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Malice in Wonderland: Dreams of theOrient and the Destruction ofthe
Palace of the Emperor of China
Erik Ringmar
abstract: This article explains the destruction of theYuanmingyuan, the imperial palacecompound located north-west ofBeijing, by an Anglo-French army in 1860. Bracketingthe politicaland military context, we look at how the palace of the emperor ofChina hasbeen interpreted in European cultural history and how itwas understood by the people
responsible for the destruction. To Europeans, the Yuanmingyuanwas a place of wonder,and it was more than anything thetransformation of the language of wonder whichmade the palacevulnerable to European aggression. Inter-cultural aestheticjudgments,we will conclude, always have political implications.
To Europeans, for centuries, the palace of the emperor of Chinawas a main feature
of their dreams of the Orient.1 Not surprisingly, the fewEuropean visitors who
actually had seen the place came back with accounts filled withwonders. Medieval
friars and travelers outdid each other in tales of the beauty ofthe palace and of the
immense power wielded by the Great Kaan. And although subsequentreports
from Jesuits stationed at the imperial court were more measured,they too spoke of
its beauty and its many varied delights. And then, in 1860,during the Second
Opium War, the imperial palace, the Yuanmingyuan, was firstlooted and then
burned to the ground by a contingent of British and Frenchtroops. J'ai march
pendant deux jours sur plus de trente millions de francs desoieries, de bijoux, de
porcelaines, bronzes, sculptures, wrote Armand Lucy, a Frenchsoldier, Je ne crois
pas qu'on ait vu chose pareille depuis le sac de Rome par lesBarbares.2 The light
was so subdued by the clouds of smoke, Garnet Wolseley, one ofthe British
1 I am grateful to Julie K. Allen, Allen Chun, Nigel Leask,David Porter, Maria Tatar,Yana Zuo, an audience at Academia Sinica,Taipei, and the indefatigable efforts ofthe librarians atwww.archive.org for help with a previous version of this paper.Onthe destruction of the Yuanmingyuan, see Ringmar, LiberalBarbarism and the
Oriental Sublime.2 Lucy, Lettres intimes, 96.
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officers, remembered, that it seemed as if the sun wasundergoing a lengthened
eclipse.3
The aim of this article is to explain this destruction. Mostexplanations focus
on the political and military context of the time: the lack ofdiscipline in the French
army and a British desire to take revenge for the brutaltreatment which a group of
hostages received at the hands of the Chinese.4 Yet when itcomes to the
destruction of an object that hitherto has featured mainly indreams, political and
military contexts are never going to be enough. A properexplanation must also
consider the status of the palace of the Chinese emperor inEuropean cultural
history, and in the minds of the people responsible for thedestruction. The
question, in other words, is not so much whythe destructionhappened as how it
could have happened. Investigating the conditions of itspossibility, we need to
understand how the imperial palace has been described byEuropeans and how the
descriptions have changed over time.
In European accounts of the imperial palace recourse was alwaystaken to the
latest aesthetic principles embraced not in China, but inEurope. As a result, the
descriptions changed, often abruptly, not because the palaceitself changed, but
because of changes in European conceptions of beauty. Comparingtwo eighteenth-
century accounts of the Yuanmingyuan, written only fifty yearsapart, shows how
dramatic these transformations could be. Everything there isgrand and truly
beautiful, the Jesuit missionary Jean Denis Attiret assured hisEuropean
correspondent in 1745, and I am all the more struck by it, sinceI never have seen
anything like it. Everything is of a beauty and a taste which Icould never
3 Wolseley, Narrative of the War with China, 279; on the historyof the palace, seeMalone, History of the Peking Summer Palace,279.
4 On September 18, 1860, the Chinese took 39 hostages, includingtwenty Indiansoldiers and Thomas Bowlby, the correspondent for theTimes. In the end only 18of them were returned alive. SeeD'Escayrac de Lauture, Rcit de la captivit,II:349-355; Loch,Personal Narrative; For the official rationale for thedestruction,
see Stanmore, Sidney Herbert, II:349-355; Knollys, Remarks onthe FrenchMarch, 214-225.
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express.5 Yet in 1793, John Barrow, a member of the Macartneymission to China,
who spent five weeks inside the palace, saw none of thoseextravagant beauties
and picturesque embellishments, which had made Yuanmingyuanfamous
throughout Europe.6
Of those parts contiguous to the palace, which may be supposedthemost carefully cultivated, and the numerous pavilionsandornamental buildings in the best order, I can say nothing inpraise;no care whatever appeared to be taken of any, nor regard hadtocleanliness.7
As we will discover, the language of wonder has implications forthe distribution of
power between the wonderer and the thing wondered at. Wonderlandmay be a
magical place, but it is political through and through. Byeliciting wonder, the
palace of the Chinese emperor had a power over its visitorswhich they either could
resist or passively submit themselves to. Submitting themselves,the medieval
travelers acknowledged the immense power of the emperor andtheir own
inferiority. Refusing to marvel, the British commanders in 1860emphasized the
powerlessness of the Chinese in the face of Europeanimperialism. In this way the
language of wonder provides us with a way of characterizing therelationship
between Europe and China, and its transformation over time. Thequestion is who
the wonder-inducing power belongs to, but also how the wonderersreact to what
they experience. The transformation of the language of wonder,the argument will
be, allowed for a reinterpretation of the Yuanmingyuan whichmade it vulnerable to
European aggression.
the marvel of medieval travelers
The language of marvel was the preferred idiom of medievaltravelers.8 In the
5 Attiret, Lettre du frre Attiret, 389-390, 393.
6 Barrow, Travels in China, 85-86.
7 Ibid., 85.
8 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 25-38;Greenblatt, MarvelousPossessions, 52-85; Bynum, Wonder, 12-14.
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Middle Ages travelers always marveled at what they saw, andsince marvels were
thought to be more common in the margins of the world, they weremore
common in the East.9 This supposition was amply confirmed in thethirteenth-
century when Pax mongolica made it possible for Europeanmerchants and
missionaries to travel all the way to China. In their accounts,the palace of the
Great Kaan featured prominently. The most famous description isby Marco Polo,
who reached Beijing in 1266 and spent some 24 years in China,but Odoric of
Pordenone, who set off from Padua in 1318, also mentions thepalace, as does
Giovanni de Marignolli, who visited Beijing in 1342; William ofRubruck left an
account of the palace in Karakorum which he visited in1254.10
The emperor's palace is not just a single building, thetravelers explained, but
a vast compound some four miles in compass, and within thisspace be many
other fine palaces, and an enclosure were the Khan lives withhis family.11 There is
an artificial hill planted with trees, and an artificial lakewith bridges across. Much
of the compound is filled with birds, but also wild game so thatthe emperor can
follow the chase when he chooses without ever quitting thedomain.12 The main
palace has 24 pillars and the walls are hung with skins of redleather; in the middle
of the building is a large jar from which visitors can drink,and there is a collection
of artificial peaco*cks and, amazingly, a tame lion is walkingaround from room to
room.
