Schönbrunn Palace

The story

The name means "beautiful spring". The Habsburgs, who ruled Austria and much of central Europe for more than six hundred years, had a hunting lodge here outside Vienna. Turkish soldiers burned it during the siege of 1683.

What you see was begun in 1696 and made into a family home from 1743 by Maria Theresa, the only woman ever to rule the Habsburg lands. In China that is the eighth year of the Qianlong emperor (乾隆, reigned 1736–1795). She had sixteen children and needed the space.

Close by, with a page of its own: Hofburg, Neuschwanstein.

What is here

One estate, many tickets. The park is free. Each thing inside it is sold separately or in a pass.

If you have one minute

In the forecourt, facing the yellow front

Count the windows if you can. The front is about 175 metres long. Behind it are 1,441 rooms. About forty are open to visitors. The rest are offices and flats, and people really do rent them.

The colour has its own name, Schönbrunn yellow, and was copied on stations, barracks and town halls from Trieste to Lviv. It was the colour of the empire.

Walk through the middle arch and the palace turns out to be the gate to something larger. A flat garden runs away from you to a fountain, and above the fountain a hill, and on the hill a row of arches against the sky.

Things people often get wrong

"It has always been yellow." Research on the old plaster suggests that in Maria Theresa's day the walls were paler, with touches of pink and grey. The yellow seems to date from the early nineteenth century.

"This is where the emperors lived." Only in summer. The court's home was the Hofburg in the middle of Vienna. Franz Joseph, in old age, was the first to live here all year.

"The garden needs a ticket." The park has been open to the public since 1779 and is still free.

"It is Austria's Versailles." The first design, never built, was meant to outdo Versailles, with the palace on top of the hill. What was built is smaller, and the family lived in it far more plainly than the French court.

People who stood here

• Maria Theresa (ruler of the Habsburg lands, 1717–1780)She inherited at twenty-three, fought off half of Europe to keep her lands, and ruled for forty years, spending her summers here. After her husband died in 1765 she wore black for the rest of her life and turned his study into a memorial lined with Chinese lacquer.
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Austrian composer, 1756–1791)On 13 October 1762, aged six, he played the harpsichord for the empress. His father wrote home that Wolferl jumped into her lap, put his arms round her neck and kissed her soundly.
• Marie Antoinette (queen of France, 1755–1793)Born Maria Antonia, the fifteenth child, she grew up in these rooms and gardens. At fourteen she was sent to France to marry the heir to the throne. She never saw Schönbrunn again.
• Napoleon Bonaparte (emperor of the French, 1769–1821)He took Vienna twice, in 1805 and 1809, and both times made this palace his headquarters. In October 1809 a German student of seventeen came to a parade in the forecourt with a kitchen knife to kill him. Months later Napoleon married the Austrian emperor's daughter.
• Napoleon II, Duke of Reichstadt (1811–1832)Napoleon's only legitimate son was brought to Vienna at three and raised as an Austrian prince. He never saw his father again. He died of tuberculosis at twenty-one in the room his father had slept in.
• Franz Joseph I (emperor of Austria, 1830–1916)He reigned for sixty-eight years. He got up before four, washed in cold water, and was at his desk by five. He slept on an iron soldier's bed, and died in it on 21 November 1916, in the middle of a world war.
• Elisabeth, "Sisi" (empress of Austria, 1837–1898)She married the emperor at sixteen and spent much of her life getting away from his court. Her rooms here have a staircase she had built so that she could reach the garden without being seen.
• Charles I (last emperor of Austria, 1887–1922)On 11 November 1918, the day the guns stopped in the west, he signed a paper in the Blue Chinese Salon giving up any part in the government. He never used the word abdicate. The republic was declared the next day.
• John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev (leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union)They met in Vienna on 3 and 4 June 1961. The talks went badly. On the first evening Austria gave them a dinner in the Great Gallery. Ten weeks later the Berlin Wall went up.
• Romy Schneider (Austrian-born actress, 1938–1982)She played the young empress in the three Sissi films (1955–57), partly shot here. They made the palace famous across Europe and Asia, and made her so tired of the role that she refused a fourth.

