The burning of the Yuanmingyuan was from October 18, 1860 to October 21, 1860.

On October 18, 1860, 3,500 British troops stormed into the Yuanmingyuan and set it on fire. The fire was not extinguished for three days and three nights, and the clouds of smoke enveloped the city of Beijing for a long time, so the unparalleled masterpiece of the gardens was torched all together.

October 11, 1860, the British army sent more than 1,200 cavalry and an infantry regiment, once again ransacked the Yuanmingyuan, the British plenipotentiary James Bruce to the Qing government had Baxia Li imprisoned in the Yuanmingyuan as an excuse, ordered Lieutenant General Mitchell on October 18, led an invasion force of more than 3,500 people straight to the Yuanmingyuan, arson. The fire lasted three days and three nights.

Architectural Forms

The main types of buildings in the Yuanmingyuan include halls, chambers, pavilions, terraces, buildings, attics, pavilions, corridors, Xuanxuan, lounges, houses, boats, pavilions, halls, bridges, gates, walls, towers, as well as temples, Taoist temples, village dwellings, and markets of all kinds.

The building styles in its heyday, but also almost all of the ancient Chinese architecture may appear in all the layout and modeling styles: both the common single-eave roofing gray tile roof, simple and elegant; and palace-style heavy eaves glazed tile roof, brilliant; both a two-room, two into four compartments of the regular courtyard, but also flexible and varied architectural clusters.

There are 38 kinds of architectural layout ****, in addition to the common rectangular, square, round, I-word, concave and convex characters, hexagonal, octagonal, there are also a lot of unique and novel plane form, such as the eyebrow and moon shape, swastika shape, scroll shape, cross-shaped, field-shaped, curved, plum blossom-shaped, triangular, fan-shaped, and even set of rings, Fang Sheng, etc., it can be said that the richness of the incomparable.