. "The boy in blue is the future Xianfeng Emperor. The one in brownish red is the sixth prince, who would later become Prince Gong." [Detail, Joy Overflowing the Autumn Courtyard, He Shikui (d. c. 1844), Daoguang years 13–14 (1833–1834), Qing dynasty, collection of the Palace Museum.] Daoguang, the story goes, was fond enough of this particular painting that he inscribed its title himself — the four characters for "joy," "overflowing," "autumn," "courtyard" in the upper left — a way of putting his own domestic happiness into words.
Beside the inscription is his seal, "Treasure of the Hall of Prudent Virtue" — Shendetang, his private residence at Yuanmingyuan, and also the room in which he eventually died. In a real sense, the garden held the entirety of Daoguang's life, beginning to end. [Joy Overflowing the Autumn Courtyard, He Shikui (d. c. 1844), Daoguang years 13–14 (1833–1834), Qing dynasty, collection of the Palace Museum. Image courtesy of the Hong Kong Palace Museum.] Look closely at the painting and you can still make out creases running through the paper.
"According to the archives, when Yuanmingyuan was sacked in 1860, this painting was looted and lost somewhere along the way out. It later turned up and was reported to Prince Gong — by then grown, the same boy in brownish red in the painting. He rushed to Changping to recover it, and had it sent back to the Shouhuang Hall in Beijing for safekeeping. That's the only reason we can still see this work today," Yang told us.
[Installation view; Eight Poems on the Lion Grove Garden, Qianlong reign, Qing dynasty. Installation views, "The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Imperial Garden Life in the Qing Dynasty," Hong Kong Palace Museum, 2024. Images courtesy of the Hong Kong Palace Museum.] Visitors to the Yuanmingyuan ruins in Beijing today can still find a stone tablet standing where it always has, carved with three characters — Shizilin, the Lion Grove — in Qianlong's own hand.
A fair number of visitors have probably wondered about this: isn't the Lion Grove Garden in Suzhou? What is it doing at Yuanmingyuan, more than a thousand kilometers to the north? The story behind it turns out to be worth telling.
"The Qianlong Emperor built a replica of Suzhou's Lion Grove Garden inside the Garden of Eternal Spring, an annex of Yuanmingyuan," Yang told us. Not long after taking the throne, Qianlong had acquired a painting attributed to the Yuan-dynasty artist Ni Zan, titled Lion Grove Garden. He prized it enough that he spent years hoping to track down the actual garden it depicted. [Lion Grove Garden (details), attributed to Ni Zan, from the Qianlong-era imperial collection. Images courtesy of the Hong Kong Palace Museum.] The search paid off: on his second tour of the south, he found the real Lion Grove Garden in Suzhou, proof it wasn't only a painted fiction.
From then on, Qianlong visited the Suzhou garden on every one of his southern tours, and in the thirty-seventh year of his reign he had it reproduced in the northeast corner of the Garden of Eternal Spring.
"The eastern half of the Lion Grove is dense with rockery — it's one of the largest stone assemblages anywhere across the three gardens that made up Yuanmingyuan. Even now, at the ruins in Beijing, you can still see how much stone is there," Yang said.
[Installation view. Boating on West Lake on a Clear Day, Qian Weicheng (1720–1772), c. Qianlong 30th year (1765), Qing dynasty, collection of the Palace Museum. Images courtesy of the Hong Kong Palace Museum.] Most of the surviving architectural plans of Yuanmingyuan that exist today date from the late Qing, drawn up during the Tongzhi reign, when the court was weighing whether to rebuild the garden after its destruction.
Drawings from the mid-Qing, and especially from the Qianlong reign itself, are exceedingly rare. [Architectural plans and scale models of Yuanmingyuan. Installation view, "The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Imperial Garden Life in the Qing Dynasty," Hong Kong Palace Museum, 2024.] Which is what makes the show's centerpiece so remarkable: the earliest known general plan of the entire garden, on public view for the first time, completed around the forty-fourth year of Qianlong's reign. Look closely and the sheet is covered in corrections — some lines painted out with white powder, others patched over with small paper overlays, including one right at the center, over the Nine Continents in Peaceful Repose complex, where a newer layout has been pasted directly on top of the old. The whole document has the worn, handled look of something consulted and revised again and again.
"This plan was in continuous use from the mid-1770s or so all the way into the Daoguang reign — more than fifty years," Yang told us. "Every time Yuanmingyuan needed to be altered, the palace's own design office, the Yangshifang, would go back and mark up this same sheet, either painting over it or pasting on a patch. It looks like a single drawing, but it actually recorded half a century of continuous change." [The Qianlong Emperor at Leisure, Qianlong reign, Qing dynasty, collection of the Palace Museum. Installation view.] The section revised most often, the Nine Continents in Peaceful Repose, was also the earliest part of the garden to be built, and the site of the imperial bedchambers for generations of emperors and empresses.
