Page 54 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

From the Summer Palace 1860 39
Chinese Government has pursued, encouraging wealthy patriots as well as expatriots
(some ironically responsible in the past for removing cultural treasures from China),
to buy and donate objects with a stated imperial provenance back to the motherland.
Macau-based casino owner Stanley Ho did just this in October 2007, when he
brokered a private sale prior to Sotheby’s Lost Treasures from the Qing Palaces
auction, acquiring yet another bronze head (of a horse), from the Haiyantang which
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he then donated to China. In the press release issued by Sotheby’s, Ho was praised
by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage of the People’s Republic of China,
which commented: “We are glad to witness the home-coming of the bronze head
after its expatriation for nearly one and a half centuries. We highly commend and
are grateful for Dr. Ho’s patriotic act and appreciate Sotheby’s Hong Kong for its
efforts in making this possible.” 7
The latest incident in the saga of the bronze heads took place in February 2009,
when the estate of couturier Yves Saint Laurent was offered for sale at Christie’s
Paris by his partner, Pierre Bergé (see Hevia, Chapter 2). The sale included the heads
of the rat and the rabbit and once again the Chinese Government demanded a halt
to the sale of the two items, invoking the 1995 Unidroit Convention, on Stolen or
Illegally Exported Cultural Objects, signed by China and France. Provocative remarks
about a free Tibet from Bergé only fueled the situation, the People’s Daily On-Line
offering the headline: “Political blackmail in Disguised Form,” and raising once again
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the specter of the West’s “blood-shed history” in China. The highest bidder for the
heads was Cai Mingchao, a collector and auctioneer, who then refused to pay the
auction price of U.S.$18.27m. At the time, Bergé chose to keep the heads, although
this chapter has come to a close with the announcement in April 2013 that François-
Henri Pinault, owner of Christie’s, had purchased the heads and would be presenting
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them to the Chinese Government. This was in the same month in which Christie’s
were granted a license to trade in Mainland China, the first international auction
house to be granted the privilege. The gifting of the heads took place in a ceremony
in Beijing at the National Museum of China on June 28, 2013. 10
I have dwelt somewhat on the relatively recent events surrounding the bronze
fountainheads as a preamble to a discussion around the provenance of so-called loot
from Yuanmingyuan—its problems and challenges. In terms of the bronze heads,
there can be no doubt as to their origin. If nothing else, there is a pictorial record,
a series of engravings made between 1783 and 1786, where in the engraving of the
west facade of the Hall of Calm Seas, the fountain heads can clearly be seen. In terms
of their looting, however, there are a number of questions to be answered, one of
which relates to when the fountainheads were removed. A statement to the effect
that the three heads up for auction by Christie’s and Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2000
were first auctioned in Paris between 1861 and 1863, indicating that they were part
of the 1860 looting, remain unverified. 11 The various eye-witness accounts of 1860
make no mention of their removal, remarking that the looters were looking for
portable and high-value items, even if these were sometimes large. Lamenting just a
few years after the sacking, two Chinese interpreters at the British Legation told
Legation doctor, David Field Rennie, that they regretted that “comparatively little
of what was in their eyes really valuable, had been removed, but only the meretricious
articles, to which a secondary importance was attached, and that the property of real
value was overlooked . . . or destroyed.” 12 It strikes this author that fixed items such
as the heads would not have been that portable in 1860 (or seen as intrinsically