Page 118 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

“Rose-water Upon His Delicate Hands” 103
The Second Opium War and the North China Campaign of 1860
The wider events that led to the looting and razing of the Yuanmingyuan—by far
the most notorious event of the Second Opium War—are well described elsewhere,
and will only be briefly recounted here. 20 The events that led to Anglo-French forces
marching on Beijing were precipitated by the capture of European and Indian soldiers
and civilians on 18 September 1860. With British and French troops marching on
Beijing, the Xianfeng emperor (r. 1850–1861) fled the Yuanmingyuan for Chengde
on 22 September. On the evening of 5 October, French troops arrived first at the
Yuanmingyuan—an enormous sprawling complex of imperial palaces, pavilions and
other buildings in a classical Chinese style, situated amid waterways and classical
21
gardens located several kilometers northwest of central Beijing. The several thousand
strong security force left behind after the Xianfeng emperor fled, retreated in the
face of the overwhelming Western military power, and so, finding it unguarded,
the French troops began looting. British troops arrived not long afterward, and
both officers and men joined in the looting of the palaces in what was described
by one observer as a temporary insanity; in body and soul they were absorbed in
one pursuit, which was plunder, plunder. 22 By October 18 and 19, what survived
of the Yuanmingyuan was put to the torch by order of James Bruce, Lord Elgin
(1811–1863), British High Commissioner in China, in retaliation in part for the
capture and torture of the European and Indian prisoners taken by the Chinese in
September, and in part for the Chinese failure to surrender. A report by General Sir
Hope Grant to the Secretary of State for War, Sidney Herbert (1810–1861), written
on October 21 states that he was responding to the looting of the palace complex
by French troops, and the need to maintain discipline among British troops whom
he ordered bivouacked, when upon witnessing these events he ordered his officers to
gather all that had been looted and auction it, with the sums raised being dispersed
23
among the ranks in a manner which was then customary in the British army. Rather
than detailing the actual nature of the looting, this account instead discusses the
responses of the officers to mitigating the activities of the men of ordinary rank. James
L. Hevia provides a useful critical overview of the various accounts of the looting in
24
October 1860, both first-hand and published in subsequent memoirs. In the decades
following the events of 1860, a number of revealing first-hand accounts by witnesses
to the events of October that year were published. Two excerpts below, provided
firstly by Count Maurice D’Hérisson (1839–1898), secretary and interpreter to
General Charles Cousin-Montauban (1796–1878), commander of the French forces,
and secondly by Charles Dupin (Paul Varin), a Lieutenant-Colonel also serving with
Montauban, illustrate the impact of the dazzling and overwhelming spectacle that
greeted the Anglo-French forces within the palaces. These were sights that only a
small number of Europeans, such as the Jesuits serving at the Qing court, had
previously seen, and in line with other French accounts they focus on interior spectacle
rather than the exterior setting of the architecture and gardens. 25

The walls, the ceilings, the dressing tables, the chairs, the footstools are all in gold,
studded with gems . . . There on supports of jade are two pagodas of enamelled
gold, as large as corn bins, with seven superimposed roofs, and from each pear-
shaped pearls hang like so many bells. In among the gods are European clocks
of every description . . . alongside are more incense burners, torches, candle sticks,