Chengde Mountain Resort (1703): The Qing Emperors' Summer Capital

The Chengde Mountain Resort is the vast summer palace that the Qing emperors built beyond the Great Wall, roughly 180 kilometres north-east of Beijing, beginning in 1703. Known in Chinese as Bishu Shanzhuang, the “mountain villa for escaping the heat”, it served for most of the eighteenth century as a second capital, where emperors hunted, governed and received the leaders of Inner Asia.

Origins: hunting and the frontier

The Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty came from the north-east and valued the riding and archery skills of their ancestors. In 1681 the Kangxi Emperor established the Mulan hunting grounds in the hills north of the Great Wall, where each autumn he led thousands of bannermen and Mongol allies in great hunts that doubled as military exercises.

A chain of travelling palaces grew up along the road from Beijing. In 1703 Kangxi began building a larger residence at Rehe, known to Europeans as Jehol, a valley with hot springs and a cooler summer climate. By 1711 the main palace was ready, and Kangxi chose 36 scenic views within it, each named in a four-character phrase.

Palace and park

The resort covers about 5.6 square kilometres and is enclosed by a wall roughly 10 kilometres long. Its palace quarter is built of grey brick and unpainted wood, far plainer than the Forbidden City, to suggest simplicity and closeness to nature.

The rest is a designed landscape that represents the empire in miniature. A lake district with islands and pavilions recalls the gardens of southern China, an open plain with grassland and yurts evokes the Mongolian steppe, and wooded hills to the north-west stand for the mountains. The Qianlong Emperor expanded the park from 1741 onwards and added 36 more named views of his own, bringing the total to 72.

The Eight Outer Temples

Around the resort the emperors built a ring of Buddhist temples between 1713 and 1780, of which eight were maintained by the court and became known as the Eight Outer Temples. Several mix Chinese and Tibetan architecture, reflecting the importance of Tibetan Buddhism to the Mongols whom the Qing sought to win over.

The Puning Temple of 1755 marked the Qing victory over the Dzungars and is modelled in part on Samye, the oldest monastery in Tibet. Its main hall holds a giant wooden statue of the bodhisattva Guanyin, more than 22 metres tall and often described as the largest wooden sculpture of its kind in the world.

The largest, Putuo Zongcheng (1767–1771), is modelled on the Potala Palace in Lhasa and was completed in time for celebrations of Qianlong’s 60th birthday and his mother’s 80th. Xumi Fushou, finished in 1780, imitates the Panchen Lama’s seat at Tashilhunpo and was built to house the Sixth Panchen Lama, who travelled from Tibet for Qianlong’s 70th birthday.

A stage for empire

Chengde was more than a retreat. Mongol princes who had not had smallpox, and so had no immunity to it, could meet the emperor there without risking the crowded capital. Envoys from Kazakhs, Torghuts and other Inner Asian peoples were feasted in tents on the plain. In 1771 Qianlong welcomed Torghut leaders who had returned from the Volga to Qing territory, and he recorded the event on stone steles.

Western visitors also came. In September 1793 Qianlong received the British envoy Lord Macartney at Chengde during the Macartney embassy, a meeting famous for the dispute over court ritual and for the emperor’s refusal of British trade demands.

Decline and later history

After Qianlong’s death in 1799, the resort was used less often. Its most dramatic later moment came in 1860, when the Xianfeng Emperor fled there as British and French troops approached Beijing and burned the Old Summer Palace. He died at Chengde in August 1861, and the power struggle that followed brought the Empress Dowager Cixi to power.

In the twentieth century the resort and temples suffered from neglect, war and looting. Restoration began in the 1950s and intensified from the 1970s. In 1994 the Mountain Resort and its Outlying Temples were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and they are now among China’s most visited historic sites.

Timeline

• 1681: Kangxi establishes the Mulan hunting grounds north of the Great Wall.
• 1703: Construction of the resort at Rehe begins.
• 1713: The first outer temples are built for Kangxi’s 60th birthday.
• 1741: Qianlong begins a major expansion of the resort.
• 1771: Putuo Zongcheng Temple is completed.
• 1780: The Sixth Panchen Lama visits for Qianlong’s 70th birthday.
• 1793, September: Lord Macartney is received at Chengde.
• 1861, August: The Xianfeng Emperor dies at the resort.
• 1994: The site is inscribed on the World Heritage List.

Why it matters

The Chengde Mountain Resort shows how the Qing saw themselves: not only as Chinese emperors but as rulers of Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans and Turkic peoples. Its gardens, temples and hunting grounds were tools of diplomacy that helped hold together one of the largest empires in history.