Page 48 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

The Afterlives of a Ruin 33
in new historical memory projects evoking a kind of nostalgic remembrance of past
British greatness.
Other Summer Palace objects found themselves recommodified. In 1988, Sotheby’s
auctioned off what it termed “original paintings from the Summer Palace Beijing,”
and included reference to the first sale of these paintings in London in 1863 as part
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of their provenance; the anticipated price was £80,000–100,000. In 1993, Christie’s
offered a white jade bowl said to have come via an American private collection from
the estate of Sir John Michel, commander of the British division that had burnt the
gardens in 1860. The asking price was between $150,000 and $250,000. 18 And, as
noted above, items identified as from the Summer Palace also turned up in Christie’s
“imperial sale” in Hong Kong in 1996 (see also Pearce, Chapter 3).
There have been other objects circulating through the auction markets as well, like
a European-manufactured gilt box from the Captain James Gunter family that has
inscribed on it “Loot from the Summer Palace.” It sold at auction in 2011 for
£490,000. But the Summer Palace objects that have drawn the most attention inter -
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nationally are those zodiac animal heads that surfaced in 2001. A second pair appeared
in early 2009 as part of the disposition in Paris of the estate of Yves Saint Laurent.
Once again there was a loud protest by the government of China, but Christie’s went
ahead with the sale. Matters then took a curious turn. A Chinese art dealer bid the
unprecedented sum of $40,000,000 for the heads of a rabbit and a rat. Then he refused
to pay for them, claiming that his bid was a patriotic protest. Much consternation
was expressed over this ruse by the Wall Street Journal, in an article charging the art
dealer and the government of China with distorting the market 20 (see also Pearce,
Chapter 3).
Whether it was the events surrounding this sale or the upcoming 150th anniversary
of the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan that motivated the next event is unclear, but
later in 2009 the Chinese government announced that it was sending a team of
researchers to New York and London to catalogue the Yuanmingyuan relics there. 21
Why the team was sent to New York, rather than Paris, is unclear. Not surprisingly,
they found nothing claiming Summer Palace provenance in New York museums, but
did manage to film their tour for a documentary on China Central Television. Mean -
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while, no one seemed to notice or mention that in all of the accounts of the looting
of the Summer Palace, then and later, there had been no reference to animal heads;
no hint that along with imperial robes, throne cushions, jade scepters, porcelain bowls,
and lacquer boxes, and a tiny Pekinese dog, French and British soldiers might have
also absconded with the bronze heads of a rat, rabbit, monkey, and ox. It was as if
the heads suddenly materialized in the twenty-first century, and that their very lack
of provenance gave them authority. Indeed, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei may have
been commenting on this strange development when he produced duplicates of all
12 animal heads in original small sizes and in large versions, and exhibited them in
the United States and Great Britain. 23
At any rate, the action of the Chinese government was for all practical purposes
bringing Yuanmingyuan “national humiliation” history and the history of Summer
Palace plunder into conjunction. Even the Wall Street Journal, for all its bluster about
market distortion, was forced to provide a context to its readers for those fetishized
animal heads. And the context was, of course, the looting and destruction of the
Yuanmingyuan, a place that very few Europeans and Americans knew anything
about. More importantly, as the story of the Paris auction circulated out of France