In 1860, it took Lord Elgin three days to burn down the summer palace but it has taken Liu Zuo and his 160 workers three years to rebuild it. Hidden in a vast hangar in the countryside south of Beijing, Mr Liu, oil engineer and inventor, has painstakingly recreated the exquisite splendour of the Yuan Ming Yuan in model form from sorghum stalks. Work has just finished on this private venture and next month Mr Liu, 69, hopes to recoup the millions of yuan he has invested when he puts it up for auction.
The destruction and looting of the old summer palace still ranks in China as one of the most dastardly acts committed by the West during the Opium Wars. The model is bound to become a popular tourist attraction. For decades, the Chinese have talked about rebuilding it and erasing the humiliation but there has never been enough money. Kowloon is now the most abiding legacy of its destruction since the land was ceded under the Treaty of Peking signed after French and British troops occupied the capital.
In the last century, the Empress Dowager Cixi chose to build an entirely new summer palace, the one most tourists visit.
The Yuan Ming Yuan is now a park where amid the lakes, visitors can still see a few stone columns, the remains of a handful of Western buildings which Jesuit priests erected for emperor Qian Long. Yet the rest of the 4,200 palaces, temples and pavilions were all made of wood. As they burned, observers in Peking could see vast columns of smoke and one Englishman recorded that the world looked dark with shadow while close by the very face of nature changed.
The walled grounds enclosed an area 10 times of the size of the Forbidden City, which the invaders thought wiser not to destroy for fear of triggering the Ming dynasty's downfall. Inside these grounds, the emperor was the only adult male and was served by tens of thousands of eunuchs, concubines and maid servants. He travelled throughout by pleasure boat since the main buildings were linked by canals which in turn had 240 bridges spanning the lakes and waterways. Mr Liu, from Liaoning in Hebei, had the idea while up in bed with a broken leg and flicking through a secondhand book of engravings.
While wondering what materials to use, he saw a television programme about a craftsman who used sorghum stalks to make models, tracked him down to Lanfang county and bought his patent. The work then consumed 30 tonnes of sorghum seed and sorghum stalks which laid end to end would stretch 900 kilometres and had to be cut, bent and fitted together to create the intricate buildings.
