Mapping Chengde

The imperial residence of Chengde was built by two powerful and ambitious Manchu emperors between 1703 and 1780 in the mountains of Jehol. This volume, the first scholarly publication in English on the Manchu summer capital, reveals how this unlikely architectural and landscape enterprise came to help forge a dynasty's multicultural identity and concretize its claims of political legitimacy. Using both visual and textual materials, the author explores the hidden dimensions of landscape, showing how geographical imagination shaped the aesthetics of Qing court culture while proposing a new interpretation of the mental universe that conceived one of the world's most remarkable examples of imperial architecture.