— “They Built a Garden with the Navy’s Money”: Re-examining the Summer Palace and the First Sino-Japanese War
Every guide tells you the same thing
When I visited the Summer Palace in Beijing, our Japanese-speaking guide told us that this garden was the reason China lost the war against Japan. Walking on, I passed an English-language tour group. Their guide was saying the same thing.
The story is told with remarkable consistency: Empress Dowager Cixi diverted the navy’s budget to rebuild a pleasure garden for her retirement. Starved of funds, the Beiyang Fleet could not buy new warships. In 1894–95, Japan destroyed it.
It is a famous story, and a tidy one. I have written elsewhere about seeing Li Hongzhang’s calligraphy in Shimonoseki, the port where he was forced to sign the treaty that ended that war (→ [Li Hongzhang’s Calligraphy in Shimonoseki]). The contrast writes itself: the exhausted statesman bearing the humiliation of defeat in Japan, and the Empress Dowager admiring her lake in Beijing.
But how much of it is true? That is what I want to examine here.
I should say at the outset that most of the work revising this story has been done by Chinese historians. This is not a case of foreign scholars correcting a Chinese account. It is a case of a popular narrative outliving the research.
What the Summer Palace was: a garden built for a mother
The Summer Palace (Yiheyuan) sprawls across the northwest of Beijing. But it did not begin under Cixi, and it did not begin as a retirement villa.
It began as the Qingyiyuan, the Garden of Clear Ripples, built by the Qianlong Emperor. In 1750, to mark the sixtieth birthday of his mother, Empress Dowager Chongqing, Qianlong ordered the West Lake enlarged. The earth dug from the lakebed was piled onto the hill to the north, and the hill was renamed Wanshou Shan — Longevity Hill. The lake was named Kunming, after an ancient Han dynasty precedent.
His mother was a devout Buddhist. So on the southern slope of Longevity Hill, Qianlong built a great temple complex, the Temple of Gratitude and Longevity. The Tower of Buddhist Incense (Foxiangge) that dominates the hill today stands on that same central axis. Behind the hill, he added a Tibetan-style Buddhist complex.
This garden was, from its foundation, a garden built for a mother — and a public demonstration of xiao, filial piety, the virtue by which a Chinese ruler was expected to govern. Its cost is recorded at roughly 4.8 million taels of silver. (A tael is about 37 grams; the sum is close to 180 metric tons of silver.)
In 1860, during the Second Opium War, Anglo-French forces burned it. It lay in ruins for a quarter of a century. In the 1880s, Cixi rebuilt it, and in 1888 it was renamed Yiheyuan.
What actually happened to the navy’s money
The Board of Admiralty (Haijun Yamen) was created in 1885, after China’s defeat by France exposed how badly the coastal fleets were coordinated. Its head was Prince Chun, Yixuan — the future Puyi’s grandfather, the prince who made harmlessness his survival strategy (→ [The House of Prince Chun: Harmlessness as Strategy]). Li Hongzhang served under him as deputy.
The diversion was not a simple raid on a naval budget. It worked in subtler ways.
First, provinces contributed funds under the Admiralty’s name — a large pool of capital. Interest earned on those deposits was channelled into the garden works. The money carried the navy’s label, but this is not the same as stripping the fleet’s operating accounts.
Second, a naval academy was established on Kunming Lake, which allowed construction at the garden to be described, on paper, as a naval undertaking.
Prince Chun is understood to have been deeply involved, in order to please Cixi. A prince who had staked everything on being harmless lent the navy’s name to a garden. That is the shadow side of his family’s strategy.
As for the amount: older accounts cite figures as high as 30 million taels. Recent research generally puts it somewhere between a few million and ten million. Money moved specifically so as not to leave a trace is hard to count.
The story is usually presented as a chain:
Navy funds flow to the garden → the fleet is never modernised → China loses in 1894–95 → Li Hongzhang goes to Shimonoseki → the old military order is discredited → Yuan Shikai’s New Army is born
The Summer Palace sits at the head of that chain.
✦ Satoe’s Take: Was that really all of it?
The story is vivid, memorable, and morally satisfying. A wicked woman builds a garden for her own pleasure, and a nation falls.
Which is exactly why I am wary of it. A story that clear has usually simplified something.
Three reservations.
First, the sum. The figures were inflated for a long time. Whether the garden could have swallowed the navy whole is doubtful.
