Page 41 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

26 James L. Hevia
the New Summer Palace. The remains of the old imperial gardens were scavenged
for the new one. Most of the trees were also cut down to be used for construction
material, and later for the making of charcoal. Meanwhile, members of the foreign
diplomatic community and their retainers found the ruins of the European-style
palaces in the northeastern part of the Yuanmingyuan a charming site for picnics.
In the 1930s, the small hills and lakes of the Garden were leveled and filled in order
to turn the area into farmland. Other parts had been turned over to Yanjing, later
Peking, University and Qinghua University, and remain part of those campuses. After
1949, much of the land that was not owned by the universities was turned into a
collective farm, while another bit seems to have contained the Haidian Machine Tool
factory. During the 1960s and into the 1970s, the farms also became a place where
Chinese intellectuals, and even some British and Australian students studying at
Peking University, could learn the virtues of manual labor in between self-criticism
sessions and language classes. 3
At the beginning of the reform era in the early 1980s, things began to change. A
historical research unit was set up that started a journal in 1981, and a small museum
was organized. Among other things in the collection, the museum held a fascinating
diorama of British soldiers looting the Yuanming Gardens in 1860. Meanwhile, the
remaining stones were repositioned and some of the foundations of the European
palaces were unearthed. These developments are significant. What was happening on
a very modest scale, I would suggest, was that the site of the gardens, almost an
embarrassment for several generations, was being rediscovered and reworked by the
Chinese government as a “site of memory.”
What do I mean by this? I take the term “site of memory” from the French historian
Pierre Nora, who contrasts such sites to embodied or lived memory. Embodied
memory is produced in the ceremonies of a community or a household, and is lived
through the taken for granted routines and rituals of social life. In contrast, the sort
of memory that adheres to sites, according to Nora, is a product of “a society deeply
absorbed in its own transformation and renewal, one that inherently values the new
4
over the ancient, the young over the old, the future over the past.” In the place of
lived memory, we have national museums, archives, national holidays, and official
histories; memorial monuments, veterans organizations, and fraternal orders. Each
of these sites fabricates a relationship between an ever receding past that requires
human intervention to recover, and a present in which the inherent value of the new
tends to be given precedence.
Central to Nora’s argument is the notion that sites of memory rely upon a will -
ful intention to remember, a desire to block forgetting through the very material
practices of producing such sites. This materiality might be understood as providing,
on the one hand, an anchor for the present and, on the other hand, a condensation
of the complexities of the past into an unambiguous meaning. Yet, if such willful
action is designed to fix meaning, the sites themselves, Nora asserts, have a “capacity
for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning, and an unpredictable pro -
liferation of their ramifications.” 5
To put this another way, original acts of will require repetition if memory of them
is to be maintained; but when such acts are performed, they are necessarily inflected
through a new set of relationships different from those involved in the moment of
the original constitution of a historical event. What will be reconstructed as memory
is thus open to alteration and an infusion of new meaning. It is this double identity—