Page 43 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

28 James L. Hevia
strewn bits and pieces of stone remained. Farming was still evident and little if
anything had been done to alter the look of the site. There was one change, however.
An artist’s colony, I later learned, had been established. It flourished until 1995 and
then was dispersed by city officials. 7
By the second half of the decade of the 1990s a much greater change was apparent.
At the same time as the farms were being transformed into a somewhat tacky leisure
center, historical restoration and museumification were also in evidence. The gardens
were reconstituted as a signifier of high cultural art from the past and as a different
sort of historical memory text. Parts of the garden were now clearly indicative of
national heritage, a new construction that aligned the Yuanmingyuan with sites like
the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and the Qing imperial retreat at Chengde
in a global discourse of cultural preservation. This shift was most notably marked
by the naming of numerous UNESCO World Heritage sites in China. Although the
Yuanmingyuan did not achieve such a designation, publications and signage never -
theless dwelt on the artistic beauties of the gardens. At one point, miniature models
of some of the buildings appeared where the original had stood, and projects to
digitally reconstruct the Qing-era gardens were announced. 8 Significantly, stone
remnants began to be rearranged again and the sites where the European palaces had
stood identified. In addition, sometime in the 1990s, the maze—a labyrinth of
shoulder-height walls—was rebuilt.
At the same time, however, attention continued to be drawn to the British des -
truction of the palaces. Within the European garden new commemorative structures
were erected in 1997, nominally as part of the official celebration of the return of
Hong Kong to China. One of these was a long wall bearing 51 plaques tightly packed
with text that provided a blow-by-blow synopsis of the history of imperialism in
China from 1840 through the war with Japan that ended in 1945 (see Figure 2.1).
Large golden characters next to the first plaque proclaim “Never Forget National

Figure 2.1 Wall bearing 51 plaques. Large golden characters next to the first plaque
proclaim “Never Forget National Humiliation”. Photograph taken by/copyright
James Hevia. August 8, 2001.