Boris Stoyanov
Imitative Introspection | Yuan Ming Yuan
Columbia GSAPP
Fall 2023
Professor Reinhold Martin
Geremie Barmé’s “The Garden of Perfect Brightness: A Life in Ruins,” which focuses on the Yuan Ming Yuan (sometimes spelled “Yuamingyuan”), also known as the Gardens of Perfect Brightness, deserves deeper analysis. The Yuan Ming Yuan was a vast imperial complex of palaces, gardens, and temples located in what is now the Haidian District of Beijing, China. It was originally constructed during the 18th century, particularly during the reign of Emperor Qianlong of the Qing Dynasty, and it served as a retreat and imperial garden for the emperors of the Qing Dynasty.¹ It was of note in our class because it was the site in which the Chinese were mirroring European Orientalism and imitation. It, much like its counterpart Kew Garden in London, featured a blend of Chinese and Western architectural styles, and its gardens incorporated elements from both Chinese and European landscaping traditions.
Perhaps the most captivating idea presented in the reading was that the Yuan Ming Yuan, and the events that partook there, serve as a microcosm of the most significant events in Chinese history during its existence. “It is a history that reflects in its many facets the relationship that the Manchu-Qing empire had with the Western powers last century. It is also a story that has mirrored the relationship of place and power, symbol and rhetoric in China for nigh on three hundred years.”² In this manner, through honest analysis, one could surmise that a member of the society who are the descendants of those who have birthed the Yuan Ming Yuan would stumble upon strong retrospective themes during said analysis, and that they would contend and grapple with the implications.
To draw these comparisons, one must first be intimate with the events that took place over the course of the Yuan Ming Yuan. The Qing Dynasty, under whom the pleasance was constructed, were not ethnically Han Chinese—they were Manchu.³ They were seen, by the Han, as a conquering empire that subjugated them to their rule, more so than true Chinese Emperors. The Manchu heeded from the north—beyond the wall. They are a nomadic steppe people originating in their deep history from the Altai Mountains, and they had been the subsequent nomadic horse archers that were causing the Chinese trouble. The crucial difference between the Manchu and most previous steppe tribes is that they took control of the whole of China, and they were desperately trying to ingratiate themselves in order to legitimize their rule.⁴ Despite ruling from 1644–1911, they never truly ingrained themselves in the popular Han culture.
There is a lovely term that the Chinese chroniclers had for millennia, as a measure of just how barbaric the steppe tribesmen to their north were. They would describe them as “raw” or “boiled.”⁵ A “raw” barbarian would be one who was incredibly savage and had absolutely nothing to do with your culture. In this context, it was an individual who did not come from China, partook in no Chinese customs, wore clothes not of a Chinese fashion, and so on. These “raw” barbarians were the ones which were feared by the Chinese chroniclers, as is made obvious in their writings.⁶ They would much rather prefer to contend with “boiled” barbarians: those who had been in close enough contact with the Chinese culture that they would adopt Chinese customs, Chinese food, the Chinese language, and so on. One becoming “boiled” was almost an inevitability.⁷ The barbarians who raid cities will steal their clothes, and their food, and all other cultural artifacts imaginable, and begin to adopt them—not because they were actively seeking to become more like the Chinese, but because they just happened to be their victims. They would slowly become more and more like the people they were raiding. Of course, there would be many nuanced differences between these terms, but they served as the two extremes of the spectrum.⁸
This phenomenon can be thought of as one of deprivation and decadence, and existed in its most extreme form within the Qing dynasty. With every generation, the emperor was more and more removed from the initial militaristic people that conquered the land in the first place.⁹ These were not people born on the back of a horse with a bow in their hand—they were people who grew up in a royal court, with servants, sugar, and silk sheets. Quickly, one could see how “boiled” they had become. This left them much weaker, in just about every regard imaginable, than their predecessors.¹⁰ It is precisely this cycle which led to the European powers so thoroughly exploiting China during the Qing dynasty.
This transition is precisely what birthed the Yuan Ming Yuan, which was initially a hunting ground for early Qing rulers. Over the course of just a few generations, it had become a gaudy amalgamation of all the realms of the world, wrought with artifice and ripe for generations of pillaging from every side imaginable.¹¹ The debauchery was to such comical levels that by the 1740s, the emperor had an army of eunuchs act out village life for his amusement. There was “a township where eunuchs masquerading as storekeepers engaged the emperor and his ladies in make-believe village life”¹²… “Perhaps you ask what purpose this serves? The chief motive has been to create for the emperor a condensed picture of the bustling life in a great city where he wishes to see this.”¹³ The level of artifice present in this play-acting was just as present in the architecture of the Yuan Ming Yuan.
