Page 47 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

32 James L. Hevia
certainty, to identify fakes and recognize true value. Between 1897 and 1904, Bushell’s
classification scheme became the standard for public and private collections, including
the Walters and Morgan holdings and those of the Smithsonian in the United States,
as well as the holdings of the Victoria and Albert (V&A) and British Museum in
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London. Equally important, the sort of knowledge that Bushell and others produced
had an influence on the looting of Beijing in 1900, when the city was occupied by
the forces of six European powers, the United States, and Japan. Many looters from
the military forces of the eight armies knew precisely what they were looking for as
they ransacked Qing palaces and the homes of Beijing’s elite and common people.
The research reported in this paper began in 1987 and included the V&A,
the British Museum, and the Royal Engineers Barracks in Chatham. Subse quently, I
added other sites such as the Museé Chinois at the Château of Fountaine bleau, the
Yuanmingyuan museum in Beijing, and regimental museums scattered around
the British Isles. On my first visit to the V&A Museum, I noticed the epithet “from
the Summer Palace of the Emperor of China” for the very first time. I went to see
one of the museum’s curators and asked him how the museum knew the object was
from the Summer Palace. He told me that the museum had accession records that
indicated as much. He not only directed me to the V&A’s archives, but aided me in
finding relevant auction house catalogues in the National Art Library housed in the
museum. 16
These records allowed me to fill in biographical details and flesh out the careers
of Summer Palace objects, most of which never turned up in nineteenth century
military campaign accounts. For example, volumes from The Record of the Qian -
long Emperor’s Ten Great Campaigns were donated to the British Museum in 1872,
arriving with a Summer Palace designation. Another Qianlong era text “from the
Summer Palace” was purchased in 1906 from a Paris dealer for £100. But perhaps
the most interesting of the textual materials accessioned at the V&A were pages
from the Qing Court’s Illustrated Catalogue of Ritual Implements, mentioned earlier.
This version was made of large format, hand-painted leaves, and had been take apart.
Other parts of it were at the V&A Museum, the Royal Scottish Museum (now the
National Museum of Scotland), and the National Museum of Ireland. The British
Museum had purchased the volume from William Knollys, author of several works
on the 1860 campaign, in 1924, and then sold off portions to the other museums to
recover its costs.
While I was doing this research in the accession records of London’s two most
prominent history museums, military museums in Great Britain were undergoing
substantial changes. Stimulated in part by an upsurge in family history, much of which
involved tracing the military service of fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers,
regimental museums found themselves awash in new monies for the renovation
and expansion of their museums. Summer Palace objects, ranging from an imperial
throne and throne cushions at the Royal Engineers Museum to imperial robes at the
Royal Wiltshire Regiment Museum, were now prominently organized into a
chronological history of military campaigns from roughly the sixteenth century
forward. Trophies of wars fought in south and east Asia sat beside battle honors—
such as “Taku Forts” and “Pekin 1860”—that were displayed on regimental banners
in the museums. In other words, a process of transformation and renewal of historical
memory then occurring in China was paralleled by a similar revitalization going on
in Great Britain. In the latter case, Summer Palace objects were being repositioned