China · CN

Yuanmingyuan Park

The Old Summer Palace — Yuanmingyuan in Chinese — is one of Beijing's most emotionally powerful sites. Once the grandest imperial garden ever created, it was looted and burned by Anglo-French forces in October 1860 during the Second Opium War. The ruins have been deliberately left unrestored, making this 350-hectare park an open-air monument to both extraordinary artistic achievement and catastrophic loss. What survives is haunting: shattered Baroque marble columns standing where they fell, vast placid lakes where pavilions once glimmered, and seasonal gardens that bloom over buried foundations. The park offers a fundamentally different experience from the fully restored Summer Palace just two kilometers away — here you are not looking at imperial magnificence intact, but at the exact point where it was destroyed.