The Yuanmingyuan, the most brilliant treasure in the history of Chinese civilization. In 1709, the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing Dynasty personally took up a pen and wrote down the three characters of "Yuanmingyuan", which were then hung by celebrities above the door of the Yuanming Hall. For the origin of this name, the Yongzheng Emperor once explained it like this: Round and into the gods, the gentleman's time is also in the middle; the light and the universal, the wisdom of the people is also!
From here, it is enough to see the importance that the Qing emperor attached to the Yuanmingyuan. In fact, the construction of the Yuanmingyuan is indeed a huge project, and the total area of the Yuanmingyuan is as much as 350 hectares, equivalent to 8.5 Forbidden Cities. Among them, the water area is about 140 hectares, which is equivalent to a Summer Palace. However, this "Garden of Ten Thousand Gardens", which took more than 150 years to build, has experienced repeated destruction in the years that have followed.
In 1856, the Second Opium War broke out. On the evening of October 6, 1860, The Anglo-French army broke into the gate of the Old Summer Palace. Although there were still more than twenty eunuchs guarding the garden at that time who struggled to resist, these twenty or so people were tantamount to hitting a stone with a pebble for the invaders, and such resistance was simply not seen by the invaders. After repelling the resistance of more than twenty people, the Anglo-French coalition began to plunder the Yuanmingyuan like bullying weak bandits.
What you can take, what you can't take, anyway, is to achieve the realm of "what I can't get, you don't want to get", as a robber, I would rather burn these rare treasures than leave them to the master, what a shameless act! Sadly, this is not the final outcome of the Yuanmingyuan. In 1900, the Eight-Power Alliance invaded, and the royal gardens in the western suburbs once again ushered in the ruthless destruction of the invaders.
The Yuanmingyuan, which has undergone several destructions, has long since become unrecognizable. The treasures that could be taken away in the garden had long been taken away by the invaders, and even those that could not be taken were burned in large quantities, except for some remote and water-based buildings that escaped the disaster, most of the others were almost destroyed. According to the Times, the value of the lost property in the Yuanmingyuan exceeded 6 million pounds, and these can still be estimated, and so many other treasures that can no longer be copied are far from being valued for human beings with cold money.
In 1996, the state began to organize archaeological excavations of the Yuanmingyuan, hoping that on the one hand, it could try its best to restore some damaged cultural relics, and on the other hand, it hoped that some cultural relics left by the invaders could be found. Fortunately, I am grateful for the blessing of my ancestors, and I also have to "thank" those invaders for going too hastyly, and some cultural relics are too late to pack, and they are left for us Chinese. In the past twenty years, those archaeologists have gained something.
Among these recycled artifacts, one of the most precious is the bronze gilded elephant head. Speaking of which, the discovery of this artifact is also dramatic. In 2014, when the expedition was sorting out the cultural relics around the Gongmen River, someone suddenly found that there was a bulge in the river, and with the idea of trying a luck, the expedition team salvaged the mud bag. After returning, after more than half a month of cleaning, I found out: this is a royal treasure from the Qing Dynasty!
Its craftsmanship is still far above the zodiac, which is definitely a windfall for archaeologists. Archaeologists speculate that this should be the elephant head accidentally dropped while carrying large elephant ornaments, and the situation was too chaotic to be found, so the elephant head was submerged in the river. It wasn't until 2014 that the expedition arrived and made it a reality.
In fact, after these years of sorting and excavation, more than 50,000 cultural relics have been found by the expedition team, and the place that has been searched is less than 50,000 square meters, the size of the Yuanmingyuan, I believe it will bring more surprises to the Chinese people. Indeed, for the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan, everyone Chinese feels great heartache. However, history cannot be traced, and all we can do is to learn experience and lessons from history and not repeat the mistakes of the past.