Page 60 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

From the Summer Palace 1860 45
A Sino-Tibetan skull cup, or kapala, made up of the calvaria of a human skull
mounted in gold and precious stones, it had a brief sojourn in India and took on a
potent and very public identity as the skull of the Chinese sage when it was loaned
46
to the 1862 International Exhibition in London. The history of the cup also provides
us with an object whose trajectory illustrates very clearly the difficulties encountered
in identifying or placing specifically Yuanmingyuan loot. In fact the evidence provided
by the reconstruction of the cup’s provenance, points towards its origins being the
1860 campaign, but taken from one of the Lama temples (either the Huangsi or Heisi
Temple), situated north of the Anding Gate to the Tartar City where British troops
were encamped, rather than Yuanmingyuan. 47
It is interesting to consider the route by which objects from the Second China War
(as we might more correctly consider them), entered the consciousness of, for example,
British collectors. Wells and Tayler were both early collectors of a material relatively
new to the Western market: jade and cloisonné enamels. Neither man had a close
association with China or the military, so this was not an obvious stimulus. Tayler
might have been inspired by other collectors in India, where collecting had an
established pattern by 1860. One such collector, Colonel Charles Seton Guthrie
(1808–1874), a wealthy officer in the Bengal Engineers, formed an important col lec -
tion of Mughal jades, part of which was sold to the Indian Museum in London in
1868. 48 Guthrie’s collection also included a smattering of Chinese jade. Wells seems
to have had no such predecessor, embarking on building his collection of jade and
other Chinese works of art shortly after 1860, his stimulus being a combination of
opportunity and a genuine love of the material. Wells may have been inspired by the
quantity and quality of objects on the market from 1861 and also the possibility of
acquiring objects of quality, but which commanded a lesser price than other more
familiar Chinese works of art. Katrina Hill has noted that “At auctions, jade was
priced below cloisonné and porcelain” and she cites the collection auctioned by

Figure 3.3 Box and cover (one of a pair). Repoussé with gold on a ground of dark blue
enamel. Courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tayler Collection.