A set of design drawings made by a royal architect surnamed Lei in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) began to be displayed at the National Library of China last Sunday. The design drawings were once included in the United Nation's World Memory Heritage List.
During the Qing Dynasty, the Lei family, which consisted of ten people in seven generations, had taken on the design work for many imperial buildings. Five of them have been selected into the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List. These include the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, the Chengde Summer Resort, and Mausoleums of Qing Emperors.
About 276 designing items have been selected to be on display this time. Most of them are shown to the public for the first time. They include the design drawing of Wenhua Hall at the Forbidden City; the design drawing of Wen Yuan Hall at Yuanmingyuan park (the Old Summer Palace); the design drawing of the irrigation system at Yuanmingyuan; the design drawing for the decoration at Lord Guan Temple in the Zhengyang Gate and its affiliated buildings; the design drawing for the Temple of Heaven, etc. In addition, the miniature version of the Ding Dong Ling and the architectural design of the underground palace, the miniature version of the Wan Fang An He building at Yuanmingyuan, and the miniature of the Kuo Ran Da Gong building at Yuanmingyuan, are also displayed.
At present, about 20,000 architectural drawing designed by the Lei family are well preserved. The National Library of China has kept 15,000 of them. The China No.1 Archives Building, the Forbidden City, the National Museum and the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University have also kept some.
At present, the World Memory Heritage List has included five Chinese cultural heritage items. They are the archive files made in Qing Dynasty which record Western missionaries' activities in China during the 17th century, an audio archive file of traditional Chinese music, the ancient documents about Dongba culture, the list of scholars that passed the Imperial Civil Examination during the Qing Dynasty, and the architectural design drawings done by the Lei family.
(China News Service September 11, 2007)
