Palace for Gathered Elegance, Palace in Forbidden City, Beijing, China

The Palace for Gathered Elegance is a single-eave hip-and-gable roofed hall of five bays in the northeast corner of the Western Six Palaces of Beijing's Forbidden City. Its broad roof is covered in yellow glazed tiles, with a band of green and blue painted brackets under the eaves. Dark red wooden doors and window panels, carved with wanzi patterns, bats and longevity characters, stand between red pillars on a low pale stone base. The front corridor connects to side halls and the rear hall, Lijing Xuan.

The palace received a major renovation in 1884 to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of Empress Dowager Cixi. The work cost 630,000 silver taels and transformed the interior furnishings.

The name means "gathering beauty," and from the Jiaqing reign the palace was known as the empress's palace because most later empresses lived here. The corridor walls are inlaid with glazed-tile panels of the "Ten Thousand Years of Longevity" ode, composed by officials for Cixi's birthday. In the west hall, a 2005 royal telephone office displays materials on the palace's 1910 ten-line switchboard.

The glass partitions allow visitors to view the arrangement of private sleeping quarters without touching the furniture up close. The western wing shows the heating systems that provided warmth during the winter months.

The courtyard's pair of bronze dragons and pair of bronze deer were cast for Empress Dowager Cixi's fiftieth birthday in 1884. The deer are specifically plum-blossom deer, not the animals themselves; the name refers to the white spots on their coats. Cixi had the palace's rear hall renamed Lijing Xuan and used an indoor stage there.