Page 46 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

The Afterlives of a Ruin 31
“from behind the Emperor’s throne,” pages from the Qing Court’s Illustrated Cata -
logue of Ritual Implements (Huangchao liqi tushi), various objects from the emperor’s
private quarters, such as a small jade covered book said to be the sayings of Confucius,
but actually the Heart Sutra, a (Tibetan ritual) vessel purportedly including the “Skull
of Confucius,” and a Pekinese dog, appropriately christened “Looty.” 14
In auctions in Paris and London between 1861 and 1865, French and British
collectors, art dealers, and the public in general had the opportunity to see and buy
Summer Palace curiosities. The first appearance in auction records was in London
in 1861. The items were put up for sale by Henry Loch, the courier who carried the
dispatches that announced the defeat of China and the sack of the palaces to the
British government and Parliament. Over the course of the next few years, Summer
Palace loot appeared in a dozen or more auctions in both London and Paris.
Moreover, sales of the items continued through the end of the century, with the
Summer Palace designation indicating their provenance in newspaper advertise -
ments, several of which appeared in The Times of London between 1870 and 1902.
I have located 14 such notices in all by searching on the term “Summer Palace” in
The Times digital archive. The sales included the disposition of the estates of at least
two participants—those of the commander of the British forces General Hope
Grant in 1893; and those of Charles “Chinese” Gordon the following year (see
Chapter 6).
This commodification and recirculation of Chinese imperial regalia was paralleled
by public display, first in a Paris exhibition at the Tuileries Palace, and later in the
1862 London International Exhibition. By the 1870s, objects had begun to enter the
collections of public museums such as the Victoria & Albert and British Museum.
At these sites, the epithet from the “Summer Palace of the Emperor of China” became
fixed to the objects in museum accession records and on the identification labels that
sat next to them in display cases.
In the late-nineteenth century other forms of address were added to the biographies
of Summer Palace loot. This involved the accretion of layers of new knowledge
at taching to things Chinese. For purposes here, I can only draw attention to part of
this process of knowledge production. The key point was that this new knowledge
was produced not in Europe, but in China, by Western diplomats, who in their spare
time took up the study of Chinese objects and by so doing transformed them into
art.
In the English-speaking world, the central figure was Stephen Bushell, the surgeon
at the British legation in Beijing from 1868 to 1900. Through his study of objects
available in Beijing art markets and in the collections of Chinese connoisseurs, and
with his translation of Chinese works on porcelain and jade, Bushell provided a host
of new nomenclature, ranging from transliterated words for objects to wholly new
classification schemes based on historical typologies, sites of manufacture, and descrip -
tions that allowed pieces to be more accurately dated, all of which he based on
references to over 100 Chinese published sources. He also provided translations of
the Chinese dating ideograms to be found on the bottom of pieces.
Bushell’s efforts made it possible to identify previous errors in writings about
Chinese porcelain and jade, and hence put the museum’s descriptive tags and accession
files in order, while providing a whole new nomenclature for the “oriental” art market.
For the first time, collectors and museums were able to place the authenticity of their
holdings on a firm footing. It was now possible, with an unprecedented sense of