Yuanmingyuan was not only famed for its beauty. It was also an imperial museum with a vast collection of cultural treasures. The French writer Victor Hugo once remarked, "With all its treasures, Notre Dame in Paris is no match for Yuanmingyuan, that enormous and magnificent museum in the East." Furniture made of red sandalwood decorated the numerous halls in which countless rare cultural relics were on display. As one of the four most famous imperial libraries, the Wenyuan Hall (Hall of Literary Profundity>) in the garden originally housed such precious ancient books as The Complete Library of Four Branches of Books (<Sikuquanshu>), Gems of the Complete Library of Four Branches of Books (<Sikuquanshukuiyao>), and The Completed Collection of Graphs and Writings of Ancient and Modern Times (<Past and the Present integration>).

   Alas, the skill and sophistication of the builders of this historic "Garden of Gardens," and the cultural treasures contained within it, failed to escape the destruction inflicted on China by the Western powers. In October 1860, the Anglo-French forces sacked and looted Yuanmingyuan and burned it to the ground. From then on, the garden suffered continual damage at the hands of the warlords, bandits, and the Eight-Power Allied Forces.  Its former beauty and glory no more, the entire garden lay in clusters of ruins and debris. In hushed silence it bore witness to the atrocities of the Western powers and the corruption and incompetence of the Qing rulers, and admonished the Chinese people never to forget the tragedy.