A secret garden in Beijing has opened to visitors for the first time in a century
By Fred He
Beijing (CNN) — When Ho Puay-peng first visited Beijing’s Forbidden City in the late 1980s, the Singaporean architect saw many of the historic courtyards used for storage, filled with garbage, and occupied by danwei (government offices).
He summed it up with one word: “horrible.”
That was when the majority of the sprawling former imperial palace in the center of the Chinese capital was not yet open to the public. Besides government offices, many areas had been severely damaged by disrepair, and fires – easy to occur since most buildings were wooden structures.
The Forbidden City was constructed in the 15th century during the Ming Dynasty as the imperial family’s workplace and residence. It was later taken over by the emperors of the Qing Dynasty, who restored and reconstructed many parts.
The Palace Museum opened on the site in 1925, after the already-abdicated last Qing emperor Pu Yi was forced out of the Forbidden City, but proper restoration works started much later.
Since Ho’s first visit decades ago, all the danwei have moved out of the Palace Museum, one of the most popular attractions in China. “So, it now owns the whole compound, and they will restore bit by bit to open it up,” said Ho, the UNESCO Chair on Architectural Heritage Conservation and Management in Asia. “And I think that’s a wonderful effort.”
As the Palace Museum celebrated its 100th anniversary in October, a small site in its northeastern section attracted outsized attention upon its public opening on September 30, with the museum describing it as “the most exquisite and beautifully decorated garden” of the entire compound.
The Qianlong Garden was closed for nearly a century. While its construction was completed within five years in the 1770s, the restoration took 25 years through a partnership between the museum and World Monument Fund. “I am happy to see they spent such a long time on this,” said Ho.
This is one step in the museum’s long-term conservation efforts. Last Monday, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the museum for an anniversary exhibition, where he said the museum is “an important symbol of the Chinese civilization” and should “work harder to protect, restore, and make good use of the cultural relics.”
A first glimpse
On the rainy last day of China’s recent Golden Week holiday, long queues of domestic tourists formed inside Qianlong Garden, with the attraction trending on the country’s social media platforms.
The garden, bearing the name of Emperor Qianlong, sits next to another popular tourist site inside the museum. Its discreet entrance speaks to the Qing ruler’s design and desire to make it a personal retreat.
Covering 6,0000 square meters, the garden is smaller than a soccer field. That’s a significant contrast to other parts of the Forbidden City, marked by wide open spaces intended to represent the grandeur of imperial power and territory.
Qianlong took a page from the design of private gardens in southern China to make the layout more compact, and divided the site into four connected courtyards, two of which are currently open to the public, from south to north. He varied the courtyard arrangements: some filled with a cluster of buildings, others open and spacious.
“The architecture has carved up the very tight space to accommodate many sceneries,” explained Ho. “When you look at the sceneries from below and up on the inner pavilion, on the artificial hills, you get different perspectives.”
A quarter-century of work
Major renovation work of the Palace Museum only started in 2002 after the State Council, China’s cabinet, held a meeting on site and announced the initiative.
When the restoration project was launched, less than one third of the Museum was open to the public. The area increased to 80% by 2018, according to state media, after numerous buildings and city walls were restored, and 135 temporary structures inside the compound were torn down.
Restoring the Qianlong Garden took more than two decades, a costly and painstaking process based on a 2000 cooperation agreement signed by the World Monuments Fund and the museum, which estimated a price tag of $15-18 million.
Back in 2006, the restoration work of Taihedian (Hall of Supreme Harmony), the largest building in the palace, took less than two years.
Following the Qianlong Garden, museum officials said Yangxindian (Hall of Mental Cultivation), the residence and administrative office for Qing emperors, is also expected to reopen this year after completing restoration work that started in 2018.
For Ho, it’s important for China to apply what it has learned from the experiences of restoring the Palace Museum buildings to “professionally and scientifically” conserving Qing Dynasty architecture across the country – including a smaller imperial palace in northeastern China as well as old streets in many other regions.
“By and large, I think the country has woken up to the very, very important task in protecting historical heritage,” he added.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
