Above Beijing's imperial center rises Jingshan, or Prospect Hill. From a pagoda at its modest peak, a panoramic view of the city presents itself.
To the south, the dull golden roofs of the Forbidden City crest and fall, pulling the eye southward to Tiananmen — the Gate of Heavenly Peace — and the vast square of the same name just beyond. To the east stand the smooth metallic skyscrapers of the city's business district. To the north, at the top of Beijing's central axis — its so-called dragon's vein — sit the Bell and Drum Towers, which once acted as the city's collective timepiece. And stretching all along the western periphery are the calm, tree-lined waters of the manmade lakes, dug by hand for the pleasure of past emperors.
It's this aerial view of "Zhongnanhai," meaning "middle and southern seas," and the surrounding buildings that today's Chinese leaders prefer you did not see. That's because the 1,500-acre site of repurposed imperial pavilions and temples, along with gray modern offices has formed the leadership compound for the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1950.
As the seat of power, Zhongnanhai is often thought of as China's equivalent to the White House, or the Kremlin. Synonymous with China's communist party elite, and among the country's most secretive places, it is ringed by a centuries-old red ochre wall, with countless CCTV cameras periscoping above it — and patrolled assiduously by security forces in both plain clothes and uniform.
For Chinese leader Xi Jinping's imperial forebears, the site served a somewhat different function. While emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties ruled their vast kingdom from within the Forbidden City, they built temples, halls and living quarters in Zhongnanhai; less grandly ceremonial than those of the palace, they were often oriented to take advantage of the views afforded by the area's tranquil waters and carefully planned gardens. Many of these emperors came to favor passing their days surrounded by drooping willows in the cool and quiet of this cultivated pleasure garden.
A story relayed by the scholar Geremie Barmé in his book "The Forbidden City" tells of the 18th-century Qianlong Emperor's daily routine at Zhongnanhai: Each morning, after a first breakfast of cold swallows nest soup, he would travel by heated palanquin to the gardens' Studio of Convivial Delight, a pavilion he built to capitalize on the view of the South Lake, where he would breakfast again on a meal of 18 dishes.
As the historian and author of "The Shortest History of China," Linda Jaivin, told CNN via email: "There is something outrageous and yet poetic about the incredible coordination and effort required of a team of bearers, cooks and attendants, just so that an emperor could come, catch a view of the magnificent Ocean Terrace, scoff his food and (leave)."
The first ruler to view Zhongnanhai as primarily a place to govern from, not simply relax in, was the Empress Dowager Cixi, who effectively controlled China for almost five decades from 1861. She lived for many years in the gardens' Hall of Ceremonial Phoenixes, which became the center of political authority in China. She would die there in 1908.
The serene surroundings of Zhongnanhai also became, under Cixi, a place of punishment and confinement. In 1898, following attempted reforms that displeased her, Cixi imprisoned her nephew, the Guangxu Emperor, on Yingtai Island, which juts out into the southern lake.
Built as a miniature version of the mythical Penglai island, home to the immortals of Chinese legend, the tiny piece of land would become the emperor's home for most of his life, bar a brief period when the Boxer rebellion of 1900 forced the whole court to flee the capital. He would die on Yingtai Island from arsenic poisoning the day before the Empress Dowager herself.
His imprisonment and death, said writer M. A. Aldrich, author of "The Search for a Vanishing Beijing: A Guide to China's Capital Through the Ages," perhaps adds a touch of poignancy for any subsequent resident of Zhongnanhai. "In addition to being a site that preserves sites of imperial splendor," he told CNN, "it also functions as a reminder to the political elite about the consequences for stepping out of line."
For Aldrich, however, the Zhongnanhai compound also represents the destructive impulses of the CCP towards its adopted capital in the years after 1949, when Mao Zedong proclaimed the foundation of the People's Republic. "As a political symbol of the New China, it has been torn up, rebuilt, expanded, and revamped so many times that its connection with its elegant past has been lost," Aldrich said.
Keep reading about the garden's transformation.
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