Between 1709, the year the Kangxi emperor (1654-1722) began construction of his garden Yuanmingyuan north of the Beijing Forbidden City, and 1799 when Kangxi's grandson the Qianlong emperor (b. 1736) died, building projects of the Qing court, particularly pleasure gardens, reached an all time high. The first century-and-a-half of Qing rule was an age when Jesuit missionary-artists had the ear of the Chinese emperors: Matteo Ripa (1682-1746), Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688), and Guissepe Castiglione (1688-1766) were among them. It was also a time when western science and technology entered China, and the Qing empire was confident enough to accept selected aspects of the world outside China without threat or retreat.
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