This is a beautiful spot with exuberant wood and grass at the foot of the West Hill in the western outskirts of Beijing. From the Ming Dynasty on, many high－taste nobles built their private gardens in this place. In the Qing Dynasty perhaps because the Manchu aristocrats who had just left their forests and grassland had not accommodated themselves to the austere environment of the palaces, they built grandiose imperial gardens there. The Summer Palace that has survived calamities in history is one of those architectural masterpieces.
This is a marvellous conception of a paradise on the earth:
The Long Corridor and the Seventeen－Arch Bridge are like ribbons. They frame the Kunming Lake and turn it into a beautiful picture. With the Buddha Fragrance Chamber on the Longevity Hill as the highlight, the lake and mountains become a lively whole.
The West Hill and the pagoda on top of the Jade Spring Hill blot out the limit of the garden and fuse it into an open expense.
Spring in the Summer Palace is merrily colourful, the summer is leisurely exuberant, the autumn sentimentally bright and winter sober, tranquil and clean.
The beauty of the Summer Palace is kaleidoscopic. First you enter spacious courtyards. Their owners have long passed away, but the peonies, crab－apples and magnolias that have survived them still beam in elegance.
Walking out the grandiose imperial courtyards, through the Long Corridor while enjoying the misty lake, along the scarcely traversed West Dike and the ride in the forest, you suddenly spot the dream－like Jade Belt Bridge...
With elapse of time those roaming around the Kunming Lake are no more imperial relatives or nobles, but the common people. The beauty of the Summer Palace, however, is timeless. Year after year people greet the spring with the willow branches at the Spring Discerning Pavilion, sink into meditation facing lotus in a kiosk of the Garden of Harmonious Delights, and whisper with the frosted leaves at the tranquil back hill... Rain or shine, the Summer Palace is always enchanting.
The beauty of the Summer Palace is, of course, deliberated. The pavilions, kiosks, terraces, bridges, dikes, corridors are crystallisation of the thousand－year old Chinese landscape gardening. The scenic spots contain a nation's profound philosophical and aesthetic tradition. The Summer Palace was not built for public benefit, but through the turbulent century, Summer Palace has been displaying the height a civilisation once reached to people of different times and origins.
On 2 December 1998 the Summer Palace was listed in the World Legacy of United Nations.
The council of the World Legacy remarked, Chinese imperial gardens with the Summer Palace as a representative is a convincing symbol of one of the great world civilisations.