Everything in the imperial palace is great in size and number.The emperor's
family is so numerous, Odoric explained, and his courtiers forman innumerable
multitude, and so do even the birds of his artificial lake.13And everything is
9 Or, for that matter, in Ireland. Daston and Park, Wonders andthe Order of Nature,34-39.
10 Polo, Book of Ser Marco Polo; an influential collection ofprimary sources, firstpublished in 1614, is Purchas, Purchas HisPilgrimage, which included all the thenpublished accounts of Jesuitmissionaries in China; see Markley, Far East andEnglishImagination, 81; Ruysbroek,Journey of William of Rubruck.
11 Friar Odoric, The Friar Reacheth Cambalech, 130.
12 Ibid.13 Polo, Book of Ser Marco Polo, 261.
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exceptionally beautiful. The artificial hill is the mostbeautiful in the whole world;
the red leather on the walls of the palace are the world'sfinest; and if there be
in the whole world any fine and large pearls they are sure toadorn one of the
emperor's ladies. Plenitude and beauty emphasized the emperor'swealth; the 24
pillars of the palace were made from gold and so were theartificial peaco*cks; the
drinking jar was carved from a precious stones which exceededthe value of four
great towns, and the pearls which adorned the coats of hiscourtiers were each
worth some fifteen thousand florins and there were no fewer than14,000 of
them.14
Plenitude, beauty and wealth, in turn, were expressions of theemperor's
immense power. Before his throne, the visitors first fellsilent, then they prostrated
themselves performing the koutou, the three kneeling and threeknockings of
the head prescribed by the court protocol.15 And yet theirsilence was more a
result of sheer dumb-foundedness than fear of incurring theemperor's wrath. The
palace was a marvel' and a wonder to behold. In short, Odoricconcluded, the
court is truly magnificent, and the most perfectly ordered thatthere is in the
world.16 To koutou before such a ruler, was a sign of submissionto be sure, but
then again the European visitors were few in number and they hadnothing but
their good behavior to back up their modest demands for tradeand for the right to
preach the gospel.
Returning home, the marvels of the East featured prominently inthe
travelers' accounts. Marco Polo was nicknamed Millione for hisreputation for
exaggeration, but believable or not, plenty of marvels wererequired if the stories
were to find an audience. Marvel was what travelers weresupposed to do, and
when they did, it helped to make sense of their long journeys.17By making their
14 Friar Odoric, The Friar Reacheth Cambalech, 132.
15 For a description, see Rockhill, Diplomatic Audiences,28.
16 Friar Odoric, The Friar Reacheth Cambalech, 134.17Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 77-79.
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listeners marvel in turn, the tales, and their tellers, borrowedsome of the magic,
and power, of which they spoke. But just as the travelers'initial reaction, the
response of their audiences was not one of fear. Behind the manywondrous
objects, animals and people, there was an emperor who was thesource of them all,
and his person, in the end, was the true marvel.18 Seeing him inhis attributes and
in his actions, but rarely catching more than a glimpse of theperson himself, the
Europeans were amazed.
the curiosity of the Jesuits
Following the example set by Matteo Ricci, the Jesuitmissionaries in China pursued
a top-down strategy of conversion.19 By first convincing theimperial court to
embrace Christianity, they hoped later to convert the wholecountry. To this end
they presented the emperor with various examples ofEuropean-made technology
and arts, and offered their services as painters, cartographers,astronomers, clock-
makers and even cannon-founders. The letters home from theJesuit mission
published in Paris as Lettres difiantes et curieuses provided,in the seventeenth-
and eighteenth-centuries, the most authoritative source ofinformation about China.
The Lettres were widely read, not least by defenders of royalprerogatives in
England and, in France, byphilosophes Voltaire most famously forwhom
China became a model of rational government and socialorder.20
Although their access was restricted, their work in theYuanmingyuan allowed
a few of the Jesuits to put together a reasonably comprehensivedescription of the
palaces and gardens. The most famous account is found in aletter written in 1745
by Jean Denis Attiret, a painter at the court.21 Attiretdescribed a park, complete
18 Bynum, Wonder, 13-14, 20, 24.
19 On Ricci, see Mungello, Curious Land, 44-73; Porter,Ideographia, 83-108.
20 On the sinophile fantasies of the English architect andamateur scholar John Webb,see Markley, Far East and EnglishImagination, 76-79; cf. Porter, Ideographia, 124-
132.21 Attiret, Lettre du frre Attiret, 387-412, translated intoEnglish in 1752.
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with palaces, pavilions, tea-houses, temples, pagodas and lakesfilled birds and
magnificent boats. The emperor has selected 40 locations fromwhich the garden
presents itself in a particularly attractive fashion, heexplained. Among them are
buildings taken from around China and the world: temples fromMongolia and Tibet,
a hamlet and a river scene from Hunan, gardens from Suzhou andHangzhou, and a
set of European-style palaces.22 Yuanmingyuan even had afaithful replica of a
regular Chinese street filled with shops, stalls, hawkers,customers and beggars,
where the emperor moved around at his own leisure, and his womenstruck
bargains with the eunuchs who played the part of vendors.23 Inaddition there was
a farmhouse, complete with fields, animals and all kinds ofa*gricultural equipment.
Most remarkable, however, was the beautiful disorder andanti-symmetry
which governed the lay-out and the design. Buildings of verydifferent kinds were
placed close together; the paths were not straight, butmeandering; the bridges
across the lakes were zigzagging; the doors and windows were notsquare but
round, oval, or shaped in the form of flowers, birds or fish.24Although such a
description may sound ridiculous, Attiret admitted, seeing it inperson you think
differently and begin to admire the art with which thisirregularity is put together.
Since nothing can be taken in by one glance, you are forced toexplore the gardens
on foot, and each new turn of the path provides new vistas andimpressions. This
admirable variety gives the visitor a delightful and enchantingfeeling, which
makes the Yuanmingyuan into a pleasure ground rather than animperial palace.
