architecture
Updated 14th February 2021
Debates over Beijing s derelict Old Summer Palace are about more than history
Written by Paul FrenchOscar Holland, CNN
Paul French is the author of books including Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, and Through the Looking Glass: China s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao.
Northeast of Beijing s resplendent Summer Palace lie the ruins of another stately structure, burned to the ground by European forces during the Second Opium War.
Once an elaborate network of pavilions, palaces, bridges and gardens, Yuanmingyuan The Garden of Perfect Brightness, known simply as the Old Summer Palace in English is now little more than collections of rubble amid a network of tranquil lakes. In 1860, Britain s High Commissioner to China, Lord Elgin, ordered troops to destroy both the Summer Palace and Old Summer Palace to avenge the killing of several British envoys to Beijing. B