Page 87 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

5 “True Beauty of Form and
Chaste Embellishment”

Summer Palace Loot and
Chinese Porcelain Collecting in

Nineteenth-century Britain

Stacey Pierson

As is noted in the many studies of this subject in English and Chinese, the looting
of the Yuanmingyuan or “Summer Palace” in 1860 has had a number of enduring
consequences for geopolitical relations and Chinese cultural identity for over a century
and a half. The looting also had consequences in the world of objects, both in the
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art market and in art scholarship, where it is increasingly seen today as another
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example of colonial aggression and therefore an object repatriation issue. Certainly
the looting brought a number of seemingly new objects into the market and to the
attention of collectors. As Hevia (1994) has noted, sales of objects from the Summer
Palace took place in China almost immediately after its destruction, and within a
few months they also took place outside of China, so there were several predictable
but nonetheless significant impacts on the art market. First, there was a new source
of goods—new objects entered the market for the first time and fresh supplies are
always a stimulus for the art market. These fresh objects had a unique and glamorous
provenance which in turn generated a new category of objects—Chinese “imperial”
art. This new category was contrasted with the more familiar one of export art that
dominated collections at that time. The following discussion will consider how the
novelty of the Yuanmingyuan objects was received and conceived of by collectors
shortly after the 1860 aggression. It will then explore how these new objects were
incorporated into a developing canon of “Chinese” things, particularly Chinese
porcelain, the most popular type of Chinese object in Britain at that time.

The Appeal of the New: Location and Provenance
When the first sales of items from the Yuanmingyuan took place in Britain, the new -
ness of the objects, and the desirability of this newness, was evident in the way in
which these objects were promoted in some of the early auction catalogues for sales,
which included these items in 1861. For example, an early sale in January of that
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year described the objects as being “received direct from China”, a description
evoking freshness as well as novelty (see Figure 5.1). Not only were the objects fresh
from China, but they also came from a specific place that would soon have a
memorable and evocative name in English: the Summer Palace (my italics). The
English name emphasized the palace aspect rather than the garden as the Chinese