Page 15 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

Acknowledgments

This volume emerged from papers presented at a conference at the University of
Manchester in July 2013—The Yuanmingyuan in Britain and France: Representations
of the “Summer Palace” in the West. I am grateful to Yangwen Zheng, Professor of
History and formally Acting Director of the Centre for Chinese Studies at the
University of Manchester, for her support of this event—and for her advice and
encouragement throughout. At the University of Manchester, Hannah Mansell and
Olivia Pennelle provided much needed organizational help; and Stephen Welsh,
Curator of Living Cultures at the Manchester Museum, offered illuminating inter -
pretation sessions devoted to the Chinese collections as part of the conference pro -
gramme, which were much appreciated. I thank Greg Thomas for his thoughtful
advice during the conference preparations, as well as for his translations of both
Vincent Droguet’s paper and the chapter in this volume. I am grateful as well to all
the contributors and participants at the conference for creating such an intellectually
stimulating atmosphere.
The original series editor, Michael Yonan, supplied positive and enthusiastic feed -
back from the start. Margaret Michniewicz at Ashgate gave excellent guidance on
the initial proposal, while Isabella Vitti and Julia Michaelis at Taylor & Francis have
ably seen the volume through to publication. I would like to thank Katrina Hill for
commenting on a draft of the introductory chapter. The views of two anonymous
reviewers were also extremely useful. Above all, I am indebted to James Hevia’s pio -
neering work. His book, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-
Century China (2003) inspired my initial research on “Summer Palace” objects some
years ago, thus sowing the seeds for both the conference and this publication.