Il y a de quoi s'amuser longtemps, et de quoi satisfaire toutesa curiosit.25
The person for whom these amusem*nts had been assembled wasthe
emperor, but in the Jesuits accounts he was no longer theomnipotent ruler the
medieval travelers had described, but instead something likeapetit prince who
22 Wong, European Buildings with Chinese Characteristics;Thomas, YuanmingYuan/Versailles, 133-134.
23 Attiret, Lettre du frre Attiret, 396-397.
24 Ibid., 401-402.25 Quotes in this paragraph are from Ibid.,400-401.
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walked around in his enchanted garden surprised and delighted ateverything he
saw.26 The Yuanmingyuan, in its variety and comprehensivenessrepresented all
there is: times past and times future, exotic locations, amazinganimals, flora and
fauna, high mountains, oceans, the countryside and the city. Andthe emperor was
the unquestioned ruler of this bijou universe. Moreover, sinceeverything was
harmoniously ordered and at peace, the garden gave ampleevidence of the virtue
of his reign.
In terms of the aesthetic categories popular in theeighteenth-century, this
was all very curieux.27 In the Jesuits' letters the medievallanguage of beauty and
terror has been replaced by impressions of delightfulmultiplicity. The
Yuanmingyuan was transformed into a rococo palace: a vastcabinet of curiosities
filled with life-like automata and trompe l'ileffects.28 It wasa cornucopia which
constantly produced things at the same time overwhelming andsurprising. There
is, says Attiret, an unsurpassed fecundity in the spirit of theChinese. In fact, I am
See AlsoNaval/Maritime History - 14th of May - Today in Naval History - Naval / Maritime Events in Historytempted to think that we are poor and sterile by comparison.29In an earlier era,
such fecundity would have served as proof regarding the locationof Paradise. After
all, Paradise too was a garden where everything constantly andeffortlessly
rejuvenated itself. In a later era, the same fecundity wouldbecome a sign of the
productivity of the Chinese soil and the riches of Chinesemarkets which were
waiting to be tapped by European merchants.30 But for theJesuits themselves it
was above all a feature in which to take a curious delight.
the sublime of the poets
Attiret's account of the Yuanmingyuan had a far-reaching impactin Europe. Fitting
26 Attiret, Lettre du frre Attiret, 403; Cf. Porter,Ideographia, 147-155.
27 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature,273-274.
28 On cabinet of curiosities, see Daston and Park, Wonders andthe Order of Nature,255-290; Benedict, Curiosity, 134-135.
29 Attiret, Lettre du frre Attiret, 399.30 Markley, Far East andEnglish Imagination, 79.
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perfectly with the already well-established fashion forchinoiserie, Attiret helped
inspire the creation of Chinese-style gardens and gardenfeatures across the
continent.31 Only a few years after the publication of hisaccount, Fredrick the
Great built a Chinesisches Haus at Sans Soucis; Catherine theGreat a Chinese
palace at Oranienbaum; and Adolf Fredrik, king of Sweden, builta Kina slottat
Drottningholm. In 1761, the architect William Chambers erected afifty meter tall
pagoda in Kew Gardens, as well as a House of Confucius.32
In contrast to his colleagues, Chambers had actually been toChina.33 As a
young man he visited Guangzhou twice in the 1740s, on boardships of the Swedish
East-India Company. Here he had studied Chinese architecture andgarden art, and
once back in Europe he published, in 1757, a short pamphlet, Onthe Art of Laying
out Gardens among the Chinese.34 There are three different kindsof scenes in a
Chinese garden, Chambers explained, the pleasing, horrid, andenchanted.35
While the pleasing and the enchanted corresponded to categoriesalready discussed
by the Jesuits, his emphasis on the horrid was something quitenew. These horrid
scenes, Chambers insisted, were filled with ill-formed treestorn by tempests,
impending rocks, impetuous cataracts, and buildingshalf-consumed by fire.36 They
were, in short, designed to elicit feelings of the sublime.
The sublime was an aesthetic discovery of theeighteenth-century.37 Originally
defined as a rhetorical device a certain heightening of languageit gradually
came to be applied to natural features: in particular to highmountains, and to
31 For a survey, see Sirn, China and the Gardens of Europe.
32 The Chinesisches Haus dates from 1755; Kina Slott from 1753,and the Chinesepalace at Oranienbaum from 1762. On Kew gardens, seeChambers, Plans,Elevations, Sections.
33 In 1743-44 and 1748-49. See Harris, Chambers.
34 Originally published in The Gentleman's Magazine, May 1757,and reprinted inChambers, The Art of Laying Out Gardens, quotesfrom 129, 144.
35 Chambers,A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 35-40; onChambers, see Porter,Ideographia, 155-162, 175-181; Porter, Beyondthe Bounds of Truth; Liu, Seedsof a Different Eden, 6-10.
36 Chambers,A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 131-132.37Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 271-323.
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vistas seen from high mountains, but also to other dramatic,obscure or mysterious
sceneries. Traveling in Italy in 1688, John Dennis discoveredhorrid, hideous,
ghastly Ruins, but was surprised to find that they gave him adelightful horror
and a terrible joy.38 Developing the concept, the Third Earl ofShaftesbury and
Joseph Addison described the sublime as that awe which fills usas we contemplate
supreme beauty or the infinite powers of God. The concept was oneveryone's lips
in the spring of 1757 when Edmund Burke published The Origin ofOur Ideas of the
Sublime and the Beautiful, only a few weeks before Chamberspublished his
pamphlet on Chinese gardens. As Burke explained, the sublimeastonishes us,
overwhelms our senses and suspends our power of reasoning, butthe effect is
pleasurable, not scary, since we know we never will come to anyactual harm.39
The sublime is a game we play, and as Addison pointed out in hispraise of its
irregular aesthetics, a Chinese garden is a perfect setting forit.40 Chambers
emphatically agreed.
In a subsequent and longer work,A Dissertation on OrientalGardening, 1772,
Chambers returned to the garden of horror, and used theYuanmingyuan as an
illustration. After describing the pleasures induced by its manymeandering paths
and enchanting vistas, he turned to the scenes of terror: gloomywoods, deep
vallies inaccessible to the sun, impending barren rocks, darkcaverns, and
impetuous cataracts rushing down the mountains from allparts.41
Bats, owls, and every bird of prey flutter in the groves;wolves, tigersand jackalls howl in the forests; half-famishedanimals wander uponthe plains; gibbets, crosses, wheels, and thewhole apparatus oftorture, are seen from the roads; and in the mostdismal recesses ofthe woods, where the ways are rugged andovergrown with weeds,and where every object bears the marks ofdepopulation, aretemples dedicated to the king of vengeance, deepcaverns in therocks, and descents to subterraneous habitations,overgrown withbrushwood and brambles.42
38 Ibid., 279 on Shaftesbury and Addison, see 289-323.
39 Burke,A Philosophical Enquiry, 41-43.40 Addison quoted inNicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 316-318;
Lovejoy, The First Gothic Revival, 113-115.