Second, and more importantly, the actual reason the fleet stopped growing. After the Beiyang Fleet was formally constituted in 1888, it acquired almost no new capital ships. The decisive act was not Cixi’s. In 1891 the Board of Revenue, citing the state’s finances, memorialised that the purchase of foreign warships and heavy guns be suspended for two years. It was approved.
That was a fiscal decision of the central government, shaped in part by a court that was uneasy about how much military power had accumulated in the hands of one Han Chinese official. Blaming a garden for it does not fit.
Third, the causes of defeat were plural. A shortage of quick-firing guns; problems with ammunition; confused command; poor tactics; failing logistics. The famous claim that Chinese shells were packed with sand is generally regarded as exaggerated — but the shortage of explosive shells, leaving gunners with solid shot that punched through without detonating, is well attested.
And this was not only a naval war. China lost on land too, at Pyongyang and across the Liaodong peninsula.
To hang the whole defeat on one woman’s extravagance is to simplify too far.
✦ Satoe’s Take: What was she trying to re-stage?
So why did she want this garden so badly?
Here is what I found, and it changed how I saw the place.
1894 was the year of Cixi’s sixtieth birthday.
She ordered the celebration to follow the precedent of the Qianlong reign. The model was the birthday celebration of Empress Dowager Chongqing — Qianlong’s mother.
Recall what happened for that woman’s sixtieth birthday. The Qingyiyuan was built.
Chongqing turned sixty in 1751, and a garden appeared. Cixi turned sixty in 1894, and the same garden was finished for her. She was restaging a scene from a hundred and forty years earlier, on the same ground.
The imitation was systematic. Qianlong had built the Palace of Tranquil Longevity for his retirement; after announcing in 1889 that she was handing power to the Guangxu Emperor, Cixi moved into it. Qianlong had processed to his garden on his birthday past decorated streets; Cixi planned the same.
The scale of those street decorations is astonishing. From the west gate of the Forbidden City out to the eastern gate of the Summer Palace, the route was to be lined with dragon pavilions, sutra altars, opera stages, and ceremonial arches, section by section. Chongqing’s celebrations had each cost over 850,000 taels. The decorations alone for Cixi’s were budgeted at more than 1.5 million.
The money is documented. In 1893, officials were assessed contributions for the birthday: about 263,900 taels from officials in the capital, 943,000 from the provinces — 1,206,900 taels in total. A separate stream from the navy question entirely.
Then history intervened.
War broke out in July 1894. On 17 September, the Beiyang Fleet was broken at the Battle of the Yalu River. Eight days later, on 25 September, the edict came down cancelling the celebration at the Summer Palace. The street decorations were dismantled. On the day itself, she received congratulations quietly, inside the Forbidden City.
A couplet is said to have circulated at the time:
Boundless longevity, the whole world rejoicing — Three armies routed, land ceded to sue for peace.
The Summer Palace was a stage set for a performance that never took place.
✦ Satoe’s Take: Nobody built it for her
But there is a difference between Qianlong’s garden and Cixi’s, and it is the whole difference.
Chongqing’s garden was built for her by her son.
Qianlong’s devotion to his mother is among the best documented in Qing history. He took her on all six of his southern tours, escorted her on pilgrimages, and made each successive birthday grander than the last. She lived past eighty. She had only to receive.
So who built a garden for Cixi?
There was one attempt. In 1873, the young Tongzhi Emperor — her own son — took power and made the rebuilding of the Old Summer Palace his first great project. The stated purpose was to provide the Empress Dowagers with a place of comfortable retirement; the edict spoke of delighting his mother’s heart above and fulfilling his small filial duty below.
But it was not filial piety. As the Palace Museum’s own account puts it, Tongzhi intended to use the restoration to move his mother out of the palace and escape her interference in government.
Filial piety, used as a device to get rid of a mother.
And Cixi saw through it, and did not care — because she wanted the garden. The architectural drawings and models were all sent to her for approval, and she personally sketched interior decorative designs for one of the halls.
Work began in 1874 and quickly ran into empty coffers and a fraud scandal. That July, Prince Gong led ten senior ministers to remonstrate with the emperor face to face. Tongzhi exploded: shall I hand this throne over to you? Construction stopped. Six months later, in January 1875, Tongzhi was dead.
More than a decade later, as the Guangxu Emperor came of age, work began at the Summer Palace — again framed as providing Cixi with a peaceful old age. The name Yiheyuan itself means something like “nurturing harmony in retirement.”
