Page 44 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

The Afterlives of a Ruin 29
Humiliation” [wuwang guochi]. Nearby was a large museum that displayed a history
of the destruction of the palaces. It still included the dusty and ill-lit 1980s diorama
of the looting of the Summer Palace, but also made reference to the occupation of
Beijing in 1900. Drawings, maps, and photographs were accompanied by dense
textual explanations. Of particular interest was the inclusion of photographs taken
by European and American photographers in 1900. This transformation and renewal
was, in other words, fashioning a mimetic relationship between the events in and
around Beijing in 1860 and in 1900 during the Boxer Uprising; that is, between the
British destruction of the Gardens and the eight army invasion of north China in
1900. 9
And anyone who had read the writings of Chinese Communist historians on
Western imperialism might also have noticed that, like those historians, the makers
of the Yuanmingyuan museum cited primary source British and French accounts of
looting and destruction of the Gardens as powerful examples of the depredations
of imperialism. There was also at least one critical Western voice to be heard, that
of Victor Hugo, whose comments, presented in French and Chinese, eloquently
condemned the looting and destruction of the Yuanmingyuan. 10
As if to emphasize this point, the display in the museum also contained an import -
ant public recognition of a foreign location where some of the looted objects are held
today—the Château of Fontainebleau (see Chapters 9 and 10). A photograph of the
objects at the Château are the ones that General Montauban, the commander of the
French forces in 1860, sent to the Empress Eugénie for her oriental collection. This
picture had been taken from a French guidebook to the collection produced when
the Château was restored in the early 1990s. 11
The presence of pictures from a French catalogue in the museum suggested a
heightened sensitivity to the overt sale and display of Qing plunder in European and
American museums and auction markets. Events in Hong Kong in 2001 reinforced
this impression. In the 1980s and 1990s, auction houses such as Sotheby’s and
Christie’s sold off Summer Palace plunder on the international market, some times
drawing specific attention to their status as loot by dubbing them “imperial sales.” 12
In 2001, Sotheby’s and Christie’s Hong Kong included four items from the Yuan -
mingyuan in a second “Imperial Sale,” including two bronze animal heads (a monkey
and an ox) identified as among the zodiac of 12 animals that made up part of the
water clock the Qianlong emperor had commissioned his Catholic missionaries to
build in the European section of the Yuanming Garden.
This sale proved to be the last straw. Outraged, the Chinese government formally
protested, requesting that Christie’s and Sotheby’s withdraw the items. When the
auction houses refused, an unprecedented event occurred—mainland Chinese
companies intervened and bought the objects, paying in excess of $6 million for the
four pieces, three times the asking price. One of the two animal heads in the lot was
later put on display at the Yuanmingyuan. 13 From the point of view of a number of
constituencies within and outside China, the message seemed clear: as reform China
reconstructed itself as a capitalist nation-state and global power, it could no longer
tolerate the flaunting of objects outside of China that marked an earlier era of
national humiliation.
And yet, matters did not rest there. More change soon followed. In 2008, I took
a group of students to the gardens to show them the “Never Forget National
Humiliation” memorial, but it was gone. One of the park attendants said that it had