China's Age of Fragility
As China reclaims its central role in the world, Robert Bickers appeals to Britons and others in the West to take account of the legacy left by the country’s difficult 19th century.
One recent late November, I took a stroll through the grounds of the Yuanmingyuan, the ‘Old Summer Palace’, just north of the Peking University campus in the north-west corner of that sprawling city. This one is a big site, forested and landscaped, and generally lacks the crowds of tourists that converge on the new Summer Palace, the Yiheyuan complex, located a mile to the west, which surrounds the vast Kunming Lake. The Yuanmingyuan is a complex of gardens, lakes and islands built during the 18th century as a private resort for the Manchu emperors of the Qing dynasty.
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