Page 49 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

34 James L. Hevia
into the international media, more and more people were made aware of the events
of 1860, however partial and biased the accounts may have been. Indeed the auction
controversy provided an opportunity for some residents of Great Britain to remind
everyone how barbaric the British empire had been, how abuses that had happened
in China had also occurred in India and Africa, and, from another side, how the
nineteenth-century British were no more disrespectful of human rights than the
contemporary government of China. 24
Meanwhile in China, the 150-year commemoration of the destruction and plunder
of the Yuanmingyuan, held in 2010, included a performance by the singer Wang Ti
and the Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan of the song “Country.” Chan was quoted at
the time as saying: “When I learned about the illegal auction of the zodiac animal
heads at Christie’s, I decided to make a movie to urge the return of looted treasures,
not just for China, but also for countries like Egypt and Cambodia.” 25 Two years
later, Chinese Zodiac was released. In the film, Chan as “Asian Hawk,” with the
help of a Chinese student and a Parisian woman, stops at nothing to track down the
animal heads and return them to China.
Whether it was the movie, the 150th anniversary commemoration, or the highly
visible public controversy over the sale of the animal heads in 2009 that served as
motivation, the purchasers of the rabbit and rat heads, the Pinault family, owners of
a transnational empire of “life-style products” companies, announced that they were
returning the heads to China. 26 For a moment, at least, the two histories—the one
concerning the Yuanmingyuan, the other, the Summer Palace, were fused together.
But now, the link did not center on the regalia of Qing emperors, imperial thrones
and throne cushions, or porcelain and jade, but rather the heads of zodiac animals
that might have adorned one of the Qianlong emperor’s European-style palaces.
I have to admit that I found this particular transformation and renewal puzzling.
Why the animal heads, why the investment and domination of this particular site of
memory with these objects? How, we might wonder, have, what I would argue are
the least imperial of the imperial objects once located at this site, become an essential
symbol of the Yuanmingyuan? Perhaps it was the prominence of the heads in sales
over the last decade or so. Or perhaps it was the temporal proximity of the 2008
Olympics, the Yves St. Laurent sale, and the 150th anniversary of the looting and
destruction of the Yuanmingyuan in 2010. But I also imagine that it is something
more than that. Everyone has a connection to the signs of the zodiac. They stand for
our birth years and perhaps that is why in Chinese temples people leave offerings at
their images and have themselves photographed next to them. It’s also the case that
the simple version of the Chinese zodiac (once ubiquitous in Chinese-American
restaurants) provides a clearly defined number of known and understandable entities.
In other words, there is less mystery involved than there has been with an uncountable
number of unidentifiable, and almost untraceable, Summer Palace objects. However
we evaluate the aesthetic qualities of the animal heads, perhaps it is not difficult to
understand how they have come to stand, at least for the time being, for the whole
of the Yuanmingyuan/Summer Palace. Nor should we forget that they are not just
bric-a-brac or ornaments. They are architectural elements, part of a Yuanmingyuan
structure that was violently destroyed in 1860. Removed from their series and the
large time-keeping apparatus of which they were a part, they are indexes of ruin and
loss itself.