Book review of A Paradise Lost: The Imperial Garden Yuanming Yuan. By Young-Tsu Wong. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8248-2328-1.
Yuanming Yuan has become the most famous garden of imperial China thanks to its well-documented and tragic history. The nationalism of Chinese historians and the enthusiastic endorsement of Westerners - Victor Hugo used to compare Yuamming Yuan to the Parthenon - have combined to turn the ruins of the Yuanming Yuan into a major tourist attraction today. At the very beginning of the 18th century the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1722) supervised the simultaneous construction of two new garden complexes, the court's principal residence of Yuanming Yuan in Haidian (Beijing) and the summer residence of Bishu Shanhuang in Chengde.