Originally dedicated to the Qianlong Emperor to celebrate his 60th birthday and his mother's 80th birthday, the palace complex was designed to resemble the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet.

That’s fascinating! I wonder — will be digging into the Qianlong Emperor’s cats to see what I can find about them in the written record, but anecdotally when I was in Beijing more than a decade ago the strays were mostly white, but that had changed when I was back in 2018