The Summer Palace or Yiheyuan, literally "Garden of Nurtured Harmony” is the largest and best-preserved imperial garden in China, located in Haidian District, 12 kilometers northwest of the downtown, where the Chinese Royalty used to spend the Summer months.

Early in the Jin dynasty, an imperial palace named Golden Hill Palace was built on the present site of the Summer Palace. Kublai Khan the Mongol Emperor (Yuan Dynasty, 1279-1368), ordered the construction of canals to transport water from the Western Hills to the Summer Palace for the sake of improving Beijing's water supply. He also enlarged the lake to use as a reservoir. In 1750, Emperor Qian Long of the Qing dynasty built the Garden of Clear Ripples here and renamed it longevity Hill to celebrate his mother CiXi’s birthday. The grounds of the Summer Palace cover 716 acres that features a variety of palaces, gardens and other ancient-style architectural structures.. It was ransacked by the Anglo-French Allied Forces in 1860, was rebuild in 1886 with funds that it had impropriated from the Imperial Navy and other sources by Empress CiXi, The Summer Palace is a fascinating, involving plenty of superstition, intrigue, wars and the decadence of the emperors. It has two entrances, one is the East Palace Gate and the other is North Palace Gate. Most visitors enter the garden from the East Palace Gate.

Two thirds of the Summer Palace is made up of water which in the shape of a peach, the Kunming Lake, means Vast Brightness, it was used for a while in the eighteenth century for training the Chinese navy. it would take about 2 hours to walk along the entire shoreline of it, where also the wonderland for artists and poets.

The Marble Boat is also called Qingyanfang Boat, is securely planted in the northwest of Kunming Lake. It was first built in 1750 with a Chinese-style wooden superstructure on it. Was burned down by the Anglo-French forces in 1860, and in 1893, it was rebuilt with a French-style superstructure and two wheelers added to it. Taking the implied meaning of "the water can hold the boat as well as topple the boat", the Marble Boat symbolizes the steadfast rule of the Qing dynasty. Built with huge stones, the body of this boat is 36 meters long with two tiers.

The One thousand-steps corridor arranged along the shore of the lake， it was first built in 1750, and the interior is covered in Suzhou-style paintings which landscapes of the southern region of China were painted on. Pretty nice but it seems to go on forever. The steps of the corridor will lead you to the famous symbol of the Summer Palace: Foxiang Ge or the Tower of Buddhist Incense. It is a four-floor, 41 meter-high building.

There are also some other interesting places like The Long Gallery, the Palace of Budhist Fragrance where is on the top of the Longevity Hill can be observed from almost every site in the Summer Palace near the Kunming Lake.

In 1898, CiXi threw Emperor Guangxu in jail(house arrested at longevity hill) after he supported the liberal reformers. In the hall, the hanging with the Chinese character for "Longevity" is encircled by a hundred bats, as the word for bat in Chinese is a homonym for happiness, so linking the two together. Cixi's seal on the hanging suggests that she painted it: rather unlikely.

In December 1998, UNESCO included the Summer Palace on its World Heritage List with the following comments: 1) The Summer Palace in Beijing is an outstanding expression of the creative art of Chinese landscape garden design, incorporating the works of humankind and nature in a harmonious whole; 2) The Summer Palace epitomizes the philosophy and practice of Chinese garden design, which played a key role in the development of this cultural form throughout the east; 3) The imperial Chinese garden, illustrated by the Summer Palace, is a potent symbol of one of the major world civilizations.