Go deeper: eight stops, through the rooms and up the hill

Stops 1 to 5 are inside and need a ticket. Stops 6 to 8 are in the park, which is free.

1. The emperor's rooms

The visit begins with Franz Joseph. His study has a desk, family photographs and little else. His bedroom has the iron bed. Beside it stood a washstand, and, a late concession, a water closet installed in 1899.

Look at the tall white stoves in the corners. None has a door. They were fed from passages behind the walls, so that no servant carrying wood ever crossed a room.

2. The Mirror Room

White and gold, with tall mirrors that double the candles. By tradition this is the room where the Mozart children played in 1762: Wolfgang, six, and his sister Nannerl, eleven. The empress gave each of them a set of court clothes that her own children had outgrown.

3. The Great Gallery

Forty metres long, ten wide, with windows on one side and mirrors facing them. The court danced here. The ceiling shows the Habsburg lands bringing their riches to Maria Theresa and her husband.

Look at the painting at the eastern end. It is a copy. In February 1945 a bomb came through the roof at that spot.

4. The Chinese rooms

A Chinese visitor will find things from home. Off the gallery are two small cabinets, one round and one oval, lined with lacquer panels and blue-and-white porcelain on gilded brackets. Maria Theresa held her most private meetings in the round one.

Further on is the Vieux-Laque Room, her memorial to her husband. Black lacquer panels from Beijing, painted in gold with landscapes, birds and flowers, were cut up and set into walnut walls. She paid a fortune for them. In eighteenth-century Europe nothing was more fashionable than China, and almost nobody had been there.

The room called the Millions Room is panelled in a rare tropical wood. Set into it are sixty frames, and in each frame a collage of Indian and Persian miniatures, cut apart and rearranged by members of the family.

5. Two small rooms

The Napoleon Room was Maria Theresa's bedroom. Napoleon probably slept in it in 1805 and 1809. His son died in it in 1832. The boy's pet, a crested lark, is still there, stuffed, under glass.

The Blue Chinese Salon has hand-painted paper wall-hangings made in China in the eighteenth century: scenes of people growing rice, raising silkworms and making porcelain. In this room, on 11 November 1918, the last emperor signed.

6. The garden and the fountain

The flat garden behind the palace is called the Great Parterre. The flowerbeds are laid out like embroidery, to be read from the windows above. Thirty-two statues of gods and heroes stand along the hedges.

At the far end the sea-god Neptune stands over a rock with his trident, among horses with fish tails. The fountain was finished in 1780, just before Maria Theresa died.

To the left of the fountain, in the trees, is a ruin: broken columns, a fallen arch, a pool. It was built as a ruin, in 1778. A ruin in a garden told visitors that even Rome fell, and that the family which owned the garden had outlasted it.

7. The Gloriette

Climb the zigzag path. It takes fifteen minutes. The arcade on top was built in 1775 as a monument to what the empress called a just war, the one that kept her lands together. The Latin letters name her and her son Joseph. Part of the stone came from an older, abandoned palace.

Franz Joseph took breakfast in the glazed middle section. It is a café now. Turn round. This is the view the first architect wanted for the palace itself: the yellow front below, and all Vienna behind it.

The same shot: stand at the edge of the pond in front of the Gloriette on a still morning and the whole arcade is doubled in the water.

8. The zoo and the glass house

In 1752 Maria Theresa's husband, who liked science more than ruling, laid out thirteen animal enclosures like slices of a cake round a small pavilion, where the family ate breakfast and watched. The pavilion is still there. This is the oldest zoo in the world that has never closed.

Giant pandas have lived here, on loan from China, since 2003. A cub born in 2007 was the first in Europe conceived without help from the keepers.

Near by, the Palm House of 1882 is 111 metres of iron and glass in three domes, each kept at a different climate.