The Summer Palace occupies a landscape northwest of Beijing where imperial estates existed before the Qing dynasty. In 1750, the Qianlong Emperor began transforming the area into the Garden of Clear Ripples, partly to honor his mother’s sixtieth birthday. Workers enlarged a reservoir into Kunming Lake and reshaped excavated earth into Longevity Hill. The project joined water management, garden design, architecture, painting, and poetry, creating an imperial retreat whose carefully framed scenes referred to celebrated landscapes and buildings elsewhere in China.

Palaces and administrative halls stood near the eastern entrance, while temples climbed the central hill and pavilions, bridges, islands, and paths organized leisure around the lake. The long covered corridor became a painted route connecting residential areas with the landscape. Kunming Lake also supported flood control and irrigation beyond the garden. Although the ensemble appeared natural, its shorelines, views, plantings, and architectural focal points were deliberately composed. The garden expressed the ruler’s ability to gather the empire’s cultural traditions and transformed geography within a single controlled setting.

Anglo-French forces destroyed or looted much of the Garden of Clear Ripples in 1860 during the Second Opium War. The nearby Old Summer Palace suffered even greater devastation. Beginning in the 1880s, Empress Dowager Cixi directed a major reconstruction and renamed the estate Yiheyuan, the Garden of Nurtured Harmony. The work used funds associated with naval development and court finance, though the familiar story that one simple act of embezzlement paid for the entire garden obscures a more complicated budgetary history. Rebuilt halls became a setting for residence and government.

Foreign troops again damaged the palace during the Boxer crisis in 1900, and restoration followed after the court returned to Beijing. Cixi used the complex during the Qing dynasty’s final years, receiving officials and managing affairs from its residential and ceremonial halls. After the 1911 Revolution, the property remained connected with the former imperial household for a time. It opened more broadly as a public park in 1924, transferring a landscape of exclusive court life into the civic and tourist realm of modern Beijing.

The present palace preserves Qing buildings, reconstructed interiors, Kunming Lake, Longevity Hill, the Long Corridor, Seventeen-Arch Bridge, Marble Boat, gardens, and temples within a unified scenic composition. Repairs have addressed painted timber, roofs, stonework, water quality, vegetation, and intense visitation. UNESCO inscribed the Summer Palace in 1998 as a major expression of Chinese landscape-garden design. Its historical importance includes both creative achievement and violence: imperial planning, hydraulic engineering, foreign destruction, contested reconstruction, dynastic politics, and public preservation remain visible in the same designed environment.