During the 18th century, Jesuit missionaries were jockeying for favor in the Qing court, by which time it was held full-time at the Yuan Ming Yuan. As a means to ingratiate themselves further, they offered to the Emperor, Qianlong, European specialists, including “astronomers, designers, artists, and artisans.”¹⁴ When someone showed Qianlong pictures of French and Italian palaces and gardens, he at once ordered his engineers to build replicas in the Yuan Ming Yuan. The first of these buildings was completed in 1747. It was also “…the first extended attempt to amalgamate Chinese and Western architectural motifs in a style of Europeanoiserie.”¹⁵
Qianlong’s massive construction projects are considered to be the final high-water mark of Imperial Chinese history. In addition to his building, he also pacified Tibet and Mongolia during this time. Perhaps he struck the right balance of “raw” and “boiled”—“raw” enough to keep on expanding empire and wage war, yet “boiled” enough to attempt to progress culture.¹⁶ This “rawness” interestingly is also reflected in the architecture, as it is quite ham-fisted. “But (Qianlong’s) was a heavy hand, and for all its majesty, it still weighed ponderously, and quite often artlessly, on all that it touched.”¹⁷
Qianlong’s successors added to the Yuan Ming Yuan quite significantly, ever expanding the realms which this garden encompassed. Yet as this decadence increased, so did the degree of “boiling” of the Qing. They had fallen victim to Western imperialism through the Opium Wars. By the autumn of 1860, a delegation of both British and French negotiators were sent to sign a peace treaty with the Qing. The terms were set to be quite favorable to the Europeans, as the Chinese were the clear losers in this war.¹⁸ Rather than buy peace, the Qing court instead decided to detain and torture 39 of the delegation, 18 of whom died. When the bodies were returned to European forces, “even the liberal use of lime in their coffins could not conceal the fact that they had suffered horribly before expiring.”¹⁹
The Anglo-French troops, under the command of Lord Elgin (son of the Elgin who pillaged the so-called Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon in Athens), concocted a plan to punish the Qing court, rather than its subjects, for this abuse against the diplomats and deceit in peace negotiations. In order to inflict pain on the court, and the court alone, it was determined that the sacking of the Yuan Ming Yuan was a just punishment.²⁰
The complex suffered significant damage beginning on October 18, 1860, when British and French forces looted and set fire to many of its buildings. This looting and pillaging continued for days, with opportunistic locals joining in the lawlessness as well.²¹ Lord Elgin’s intended effect of punishing the ruling class only was not successful. The reaction to the destruction of the Yuan Ming Yuan by the populace was one of horror and atrocity. According to a contemporary source, “(t)his was a most outrageous insult and humiliation to the Chinese race.”²² I would like to remind you that the Han typically did not consider the Manchu of their same race, yet the degree of atrocity in this case superseded even that.²³ This remains a symbol of the humiliation and loss of prestige experienced by the Qing Dynasty in the face of foreign aggression during this period. Symbolically, it was the pillaging of the Yuan Ming Yuan which brought onto China the “Century of Shame,” which was only countered by China’s Communist Revolution.²⁴
However, despite the sacking of the Yuan Ming Yuan by Anglo-French troops in the autumn of 1860, most of the palace actually remained intact. “Indeed, although twentieth-century accounts generally claim that the area was completely razed, contemporary accounts generally claim that the Yuan Ming Yuan could have been preserved and repaired without too great an effort.”²⁵ The initial pillaging by the Europeans spurred on a subsequent ten waves of pillaging, all but one of which were enacted by Chinese, each subsequent pillage serving as a chapter of a microcosm representative of their history during that period. After a half-hearted attempt of restoration in 1874, no further attempts were made to reconstruct during the Imperial era.²⁶
The first wave of pillaging came by local villagers from 1860–1874, where “they immediately set about raiding the gardens and looted much that was precious and rare from the building—silks, golden and bronze objects, jades—and virtually anything that was not battened down.”²⁷ This pillaging, in addition to being opportunistic, was also indicative of a wider civil unrest which was tied to Qing rule.
The second wave of pillaging actually came from the Qing themselves, who destroyed most of the remaining buildings and pilfered their bricks, tiles, wooden columns, and stonework for the neighboring Summer Palace (often incorrectly conflated with the Yuan Ming Yuan in modern times). This exploitation occurred because of financial troubles in the empire—yet they were still superfluous in their spending despite this, evidenced by the fact they were building a new palace to begin with.²⁸
In 1900, the third wave of sacking began when any surviving wooden structures—including the hundreds of bridges—as well as the trees, were all pilfered and sold for the manufacturing of charcoal.²⁹ This is indicative of the rapid industrialization happening at the time, leaving nothing considered too holy to escape this industrial push. What little wood remained was stripped during the Boxer Rebellion in 1901. All the remaining trees and wood were destroyed within a month. The connection between this fourth wave and Chinese history is quite clear.
