Photo Reference Resource including images of China

The Summer Palace is a vast estate of lakes, gardens and palaces on the outskirts of Beijing. It was the Imperial garden during the Qing Dynasty, it covers approximately 2.9 km square.

The Suzhou Street was built in 1762, as a copy resembling Shantong Street and canal in Suzhou by the Emporer Qianlong. In 1860 the British and French destroyed parts of it which were rebuilt and restored in 1988.

Construction of the Shantang Canal  started in 825 AD, during the Tang Dynasty by Bai Juyi, a poet and the Cishi (modern-day equivalent of the prefectural governor) of Suzhou, to provide a link between Huqiu and the city. The sludge dug out from the construction formed a dam along the north bank of the canal known as Baigong Dam in honor of Bai Juyi. A street was built on the dam, which later became the modern-day Shantang Street.

The site it massive and it’s spread allover the estate, I spent a day there and only saw a fraction of the Summer Palace.

We decided to visit this in the early morning arriving at 8:30am when it opened hoping to avoid the crowds only to turn up on a day when schools from all over China had arrived for a visit. So it was rammed lol

It was also a really hot day, and once in side a lot of the palace has white walls, so the sun bounced off every surface which made it even hotter. The site is huge and is literally a warren of different buildings and walkways. It’s one of those places you really should visit if you go to China.

This was a temple complex on the side of a mountain near Chengdu, you climb up through the complex to the top of the mountain, where the views are supposedly pretty amazing, the problem was when we visited a fog descended by the time we reached the top lol

These are some images I’ve taken on several trips to China. I’ll be adding more images of some of the historic buildings from various periods in Chinese history.

Here’s some of the images I took on a cheap 35mm compact camera during the Gulf War (Desert Storm). It’snot all of the pictures I managed to take. I’ll have to head up to the attic to locate a small photo album I have. I did take a lot of images of battle damage to Iraqi vehicles, so I’ll try and find those.

Second batch of rust images

Some reference pictures for painting rust

More images of the rich persons house.

In one part of the movie set was this rich mansion style building.

More images

Some more images that includes interiors

I finally managed to get some time to sort out some more images from the Movie town set.

Some more images from the set

More images from the movie set. The range of building styles is quite interesting, from wooden building which wouldn’t be out of place in the 19th Century through to brick/stone buildings. The roads varied from hard dirt tracks to cobblestone as well.

Part 2 of the images for the Shenyang Movie Town set

It’s going to take a while to get all the images into the project log as I’m having to resize them in Photoshop first.

Most of these buildings have disappeared in Modern China, sadly they’ve been bulldozed in the majority of towns and cities to make way for modern skyscrapers and tower flats, so it’s only places such as these movie/TV sets where you can still see reconstructed examples of ordinary period buildings.

My long term plan is to scratch build some copies of the building for future gaming set in Early 2oth Century China. I’ll create a separate project log once I start on that terrain.

I’ll continue on a regular basis to upload more images.

This is the first street as you enter the set, which takes you up towards a Shanghai style tram car.