Palace Architecture in Premodern China (Ming-Qing)

The majority of scholarship on palace architecture from the Ming and Qing dynasties concentrates on the Forbidden City (Zijincheng 紫禁城) in Beijing. This palace served as the emperor’s primary residence and seat of power for more than five centuries, from the early Ming dynasty (1368–1644) to the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Most of the current buildings date to the Qing dynasty and are continuously refurbished (if not entirely rebuilt) to keep them in pristine shape for the millions of tourists who visit the palace, now a museum, annually. The two most prolific publishers of Chinese-language scholarship on the architecture of the Forbidden City are the academic press associated with the palace, Gugong chubanshe 故宮出版社 (formerly Zijincheng chubanshe 紫禁城出版社) and Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe 中國建築工業出版社, which publishes extensively on premodern Chinese architecture. While English-language scholarship on the Forbidden City’s architecture is still scant, it has been growing in recent years alongside the more general expansion of the field of Ming and Qing architectural history. The summer palaces of the Qing emperors—Bishu shanzhuang 避暑山莊 (“Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat”) in Chengde, Hebei; Yuanming Yuan 圓明園 (“Garden of Perfect Brightness”) and Yihe Yuan 頤和園 (“Garden of Preserving Harmony”), located northwest of the Forbidden City in Beijing—have also generated a great deal of scholarship in recent years. Because much of the early architecture at both Bishu shanzhuang and Yuanming Yuan no longer survives, scholars have devoted much of their attention to trying to understand the architectural histories of these sites through textual evidence, visual documentation, archaeology, and new digital technologies. Much more so than the Forbidden City, the Qing summer palaces incorporate natural landscape elements such as lakes, islands, forests, and grasslands into their designs, and therefore have been examined from the angle of landscape studies in addition to architectural history.