Archive of Power: The Qing Dynasty Imperial Garden-Palace at Rehe

Abstract

The Manchu rulers needed to find ways to occupy, order, and govern their realm. Archiving—naming and categorizing relationships between people, places, and things—was a means to map and occupy empire. Archival projects such as the Qianlong emperor's ”Siku quanshu” encyclopedia allowed the dynasty to claim possession of all under heaven by the naming and ordering of knowledge. Likewise, in the Manchu architectural typology of the imperial garden-palace, sites and peoples across the nation and the world were encompassed within the framework of empire.This paper examines the architectural design of the Imperial Summer Villa (Bishu Shanzhuang) at Rehe as an act of archiving. After the early imperial southern tours, political and military attention switched to the north. The Summer Villa was constructed during the Kangxi and Qianlong reigns, as the first Manchu ”garden-palace,” a new architectural typology. Situated 180 kilometers northeast of Beijing, the site was partly selected for its salutary environs. The fear of smallpox was part of the cultural mindset of the times, and necessitated a relatively disease-free location where the Qing court could meet with their frontier allies.At the Summer Villa, archiving is demonstrated in the symbolic layout of the garden-palace, and through the design of its component gardens and buildings. Additionally, it was through woodblock illustrations, poems, paintings, and maps that knowledge of the Villa was presented to a wide public audience in China and the West. It was through print and visual media that the Qing court was able to represent the Villa as an immortals' paradise. At the center of this paradise was the emperor's residence, and around him, like ”spokes around a hub,” were copied sites from around the country and beyond the borders.Through the archival practice of gardening, architecture, collecting, and printing the emperors not only defined an order for the empire, but they also laid claim to the physical, religious, ethnic, and epistemological territories of their empire.