Page 50 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

The Afterlives of a Ruin 35
Whatever the case, the two histories outlined here are no longer starkly separated.
Instead, we may well be seeing the emergence of a transnational process, one that as
Jackie Chan suggested, may serve to stimulate a discussion about all of the cultural
treasures looted by European and American empire builders in the nineteenth century.
Perhaps we may also be at the beginning of a time in which the return of such objects
will be understood as necessary to the promotion of international understanding and
as a way of acknowledging responsibility for past misdeeds. No matter how neoliberal
China seems to have become and no matter how hard-headed art investors may be,
it still seems far too historically provocative to leave repatriation to the vicissitudes
of amoral market forces.

Notes
1 For an account of the looting and destruction of the Yuanmingyuan, as well as the display
and sale of objects taken from the gardens in Paris and London, see James L. Hevia,
English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003), 74–113.
2 Paul Cohen provides a helpful catalogue of many of the publications that reference
national humiliation in his “Remembering and Forgetting National Humiliation in
Twentieth Century China,” Twentieth Century China 27, 2 (April 2002): 1–39. One of
the earliest examples cited by Cohen is by Shen Wenjun, who published A Short History
of National Humiliations (Guochi xiaoshi) in 1910.
3 On the history of the site after its destruction see Geremie Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect
Brightness, A Life in Ruins,” East Asian History 11 (1996): 138–158.
4 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations
26 (Spring, 1989): 12.
5 Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 19.
6 Steve S. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 78, 197.
There is also a list of humiliation days in National Archives and Records Administration,
Washington, D.C., Record Group 127–138, Box 3.
7 Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 145–148.
8 Several of these can be found on the internet. See, for example, Yan He, “Re-relic/
Yuanmingyuan: an Effective Practice in Virtual Restoration and Visual Representation
of Cultural Heritage” at http://cipa.icomos.org/fileadmin/template/doc/PRAGUE/071.pdf;
accessed June 16, 2015.
9 The forces involved came from the United States, British India, Japan, France, Germany,
Austria, Italy, and Russia.
10 Hugo’s statement was in the form of a letter to a Capt. Butler. For an English translation
see “Napoleon.org,” www.napoleon.org/en/reading_room/articles/files/477511.asp; accessed
June 13, 2015.
11 The original photographs are in Colombe Samoyault-Verlet, Le Museé chinois de
l’impétrice Eugénie (Paris, 1994), 21, 24–25, 52, 59, 67. I am grateful to Craig Clunas
for being kind enough to send me a copy of this publication; and to Regine Thiriez for
arranging a special visit to the museum in 1997.
12 See the Christie’s catalogue The Imperial Sale, Hong Kong, April 28, 1996 and Daily
Telegraph, April 19, 1996, 18. Summer Palace plunder has turned up on the auction
market periodically since 1861. For other examples of more recent sales, see Hevia, English
Lessons, 331.
13 See The New York Times, April 29, May 1 and May 3, 2001.
14 See my discussion of these objects in Hevia, English Lessons, 86–99.
15 Stephen W. Bushell, Oriental Ceramic Art: Collection of W.T. Walters (New York:
D. Appleton and Company, 1899); Chinese Porcelain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908);
Chinese Art (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1924 [1904]), and with W.M.
Laffan. Catalogue of the Morgan Collection of Chinese Porcelains (New York: Metro -
politan Museum of Art, 1907 [1904]).