The European Summer Palaces of China

There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces
And the silken girls bringing sherbert.

So reminisced the Magi of T. S. Eliot's imagination, on their long trek west of Bethlehem. Probably more Eliot than the Magi. In the century of the juggernaut and the nuclear power station, the idea of a summer palace can lure us into an irresistible daydream world: of sultry afternoons shaded by the hedges of elaborate gardens, of trailing one's fingers in fountains laid out like jewellery to decorate the palaces nearby. Such palaces may be as fragile as they are picturesque, and not destined to last many summers.

This was the case with the European summer palaces of the Yuan Ming Yuan outside Peking, built in the eighteenth century by Jesuit missionaries at the behest of the Emperor Ch'ien Lung. Nothing remains of them now but a few intriguing marble fragments of huge portals and volutes, arranged in blocks like Stonehenge in the deserted outskirts of the modern Summer Palace grounds. But they have a richly documented past, attesting to one of the strangest meetings of East with West.