Building up a legacy

A scene from Yangshi Lei, a documentary about a family of architects which prospered during the Qing Dynasty. In 1860, on a devastating night when Anglo-French forces were looting and burning Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, Lei Jingxiu, who worked as head of the Yangshi Office, the imperial architectural design institute at that time, was anxious to hear just what exactly was unfolding. Risking their lives, he rushed to the office in Yuanmingyuan with his son and colleagues, salvaged architectural archives and models related to imperial architecture of the Qing Dynasty, and got them back to his house. The surviving records played an important role for architects to study the designs and construction of Qing imperial architecture decades later, and have enabled people of the present time to get a glimpse of the past glory of the imperial garden. Many of its members worked as chief architects for the Qing court and designed buildings which are now world cultural heritage sites in China, including the Summer Palace in Beijing, the Eastern and Western imperial Qing tombs, and the Mountain Resort in Chengde, Hebei province.