And here is the detail I keep returning to. Where in 1874 Prince Gong and the senior ministers had blocked the project outright, this time the objections dwindled to almost nothing, and the number of officials competing to flatter rose sharply.
The same woman, the same kind of garden. In 1874 the court stopped it. In 1888 the court did not. What had changed was not the price. It was how much everyone had learned to defer.
This is what the Summer Palace actually testifies to. Not a specific sum diverted from the navy, but what kind of state the Qing had become — one in which the comfort of the powerful could take precedence over the survival of the country, and in which nobody in the room would say so.
And one thing more. The story itself — Cixi lost us the war — performed a service. Every prince and every official who stayed silent could point at her afterwards. If there is a wicked woman to absorb all the blame, everyone standing next to her is saved.
In closing: an empty garden
The Summer Palace is a World Heritage site now, and full of visitors.
I walked it. I had grown up thinking of the Byodo-in at Uji as a garden of paradise, and this was simply too vast for that frame. Kunming Lake does not look man-made. The long corridor along the shore is painted panel by panel, no two alike.
And as I walked, I kept thinking about Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan.
At Sun Moon Lake you take a boat out from near Hanbi Lou, once Chiang Kai-shek’s lakeside villa. On the far shore, up the slope, there are Buddhist halls — including the temple that enshrines a relic of the monk Xuanzang. And on the peak above, the Ci’en Pagoda, which Chiang built in memory of his mother. The island, the temple and the pagoda stand on a single axis.
The Summer Palace has the same shape. The imperial party travelled by boat up a canal from the western side of the city — Cixi used that route herself — into Kunming Lake, where Longevity Hill rises from the northern shore with its Buddhist temples on the central axis, built for a mother.
Two rulers, two centuries apart, arranging the same landscape: a lake, a boat, a Buddhist mountain, and a monument to a mother at the end of the axis.
But look again at who is standing where. Qianlong and Chiang Kai-shek are both the sons. They built for their mothers.
Cixi is the only one who does not fit the pattern. She had to be the builder and the honoured at once.
I noted earlier that Qianlong’s 4.8 million taels and Cixi’s diversion are of a similar order of magnitude. But spending a similar sum is not doing a similar thing.
Qianlong’s garden had someone giving and someone receiving. Cixi’s had only her.
Think again about that 1,206,900 taels collected in 1893. The officials in the capital were assessed one amount, the provincial officials another. The congratulations came with a rate schedule. That is not celebration.
Nobody was truly celebrating her birthday. And she cannot have failed to know it. She knew, and ordered it done on a grand scale anyway.
So no, I do not think this can be called filial piety. It was waste.
And yet — to stop at “waste” leaves something out.
I do not think what she wanted was a garden. I think she wanted to be Qianlong’s mother. To be the woman who was cherished by her son, taken along on his journeys, given a lake and a hill and a temple for her sixtieth year, and honoured into her eighties.
Power, she had. She reached the highest position a woman could reach under the Qing. She could have a lake dug, a road lined with pavilions, an empire’s officials assessed for contributions. The one thing she could not commission was for anyone to mean it.
And even the celebration she had bought was cancelled, eight days after the fleet went down.
History is written by the winners, people say. There is a version of that here: the specific charge — she ate the navy and lost the war — was assembled after the defeat, by people with reasons to assemble it.
But what separates Qianlong’s garden from Cixi’s is not who won. The two were different from the beginning.
Our guide said the garden was why China lost the war. I do not think condemning it that way is right, and I do not think the opposite — treating it as a beautiful place with no bearing on the defeat — is right either.
This is not the garden that lost a war. It is an empty garden.
Kunming Lake is still beautiful. The corridor paintings are still worth walking slowly past. The Tower of Buddhist Incense is visible from everywhere on the water. She had all of it built, and something still went unfilled.
The calligraphy I saw in Shimonoseki, and the Summer Palace in Beijing. The handwriting of a man sent to absorb a nation’s humiliation, and the garden blamed for causing it.
Set them side by side and the weight of the late Qing becomes visible.
And a question rises with it: who was it that cut that cultivated, capable man loose and left him standing there alone? Could nobody have helped him?
Related articles
- [Li Hongzhang’s Calligraphy in Shimonoseki]
- [From the Decline of the Eight Banners to Yuan Shikai]
- [The House of Prince Chun: Harmlessness as Strategy]