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Old photos shed new light on Yuanmingyuan's former glory

Updated: 2021-02-25 07:32 ( China Daily )
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Visitors view documents at the photo show. [Photo by Zou Hong/China Daily]

Semalle's photographs are the first comprehensive record of surviving wooden architecture in Yuanmingyuan. Unfortunately, all of these constructions were believed to have been destroyed in war around 1900, when the Eight-Nation Alliance Force attacked Beijing.

Other key figures from the 19th century contributing to these precious photographic records include Lai Afong, a Hong Kong-based photographer, Ernst Ohlmer from Germany, Osvald Siren, a Swedish scholar, and Thomas Child, a British man who lived in Beijing for 20 years.

Thanks to them, people can now get a glimpse of how Xiyang Lou (Western Mansions)-a combination of the Western Baroque style and traditional Chinese architecture, and an iconic symbol of today's Yuanmingyuan ruins-looked in the 19th century.

It appears that some of the structures disappeared later than people originally thought. A recently released photo from the 1920s shows an exquisite statue of Manjusri Bodhisattva, a Buddhist deity, at Zhengjue Temple, a rare example of a well-preserved structure in Yuanmingyuan. However, this statue was gone by the early 1930s.

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