Chinese garden architecture has a long history and enjoys a high reputation in the history of world gardens. The earliest palace gardens existed in China during the Zhou Dynasty more than 3,000 years ago. Since then, gardens have been built in all Chinese capitals and famous local cities. Thousands of years of history and China's geography, climate, customs, etc. have given birth to a unique garden system and characteristics, which contain rich classical aesthetic ideas and embody the Chinese nation's advocating peace, coordination, indifference and tranquility with its unique spatial art language. spiritual and cultural inheritance. Chinese urban gardens are rich and colorful, occupying a glorious position among the three major garden systems in the world, and are known as the "Mother of Gardens in the World". Among the garden architecture, the Old Summer Palace has a very high status in the history of world gardens and is highly popular for viewing and sightseeing. Value is an important tourism resource in our country. The Old Summer Palace is located in the western suburbs of Beijing, adjacent to the Summer Palace. It consists of the Old Summer Palace, Changchun Garden and Qichun Garden, so it is also called the "Three Old Summer Palaces". The Old Summer Palace was first built in 1708. It was originally given by Emperor Kangxi to his fourth son, Yinzhen, and it took 150 years to complete. The Qing Dynasty devoted all the material resources of the country, gathered countless skilled craftsmen, filled lakes and mountains, planted exotic flowers and trees, gathered 40 domestic and foreign scenic spots, built 145 large buildings, and housed countless art treasures and books and cultural relics. With a construction area of ??more than 160,000 square meters, it is a large-scale royal palace created and operated by the emperors of the Qing Dynasty for more than 150 years. It is known as the "Garden of Ten Thousand Gardens" and is the pinnacle work in the history of Chinese garden art. In 1860, the Old Summer Palace was burned down by the British and French forces during the Second Opium War, and only the ruins remain. The Old Summer Palace in China is world-renowned not only for its size and collection of valuable art treasures and books and cultural relics, but more importantly for its unique design style. If you want to fully understand the design art of the Old Summer Palace, you should grasp and appreciate it from its architectural design style. Only in this way can people enjoy the beauty and truly feel the charm and unique style of the "Garden of Ten Thousand Gardens". There is an old saying: "The wise enjoy the mountains, the benevolent enjoy the water." Chinese classical gardens aim to meet the multiple needs of living and sightseeing, forming a unique style based on "landscape". Its layout is flexible and changeable, integrating the man-made physical environment. Combined with the natural scenery, it integrates architecture, painting, literature, calligraphy, and gardening, so that artificial beauty and natural beauty are integrated into one, forming a strange and ingenious effect. These garden buildings originate from nature but are higher than nature. They hide the buildings in the mountains and rivers and elevate the beauty of nature to a higher level. The Old Summer Palace is a representative garden with the theme of "water". The Old Summer Palace is a waterscape garden. Because of the water, the water surface accounts for more than half of the entire garden area. The Old Summer Palace is a large-scale artificially created garden with magnificent scale and beautiful scenery. The flat land is stacked with mountains and water, the garden buildings are refined, and trees and flowers are widely planted. Intermittent hills, zigzag water surfaces, pavilions, winding corridors, islands, bridges, embankments, etc. divide the vast space into more than a hundred landscape groups with different interests, surrounded by mountains and rivers. The water surface in the park accounts for about four-tenths of the total area of ??the three gardens. Large, medium and small water surfaces are artificially excavated on the flat land, and are connected in series by looping rivers to form a complete river and lake system. The garden is dotted with 250 large and small earth hills, which are combined with the water system. The water rotates with the mountains, and the mountains are animated by the water, forming a garden space with mountains and rivers, and layers upon layers, making the entire garden like a water town in the south of the Yangtze River. The smoke and water are blurred. Although it is made by humans, it seems to be opened from the sky. The Back Lake Scenic Area of ??the Old Summer Palace has nine small islands built around the back lake, which is a symbol of the "Nine Continents" of the country's territory. The small gardens or landscape groups built on each island not only have their own characteristics, but also borrow from each other to create scenery. The skylight above and below the north bank is quite comparable to climbing the Yueyang Tower to have a panoramic view of Dongting Lake. The openness and openness of the