41 Chambers,A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 37.42Ibid.
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Chambers had clearly overdone it.43 The Dissertation wasmercilessly ridiculed by
the defenders of the classical English garden who refused tobelieve that anything
of value could be learned from the Chinese, and who objected towhat they saw as
Chambers' defense of pointless embellishments and theexcessively decorative.44
Chinese gardens were too cluttered, the critics argued, and thisgave them a
contrived and unnatural feel. And of course Chambers' outlandishaccount of the
garden of terror was an easy target for ridicule. In theEmperor's garden of
Yven-Ming-Uven, near Pekin, William Mason noted sarcastically,fine lizards, and
fine women, human giants, and giant baboon, make but a smallpart of the superb
scenery.45 Hurt by such attacks, Chambers inserted an apologeticexplanatory
discourse when the Dissertation was republished, and there wasabsolutely nothing
Chinese or ornamental about his next major commission, theclassically
Neoclassical Somerset House in the center of London.46
And yet the sensibility of which Chambers' account was anexpression could
not easily be held back. To Romantic writers of the turn of thenineteenth-century,
the wonders of the Orient were a source of exotic reveries and,once again, the
palace of the Chinese emperor was a favorite topic. In October1797, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge took a few grains of laudanum, read a few pagesfrom Purchas His
Pilgrimage a collection of medieval travelers' tales andpromptly fell asleep.
When he woke up, he wrote a poem, describing a sublime paradisewhich inspired
both longing and dread:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
43 Sirn, China and the Gardens of Europe, 102.44 See thediscussion in Bald, Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden,287-
320; Lovejoy, The First Gothic Revival, 120-122; Porter,Ideographia, 175-177;Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden, 6-10.
45 Mason, Heroic Epistle, 3-4; As Burke's Annual Register notedin an obituary: "Thehorrible and strange devices described to existin the Chinese gardens have beenmuch ridiculed, but are no morethan had been before published by father Attiret,in his account ofthe Emperor of China's gardens near Pekin." Burke, Anecdotes oftheLate Sir William Chambers.
46 Bald, Sir William Chambers and the Chinese Garden, 307-310;As Lovejoy points
out, sudden switches between Neo-Classicism and the Neo-Gothicwere alsocommon. Lovejoy, The First Gothic Revival, 151-152.
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a stately pleasure-dome decree,where Alph, the sacred river,ranthrough caverns measureless to mandown to a sunless sea. ...
A savage place! As holy and enchantedas a'er beneath a waningmoon was hauntedby woman wailing for her demon lover.And from thischasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,As if this earth in fastthick pants were breathing,A mighty fountain momently wasforced:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from farAncestral voicesprophesying war! ...
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!His flashing eyes, hisfloating hair!Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,For he on honey-dew hathfed,And drunk the milk of Paradise.47
Coleridge is clearly moving in the same poetic territory asChambers. It cannot be
very far from his caverns measureless to man to Chambers' deepcaverns in the
rocks.48 But it is equally not very far from the account whichMarco Polo once had
given. What Coleridge had seen in his dream was the palace ofKublai Khan, which
Polo had visited, and Polo's account was reprinted in PurchasPilgrimage which
Coleridge read before he fell asleep.49 Coleridge is unashamedlymedieval in his
references, relying on dreams rather than on empiricalobservations, and the
violent, intoxicating, images are, much like the descriptions ofmedieval travelers,
combining the marvelous with impressions of overwhelmingmight.50 Subjected to
a Neo-Gothic transfiguration, the wonders of Polo's palace havebecome sublime.
What has been added, that is, is a Burkean aesthetics of thevicarious frisson: the
47 Coleridge, Kubla Khan, 276-279.
48 Nicolson would see them both as sharing a number ofeighteenth-centurycommonplaces. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom andMountain Glory, 289-290.
49 "In Xanadu did Cublai Can build a stately palace,encompassing sixteen miles ofplain ground with a wall, wherein arefertile meadows, pleasant springs, delightfulstreams, and all sortsof beasts and chase and game, and in the middle thereof asumtuoushouse of pleasure, which may be removed from place to place."Purchas,Purchas His Pilgrimage, 415.
50 On the written sources of the poem, see Lowes, Road toXanadu, 356-425; on thenatural sources, see Holmes, Coleridge, 164;as Lovejoy shows, Chinese and Gothic
references were often invoked by the same author. Lovejoy, TheFirst GothicRevival, 159.
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intense pleasure which comes from a knowingly unjustified fearof imminent and
grievous bodily harm.
The contrast with the Jesuits' accounts is most clearly broughtout by the
sexual references implied. While Attiret's emperor may have beena wide-eyed
petit prince, ignorant of the desires of grown-ups, the world heinhabited was
constantly rejuvenated thanks to its joyous, unrestrained,fecundity. By contrast,
the palace described both by Chambers and Coleridge is alocation of
sadomasoch*stic orgies. It is a place of devastation and fear;where women wail
for demon lovers, and close their eyes in holy dread. Ruled bythe orgiastic and
the Dionysian, the imperial palace is the source of anunstoppable life-force which
simultaneously both creates and destroys. Yet its destructiveeffects are more
obvious than its regenerative; this world is more barren thanfecund, and the
sexual encounters that take place, like the futile coupling ofeunuchs, leave no
issue. Like rape fantasies, these Orientalist visions are lessabout sex than about
power.
the picturesque of the diplomats
In August 1793, a British diplomatic delegations led by GeorgeMacartney arrived in
Beijing with the aim opening up the enormous Chinese market totrade in British-
made goods. Arriving at the imperial palace, clearly expecting asublime
experience, the diplomats were sorely disappointed.51 From everything I can
learn, Macartney concluded, it falls very short of the fancifuldescriptions which
father Attiret and Sir William Chambers have intruded upon us asrealities.52 John
Barrow, the Comptroller-General to the mission, who spent fiveweeks at the
Yuanmingyuan, agreed: Chambers' descriptions were extravagant,and the Jesuits
51 There is a parallel here with eighteenth-century Englishtravelers who cameprepared for sublime experiences when crossingthe Alps. Nicolson, Mountain
Gloom and Mountain Glory, 355.52 Macartney quoted in Barrow,Embassy to China, 133.
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had their own motives for presenting the place in the mostfavorable light.53 Our
task, Barrow concluded, should be to divest the court of thetinsel and the tawdry
varnish with which, like the palaces of the Emperor, themissionaries have found it
expedient to cover it in their writings.54
Their own descriptions make a clear distinction between thebuildings, their
content, and the gardens themselves.55 With the buildings, theBritish visitors were
far from impressed. The palaces, said Aeneas Anderson, were toosmall, too
heavily decorated, and not only destitute of elegance, but in awretched state of
repair, giving an appearance of neglect.56 These assemblages ofbuildings, said
Barrow, which they dignify with the name of palaces, are moreremarkable for
their number than for their splendour or magnificence.
