Chengde Mountain Resort

Built between 1703 and 1792, the resort served diplomacy more than rest: the court spent half the year here dealing with the peoples of the empire’s margins, in a setting that reproduced their own architecture. The "eight outer temples" around it quote the Potala of Lhasa and Mongol monasteries, a way of asserting that the emperor also ruled those worlds. It was here that Macartney’s British embassy was received in 1793, and where the unequal Treaty of Beijing was negotiated after 1860. World Heritage since 1994.