The Summer Palace, or Yiheyuan (颐和园), lies in Beijing’s Haidian district and is arranged around Kunming Lake and Longevity Hill. The official park describes a total area of 3.009 square kilometres, about three quarters of it water; UNESCO’s inscribed property covers 2.97 square kilometres. This is not simply a palace building with a garden attached. Water, slopes, halls, bridges, temples and long covered galleries form one designed landscape, where routes and viewpoints change as visitors move around the lake and climb the hill.
The garden’s formal predecessor was Qingyi Yuan, the Garden of Clear Ripples. Beijing’s park authority dates its construction to 1750 and completion to 1764, under the Qianlong emperor. The project reshaped existing water and terrain, enlarging Kunming Lake and using excavated earth to raise Longevity Hill. The official Summer Palace site gives the lake-and-hill composition as the organizing framework of the grounds. It is a useful way to read the site: the landscape itself was engineered, not merely decorated.