A great proportion of the buildings consists in mean cottages.Thevery dwelling of the Emperor and the grand hall in which hegivesaudience, when divested of the gilding and the gaudy colourswithwhich they are daubed, are little superior, and much lesssolid, thanthe barns of a substantial English farmer.57
And while Macartney himself was more positive calling thebuildings perfect of
their kind what he appreciated were not the structuresthemselves but the way
they were arranged in the landscape, creating a pleasingcomprehensive view.58
As for the imperial collections, the diplomats were moreimpressed.
Macartney praised the stupendous vases of jasper and agate; thefinest porcelain
and Japan; and spheres, orreries, clocks, and musical automatonsof exquisite
53 By exaggerating the power and magnificence of the Chinese,"their own triumphwould be all the greater" once the countryeventually was converted to Christianity.Ibid., 123.
54 Ibid., 2.
55 On the separate development of the aesthetics of gardens andof architecture ineighteenth-century Britain, see Lovejoy, TheFirst Gothic Revival, 157-158; asNicolson points out, althoughAddison defended irregular garden art, his view onarchitecture wasperfectly Neo-Classical. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom andMountainGlory, 318.
56 Anderson,A Narrative of the British Embassy to China,111.
57 Barrow, Travels in China, 124; Barrow's assessment was echoedby James Mill,
among others, see Mill, Review of M. de Guignes, 425.58Macartney quoted in Barrow, Travels in China, 136.
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workmanship.59 And yet, overall, the visitors were notenchanted. Valuable and
rare though the items may have been, they were sing-songsandtoys.60 To the
British, the imperial collection was a cabinet of curiosities,filled with assorted exotic
bric--brac, designed to astonish rather than enlighten. Childrencould be amused
this way, and people of no education, but it was not of muchinterest to men of
learning. And men of learning was precisely what the members ofthe Macartney
mission considered themselves to be. Educated in the latestadvances of European
science and technology, they had little interest in exceptionalcases and gaudy
displays.61 The gifts they had brought along to give to theemperor reflected their
outlook. The emperor was to be presented with a planetarium,celestial and
terrestrial globes, telescopes, an air-pump, a hot-air balloon,a microscope, a
burning-lens.62 As the British diplomats were at pains to pointout, these were
scientific instruments, not automata or sing-songs.
In Britain the fashion for chinoiserie had peaked in the 1740s,and by the
1790s things Chinese were often regarded as vulgar, at leastamong men of
Neoclassical tastes.63 From a Neoclassical perspective, theChinese style, much like
French rococo or Neo-Gothic architecture, was considered asoverbearing and false.
This was art for fops exotic, effeminate, clutter to whoseseductiveness real
men succumbed only at their own, emasculating, peril. Chineseart had no balance,
no order, no perspective and no truth. Its veryundecipherableness was an insult to
man's intelligence and a threat to one's sense of propriety and,more generally, to
peace and social stability.64 A simple, naked statue, finishedby the hand of a
59 Ibid., 129.
60 Sing-song was the generic European term for mechanicalgadgets and automatasold in Guangzhou. See Braga, Seller of'Sing-Songs'; Cranmer-Byng and Levere,A Case Study in CulturalCollission, 509.
61 Cf. the discussion of "the Enlightenment and theAnti-Marvelous," in Daston andPark, Wonders and the Order ofNature, 329-363.
62 Schaffer, Instruments as Cargo in the China Trade, 217-246.63The rise and fall in the fad for Chinoiserie is traced in Porter,Ideographia, 133-192;
and Porter, A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation; on theContinent, however, the
fashion peaked only in the 1780s. See Harris, Chambers.64Porter, Ideographia, 166-172.
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Grecian artist, as James Mill put it in 1809, in a comparisonbetween Chinese and
European art, is of more genuine value than all these rude andcostly monuments
of Barbaric labour.65
It was only for the gardens and the grounds of the imperialpalace that the
British diplomats showed real enthusiasm. It is one of thefinest forest-scenes in
the world, said Macartney of the gardens at the imperial summerretreat at
Chengde.66 Reaching the summit of one of the hills, atwenty-mile vista suddenly
opened up below him, and certainly so rich, so various, sobeautiful, so sublime a
prospect my eyes had never beheld.67 What particularly attractedthe British
visitors was the sense of balance and proportion offered by thegardens. As they
discovered, all of the Yuanmingyuan was made up of scenes,well-composed
tableauxdesigned to be contemplated from designated points alonga meandering
path. A given building, Barrow noted, should be seen at acertain distance through
the branches of a thicket, and a particular sheet of water ispurposely hemmed in
by artificial rocks.68
In terms of aesthetic categories, the imperial gardens, to thediplomats, were
examples of what by the 1790s was known as the picturesque.69First made
popular by William Gilpin's Observations on the River Wye, 1782,the notion of the
picturesque was in subsequent decades enthusiastically employedby English
gardeners, architects and aesthetes. It denoted a landscapewhich was framed to
look just like a picture with some objects in the foreground,others in the
middle, and some trees in the offskip.70 And while naturenaturally was capable
of producing such pictures on its own, it often needed help froman artist. At the
hands of the skilled gardener different colors, textures, andmaterials were
65 Mill, Review of M. de Guignes, 427.
66 Macartney quoted in Barrow, Travels in China, 134.
67 Ibid., 134-135.
68 Barrow quoted in Davis, The Chinese, 266-267.
69 The seminal statement is Gilpin, The Wye Tour; lampooned inCombe, Doctor
Syntax; for an overview, see Hussey, The Picturesque; Kliger,Whig Aesthetics.70 Macartney quoted in Barrow, Travels in China,128.
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combined in irregular, undulating, and jagged patterns. Perhapsa tree, or the ruins
of an abbey, would improve a composition or, as in China, apagoda.
The notion of the picturesque achieved an ingenious compromisebetween the
idea of the beautiful and the sublime, and this, no doubt,explains its popularity.
Portraying nature in all its diversity, and not hesitatingbefore the dark, the
tempestuous and the irregular, the picturesque tapped intosublime, Neo-Gothic,
sensibilities. And yet, while the truly sublime defied andoverwhelmed all
boundaries, the picturesque always contained its subject matterwithin a perfectly
self-contained frame. By balancing contrasting elements againstone another, and
creating order among diverse objects, the overall impression waspeaceful,
pleasing, and not in the least terrifying. The landscape wasmade, and perfectly
controlled, by human beings.
