The lives of objects stolen from China’s Yuanmingyuan or old ‘Summer Palace’

This paper, titled Stolen Objects from China: The Histories and Biographies of Yuanmingyuan (‘Summer Palace’) Collections in British and French Museums,  explores the lives of objects stolen from China’s Yuanmingyuan, or old ‘Summer Palace’, to the northwest of Beijing.

Initiated by the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1722) in the early 18th century, the site was developed by his grandson, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795). At around 350 hectares, it included thousands of buildings across a vast landscape: it also housed China’s imperial art collections – paintings, calligraphy, porcelain, bronzes, textiles and cloisonné.

In October 1860, at the culmination of the Second Opium War, British and French regiments looted the buildings in the Yuanmingyuan. British troops then proceeded to burn the entire site. This widespread destruction of China’s most important complex of palaces, and the dispersal of the imperial art collection, is considered one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism of the 19th century. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of objects are estimated to have been stolen from the Yuanmingyuan. Many of these are now scattered worldwide, in private collections and public museums. This paper will analyse the biographies of objects from the Yuanmingyuan in the U.K. and French museums. It will focus on military officers involved in the looting – men such as Elgin, Grant, Gordon, Wolseley, Crealock, Montauban and Negroni – and will document the trajectories of the material they brought back with them to both Britain and France. Some pieces were displayed at major public exhibitions (the 1862 International Exhibition and the Crystal Palace in London), while other artefacts were donated or bequeathed to museums in the late 19th-early 20th century. The talk will also explore the role of the art market – especially Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and smaller provincial auction houses – in promoting the collecting of ‘Summer Palace’ loot, and the shifting interpretations given to this material from the late 19th century onwards. Once relocated to the UK and France, ‘Summer Palace’ material was transformed and reformed to fit the aesthetics and tastes of the time, and the talk thus explores the distinctive meanings and values attributed to Yuanmingyuan artefacts by a range of British and French collectors.