Digital restoration technology makes Old Summer Palace "reproduce"

　　The special pattern of the front and the back sleeping; beautiful like a fairyland, the most magnificent and beautiful building in the Old Summer Palace; the Western-style building complex combining Baroque and Chinese styles... On October 20, a group of 3D restored Yuanmingyuan buildings The group appeared on the screen of the New Tsinghua School of Tsinghua University, amazed the audience.

　　On October 18, 1860, the British and French allied forces set fire to the Old Summer Palace. The fire lasted for several days, and the peculiar spectacle was finally burned, becoming an indelible scar in the modern history of China.

160 years later, 84-year-old Guo Daiheng, a well-known architectural historian and professor at the School of Architecture of Tsinghua University, led nearly 800,000 online and offline viewers to return to Yuanmingyuan through his team's painstaking research on digital restoration technology for nearly 20 years, and appreciate the heyday of Wanyuan Garden Style.

　　Guo Daixian believes that while lamenting the miracle of architecture, we must pay more attention to the cultural heritage behind it: "Compared with the concrete physical buildings of the garden, the cultural value of the Old Summer Palace is more worthy of attention. The research on ancient buildings such as the Old Summer Palace makes people rethink our nation. The young generation must dare to imagine."

Interpreting the historical readability of cultural heritage with digital restoration

　　The Old Summer Palace was built in the forty-sixth year of Kangxi (1707) as the gift garden of the four princes Yinzhen, and when Yinzhen (Yongzheng) ascended the throne, it was the emperor's imperial garden. It has been operated for more than 150 years in Yongzheng, Qianlong, Jiaqing, Daoguang and Xianfeng. , Become the garden of ten thousand gardens.

After 1860, after the catastrophe of war, it became the pain of history. Its true content has gradually disappeared. However, since the 1990s, there have been constant proposals to rebuild the Old Summer Palace.

　　Guo Daizhen opposes comprehensive physical restoration: “Cultural sites are the carrier of historical information, and the destruction of the Old Summer Palace is also an important part of historical information. If it is changed at will, it violates the law of protecting cultural relics.” She believes that digital restoration is more convenient for interpreting the historical potential of cultural heritage. Readability.

In order to make the Old Summer Palace "reappear" in the virtual world, since 1999, she led a team to conduct a comprehensive study of the Old Summer Palace.

　　"Three points for the craftsman and seven points for the master." The first is to explore the "Party A" of Yuanmingyuan, that is, the emperor's aesthetic thoughts.

Guo Daiheng’s team reviewed the "Su Shi Zhu" and other documents and found that the emperors from Yongzheng to Xianfeng and the Five Dynasties used Yuanmingyuan as the place to govern the country, and the position is no less than the Forbidden City. The overall layout of the Yuanmingyuan from the beginning of the construction reflects the emperor's ideals of governance. .

Zhengda Guangming, Jiuzhou Qingyan, Wanfang Anhe and other scenic spots all embody the political ideals of Yongzheng.

During the Qianlong period, the construction of Yuanmingyuan reached its peak.

Among the various landscapes, the most are the agricultural landscapes that reflect the emperor’s concern for Jiarong. Various wooden structures represent the highest achievement in the design of Yuanmingyuan, while the Western-style buildings such as Dashuifa, which are familiar to the public, account for only 2%.

　　Authenticity, accuracy and as complete as possible are the primary principles for the digital restoration of Yuanmingyuan.

Guo Daiheng and his team paid attention to on-site surveys, surveying and mapping, and focused on the new achievements of archaeological excavations. At the same time, they dig in-depth historical materials, and compared the drawings of the remains of the style house, the "Rules of Old Summer Palace", "The House of Internal Affairs", "The Emperor's Wear File", "Living Notes", and " Qianlong’s Imperial Poems and related paintings and calligraphy works represented by the “Forty Scenes of Yuanmingyuan” adopt a comprehensive and multi-angle research approach and adopt cultural anthropological research methods, from history, culture, landscape, environment, and architecture. Art, garden plants, interior decoration, character stories and other aspects infer the spatial characteristics of the place.

　　Guo Daixian introduced that the current scenic spots accurately restored by his team accounted for 60% of the entire Yuanmingyuan.

More than 10,000 historical archives, 4,000 restoration design drawings, 2,000 digital building models, 120 sets of space-time units in 6 historical stages... More than 80 professionals have worked tirelessly for more than ten years to make the Yuanmingyuan digital restoration project many The data indicators set the world's most research on garden sites.

The restoration research process is like a detective solving a case

　　Lin Huiyin once said: "If one day we are quite sure of writing a history of architecture, the history of architecture will be like the most interesting detective novel."

　　The tortuous process of exploring the true face of the Old Summer Palace made Guo Daiheng lament that it was indeed like a detective solving the case.

　　The team has always been curious about what power device the water storage building of the Western Building uses to drive the fountain. Later, in an international conference, he cooperated with an Italian professor who studied Baroque architecture. He found the designer from the library of the Max Planck Institute of Art History. A letter from the missionary Jiang Youren to a friend found that Jiang Youren had used a drawing from a book on water conservancy machinery. This mechanical drawing and the copper engraving of the Western Building of the Old Summer Palace showed the "central axis" of the water supply device exposed by a half-open window. In the same way, through this clue, it is speculated that Jiang Youren may be using such hydraulic machinery.

However, the Italian professor still has doubts. I don’t know if China had such a picture at the time. He went to the National Library of China and found a French water conservancy book in the 18th century that was consulted by a missionary. On the picture of that book, there is also The traces and remarks drawn by the pencil, it is inferred that Jiang Youren made a design with reference to this drawing.

　　How to lay the pipeline from the storage building to the fountain?

In the Palace Museum, the team found the floor plan of a humorous and interesting style house with a red line drawn on it. Guo Daizhen, who had studied "Building French Style" with Liang Sicheng for many years, knew that the red line represented the waterway in the ancient construction drawings, so everyone used ground penetrating radar according to the map. The exploration revealed that there were pipelines under the ground. During the archaeological excavation the year before last, a copper water pipe that was still intact after nearly 300 years was dug out.

Based on these clues, the team successfully digitally restored the power plant of the water storage building.

Ancient buildings make people rethink the value of "imagination"

　　In the process of research, Guo Daiheng discovered that the Chinese garden represented by Yuanmingyuan had a profound influence on European garden art in the 18th century.

　　The American conceptual historian Lovejoy believes that "Chinese gardens are one of the origins of European romanticism, which promoted and contributed to the turn of romanticism."

Hugo said: "There is a world miracle in a certain corner of the world. This miracle is called the Old Summer Palace... This is all that can be achieved by the imagination of a nation that is almost superhuman." These comments made Guo Daizheng to the Old Summer Palace and China. The garden has a new understanding.

　　"From the perspective of ancient buildings such as the Old Summer Palace, Zhaozhou Bridge, and Temple of Heaven, the imagination of ancient Chinese people is very rich, and they have achieved remarkable world-leading achievements. Understanding the imagination of ancient people and providing reference for modern construction is the history of Chinese architecture. The significance of the research." Guo Daiheng said.

　　The old man who allowed the "Park of Ten Thousand Gardens" to be reborn in the virtual world said that the research meeting on Yuanmingyuan has been going on, and the digital Yuanmingyuan has also provided reference for cultural heritage protection and development projects at home and abroad. The scope of the cultural heritage restoration project was expanded to the three mountains and five parks in Beijing.

(Our reporter Deng Hui, our correspondent Wang Libin)