palace
Summer Palace
China's grandest imperial garden of pavilions, lotus lakes, and marble galleries
About Summer Palace
The Summer Palace is the most lavish imperial garden in China — a 290-hectare complex of palaces, temples, and the 728-metre Long Corridor surrounding Kunming Lake. Empress Dowager Cixi rebuilt and expanded it in the 1880s using navy funds, and it functioned as the actual political center of the late Qing court.