Regrouping: Displays of Loot from Yuanmingyuan

Abstract

Objects have tangible histories recorded in material traces. When displaced and re-contextualized, they generate new histories both for themselves and for other objects around them. Simultaneously, these tangible histories also spark intangible memories and imagined meanings for the individuals, institutions, and nations that use and display them. This paper traces this process of complex, collective meaning creation using the example of objects looted from China’s Yuanmingyuan palace in 1860 and removed to France and England. Methodologically, it emphasizes how meaning varies from one agent to another (soldiers, monarchs, critics, and collectors each interpreting looted objects differently); how specific display contexts enact these highly contested meanings; and how such meanings have changed from the imperialist era of the Opium War through the collapse of French and Chinese monarchies to today’s globalized art market. The paper begins with a brief review of the looting by French and British forces, a kind of sacrificial slaughter of the Chinese emperor’s grandest palace complex that fetishized cultural objects as simultaneously divine and debased. It then demonstrates how different displays of looted objects in France and England radically re-interpreted objects in different and often contradictory ways, alternately exotic and familiar. A final section traces Chinese reactions to the looting and subsequent razing of the entire palace, whose absence is still used to symbolize national humiliation under China’s old empire. Recent examples of digital reconstruction of the palace and repatriation of certain objects are presented to illustrate the ironies of historical memory in today’s globalized culture.