Having been the home of one key court official and later, two princes, it is where half of Qing Dynasty history seems to be hidden, and even a glance at the remnants will tell visitors that Prince Gong's Palace was an impressive place.

In the last 200 years of China's dynastic days, this is where the elite lived. And now the task is to make it look the way it once did - that is, if those in charge of the restoration can figure out how it did look.

What's more, the clock is ticking. The deadline is August 2008, when the world comes to Beijing for the Olympic Games.

The palace, known in Chinese as Gongwangfu (), covered 61,000 square metres in the Liuyinjie Hutong () beside Shichahai Lake (). Heshen, the councillor of the court, lived here. So did princes Yonglin and Yixin and princess Hexiao.

It is not only the country's largest courtyard, but was once a wonderland. It featured China's largest white marble door and magnificent rosewood houses.

The garden featured a murmuring stream that flowed around landscaped grounds, with exotic flowers and rare herbs emitting strong fragrances. It's this setting that was said to have served as the model for the real Grand View Garden described in such Chinese classics as "The Dream of Red Mansions."

More than 20 residences in the palace, composed of more than 100 rooms and each with a broad yard, were all connected by a maze of corridors. Each residence was exquisite and reflected a different style of decoration.

Twelve lines of hair knots on the stone lions at the door and the five-room facade indicated the noble status of its owner, and numerous antiques and precious jade and gold wares bore witness to the family's wealth.

But with those resplendent houses burnt down, the wonderful gardens destroyed and all the antiques lost, now only grass and some relics stand in silence.

To recapture its previous grandeur and charm, restoration on the palace -- and construction of a Museum of Great Chinese Royal Palaces on the grounds -- began last December. A stunning 400 million yuan (US$49.3 million) will be invested in the first renovation of the palace since 1850.

Determined to restore the palace to the way it looked in its prime during the reigns of Emperors Tongzhi (1862-75) and Guangxu (1875-1908), the relics administration promised that even "the ceiling paper will be historically the same."

Once the restoration began, the big project turned out to be a huge, rigorous examination on Chinese anthropology. The reason was a lack of historical records.

As the mansion of the royal family, the residence was inaccessible to common officials in those days. Then numerous raids during the wars of the 20th century caused most of the useful records to be burnt.

"We now only have two sketch maps of the palace, " said Chen Tong, engineer of the restoration project. One is the grounds plan by the Lei family, the famous architecture family used by the Qing emperors. But scholars found many of their critical questions unanswered: When was it made? Is it just a plan or a real mapping painting? Even if it is a plan, is it the one that was implemented?

Another archive, at Tsinghua University in Beijing, offered a ray of hope. Scholars found map sketches of a "Prince Gong's Palace" done by two designers from the Chinese Academy of Architecture in 1937. Among the 16 paintings, many reflect the key parts of the residences, and there are even five sketches of the interior decoration of different rooms.

As all are handmade sketches, there are many confusing patterns and curves. "Unfortunately the two painters, Mo Chongjiang and Liu Zhiping, passed away in 1990s, taking with them all the secrets, " Chen said.

After further research, architects learnt that the two designers also took many pictures during their mapping, prompting another search. "So far only 10 pictures have been found," Chen said.

But the restoration is only part of the problem at the palace. "It's a shame that even after the renovation is finished, the houses that will stand for visitors to see will be empty," said Kong Xiangxing, director of the consultative committee of the new museum.

So, the central government has decided to invest 200 million yuan (US$24.7 million) to buy back the lost antiques and ornaments in the palace. "But it is really like trying to find needles in a haystack," Kong said. "After the numerous wars and raids, many things are untraceable. "

For instance, "The You Mu Copybook ()," the authentic masterwork of famed calligrapher Wang Xizhi (321-79) of the Jin Dynasty (265-420), was stolen from the palace during the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1900). Later a Japanese collector from Hiroshima bought it, but the invaluable treasure went up in smoke during the atomic attack in 1945, and only a copy, made in 1925, was left.

According to historical records, Pu Wei, a descendant of Prince Gong, sold most of the antiques (except paintings and calligraphy works) in the palace -- about 2,000 of them -- in March, 1912, to a Japanese businessman. Some of the antiques were later auctioned off in the United States and the United Kingdom, but the records of most of them have been lost.

(China Daily 03/17/2006 page4)