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FOCUS ON
YUANMING YUAN, THE GARDEN OF PERFECT BRIGHTNESSThe Garden of Perfect Brightness, or Yuanming Yuan (Yuan Ming Yuan, also known in English as the Old Summer Palace), now constitutes an extensive public park just inside the northwest stretch of Beijing's Fifth Ring Road. It was part of an series of garden palaces and residences that covered an area including present day Peking and Tsinghua universities, as well as the Jade Spring Hill (Yuquan Shan) party retreat, the Summer Palace (Yihe Yuan), the Fragrant Hills (Xiangshan), the botanic gardens and various adjacent temples. Along with the Forbidden City and the Imperial Mountain Villa (Bishu shanzhuang) at Jehol (Rehe, modern-day Chengde), the Garden of Perfect Brightness was an integral part of imperial rule from 1726 (r.1723-1735), the year the Yongzheng emperor formally moved there, up to the assault by Anglo-French forces following the Second Opium War in 1860, which devastated the palaces and courtly residences of what is Haidian district today. Partially rebuilt in the 1870s and then finally dismantled so that the Summer Palace could be reconstructed in the 1880s, the Garden of Perfect Brightness remained a site of plunder until relatively recently. It is now celebrated as China's 'national ruin'; but the ruin park is also the centre of debates that touch on issues of heritage and the environment, preservation and restitution, as well as history and national identity. While some agitate for the garden palace, or at least part of it, to be rebuilt as part of a symbolic gesture to mark a China recrudescence, others have already constructed partial replicas outside Beijing (at 'First City Under Heaven' in Tongzhou, in Zhuhai near Macao, Shenzhen and Shenyang, for example). More recently, plans have been mooted for a full-scale mock-Yuanming Yuan to be built at Dongyang, Zhejiang province, by the Hengdian Corporation. In this issue we discuss recent debates surrounding the Garden of Perfect Brightness, as well as key works on the subject. We are also featuring some writing that is not readily accessible online, including Geremie R. Barmé's 1996 Morrison Lecture, 'The Garden of Perfect Brightness, a life in ruins' and 'A Case of Mistaken Identity', his study of the 'traitor' Gong Xiaogong, the man who supposedly led the foreign troops to the garden in 1860. We also discuss a recent stageplay and a major documentary film, both produced in Beijing in 2006, that take this contested imperial ruin as their theme. |
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