A painting that hasn't been exhibited in years, Zhang Tingyan's The Qianlong Emperor at Leisure, captures exactly that landscape as it looked during the Qianlong reign.
"It's rarely been shown before. Old photographs show it as a single unmounted sheet, a tieluo like the others — but for this exhibition it's been remounted as a hanging scroll," Yang said.
[Installation views, "The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Imperial Garden Life in the Qing Dynasty," Hong Kong Palace Museum, 2024. Architectural ornament, Qianlong years 12–48 (1747–1783), Qing dynasty. Images courtesy of the Hong Kong Palace Museum.] Also on view for the first time are three glazed ceramic fragments excavated from the ruins of the Xiyanglou, the "Western Mansions," in the Garden of Eternal Spring.
Their yellow, jade green, and sky blue glazes are still vivid enough that it's easy to picture how brilliant they must have looked when new.
"These fragments were originally set into the surface of the Xiyanglou buildings," Yang added. "When people visit the ruins today, all they see is bare white marble, and a lot of visitors assume that's how it always looked. In fact the facades were covered in color — a great deal of glazed tile just like this." The technique itself, she noted, wasn't European in origin at all; it was a Chinese decorative method, more commonly seen on roof ridges and dragon-fish ornaments, applied here to a European-style building.
So the Xiyanglou, for all its European massing, was Chinese in its ornament and craftsmanship down to the last detail — a genuine hybrid rather than an imported style. [Scale model of the Wanfang Anhe Hall, Yangshifang design office, Tongzhi years 12–13 (1873–1874), Qing dynasty, collection of the Palace Museum. Installation view.] The exhibition also includes a set of precious architectural scale models from the Qing court, chief among them a model of the Wanfang Anhe hall.
Its roof lifts off, and looking down into it you can make out every detail of the interior fittings — the latticed doors of each room, the furniture, a bed, a throne, even a small stage and a folding screen, all rendered in miniature.
"This was one of Yongzheng's favorite residences. The building's floor plan is shaped like the Buddhist swastika, a symbol of sanctity and good fortune. He named it Wanfang Anhe — Peace and Harmony for the Ten Thousand Regions — as an expression of his hope for peace across the whole of his empire."
[Installation view, "The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Imperial Garden Life in the Qing Dynasty," Hong Kong Palace Museum, 2024.] Yuanmingyuan held all of this at once — Chinese and Western art, architecture, and religion folding into one another, a kind of utopia in miniature. Its very layout mapped the empire's understanding of the world, with sections standing in for the nine continents of Chinese cosmology, the eastern seas, the West. As a royal residence, it bore witness to 136 years of court life.
Every year, as the seasons turned, different corners of the garden came into their own, and new stories and new people kept layering onto the old ones — a static landscape kept alive, in effect, by the lives lived in it. Dr. Louis Ng Chi-wa, Museum Director of the Hong Kong Palace Museum, told us that after the show opened, they were surprised by how many young visitors came through.
"Sometimes we'll see someone stand in front of a single object for ten or fifteen minutes, reading the label, taking it in — they're clearly not just passing through," Ng said. "That tells us this exhibition is actually helping people understand Yuanmingyuan more fully, in more depth." [Scale model, Wanfang Anhe Hall, Yangshifang design office, Tongzhi years 12–13 (1873–1874), Qing dynasty, collection of the Palace Museum.] [Scale model, Jiuzhou Qingyan Hall, Yangshifang design office, Tongzhi 12th year (1873), Qing dynasty, collection of the Palace Museum.] "For me personally, the scale models are the most interesting objects here. The architectural plans, after all, are flat — they have no sense of three dimensions.
So the Yangshifang built paper models for the emperor to look at, and Kangxi was delighted by them the first time he saw one. The family that specialized in making these models was surnamed Lei — seven generations of them worked as the court's dedicated model-makers, starting in the Kangxi reign," Ng said. This kind of hands-on, visual presentation, he added, also helps younger visitors grasp the continuity between the ancient and the contemporary.
"Beauty doesn't expire," he said. "The beauty of ancient art and the beauty we recognize today aren't so different. We try to bring traditional culture into conversation with contemporary life, so that this vitality can cross a century and still speak to the audience standing in front of it now." [Select images in this article courtesy of the Hong Kong Palace Museum.]