Page 40 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

2 The Afterlives of a Ruin

The Yuanmingyuan in China
and the West

James L. Hevia

On October 18, 1860, regular army British regiments and ones from the Indian Army,
some 3,500 soldiers in all, systematically set fire to the Yuanming, Changchun, and
Qichun Gardens located to the northwest of the Qing imperial capital at Beijing. The
reason for this action was in retaliation for the death in captivity of several British
subjects and Indian Army soldiers who had been seized by Qing forces, while
supposedly carrying a flag of truce. They were imprisoned at the Yuanming Gardens
for several days, where the London Times reporter and 19 other soldiers and civilians
perished in captivity. Lord Elgin, the British official who ordered the destruction of
the gardens as a “solemn act of retribution,” considered the treatment of the captives
a barbarous act and a transgression of the “laws of nations.”
The destruction of the gardens came on the heels of several days of plundering of
the grounds by British and French forces, as well as by a number of Chinese from
the nearby village of Haidian. The bulk of the plundered objects made their way to
Great Britain and France, where many were sold off in auction markets, put on public
display or entered into the collections of the regiments involved in the invasion of
Qing China where they all bore the epithet “from the Summer Palace of the Emperor
of China.” A few items were presented to Queen Victoria, the British monarch, and
a large collection was given to the emperor and empress of France. Other pieces went
with the Indian Army units back to India and probably remain in the collections of
the successor regiments in India and Pakistan. Still others found their way into Chin -
ese markets, with one report claiming that pieces were advertised for sale in a Chinese
newspaper in Hong Kong. 1
In this chapter, I will trace how subsequent generations have remembered and
reworked these events. How in China, the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan entered
2
a discourse about “national humiliation”; while in Europe and North America, the
term “from the Summer Palace of the Emperor of China” operated as a proper name
for the objects looted from the Yuanmingyuan. These are two separate and distinct
stories that on the whole have been isolated from each other since the original event.
In my conclusion, I will consider a recent event that suggests, if not a reconciliation
between these two versions of the past, something like a convergence.

Becoming the Yuanmingyuan
Following the destruction of the imperial gardens, the Qing court made a half-hearted
effort to rebuild. By the 1880s, though attempts at restoration were abandoned and
instead resources were directed to the construction of the Yiheyuan, sometimes called