Amsterdam, Gordon and Breach, 1998 (Documenting the Image, 6)

The Emperor Qianlong (1736-95) employed a number of European missionaries at his court as artists, artisans, astronomers and architects. In 1747 he commissioned some of them to design an entire series of buildings and gardens in the European style in the northwestern outskirts of Beijing. The resulting complex, the Yuanmingyuan or Garden of Perfect Brightness, creatively combined European and Chinese features in both its fountain-filled landscapes and its structures, which housed the emperor's collections of European scientific instruments and decorative arts. But even before the emperor died in 1799, the fountains had run dry, and in 1860 it was burned by the British in retribution for the mistreatment of some of their countrymen in the course of the Second Opium War, a joint Anglo-French expedition which led to treaties far more invasive than the Treaty of Nanjing, concluded less than twenty years before. By the time the empire came to an end in 1911, the Yuanmingyuan had been largely reduced to rubble by decay and depredation. As a ruin, it remained a potent reminder for Chinese of their country's extreme vulnerability to foreign imperialism, and even in its currently restored condition, it serves as a symbol of bad times gone by.

In this book, dedicated to the memory of Hedda Morrison, the well-known photographer of 1930s Beijing, Régine Thiriez brings together for the first time more than fifty photographs of the ill-fated palaces (some consisting of detailed enlargements of other entries), together with a reproduction from a series of eighteenth-century copper engravings, and two recent reconstructions. The photographs, dating from the nineteenth and early