"You just have to imagine that it is a fascinating building like the castle of the Moon Palace, and the Summer Palace (referring to the Yuanmingyuan) is such a building."
Known as the Garden of Ten Thousand Gardens, the Yuanmingyuan was still a bright pearl in the late Qing Dynasty, and those who had seen it widened their eyes and were amazed by the essence of this art, saying that it was "made by people, it was like opening from heaven", and at that time its name even spread to distant Europe, so that those Europeans who had a high self-esteem also wanted to see what China's gardens really looked like.
It was born in 1707 when the then Emperor Kangxi commissioned the palace and gave it to his fourth son, Yin Chan. This palace was originally named the Yuanmingyuan, and in China, where every word has a deep meaning, the meaning of the name of this garden still has to be speculated.
However, the next emperor, the owner of the Yuanmingyuan, Yongzheng, thought that this was his father's praise for himself, he said that "Yuan" refers to the perfection of personal morality, and "Ming" refers to the achievements of the ming, which is the requirement of the feudal rulers for mingjun, and also shows that his father was willing to ascend to the throne himself a long time ago, but all this is Yongzheng's one-sided words, and we don't know how Kangxi thinks.
In 1724, a year after Yongzheng ascended the throne, he decided to expand the Yuanmingyuan. When his son Qianlong ascended to the throne, the landscape of the garden was adjusted again, and Changchun Yuan and QiChun Garden were added. It's just that this garden, which has been built with care for generations, has not maintained its splendor, and it will soon encounter a group of greedy people and a fire.
In 1860, the Anglo-French army directly attacked the Yuanmingyuan, and the officers and soldiers who struggled to resist were outnumbered, and finally died in the line of duty. The group of soldiers finally came to the acclaimed garden, and they showed an evil smile on this piece of treasure, and from this day on, they frantically plundered the treasure in the Yuanmingyuan, and those things that could not be taken away were burned clean with a big fire, and they thought: Even if they are destroyed, they will not leave it to its owner.
After the garden was devastated, the rulers of the Qing Dynasty seemed to want to restore it to its original appearance, but the money of the late Qing Dynasty had long been lost, and it was too difficult to restore it to its original appearance. Originally, they thought that the garden would remain like this forever, but they did not expect that there would be more tragic things. In 1900, the Eight-Power Alliance invaded Beijing, and the Yuanmingyuan was plundered again, and even the ancient trees in the garden were completely destroyed.
More than 100 years later, the archaeological community began to focus on this garden, they carried out archaeological excavations and restorations here, to the surprise of this group of archaeologists, more than 2.4 million square meters of land only excavated 50,000 square meters, and even unearthed 50,000 cultural relics.
The most precious of these artifacts is the mud lump excavated in 2014, which was excavated with mud so that almost no one could see its full face, and it was not until it was put in the laboratory that people saw it as it really was. It was a bronze-gilded elephant head with smooth lines and a bowing demeanor, as if an elephant had really come to us. The gilding process is complex and the consumption is huge, so this cultural relic is of high value, of course, the most important thing is that it represents the superb royal casting process at that time.
Unfortunately, the experts only excavated the elephant's head and did not find its body. As for why it is concluded that it has a body, the main reason is that there are 4 holes in the back of this cultural relic, which are speculated according to the characteristics of previous cultural relics, which are used to fix the body.
From the re-excavation of experts, we can also see the scale and preciousness of the Yuanmingyuan at that time, and now in front of a broken wall, Chinese only regret and anger remain. Fortunately, China is getting stronger, and such things will never happen again.