The palace of Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness) was built outside Beijing in the 18th century. Like Versailles, it was an enormous royal complex of gardens, fountains, buildings, art, and religion, performing a similar symbolic function: to physically embody the national culture, merged with the body of the monarch. In 1860, during the Second Opium War, the British and French armies looted Yuanmingyuan before the British army returned to burn it down (despite French objections). By threatening to next destroy the Forbidden City, the allies forced China’s emperor to capitulate. This is the “national humiliation” so often referenced in Chinese historical discourse.
This paper examines the unique and highly ironic interplay of materiality and absence at this most important national ruin. The biggest irony is that the only significant materials that remained were the semi-collapsed stone walls of the “Western Palaces” (xiyanglou). Built as Occidentalist entertainments for the great Emperor Qianlong, these few buildings were designed in a pseudo-European style by Italian and French Jesuits. The great majority of the palace complex – hundreds of buildings designed in traditional Chinese styles but constructed of wood – burned to ashes, creating a near-total absence of authentic classical Chinese architecture. Left empty as a park, it is this vast void – this visible negation of national culture – that impresses a visitor’s senses with the enormity of imperialist destruction. Yet, ironically, it is the small corner of foreign “debris” that is always photographed to represent Yuanmingyuan as a classical Chinese ruin.
Another irony is that the palace’s destruction forced China to open the country to foreigners, after which the ruins became a major tourist destination for western visitors to Beijing. In touring the Western Palace remnants, climbing the broken fountains, and picnicking on overturned blocks of marble, these visitors simultaneously lamented China’s loss and re-inscribed China’s defeat through their own bodily action. Circulating sophisticated tourist photographs and magazine articles full of wonder, westerners also romanticized these ruins in the same way they romanticized classical and medieval ruins back home. Local Chinese residents, on the other hand, gradually stripped the ruins of material to re-use for building supplies, such that the early romantic photographs are now used by historians and archaeologists as indexical traces of the original appearance.
A new digital reconstruction of the entire Yuanmingyuan complex, finally, amplifies the play of materiality and absence in perpetuating historical memory. Led by a team affiliated with Tsinghua University, the digitization is based on meticulous archaeological data matched to historical pictures and archives, making it possible to walk the grounds with a tablet computer and see every building recreated in any year and season one wishes. Viewed on a laptop at home, such a reconstruction would be just another imagination of something remote and lost; but by linking it to physical presence at the site, the project brings the absence to life, re-activating the empty park as a trace of historical fact while also enhancing romantic nostalgia.
keywords: Yuanmingyuan, ruins, imperialism, looting
Affiliation: Professor, Dept. of Art History, U. of Hong Kong
Website: https://arthistory.hku.hk/index.php/people/greg-m-thomas/
Education: PhD Harvard, 1995
Expertise: 18th- & 19th-century Europe, Sino-European interactions, art and ecology
Related publications:
(a) “Yuanmingyuan on Display: Ornamental Aesthetics at the Musée Chinois,” in Collecting and Displaying China’s ‘Summer Palace’…, ed. Tythacott (Routledge, 2018), 149-167
(b) “The Looting of Yuanming Yuan and the Translation of Chinese Art in Europe,” 19th-Century Art Worldwide 7:2, Autumn 2008
This paper examines the ironic interplay of materiality and absence at the ruined Chinese palace of Yuanmingyuan. Looted by the French and British armies and burned down in 1860, this enormous palace-garden complex remains one of China’s most famous and significant national ruins. The paper discusses the stone ruins of western-style buildings that remain in one corner and their emblematic representation in photographs. It also discusses the vast emptiness of the rest of the complex, now preserved as a park, and describes a digital reconstruction project that will link reconstructed images to visitors’ physical experience in the park itself.