The Ruins of Yuanmingyuan

Abstract

Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness), or the Old Summer Palace, was once a massive complex of gardens, pavilions, lakes, hills, and pleasure grounds. After it was looted and burnt down by Anglo-French troops in 1860, it commenced a long “afterlife” as a site of farmsteads, factories, school campuses, a bohemian colony, and a public park. This article explores the politics of spatial configuration and signification, or “the relations of proximity,” in the present-day Ruins Park by revisiting the debates of the 1990s surrounding restoration/development issues, the disquiet over the xiyanglou ruins in literary and visual representations, and a more recent environmental controversy that has brought a new political life to the park. Analytically, the author proposes to read the park as a heterotopia of multiple emplacements: ruinscape, gardenscape, Disneyscape, and civicscape. As such, the park is a spatial metaphor of contemporary China and a schooling ground for the art of socialist neoliberal citizenship.

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