west bank resembles the Yuquan Fish Viewing Park in Hangzhou, commonly known as the Goldfish Pond. To the west of the Yuanmingyuan, there is peace and tranquility. The houses are built in the lake, which is warm in winter and cool in summer. Looking at the other side, the strange flowers are like embroidery. The Shuimu Mingse in the north of the Old Summer Palace used the Western water method to divert water into the room and turn the fan. Emperor Qianlong liked to cool off here. Haiyue Kaijin in the West Lake of Changchun Garden has a three-story palace built on a huge round white jade platform, which looks like a mirage from a distance. Another notable feature of the Old Summer Palace is that it is a large number of imitations of many famous gardens and scenic spots across the country, especially in the south of the Yangtze River. The architectural scale is the largest in the country. It integrates the essence of ancient Chinese gardening art and uses the artistic technique of a garden within a garden to create a poetic and picturesque atmosphere. Melt into the ever-changing scene. Emperor Qianlong once visited Jiangsu and Zhejiang six times, including Wutai in the west, Daiyue in the east, Rehe, Shengjing, Panshan and other places. Everywhere he went, he would ask the accompanying painter to copy the famous mountains, rivers, and gardens that he liked, and then build replicas of them in the gardens after returning to Beijing. According to incomplete statistics, there are no fewer than forty or fifty direct copies of the garden scenery of the Old Summer Palace. Surrounded by mountains and rivers, the Old Summer Palace is home to more than 140 scenic spots, of which more than 50 are directly imitating famous scenic spots from other places, such as "Autumn Moon on Flat Lake", "Spring Dawn on Su Causeway", "Three Pools Reflecting the Moon", "Quyuan Feng" Lotus" and so on, all come from the ten scenes of West Lake in Hangzhou. They not only imitate the architecture, but also copy the names.
There are also "Wuling Spring Colors" imitating the Peach Blossom Spring, "Xifeng Beauty" imitating Lushan Mountain, and "Stacked Stone Maze" imitating the Lion Forest, etc., which bring together the essence of countless scenic spots and famous gardens in the world. As the saying goes: "Whoever knows the beautiful scenery in the south of the Yangtze River can move heaven and earth in your arms." The architectural forms of the Old Summer Palace are rich and diverse. There are more than 100 gardens within gardens and scenic building groups in the Three Gardens of Yuanming Dynasty, which are commonly referred to as 100 sceneries. It integrates various garden buildings such as halls, pavilions, pavilions, pavilions, pavilions, corridors and verandas, covering an area of ??approximately 160,000 square meters. The buildings in the park not only absorb the advantages of palace-style buildings in the past dynasties, but also break through the constraints of official norms in terms of plane configuration, appearance shape, and group combination. They are widely collected and come in various forms. Many architectural forms that are extremely rare in the south and north of my country have been created, such as fan-shaped, round mirror-shaped, I-shaped, gable-shaped, cross-shaped, etc. In addition, in the layout of the garden, the scenery changes with the situation, and the scenery in the garden is surrounded by each other and deepens layer by layer, forming a rich, colorful, natural and harmonious overall beauty. French missionary Wang Zhicheng once gave a vivid description. He said: "The buildings in the Old Summer Palace have many changes in form, and are uneven and unconventional. Each of its small palaces seems to be made according to peculiar models. It seems to be arranged randomly, and no one is the same as the other. Everything is so interesting that one cannot appreciate the scenery at a glance, but must study it carefully bit by bit." From this aspect, we can understand the unique realm of the design art of the Old Summer Palace. The Old Summer Palace not only brought together several famous gardens and scenic spots in the south of the Yangtze River, but also creatively transplanted Western garden architecture. It was a culmination of ancient and modern Chinese and foreign gardening techniques at that time, embodying the essence of ancient Chinese gardening art. It was the most outstanding large-scale garden at that time. Emperor Qianlong praised it as "the area of ??heavenly treasures and spiritual beings, the place where emperors traveled to Henan, there is no place beyond this". The Old Summer Palace became famous in Europe through the propaganda of Western missionaries, and had a certain influence on the development of European natural landscape gardens in the 18th century. The great French writer Hugo regarded the Old Summer Palace in China and the Parthenon in Athens as representatives of Eastern art and Western art respectively. He called the former dream art and the latter conceptual art. He praised the Old Summer Palace as "not only a unique one, but also unparalleled in the world." A masterpiece and a sublime example of dreamy art.”