Am I In Greece? No, This is Yuanmingyuan Park 圆明园 in China
For those of you how have been following my blog, yes, all three of you, you may have seen that I have been to a few Chinese imperial palaces. They are typically found north of the country. The Forbidden City in Beijing, Summer Palace and soon the Imperial Palace in Shenyang, one thing you can say is that they look very similar. As it was the prevailing style of that time, the Qing architectural style permeated virtually every imperial structure, or so it seems. As it turns out there were some imperial palaces which didn’t look anything like the currently preserved examples in the Forbidden City.
Ruins of Some European Style Palace in Yuanmingyuan Park 圆明园
Yuanmingyuan Park was the site of some magnificent imperial palaces, that is before they were sacked by British troops. The special thing about the palace was that this one was inspired by western architectural style. At that time, China was already in touch with the rest of the world and has regular contact with Europe. The admiration of the Chinese emperors was obvious when the had the palaces built in distinctly western architectural style. Think Greek columns and similar styles. This was distinctly different from the prevailing structures at that time. It was a pity that there are only ruins left for us to imagine how magnificent it once was.
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