In Britain, by the end of the eighteenth-century, the naturalwas no longer
equated with Neoclassical geometrical ideals. In fact, as far asgarden art was
concerned, the British had fully embraced what lookssuspiciously like a Chinese
aesthetic. After all, the quintessential English garden too isirregular, meandering
and picturesque. The French were quick to pick up on thissimilarity, referring to it
as the hyphenated aesthetic ofle jardin anglo-chinois. In 1793,the visiting
diplomats too were constantly struck by the similarities. In thecourse of a few
hours, said Macartney, after riding around the imperial gardenat Chengde,
I have enjoyed such vicissitudes of rural delight, as I did notconceivecould be felt out of England, being at different momentsenchantedby scenes perfectly similar to those I had known there, tothemagnificence of Stowe, the softer beauties of Wooburn, andthefairy-land of Paine's Hill.71
The question is how this similarity best should be explained.The inclination of
English writers has always been to ascribe the picturesqueaesthetic to an
indigenous genius, often associating the freedom of the Englishgarden with
English political liberties, and contrasting both with thetatisme of the political
71 Macartney quoted in Ibid., 130.
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system, and the gardens, of the French.72 Non-English writershave been quicker to
point out that the first discussions of the new aestheticsalways made explicit
references to Chinese gardens. After all, it was only onceChinese anti-symmetrical
ideals became known in Europe that English gardeners abandonedtheir geometrical
layouts.73 Yet questions of influences are, as always, difficultto settle. As
Macartney himself put it in 1793: Whether our style of gardeningwas really copied
from the Chinese, or originated with ourselves, I leave forvanity to assert, and
idleness to discuss.74
the politics of wonder
Lets step back for a moment and consider the larger patternwhich these various
reactions produce. Invoking a more comprehensive conceptualcategory, we realize
that the marvel of the medieval travelers, the curiosity of theJesuits, the sublime
of the poets, and the picturesque of the diplomats, all can beunderstood as
variations on the notion of wonder. Wonder was always the mostbasic way in
which Europeans related to a culture as different, and asstrange, as the Chinese.
Yet wonder is far from a precise analytical term, and, as wehave seen, it includes
many different, even contradictory, reactions.75 Moreover, thevocabulary of wonder
varies over time, forming a cultural history which the differentdescriptions of the
imperial palace allow us to retrace.
Bringing a semblance of order to this permutating terminology,the language
of wonder can be divided into two radically different, yetrelated, usages. Or,
differently put, wonder makes the wonderers take up two quitedifferent postures.76
72 For a defense of the English origin of the jardinanglo-chinois, see Jacques, On theSupposed Chineseness,180-191.
73 Lovejoy, The Chinese Origin of a Romanticism, 99-135; a morerecent discussionis Liu, Seeds of a Different Eden, 98-100.
74 Macartney quoted in Barrow, Travels in China, 134.
75 On this cluster of meanings, see Daston and Park, Wonders andthe Order ofNature, 15; cf. Bynum, Wonder, 1-7, 23-25; cf.Greenblatt, Resonance and
Wonder.76 On the physiological reactions associated with wonder,see Darwin, Expression of
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The first is an inquiring attitude. Wonder, as Aristotle put it,is the beginning of
philosophy, that is, the beginning of thought.77 Here, to wonderabout something
is to ask what something is; how it came to be, and how it has,and will, develop.
To wonder is to ask questions about causes and consequences; itis to conduct
investigations and pursue science. Thus understood, wonder is anactive passion,
and often as imperative as the desire for food or sex. Likethese kindred passions,
wonder is strongly associated with a need for control. It isonly by controlling the
object we wonder about by isolating it in a laboratory, byholding and
manipulating it in our hands that it can be properlyinvestigated. This is the
connection between wonder and colonial appropriation. Arrivingin a marvelous
land, encountering marvelous things, the Europeans firstwondered, then they took
the land and the things.78
The second, radically different, posture is one of imposedpassivity. We
wonder at the wondrous, and the wondrous is best understood as aforce which
strikes us with wonder, makes us marvel, and fills us withawe.79 Here the
wonderers are caught off guard; their senses are overwhelmed andthey
temporarily lose the use of their faculties.80 Like thralls,they are enthralled by an
all-powerful, external, force which they have no option but toobey. First their jaws
drop, then they fall to the ground. The sensation may be one ofsheer amazement
or one of terror, but the experience may also be pleasant.Indeed, as John Dennis
was the first to notice and as Edmund Burke affirmed, theexperience can be
pleasant because it is terrifying.81 This is the rape fantasy ofproverbial Victorian
women, where the thing we fear the most also constitutes ourmost secret desire.
Emotions in Man.
77 Aristotle's Metaphysics quoted in Daston and Park, Wondersand the Order ofNature, 14; cf. Bynum, Wonder, 7.
78 This is the function of wonder emphasized by Greenblatt,Marvelous Possessions,52-85; Todorov, La conqute de l'Amrique.
79 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 14-15;Bynum, Wonder, 3-6.
80 Burke,A Philosophical Enquiry, 53.81 Nicolson, Mountain Gloomand Mountain Glory, 276-289.
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Politically speaking, these wonderers make no claims to colonialappropriation; they
do not manipulate anyone; and they are not in a position toimpose their will.82
How wonder strikes us depends on the objects we confront, butsometimes
the same object can result in either posture. To a considerableextent our reactions
depend on our expectations, conditioned by the culture in whichwe live. This
explains the variation in the reactions we have surveyed. It wasthe aesthetic
presumptions of their time which made European visitors to Chinatake up one
posture rather than another. But postures also depend on thedistribution of power
between the wonderer and the thing wondered at, and,importantly, a given
distribution of power will be reinforced or undermined dependingon the posture we
adopt. This is why wonder in China never had the same politicalconsequences as
wonder in the New World. In the Americas, the Europeans metlittle organized
resistance and wonder, more often than not, resulted inappropriation. In China, by
contrast, the Europeans could not simply take what they wonderedat, but had
instead to ask for an opportunity to buy it. Very frustratingly,the requests for
trading privileges were usually rejected by the Chineseauthorities.83
As we saw, the first European travelers to China were asked toassume a
reverential posture. The power of the emperor overwhelmed them,they were
struck by awe, and obligingly they quickly prostratedthemselves. The European
visitors were utterly powerless but this was not a great concernsince they had no
illusions regarding conquest or control. Although they were atthe mercy of the
emperor, their reactions expressed amazement rather than fear,and amazement
was also what their tales conveyed to their listeners back home.The relationship
between the emperor and the Jesuits was always quite different.The Jesuits
82 "Medieval theories of wonder," Bynum insists, "made the pointthat wonder is non-appropriative yet based on facticity andsingularity." Bynum, Wonder, 24.
