Description
A very large Chinese landscape painting of the Yihe Yuan Summer Palace. Illustrating views including the camel hump bridge, pavilions on the Wanshou hill and with the famous bronze bull in the right foreground. Ink and colour on paper, 18th / early 19th century, 164cm high, 285cm wide.
Provenance: by repute, brought back from Beijing in 1861 by a member of the Castle family, listed as an officer of the Royal Engineers Corps who was present at the sacking of the Palace.
Previously on loan and exhibited at the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, (formerly Liverpool Museum).
Cf. Illustrated by William Watson and Chuimei Ho, The Arts of China after 1620, p.218, pl. 274.
`The Summer Palace or Yihe Yuan literally 'Gardens of Nurtured Harmony' is a palace in Beijing. The Summer Palace is mainly dominated by Longevity Hill and the Kunming Lake. It covers an expanse of 2.9 square kilometres, three quarters of which is water. Kunming Lake was entirely man made and the excavated soil was used to build Longevity Hill.
The Summer Palace started out life as the Garden of Clear Ripples in 1750. Artisans reproduced the architecture styles of various palaces in China. Kunming Lake was created by extending an existing body of water to imitate the West Lake in Hangzhou. The palace complex suffered two major attacks. The first during the Anglo-French allied invasion of 1860 (when the Old Summer Palace was destroyed), and during the Boxer Rebellion in an attack by the eight allied powers in 1900. The garden survived and was rebuilt in 1886 and 1902. In 1888, it was given the current name, Yihe Yuan. It served as a summer resort for Empress Dowager Cixi, who diverted 30 million taels of silver, said to be originally designated for the Chinese navy, into the reconstruction and enlargement of the Palace.
In December 1998, UNESCO included the Summer Palace on its World Heritage list. It declared the Summer Palace 'a masterpiece of Chinese landscape garden design'. It is a popular tourist destination but also serves as a recreational park.