Seventeen Arch Bridge, Summer Palace, Beijing
The Seventeen Arch Bridge is an iconic symbol of Beijing. It sits at the heart of the Summer Palace complex, and connects the eastern shore of Kunming Lake with Nanhu Island. It is another fine example of architecture from the 18th Century Qianlong Period.
The tower in the distance, left of shot, is the Yufeng Pagoda on Jade Spring Hill. Most of China's top political and military leaders, including Xi Jinping, live on villas on its slopes, having long since abandoned the more spartan Central Party Compound near the forbidden city.
The Summer Palace is the best place to explore both the finery of China’s Golden Age and its rapid decay in the 19th Century. The Summer Palace isn’t just one palace, but in fact a vast complex covering more than a square mile, containing more than 3,000 buildings, and the famous Seventeen Hole Bridge as iconic a symbol of Beijing as the Palace of Westminster is of London.
Beijing was booming in the 1700s, with the population growing rapidly and along with it much light industry. Around 1749, the Qianlong Emperor decided to build a palace eight miles from the smoky downtown, on a beautiful site overlooking a lake that was being used for stables, to celebrate the 60th birthday of his mother, Empress Dowager Chongqing. He had the lake dredged and expanded to create what is now Kunming Lake, and the earth excavated to do so was used to raise the height of what is now Longevity Hill. What would become the Summer Palace was still called the Gardens of Clear Ripples.
Designed in the style of the gardens of South China, and drawing on motifs from Chinese mythology, the hill was soon graced by the Great Temple of Gratitude and Longevity, later renamed the Hall of Dispelling Clouds, which was overlooked by the Tower of Buddhist Incense, and graced by other wonderfully named buildings like Hall of Benevolence and Longevity the Hall for Listening to Orioles.
Encapsulating China’s Qianglong Golden age, it also encapsulates its subsequent disastrous decline. While the Qianlong Emperor lavished support on the arts and expanded China’s borders to their greatest ever extent, years of exhausting campaigns weakened the military, while in the Empire’s prosperous core, decadence set in, with endemic corruption, wastefulness at the court and a stagnating civil society. These problems would accelerate after the Qianlong Emperor died in 1799. In the heyday of intercontinental sailing ships, Chinese had already successfully managed direct trading relations with Europe for several centuries by this point, exporting porcelain to Europe and the Americas at scale. So when some arrogantly uncouth emissaries arrived at court in the 1830s from an upstart country named Britain, they were initially dismissed as a particularly unpleasant of self-deluding barbarians.
But a sign of the rotten state of the Chinese Empire as the 19th Century wore on was the increasingly dilapidated state of the Summer Palace. During the Second Opium War, British and French forces sacked and burned the Summer Palace as part of an invasion of Northern China which forced the Qing government to sign a trade treaty on unwelcome terms. The Place was further damaged in 1900, by an alliance of Western and Japanese troops who were putting down the Boxer Rebellion. Yet the Chinese Imperial system which stretched unbroken back to Qin ended in 1912, when Puyi, the last Emperor abdicated. Two years later, the Summer Palace was turned into a public park, and so it has remained ever since, barring a few years after the Communist takeover of 1949, when it briefly housed the Central Party School.
Restoration work has taken place at some pace since the 1980s, and continues to the present day.
This magnificent site can be very crowded, especially if you visit, as I did, on the second day of China’s weeklong early October holiday. More than ten million visitors come here every year, averaging nearly 30,000 per day. You can see why. Despite the crowds, this is one of the world’s great historic sights.
The Summer Palace is a half-hour ride on a new subway line from the city centre. The surrounding are suburbs are wealthy, and house Xi Jinping and most of the party bigwigs – but they don’t take the subway!
Seventeen Arch Bridge, Summer Palace, Beijing
The Seventeen Arch Bridge is an iconic symbol of Beijing. It sits at the heart of the Summer Palace complex, and connects the eastern shore of Kunming Lake with Nanhu Island. It is another fine example of architecture from the 18th Century Qianlong Period.
The tower in the distance, left of shot, is the Yufeng Pagoda on Jade Spring Hill. Most of China's top political and military leaders, including Xi Jinping, live on villas on its slopes, having long since abandoned the more spartan Central Party Compound near the forbidden city.
The Summer Palace is the best place to explore both the finery of China’s Golden Age and its rapid decay in the 19th Century. The Summer Palace isn’t just one palace, but in fact a vast complex covering more than a square mile, containing more than 3,000 buildings, and the famous Seventeen Hole Bridge as iconic a symbol of Beijing as the Palace of Westminster is of London.
Beijing was booming in the 1700s, with the population growing rapidly and along with it much light industry. Around 1749, the Qianlong Emperor decided to build a palace eight miles from the smoky downtown, on a beautiful site overlooking a lake that was being used for stables, to celebrate the 60th birthday of his mother, Empress Dowager Chongqing. He had the lake dredged and expanded to create what is now Kunming Lake, and the earth excavated to do so was used to raise the height of what is now Longevity Hill. What would become the Summer Palace was still called the Gardens of Clear Ripples.
Designed in the style of the gardens of South China, and drawing on motifs from Chinese mythology, the hill was soon graced by the Great Temple of Gratitude and Longevity, later renamed the Hall of Dispelling Clouds, which was overlooked by the Tower of Buddhist Incense, and graced by other wonderfully named buildings like Hall of Benevolence and Longevity the Hall for Listening to Orioles.
Encapsulating China’s Qianglong Golden age, it also encapsulates its subsequent disastrous decline. While the Qianlong Emperor lavished support on the arts and expanded China’s borders to their greatest ever extent, years of exhausting campaigns weakened the military, while in the Empire’s prosperous core, decadence set in, with endemic corruption, wastefulness at the court and a stagnating civil society. These problems would accelerate after the Qianlong Emperor died in 1799. In the heyday of intercontinental sailing ships, Chinese had already successfully managed direct trading relations with Europe for several centuries by this point, exporting porcelain to Europe and the Americas at scale. So when some arrogantly uncouth emissaries arrived at court in the 1830s from an upstart country named Britain, they were initially dismissed as a particularly unpleasant of self-deluding barbarians.
But a sign of the rotten state of the Chinese Empire as the 19th Century wore on was the increasingly dilapidated state of the Summer Palace. During the Second Opium War, British and French forces sacked and burned the Summer Palace as part of an invasion of Northern China which forced the Qing government to sign a trade treaty on unwelcome terms. The Place was further damaged in 1900, by an alliance of Western and Japanese troops who were putting down the Boxer Rebellion. Yet the Chinese Imperial system which stretched unbroken back to Qin ended in 1912, when Puyi, the last Emperor abdicated. Two years later, the Summer Palace was turned into a public park, and so it has remained ever since, barring a few years after the Communist takeover of 1949, when it briefly housed the Central Party School.
Restoration work has taken place at some pace since the 1980s, and continues to the present day.
This magnificent site can be very crowded, especially if you visit, as I did, on the second day of China’s weeklong early October holiday. More than ten million visitors come here every year, averaging nearly 30,000 per day. You can see why. Despite the crowds, this is one of the world’s great historic sights.
The Summer Palace is a half-hour ride on a new subway line from the city centre. The surrounding are suburbs are wealthy, and house Xi Jinping and most of the party bigwigs – but they don’t take the subway!