83 Greenblatt notices the difference between Marco Polo andColumbus, but basing hisaccount on European relations with the NewWorld, he exaggerates the role ofwonder understood asappropriation. Wonder is treated by Greenblatt as a
discursive rather than a political relationship. Greenblatt,Marvelous Possessions,53.
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ingratiated themselves with the court by providing uniqueservices for which there
was no ready substitute. As their letters make clear, this madethe emperor their
benevolent, if somewhat unpredictable, friend. And while theJesuits certainly
koutou-ed before his throne, this was done as a matter ofcourtesy and not in awe.
The posture of the Jesuits was instead one of unashamedcuriosity.84 Steeped first
in the Hermeticism of the Renaissance and, by theseventeenth-century, in the
creeds of the Scientific Revolution, the missionaries were keento learn the
language, and as much as possible about Chinese customs,philosophy and
religion.85 In addition, the Jesuits wanted to show that theywere doing good work
and that they made progress advancing Christianity. Throughtheir well-publicized
Lettres they recruited curious readers across Europe who sharedtheir interest in
China and their conviction regarding the importance of theirmission.
Next, compare the wonder expressed by poets and by diplomats.Clearly it
was quite impossible for someone of Coleridge's sensibilities tobe satisfied with
picturesque descriptions. Having no interest in a place thatlooked just like Kew,
he preferred medieval traveler tales to the accounts of theMacartney mission.86
Coleridge's version of the imperial palace is a perfect exampleof the sublime, as
defined by Dennis and Burke. It is a dream of the pleasures oftransgression,
intoxication and sexual submission. Subjecting ourselves to thepower of an
Oriental ruler, we relinquish all claims of our own. Politicallyspeaking, Kubla
Khan can be read as a renunciation of the white mans burden anda plead for
colonizers and colonized to trade places. Chambers, by contrast,was not so quick
to abandon himself. He praised the Chinese not only for theterror, but also for the
delight inspired by their gardens. On both accounts, however, hemet criticism
back home. Enchantments were effeminate and to be struck byterror was
unworthy of a brave Englishman. Chambers, the critics suspected,was too quick to
84 Mungello, Curious Land, 13-14.
85 Ibid.86 See, however, Leask, Kubla Khan and Orientalism.
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koutou to royal power, English as well as Chinese.87
This was a line of criticism developed by the British diplomatsin their
accounts. Making few distinctions between real Chinese art andcheap chinoiserie,
the imperial palace was given the same treatment which rococoaesthetics was
given by all Englishmen of Neoclassical tastes. This was art forchildren and fops,
people easily taken in by gaudy displays. But to slavishlyfollow Chinese fashions
was unacceptable also on political grounds. The British shouldstand up for their
own achievements, and this was never more important than inrelation to the
obscure forces of the sublime. The diplomats insisted thatBritain be treated as
equals with China and, breaking with the etiquette of theChinese court, they
refused to koutou before the imperial throne. What they wantedwere trade
concessions, but the emperor which the poets had described withflashing eyes
and floating hair was clearly not the kind of ruler with whomyou conclude
commercial agreements. In the end, although the British nevergot their treaty, the
pretensions of the Chinese were exposed. The palace, theydiscovered, was
nothing but a brightly painted barn. In the best tradition ofBritish empiricism, the
diplomats pointed out that the emperor was naked.88
The idea of the picturesque had far more benign implications. Inthe
picturesque landscape, every plant, brook and grove was free totake on its own
preferred form, yet the whole was always appropriately framedand maintained in
perfect balance. Indeed, according to the picturesqueaesthetics, balance requires
the coexistence of highly diverse and irregular entities: alarge tree needs a large
rock and only a meandering stream can hold both together. Thereis a perfect
analogy here to the market mechanism advocated by Adam Smithwhere balance
87 On the traditional connection between English monarchists andapologias forimperial China, see Markley, Far East and EnglishImagination, 76.
88 In these respects the British diplomats reacted much as thelittle boy in H.C.Andersen's story of "The Emperor's New Clothes."That Andersen had readaccounts of the Yuanmingyuan is evident fromhis story "The Nightingale" which isset in the imperial garden.There is, however, no direct evidence that the naked
emperor was modeled on the Chinese. See Andersen, TheNightingale; cf.Oxfeldt, China as a Source of Political Satire.
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was achieved through the free interaction of radically diverseinterests. In both
cases, what looked perfectly natural was actually a product ofart. The hidden
hand of the authorities that regulated the market correspondedto the hidden hand
of the master gardener who pruned his plants and prodded histrees.89 Not
surprisingly, the British aristocrats who made up the Macartneymission of 1793
were both landowners and government officials.
destroying a wonder
On the morning of October 7, 1860, French and British troopsmade their way into
the Yuanmingyuan. Despite orders from the commanders, thecompound was
looted by the French, while the English, quick to spot abusiness opportunity, put
the remaining articles up for sale. On October 18, the buildingsand what was left
of their content were burned to the ground by British troops.There is, we said, a
political and military context to this vandalism: the lack ofdiscipline in the French
army, miscommunication between the allied commanders, and, inthe case of the
final incineration, a British desire to take revenge for thebrutal treatment which a
group of hostages had received at the hands of the Chinese.90Yet when it comes to
objects which hitherto have featured mainly in dreams, apolitical and military
context is not sufficient. We also need to understand the statuswhich the imperial
palace had in the minds of the people responsible for thedestruction. These
reactions can be divided into three groups: those of the Britishofficers, the French
officers, and ordinary soldiers. Depending on how they reacted,they justified their
actions quite differently.
Like their countrymen before them, the British commanders made asharp
distinction between the gardens of the Yuanmingyuan, on the onehand, and the
buildings and their content, on the other. The gardens werepicturesque, but the
89 The garden is of course a common metaphor for the state. SeeDaniels, ThePolitical Iconography of Woodland, 45-46.
90 Stanmore, Sidney Herbert, II: 349-355; Knollys, Remarks onthe French March,214-225.
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buildings were unimpressive and the art collections expensivebut excessively
decorative. In a letter home to his wife, the British commander,James Bruce,
Eighth Earl of Elgin, described the numberless buildings withhandsome rooms,
and filled with Chinese curios, and handsome clocks, bronzes,etc.91 Wolseley
mentioned a mine of wealth and of everything curious, whichreminded him of the
antique shops of Wardour Street in London.92 But it was only inthe gardens that
the British commanders felt truly at home. They reminded them ofRichmond, of
Kew, of Stowe; it is really a fine thing, Elgin reported to hiswife, like an English
park. Overall, however, the palace was nothing like they hadexpected. Taking
Yuen-ming-yuen all in all, said Wolseley, it was a gem of itskind, and yet I do not
suppose there was a single man who visited it without beingdisappointed.93 There
was an absence of grandeur about the place for which no amountof careful
gardening and pretty ornaments can compensate. Everything uponwhich the eye
could rest was pretty and well designed, but there was nothingimposing in the
tout ensemble.
