Summer Palace or Imperial Garden History Tourism

n the morning tour to the exquisite Summer Palace (Imperial Garden), the largest ancient preserved garden in China and a former summer resort for Emperors and the chosen few, with a boat ride on Lake Kunming (weather permitting). A shopping visit to a Silk Carpet Shop followed by lunch. You’ll have your afternoon free to explore the city by yourself. You may choose to join our optional Experience the Hutong Life Tour: a special journey exploring the ancient Beijing Alley District by a pedi-cab, plus a visit to a local family and a local market or just pace yourself in the Wang-fu-jing Business Street, also called Gold Street. With hundreds year of history, it is the best place to capture the historical and modern cultures of Beijing. Today’s dinner will be on your own.

Summer Palace

Victor Hugo sent the following letter of reply to Captain Butler, from Hauteville House, his Guernsey home on the 25th November 1861, exactly one year and one day after the “New Elgin Marbles” cartoon appeared in Punch! In stark contrast to the mocking tone of Punch he wrote in sombre terms: You ask my opinion, Sir, about the China expedition. You consider this expedition to be honourable and glorious, and you have the kindness to attach some consideration to my feelings; according to you, the China expedition, carried out jointly under the flags of Queen Victoria and the Emperor Napoleon, is a glory to be shared between France and England, and you wish to know how much approval I feel I can give to this English and French victory.

There was, in a corner of the world, a wonder of the world; this wonder was called the Summer Palace. Art has two principles, the Idea, which produces European art, and the Chimera, which produces oriental art. The Summer Palace was to chimerical art what the Parthenon is to ideal art. All that can be begotten of the imagination of an almost extra-human people was there. It was not a single, unique work like the Parthenon. It was a kind of enormous model of the chimera, if the chimera can have a model. Imagine some inexpressible
construction, something like a lunar building, and you will have the Summer Palace.

Summer Palace

Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze and porcelain, frame it with cedar wood, cover it with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there a harem, elsewhere a citadel, put gods there, and monsters, varnish it, enamel it, gild it, paint it, have architects who are poets build the thousand and one dreams of the thousand and one nights, add gardens, basins, gushing water and foam, swans, ibis, peacocks, suppose in a word a sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace, such
was this building. The slow work of generations had been necessary to create it.

This edifice, as enormous as a city, had been built by the centuries, for whom? For the peoples. For the work of time belongs to man. Artists, poets and philosophers knew the Summer Palace; Voltaire talks of it. People spoke of the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids in Egypt, the Coliseum in Rome, Notre Dame in Paris, the Summer Palace in the Orient. If people did not see it they imagined it. It was a kind of tremendous unknown masterpiece, glimpsed from the distance in a kind of twilight, like a silhouette of the civilization of Asia on
the horizon of the civilization of Europe.

 Imperial Garden

This wonder has disappeared.
One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned. Victory can be a thieving woman, or so it seems. The devastation of the Summer Palace was accomplished by the two victors acting jointly. Mixed up in all this is the name of Elgin, which inevitably calls to mind the Parthenon. What was done to the Parthenon was done to the Summer Palace, more thoroughly and better, so that nothing of it should be left. All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable and splendid museum of
the Orient. It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewellery.

What a great exploit, what a windfall! One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe,arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits. We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians.

This is what civilization has done to barbarism. Before history, one of the two bandits will be called France; the other will be called England. But I protest, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity! the crimes of those who lead are not the fault of those who are led; Governments are sometimes bandits, peoples never.
The French empire has pocketed half of this victory, and today with a kind of proprietorial naivety it displays the splendid bric-a-brac of the Summer Palace. I hope that a day will come when France, delivered and cleansed, will return this booty to despoiled China.