Page 53 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

3 From the Summer Palace 1860

Provenance and Politics

Nick Pearce

On April 30, 2000, Christie’s Hong Kong mounted a sale designated the Imperial
Sale. The Sale was the latest in an annual event in the auction calendar first established
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in 1996. The Imperial Sale offered, as the name implies, Chinese works of art of
imperial quality with a suggested if not always confirmed imperial provenance.
Back in 1996, the Catalogue’s Introduction made clear that the contents of the sale
were “. . . devoted entirely to Imperial works of art originating from the Imperial
palaces . . .” and included objects provenanced to the so-called Old Summer Palace
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of Yuanmingyuan. Subsequent annual Imperial Sales in Hong Kong followed a
similar pattern. In 2000, the Sale was codenamed “Yuanmingyuan” and included
two of the 12 zodiac heads (the monkey and the ox), which had been cast in bronze
for the fountain situated in front of the Haiyantang (Hall of Calm Seas) within the
Xiyanglou (Western palace area) within the Yuanmingyuan (see Tythacott, Chapter
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1 and Hevia, Chapter 2). For the first time the Sale provoked a reaction from the
Chinese Government, which accused Christie’s of taking advantage of Hong Kong’s
“one country, two systems” designation and demanded that the objects be withdrawn
from sale. The auction house made clear that legal title was not in doubt and the
sale proceeded. The two heads (along with other alleged Yuanmingyuan objects sold
shortly afterwards by Sotheby’s Hong Kong, including another bronze head, the tiger),
were purchased by the China Poly Group, a former commercial wing of the People’s
Liberation Army (PLA) and now sit in the Poly Art Museum in Beijing. 4
The 2000 sales triggered a very public response from the Chinese Government
concerning the loss of cultural patrimony, making explicit a situation that had
been a running sore certainly since 1860. It combined incidents of China’s political
humiliation at the hands of foreign—largely Western—countries, with the overt and
covert removal of artworks, books, and manuscripts by archaeologists, soldiers, and
freebooters of all kinds. Before the focus on 1860 became so public, there was a
greater concentration by the Chinese Government on a later incident: the removal
by British, French, American, and Japanese archaeologists, of thousands of
manuscripts and artifacts from Dunhuang in the early 1900s. In this context the
People’s Daily, in a March 1992 article, accused Western nations of robbing the
Chinese people “. . . not only of their territory, integrity and property, but also of
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part of their most treasured cultural heritage.” But unlike the Dunhuang material,
which for the most part was deposited in public institutions abroad, a good quantity
of the loot from Yuanmingyuan remained in private hands and continues to appear
on the open market periodically—commodities that can more readily be returned to
their country of origin. As has been seen in recent years, this is the path which the