Scenery Borrowing from Within and Beyond: A Study on Viewing Landscape of Yuanmingyuan and Its Surrounding Areas in Emperor Qianlong’s Poems

The principle of scenery borrowing originates from classical Chinese garden design. Emphasizing the visual relationships between a garden and its surrounding areas, it offers a pathway to understand the holistic nature of traditional urban landscapes. Taking Yuanmingyuan during the Qianlong period as its research object, this paper first extracts viewed imagery from 1,585 poems composed by Emperor Qianlong for Yuanmingyuan. It then deconstructs Yuanmingyuan’s viewing landscapes into three hierarchical scales: the whole-garden scale, the scenic-unit scale, and the constructed-element scale. Through classification and localization, the visual relationships across these spatial hierarchies are reconstructed, a classification system for viewed imagery specific to Yuanmingyuan is established, and the perceptual patterns of the various categories of viewed imagery from different viewing locations are further analyzed. The findings reveal the overall composition of viewing landscapes both within and beyond Yuanmingyuan, the multi-layered arrangement of viewing locations, as well as the ingenious incorporation of exterior viewing and the diverse combination of elements of interior viewing at the scenic-unit scale. This paper provides a foundation for the holistic understanding and conservation of Yuanmingyuan as cultural landscape heritage and also preliminarily establishes an analytical framework for the planning and management of historic urban landscapes in Beijing.