Page 55 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

40 Nick Pearce
valuable) and were more likely to have been removed at a later stage when, with the
abandonment of the site, further looting took place. There is also the question as
to whether the fountainheads were in situ at the time of the 1860 looting. Hope
Danby, in her history of the Summer Palace, claims that the fountainheads were
removed in the 1840s during the reign of the Daoguang emperor (r.1821–1850),
because the empress disliked them. 13 Danby, who visited the site in 1939, also
interviewed the family descendants of the contractors who installed the fountain, who
told her that it had ceased to operate because the complex hydraulic and piping system
was never properly maintained and was gradually dismantled. Danby’s story bears
some resemblance to that related by Hui Zou in his book on Yuanmingyuan, except
the emperor removing the fountainheads is Xianfeng (r.1851–1861): “Unfortunately,
the Emperor Xianfeng disliked the water clock and put the brass statues into his
14
treasure house, where they finally disappeared in the catastrophe of 1860.” Whatever
the truth, the fountainheads seem to have been removed by 1873, when Ernst Ohlmer
15
photographed the remains of the Xiyanglou site. His photograph of the Haiyantang,
albeit taken at a distance, shows no sign of the fountainheads.
The difficulties that the imperial authorities had in protecting the garden were
immense. 16 Things grew worse post-1911, when with the fall of the dynasty there
was wholesale removal of building material, particularly wood and the felling of the
trees within the imperial compound. 17 This period also marked the expansion in
China’s participation in the international art market, which would only accelerate
in the succeeding decades. Just prior to the Revolution in 1911, Charles Wylde, Keeper
of Ceramics at the V&A, who was then on a collecting trip to China, Japan, and
Korea, was able to access the Xiyanglou area of Yuanmingyuan quite freely and “pick-
up” architectural fragments (see Figure 3.1). Wylde wrote in his report: “On leaving
the Summer Palace we drove off to the old one which is about 3 miles off, and is

Figure 3.1 Architectural[CE1] fragment, earthenware with turquoise enamel glaze Qianlong
period, 1747–1770. Acquired from the Xiyanglou site in 1911.
Courtesy of the Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum.