The Palace of the Emperor’s Father (Prince Ch’un, the Seventh Prince)
The Palace of the Emperor’s Father, which the Empress Dowager had set aside for me to live in while I was at work on her portrait, was a splendid demesne, with a noble park and spacious buildings. It had been much injured by the foreign troops in 1900 and had been unoccupied since, until Her Majesty decided it would be a suitable dwelling-place for her “Portrait Painter.” She had it hastily restored and refurnished for our occupation, but many of the pavilions and summerhouses in the grounds were in ruins, and the stables but partly rebuilt. Except the grounds immediately surrounding the buildings in which the Yu-Kengs and I lived, which were well kept and garnished, the greater part of the extensive park was in a fascinating state of natural wildness. The Palace, like all others in China, consisted of a network of verandahed pavilions built around spacious courts. There was a small Theater with the Prince’s loge and stalls for his guests, and numerous tea and summer houses were scattered over different parts of the grounds.
I selected, as my abiding-place, a charming group of buildings in a walled-in garden, fronting on a lotus-covered lake, with a winding stream at the back, spanned by a picturesque bridge. The principal pavilion of this group had a lofty central hall, out of which opened, on one side, bedrooms and dressing-rooms, and on the other dining-room and dependencies. Great doors in the center of the hall, which I had decided to use as my living-room, opened on a wide verandah which ran the whole length of the building. Marble steps led from this into a court filled with flowering shrubs. Two sides of the charming court had smaller pavilions similar to the central hall, and opposite this latter was a quaint stone wall, the upper part of tiled latticework, with curiously shaped