In 1908, with the support of the Empress Dowager Cixi, the Agricultural Experiment Station of the Ministry of Agriculture and Industry (農工商部農事試驗場), or the “Wanshengyuan” (萬生園, Garden of Ten-thousand Lives), was officially opened to the public. As the first central-level experimental station, besides agricultural fields, the entire complex also included laboratories, botanical gardens, a natural history museum, and a zoological garden. All were the first such cultural facilities in the empire. This article analyzes how the captive wild animals in imperial menageries that Qing sovereigns had maintained for more than two centuries were gradually de-contextualized from imperial ceremonies and then re-contextualized into the new agricultural experimentation station. Since the early Qing, the Imperial Household Department (內務府) managed menageries around the Forbidden City, including the Imperial Bestiary (baishofang 百獸房), the Imperial Aviary (bainiaofang 百鳥房), elephant stables, tiger rings, and so forth. Many of beasts performed important ceremonial roles in imperial rituals related to hunting, killing, and exhibiting furs. However, after the mid-nineteenth century, the number of animals kept in imperial menageries rapidly declined. At the same time, the ceremonies of hunting and killing were no longer conducted in the Nanyuan (南苑) or Royal Southern Hunting Park in Beijing, and the Qing empire stepped into the age of the zoological garden with the help of the global trade in animals and the demands of modern urban public space. Imperial animals and their mounts became collections of the zoo and museum. The imperial stages that had provided animals with the roles of power, control, dominance, and domestication were gradually turned into scenes of daily entertainment and recreation. The Garden of Ten-thousand Lives became one of several key media to visualize Cixi’s preparatory movement for constitutional monarchy. Grafted onto Qing imperial harvest ritual ceremonies, the Garden of Ten-thousand Lives modernized the classical political rhetoric of “raising all things and nourishing all the people” into the context of zoo and museum by transforming and reconnecting animal participants. The royal ploughing ceremony and silkworm-feeding ceremony were converted into scientific experiments for improving agricultural productivity. No longer being sacrificed, those beasts in spring and autumn royal hunting ceremonies, together with other species, become domesticated zoo animals under the public gaze. By gradually integrating “ritualized nature” with more “modernized nature,” the birth of the Agricultural Experiment Station reflected the political change of the Qing imperial way to cooperate with nature.