A Paradise Lost: The Imperial Garden Yuanming Yuan

Chapter 8. Repairs and the Final Blows

Chapter 8 Repairs and the Final Blows The inferno of 1860 disfigured the Yuanming Yuan so much that the imperial garden was no longer fit for royal living. Troops and eunuchs, however, guarded the destroyed garden estate to keep out unauthorized persons. The newly ascendedTongzhi emperor, together with the two dowagers, Cian and Cixi, escorted Xianfeng’s co‰n back to Beijing from Chengde.They all took residence inside the Forbidden City.They missed the pleasant garden life, and their memory was simply too fresh to forget. Tongzhi was born in the garden on April 27, 1856. The dowager Cixi, the new emperor’s biological mother, had her romance with the late Xianfeng emperor in the garden. Many other members of the family had in mind the sad moments when they had the last breakfast in the garden with the late emperor before the hasty flight to Chengde.They, of course, remembered the agony of the late emperor when he heard the bad news about the looting and burning of the Yuanming Yuan. The best remedy, of course, was to restore the Yuanming Yuan to its past glory. But given the persistent rebellions and the financial crisis derived from excessive military expenditures and war indemnities, even the Tongzhi emperor himself felt uncomfortable to raise such an issue. Not until the autumn of 1867 did the censor Detai speak on behalf of the royal family. Knowing how empty the state treasury was, the censor recommended that they seek donations and contributions from individual households in the country.This was clearly a trial balloon. When the general response of o‰cialdom was negative, the emperor quickly backed o¤ in a decree dated September 16, 1867, denouncing the censor’s idea as “inappropriate” and “ridiculous” (Wang Xianqian 1884, 73:35).The censor’s untimely proposal backfired. The court decided to exile him in the remote Manchurian frontier. He chose to commit suicide instead. Most likely, the royal family incited the censor to make the recommendation, and hence he felt betrayed and died in protest. Consequently, the garden remained in an appalling condition for many more years to come.| 161  A Tour of the Desolated Yuanming Yuan In the late spring of 1871, the Yuanming Yuan was still in desolation. Under the guidance of Liao Cheng’en (Fengting), an ex-commander of the erstwhile garden battalion, the scholar-poet Wang Kaiyun (1832–1916) and his friend Xu Shujun made a tour of the imperial garden on May 27, 1871. The tour began at the Pure Ripple Garden at the foothills of the Longevity Hills, where they saw numerous shabby courtyards, broken halls, and half dried-up lakes, with trees in green standing in the midst of the bare scene. The shepherd boys and woodcutters seemed to be wandering in wildness. On their way back from the Kunming Lake, they discovered a bronze rhinoceros with the tail cut o¤, but the imperial inscription on the back was still recognizable. Most of the various small gardens owned by princes and distinguished o‰cials in this neighborhood already bore no trace of the imperial garden’s grandeur (Wang Kaiyun 1973, 2:257; cf. YMYZ 1984, 324). The conditions surrounding the Kunming Lake as described by Wang in 1871 seemed to have further deteriorated since a British attache’s observations in 1866. The attache had seen few delightful scenes in the midst of ruins, charred walls, and the departed pine trees. He specifically noticed a mass of lotus plants in full flower on the lake, several little islands covered with trees and buildings, and a great octagonal three-story palace with its white marble balustrade standing elegantly. The Briton had also seen some structures on higher ground, including a bronze temple, a gym, two little revolving wooden pagodas, many Buddha figures in a tower, and a large temple covered by yellow and green tiles (cited in Malone 1934, 195). But none of these, which in 1866 still retained a bit of the past glory, was visible five years later. Wang and Xu spent the night with the Liao family in the neighborhood.They resumed the tour on May 28 and walked through the Lucky Garden Gate of the Yuanming Yuan. They came across an elderly eunuch named Dong, who volunteered to show them the way. They went through rubble and debris before identifying the Main Audience Hall.The hall was so badly damaged that the main stairs were not even visible. Walking further north, they...