Filial piety of Emperor Qianlong of Qing Dynasty (1636-1912) to his mother gave birth to this imperial garden at the last heyday of Chinese feudal times. As a large natural mountain and water garden, it was built on the basis of Kunming Lake and Mt. Wanshou in the northwest suburb of Beijing, while making reference to the West Lake in Hangzhou and absorbing garden design methods in South China. During the Second Opium War (1856-1860), unfortunately, it was razed to the ground by Anglo-French Allied Armies. In the fourteenth year of Emperor Guangxu reign or 1888, Empress Dowager Cixi embezzled navy funds of 30,000,000 ounces of silver (about CNY 6 billion) to rebuild the garden, which was her favored entertainment spot and summer retreat. Might be tired of the boring environment of the Forbidden City, she moved to the Summer Palace and spent the rest of her life there. To continue her control over Emperor Guangxu and keep on wielding the real power of the nation, she ordered this young emperor, his nephew, to live together with her in the Summer Palace. In this way, she inverted the garden into a vital political and diplomatic center of the imperial court. Sadly, her painstaking effort was again ransacked by the Eight Power Allied Force in 1900. When she ended her fugitive days and returned to Beijing, she launched a restoration again towards this garden. But this didn’t end its sufferings. National wars in the later years brought constant devastations to it. The Summer Palace we see today is worked out by successive efforts of the government, in forms of appropriations and renovations, since 1949.
The Summer Palace is virtually a museum of classical Chinese garden architecture. With all the mansions, pavilions, towers, rocks, ponds, cobble paths and so forth linking the natural sceneries into a poetic whole, it is an outstanding expression of the creative art of Chinese garden design. Guided by nature, it features not only grandeur of imperial garden but also the beauty of landscapes in a seamless combination. Also well known for its rich historical and cultural relic storage, it is among the first group of key cultural heritage sites under state protection. In 1998, it was designated as a World Heritage Site and in 2007 it was officially authorized as a National 5A-leveled Tourist Attraction.