Having been stripped of all wood, the Yuan Ming Yuan came under a fifth wave of assault, this time focusing on all masonry, which was again sequestered for other construction projects. This was initiated during the 1911 Revolution and continued all the way to the 1950s.³⁰
Wave six was initiated by Japanese occupation and a severe famine in the 1930s. Local farmers were forced to move onto the former Yuan Ming Yuan grounds and begin cultivating grain. To further aid them in their farming quest, they leveled the man-made hills that the Qing had constructed and infilled many streams and lakes to reclaim as farmland.³¹ All of this was occurring in a setting of ruin—actively farming in ruin and contributing to the ruin even further in order to farm more effectively. Farmers, wanting to maximize their profits, took to a devious practice: “…farmers still found that the limited yields they got from crops could be made to go just that little bit further. They did this by adding ground stone to the husked grain, thus giving both increased weight and bulk to their skimpy produce. According to the people who ate the rice cultivated in the Yuan Ming Yuan over the decades, the peasants obtained this lapideous leaven by grinding down the remaining stonework of the palace ruins, in particular marble and masonry scavenged from the Western Palaces.”³²
From here, the Yuan Ming Yuan surprisingly escaped what would seem the most likely wave, wave seven. The Communist Cultural Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s never made it to the Yuan Ming Yuan because there was essentially nothing left to destroy. A small settlement was beginning to form on the lands that were once the garden, a proper shantytown complete with small businesses, a few factories, and even a shooting range.³³ This settlement was the true seventh wave, as whatever little was left was now hidden even more deeply than before.
Wave eight was a continuation of this complete disregard for the historical site. Somehow, through the previous century of raiding and pillaging from all sides, one singular building remained from the original Yuan Ming Yuan—the Lamaist Zhengjue Temple. Its function was ever-changing during this century, yet it survived. It was completely razed in the late 1970s to make way for the Peking Great Wall Boiler Factory.³⁴ Alongside this, the last remaining lakes were landfilled.
Thus ended the physical extraction from the Yuan Ming Yuan. This, however, does not mean that the metaphorical pillaging ever stopped. Sometime in the 1980s the Party decided that it would make a park of it. Instead of authentic ruins, visitors are instead “presented (with) a garishly dolled-up and picturesque socialist park (and) are advised to keep to the well-trodden cement paths of the new edu-tainment half of the Yuan Ming Yuan.”³⁵ Whatever ruins are present in the park today have all been artificially reconstructed since the 1980s—emulating a romantic ruin that never was—all the while skewing historical facts to propose a nationalistic sentiment. Every bridge, structure, and tree has been placed within the past four decades, leaving the Yuan Ming Yuan thoroughly “Disneyfied.” Even worse, in the same era, “franchises were sold to various entertainment companies who set about converting sections of the gardens into amusement parks.”³⁶ The Yuan Ming Yuan, once the seat of Imperial China, now has a paintball course and a primitive totem pole exhibition. This, in a way, serves as the ninth wave of barbarism and razing—this iteration cultural in nature.
The last wave of razing occurred in the early 2000s, when Beijing’s fourth ring road was constructed ahead of the 2008 Olympics. The northern half of the Yuan Ming Yuan was cut off from the south by the new roadway, and the northern land was developed into Western-style suburbs, coming full circle in the blind imitation.
The Yuan Ming Yuan, within itself, encapsulates China’s entire arc of the past 300 years, and in a way acts as a compass for it. The struggles for Manchu assimilation (interestingly, Manchu culture has pervaded Han culture to such a degree that the two are now largely indistinguishable in modern China, largely due to an artificial resuscitation of national identities and the symbology thereof)³⁷, the heights of Qing power, the gradual “boiling” of the ruling class,³⁸ the destruction of countless lives due to the opium trade, the Century of Humiliation,³⁹ and the ensuing turn to a state-sponsored hyper-capitalistic society in which the consequent artifice could multiply—all are there. In the grand scheme of things, the Yuan Ming Yuan is a very young site, which has even more recently embarked on its life as a ruin. And this life as a ruin has arguably been more eventful than its time before.⁴⁰ In this sense, and in many more, the Yuan Ming Yuan is a micro-microcosm of contemporary Chinese history—in itself telling the whole story of the successive rises and demises that took place in its relatively short life.
1. Geremie R. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness: A Life in Ruins,” East Asian History 11 (1996): 111.
2. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 112.
3. Victor Lieberman, “The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors: Early Modern China in World History,” Social Science History 32, no. 2 (2008): 281.
4. Lieberman, “The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors,” 284.
5. Magnus Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’ Barbarians of Imperial China,” Inner Asia 1, no. 2 (1999): 139.
6. Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’,” 141.
7. Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’,” 148.
8. Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’,” 144.
9. Lieberman, “The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors,” 290.
10. Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’,” 166.
11. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 114.
12. Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull Jr., The Poetics of Gardens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 88.
13. Pierre Attiret, “Lettres Édifantes,” vol. 27 (1749 edition), in Osvald Sirén, Gardens of China (New York: Ronald Press, 1949), 125.
14. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 122.
15. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 123.
16. Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’,” 166.
17. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 123.
18. Lieberman, “The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors,” 300.
19. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 131.
20. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 131.
21. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 133.
22. Liu Zhanbin, Yuanmingyuan Cangsang Ji (Beijing: Shumu Wenxian Chubanshe, 1933), 100.
23. Lieberman, “The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors,” 297.
24. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 136.
25. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 136.
26. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 139.
27. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 137.
28. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 139.
29. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 139.
30. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 141.
31. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 140.
32. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 140.
33. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 141.
34. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 142.
35. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 142.
36. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 150.
37. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 113.
38. Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’,” 140.
39. Lieberman, “The Qing Dynasty and Its Neighbors,” 300.
40. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 157.