Treasures of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace restored in painstaking fashion, the work like piecing together a giant Chinese jigsaw puzzle
- Artefacts shattered into hundreds of pieces by pillaging French and British soldiers 150 years ago are being reassembled by a team of heritage restorers
- The work is part of the largest-scale effort yet to restore prized finds dug up by archaeologists on the site of the former imperial palace
Shaped like a drum, the blue and white garden seat excavated from a goldfish pond inside the ruins of the Old Summer Palace in the Chinese capital, Beijing, sports an auspicious lotus pattern that signifies honesty in Chinese culture. Called a “drum seat” in ancient times, it had been broken into 132 pieces, some smaller than the size of a fingernail.
A yellow glazed bowl with green dragon motif shimmers under the light. Reassembled from 479 pieces, it was restored because of its beauty, cultural significance, and relatively complete form.
These and 15 other damaged imperial artefacts from China’s Qing dynasty era (1644-1911), including bowls, a Buddhist statue and a snuff bottle – have been returned to near their original state in the biggest such project to date involving archaeological finds from the Old Summer Palace.
Also known as Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace was the main imperial residence of the Yongzheng emperor, who reigned from 1722 to 1735, and of his descendants until British and French troops ransacked it in 1860 during the second opium war.
For staff of the palace’s heritage archaeology department, sitting on the floor piecing together broken pieces of porcelain has been like completing a huge jigsaw puzzle.