Page 97 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

82 Stacey Pierson
Grand Tour and “instructional objects,” which were then similarly transformed into
art objects through sales in the art market and display. In London, for example, a
museum featuring a wide range of such fragments was opened in the early nineteenth
century (Sir John Soane’s museum in Lincoln’s Inn) and the most prominent of all
architectural fragments were on display in the British Museum (the Parthenon—Elgin
marbles). 46 In this context, the display and collecting of Chinese building fragments
would have seemed natural.
The most famous architectural fragments or pieces of the Summer Palace to have
been collected are perhaps the bronze zodiac animal heads that decorated one of the
fountains and were the subject of much controversy recently (see also Chapters 2
and 3). 47 These appear to have been sold initially in Paris and they were not ceramic.
However they do remind us that the architectural fragments taken from the Summer
Palace tended to be sculptural as Franks noted in his catalogue above. As architectural
fragments, they are therefore more similar to the Elgin Marbles rather than the tiles
that were taken from other buildings in China like the Porcelain Pagoda. Nevertheless,
normally they were classified as “ceramics” in Britain suggesting that the familiar
medium was also a dominant conceptual category for Chinese objects at that time.
In other fields of nineteenth century art history, architectural fragments were classified
as “sculpture,” including in European art and that of India which was another source
of plundered architectural material in the later nineteenth century. The Summer
Palace fragments and those from Nanjing (including tombs) would continue to be
classified as “ceramics” for over a century, but it was the initial circumstances of
their encounter and acquisition, which transformed them into collectable objects
in the first place.

Conclusion
After 1860, ceramics from China became much more diverse in both type and in clas -
si fication. “Ceramics” became a much broader category as a result of the availability
of new material on the market as well as the reception of the events enabling the
distribution of this new material. Within ceramic studies too, a new concept of style,
interpreted at that time as “taste,” emerged identifying with the domestic consumer
and the court in China. Objects representing such a style or taste were associated with
a specific location in China, as were actual pieces of this location, creating a new
provenance that could both identify the objects and provide an attractive history of
ownership for consumers. As scholarship in Chinese ceramics evolved in the later
nineteenth century, incorporating translations of Chinese texts about ceramics, the
Summer Palace material would retain its appeal and continue to represent the category
of “imperial” objects. With the unfortunate continuation of plunder in China, this
category would expand in art historical discourse well beyond ceramics to include
lacquer, textiles and metalwork, but it was the popular mythology of the Summer
Palace events that brought this new category of Chinese objects into being, and
primarily through an object medium that was already favored and familiar in Britain.
This brief study of the impact of the plunder of the Summer Palace on the field of
ceramics in Britain demonstrates therefore how historical events can shape and
influence not only object identifications and classifications but also the language of
objects, their connoisseurship and art historical narratives.