The Old Summer Palace, a royal garden that harmoniously blended Chinese and European landscape arts, now stands as a poignant narrator of history through its crumbling walls and shattered pillars. Wander the Grand Waterfall ruins, tracing time’s imprint on weathered carved balustrades and jade-inlaid steps, where fractured Baroque columns and white marble bases bear scars of cultural collision. Willows along the West Dyke caress the remnants of Western-style buildings, as the crimson sunset illuminates the void left by the missing zodiac statues in the Hall of Calm Seas—every inch of earth interrogates the duality of imperial glory and catastrophic decline. Here, amid ruins, we rediscover civilization’s fragility, and in desolate beauty, glimpse eternity’s persistence.