These prints represent part of a volume of twenty prints, engraved after original drawings prepared by a group of Jesuits at the Imperial Court in Beijing, and their Chinese assistants. They recapture with particular dramatic effect what was unquestionably the most extraordinary manifestation of Western cultural influence in Imperial China, the European complex of buildings six miles north-west of Beijing, which formed a small corner of the vast range of Imperial courts in the Palace complex. The story of the Yuan Ming Yuan project has been well discussed by a number of Western historians, most recently Cecile and Michel Beurdeley, Giuseppe Castiglione, A Jesuit Painter at the Court of the Chinese Emperors, pp.65-79. The Palace became the favourite residence of the Chinese Emperors under the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, and the Qing Emperors played their part in embellishing the evolving clusters of buildings. None was more important than Qianlong, who as Beurdeley notes, himself decided on the position of a Western-style palace in the manner of European architectural prints he had been shown by Jesuits at the court. The designs which he was offered by Castiglione reflected a particularly
florid Italianate interpretation of baroque formal buildings, reflecting Qianlong's specific request for Palaces 'in the manner of the European barbarians', complete with very un-Chinese hydraulic-powered water fountains, cascades and other mechanical gimmicks. Beurdeley records that the Jesuit Benoist was in charge of the hydraulic works, while in the building itself, he was assisted by two other Jesuits, a German, Father Ignatius Sickelpart, and a Florentine, the architect Ferdinando Bonavventura Moggi. The project began in 1747, and lasted some twelve years. Among the recorded buildings are the 'House for Gathering the Waters', concealing a hydraulic machine; the 'Palace of Delights and Harmony', said by the Jesuits to bear comparison with the chateaux of Versailles and Saint- Cloud; the 'Garden of Lanterns of Yellow Flowers', and the 'Palace of the Calm Sea', so-called because the terrace there contained the vast reservoir which fed the fountains. See Beurdeley, passim, for futher information about the project and the commissioning of the set of copper plates, which were prepared as Father Bourgeois relates, under the direct eye of the Emperor Qianlong.