Reviewed by: Mapping Chengde: The Qing Landscape Enterprise Jane Kate Leonard (bio) Philippe Forêt . Mapping Chengde: The Qing Landscape Enterprise. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000. xvi, 209 pp. Hardcover $60.00, ISBN 0-8248-1980-2. Paperback $32.95, ISBN 0-8248-2293-5. Philippe Forêt's Mapping Chengde is an interesting and thought-provoking study of the creation of the Qing secondary capital, Chengde, located beyond the Great Wall in southeastern Inner Mongolia. The book's purpose is to explore the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors' construction and manipulation of landscape at this site, thereby shedding light on the geopolitical and cosmological features of the Qing imperial enterprise. From a methodological perspective, the author argues that landscape analysis provides a kind of concrete evidence that, when used alongside historical, literary, and cartographic texts, enables scholars to understand cultural-historical phenomena. In the case of the Chengde capital complex, landscape analysis reveals that these two emperors collectively and cumulatively created a new geopolitical and cosmological center for the empire that was oriented toward the dynasty's non-Han constituency in Inner Asia, particularly the Mongol and Tibetan peoples, and which expressed a new imperial universalism dominated by Tibetan-Buddhist elements. Forêt asserts that Chengde, as cultural-geopolitical "spectacle," was important for the continued Qing expansion and control of Inner Asia (p. 23). Forêt traces the development of Chengde from a wilderness military outpost and hunting area to a summer capital and imperial residence, used extensively by the Kangxi, Qianlong, and Jiajing emperors. His analysis centers on the imperial residence at the heart of Chengde: the Bishu Shanzhuang and the Waiba Miao temples located on the east and north side of the site, but he also embeds this analysis within the larger geographical framework of the northeast that includes the capital region within the Great Wall and the strategic corridor from southeastern Inner Mongolia to the Qing ceremonial capital at Mukden—a corridor that comprised the home territory of the Qing conquest elites. He argues that the Emperor's Road from Beijing via the Gubeikou gate in the Great Wall to Chengde and the hunting reserve at Mulan was the tool that opened up and expanded the capital region beyond the Great Wall and effectively erased the wall as a meaningful geopolitical divide between China and Inner Asia. The Qing transformation of geographical space placed Chengde at the center of Qing strategic communications with Manchuria, Mongolia, and Central Asia, and it set the stage for the establishment of Chengde as the administrative capital of Inner Mongolia by 1724 and the secondary capital for the empire of Greater China by the end of the Qianlong reign (1796). [End Page 365] The discussion of the larger geographical framework includes a careful analysis of the administrative-geographical terms used since the late Ming to describe the city of Chengde and its immediate hinterland, which Forêt calls Jehol (Author's Note, pp. xiii-xviii). He uses the former to include the urban center of Chengde, the Qing imperial summer residence (Bishu Shanzhuang), and the arc of temples to the northeast. And he uses the latter term, Jehol, to refer to the extramural territory of Chengde County, then Prefecture, in Zhili Province that extended to the Xiliao River in the north and the Willow Palisades in the east. This careful discussion of terminology sets the stage for examination of the Qing imperial transformation of the three-capital region in the northeast as well as his analysis of the discrete parts of the imperial residence at Chengde and its cultural-cosmological landscape. Forêt provides a fascinating narrative in chapter 3 that traces the steps in the creation of the summer residence. He points out that there are three environments linked to the summer residence: the commoner landscape of Chengde-Jehol, the elite landscape of the summer residence itself, and the religious landscape of the arc of Waiba Miao temples. The elite landscape of the summer residence, in turn, consists of four main landscape sectors that represent parts of the Qing empire. The palace sector represents the Forbidden City in Beijing; the lake district represents the literati gardens of Jiangnan; the...