Both in landscape gardening and building, the Chinaman losessightof grand or imposing effects, in his endeavours to loadeverythingwith ornament; he forgets the fine in his search afterthe curious. Intheir thirst after decoration, and in their inherentlove for minuteembellishment, the artists and architects of Chinahave failed toproduce any great work capable of inspiring thosesensations of aweor admiration which strike every one when firstgazing upon themagnificent creations of European architects.94
In the rest of the world emperors and kings built imposingstructures in order to
impress their subjects, yet the Yuanmingyuan was smaller, notlarger, than life.
When given a choice, Chinese architects opted for the miniature.As a result, said
Wolseley, the palace resembles more the design of a child infront of her doll's
house than the work of grown-up men.95 The reaction of theBritish commander,
91 Elgin, Extracts from the Letters of Lord Elgin, 220.
92 Wolseley, Narrative of the War with China, 224.
93 Ibid., 237.
94 Ibid., 233.95 Ibid., 233-235.
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Lord Elgin, is particularly interesting. Elgin was aConservative, skeptical of money-
grubbing imperialism, and, moreover, he was a Coleridgean. AtOxford, according
to his brother, his intellect was attracted to high and abstractspeculation; he read
Plato, Milton, and Coleridge, the philosophy of the latter hehad thoroughly
mastered.96 Yet when confronting the Yuanmingyuan he did notrecognize it as the
palace which Coleridge had described. He did not close his eyesin holy dread and
he drank no milk of paradise. Instead he burned the placedown.
The French commanders made no similar distinctions, and theirpraise for the
rococo aesthetics of the imperial collections came with fewreservations. Nothing
in our Europe, wrote General Montauban, can give us an idea ofsuch luxury.97
Yet Montauban does not go into much detail, and Baron Gros, theleading French
diplomat, gave no description at all of the palace in his reportto the government.98
Clearly, too much detail and too much praise would have createdproblems of
presentation. After all, it was French troops who carried outmost of the looting.
Officially, however, the French commanders denied anyinvolvement and blamed
instead the ragtag band of Chinese marauder who accompanied theEuropean
armies.99 It was only once theirloot was confiscated by Frenchtroops that it ended
up in the French camp. When it came to the burning of thepalace, the French
commanders refused all participation. We are constantly talkingto the Chinese
about our civilization and Christian charity, said Baron Gros,and to destroy the
palace would be a hypocritical act of barbarism.100
As for the ordinary soldiers British as well as French once theywalked
through the gates of the Yuanmingyuan they seem to have entereda dream.101
This was a magical kingdom full of all the treasures,enchantments, and sensuality
96 Walrond, Letters and Journals of Lord Elgin, 3, 8.97Montauban quoted in Cordier, L'Expdition de Chine, 354.
98 Montauban, Souvenirs, 310.99 Gros, Ngociations entre laFrance et la Chine, 125, 133.
100 Ibid., 149.101 This is the theme of Ringmar, LiberalBarbarism and the Oriental Sublime.
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which, by the middle of the nineteenth-century, constituted therequired props of
tales of the exotic East. Less worried than their commandersabout being held
accountable, they owned up to their actions, and appealedinstead to the fantasies
of the reading public. I was dumbfounded, stunned, bewildered bywhat I had
seen, wrote one, suddenly Thousand and One Nights seem perfectlybelievable to
me; everything was ferique like a fairytale.102 I felt likeAladdin, wrote
another, filled with wonder in his enchanted palace, paved withgold and
diamonds.103 In order to describe it, I would need to dissolveall known precious
stones in liquid gold and paint a picture with a diamond featherwhose bristles
contain all the fantasies of a poet of the East.104 A Corsicanadventurer, Jean-Louis
de Negroni, even claimed to have rescued the emperor's favoritecourtesan from
the marauding troops, and she, gratefully, had given him both akiss and a box of
jewels.105 Clearly, these are not descriptions of theYuanmingyuan as much as
summaries of mid-nineteenth-century works of cheap, Orientalist,fiction.
The final destruction too took place in a sort of delirium. Thesoldiers,
including many officers, ran from room to room, decked out inthe most ridiculous-
looking costumes they could find, looking for loot.106 Officersand men seemed to
have been seized with a temporary insanity; a furious thirst hastaken hold of
us; it was an orgiastic rampage of looting; the dream of ahashish eater.107 It
was as though the war once prophesied by the ancestral voices inColeridge's
poem finally had arrived, and the Europeans were the demonscarrying it out.
Ruled by the orgiastic and the Dionysian, they represented theunstoppable life-
force which simultaneously both creates and destroys. TheEuropeans promised a
102 Lucy, Lettres intimes, 95; dHrisson,Journal dun interprte enChine, 318; SeeWolseley, Narrative of the War with China, 280.
103 Negroni, Souvenirs de campagne en Chine, 51.104dHrisson,Journal dun interprte en Chine, 306.105 Negroni, Souvenirsde campagne en Chine, 45-50.106 Wolseley, Narrative of the War withChina, 226-227.
107 Wolseley, Narrative of the War with China, 226-227; Lucy,Lettres intimes, 226-227.
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new beginning for China a bright future of progress and freetrade but first
the old world had to be laid in ruins. Only through acts ofbarbarism could
civilization be spread.
Yet this too was a conceit. Through their encounter with theOriental other,
the European view of themselves had been transformed. Therelationship of power
had shifted. China was the last major non-European country toopenly defy their
supremacy, and now its pretensions too were crushed. Thedestruction of the
emperor's palace, said Wolseley, was the strongest proof of oursuperior strength;
it served to undeceive all Chinamen in their absurd convictionof their monarch's
universal sovereignty.108 With this victory, the Europeans hadfinally emerged as
the uncontested rulers of the world. The marvels of the palace,and the orgy of
destruction in which it disappeared, served to glorify theirvictory. The frisson of
wonder was no longer caused by an unknown, Oriental, other, butby a new,
previously unknown, self. If the palace of the emperor had beenless magical, and
its destruction more matter-of-fact, their new-found powerswould not have been
half as marvelous. It was only by first defining, and thendefeating, the wonders of
the East that the Europeans could come to take their place.
108 Wolseley, Narrative of the War with China, 281.
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