Page 127 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

112 Kevin McLoughlin
Much has been written on this subject but Vogel effectively summarizes the
professional discourse around the display of culture that always should be an ongoing
part of the dialogue within, around, and about museums and their collections. Objects
may be mute but displays never should be. The question that needs to be answered
from a museological point of view in regard to the Hope Grant Ewer is whether the
critical lens that Vogel describes has been focussed tightly enough.

The Ewer and the Legacy of 1860
The Hope Grant Ewer is explicitly linked to a spectacular act of retributive cultural
violence; theft and destruction enacted against the ruling house and dynastic
administration of the Qing, and as such will forever remain inextricably bound up
with the set of events that took place a few kilometers to the northwest of Beijing
in October 1860. By virtue of the inscriptions on the ewer, and the biographical
account of General Sir Hope Grant, the ewer possesses a provenance, which
definitively binds it to the Yuanmingyuan. This is unambiguously so given the looting
and pilfering that occurred from other sites in the Three Mountains and Five Gardens
area (89:園) near the Yuanmingyuan including the nearby Qingyiyuan (;<園,
Pure Ripple Garden) and Jingmingyuan (= 園, Garden of Tranquil Brightness)
to the west, the commercial and residential sections of nearby Haidian to the south -
east, as well as more legitimate and permissible forms of acquisition from the
curio shops of Beijing’s Liulichang, all of which have served to muddy the waters of
imperial provenance. The result is that not all of the material that began to arrive
in Europe after 1860, which was described as being imperial and from the “Summer
Palace,” necessarily was. However, the texts engraved on the ewer and the circum -
stances of the ewer’s presentation indelibly link General Sir Hope Grant to the events
that took place at the Yuanmingyuan, and in turn connect the General to the very
person of the Xianfeng emperor. While intended to celebrate—much in the manner
of a sporting trophy—the success and leadership of the Commanding Officer of Anglo-
Indian forces, the texts on the ewer conversely point to a nadir in China’s “Century
of Humiliation,” the moment when, as Sir Garnet Wolseley wrote, “The destruc -
tion of the emperor’s palace was the strongest proof of our superior strength; it served
to undeceive Chinamen in their absurd conviction of their monarch’s universal
sovereignty.” 59 The Yuanmingyuan presented such a powerful vision of an Oriental -
ist “Willow Plate Pattern” fairyland fantasy of China to those who witnessed its
ransack and ruin, and even to those at a remove, most famously the French author
and dramatist Victor Hugo (1802—1885) writing in 1861, and its destruction rightly
retains the power to outrage today. The Hope Grant Ewer must be among the very
few museum objects to testify so eloquently to a moment of such profoundly felt
and displayed hurt and humiliation in the history of another nation. 60 The Hope
Grant Ewer remained an imperial artifact for only the first eight years of its exist -
ence, followed by 24 years in the possession of the Hope Grant family. With the
exception of its presentation to General Sir Hope Grant by his officers, little is known
of the history of the Hope Grant Ewer from the first two periods of its existence,
and the history of the ewer during much of the third phase of its existence, within
the National Museum of Scotland, is only marginally less obscure. Nevertheless, the
significance of the Hope Grant Ewer has shifted profoundly during this latter phase,
seemingly quietly and without notice, from imperial object to imperialist trophy, and