Destruction The Burning of the Yuanmingyuan Imperial Garden
4 min readIn 1860，British and French expeditionary forces，having marchedinland from the coast，reached Peking（Beijing）.On September 29，two envoys，Henry Loch and Harry Parkes went ahead of the main force under a flag of truce to negotiate with the Prince I at Tungchow.
After a day of talks，they and their small escort of British and Indian troopers（including two British envoys and a journalist for The Times）were taken prisoner.Parkes and Loch were returned after two weeks with other survivors.
On the night of October 6，French units diverted from the main attack force towards the Old Summer Palace.The palace was then occupied only by a few eunuchs and Xianfeng Emperor had fled.
Although the French commander Montauban assured the British commander Grant that“nothing had been touched”，there was extensive looting by both French and British.There was no significant resistance to the looting，even though many Imperial soldiers were in the surrounding country.
On October 18，the British High Commissioner to China，Lord Elgin，ordered the destruction of the palace.It took 3，500 British troops to set the entire place ablaze and the Gardens burnt the whole three days.Only 13 royal buildings survived intact，most of them in the remote areas or by the lake side.The palace was sacked again in 1900 during the Eight-Nation Alliance invasion and was completely ruined.
Charles George Gordon，then a 27-year-old captain in the Royal Engineers，was part of the 1860 force and wrote:”We went out，and，after pillaging it，burned the whole place，destroying in a vandal-like manner most valuable property which【could】not be replaced for four millions.. .You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt.It made one’s heart sore to burn them；in fact，these places were so large，and we were so pressed for time，that we could not plunder them carefully.Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt，considered as brass.It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army.”
One consolation for the Chinese was that the British and French looters preferred porcelain while neglecting bronze vessels prized locally for cooking and burial in tombs.Many such treasures dated back to the Shang，Zhou and Han dynasties and were up to 3，600 years old.A specific exception was the looting of the Haiyantang Zodiac fountain with its twelve bronze animal heads.
Like the Forbidden City，no ordinary Chinese citizen had ever been allowed into the Summer Palace，as it was used exclusively by the Imperial family.The burning of the Gardens of Perfect Brightness is still a very sensitive issue in China today.According to Prof.
Wang Daocheng of the People’s University in Beijing，not all of the palace was destroyed in the original burning.Instead，some historical records indicate that 16 of the important garden sceneries survived the destruction in 1860.Wang identifies the eras of the Republic of China and the Cultural Revolution as two significant periods that contributed further to the destruction of the Yuan Ming Yuan.
Criticism
The act of burning the palace has been perceived as barbaric and criminal by many Chinese，as well as by outside observers.In his“Expedition de Chine”，Victor Hugo described the looting as，“Tworobbers breaking into a museum，devastating，looting and burning，leaving laughing hand-in-hand with their bags full of treasures；one ofthe robbers is called France and the other Britain.”In his letter，Hugo hoped that one day France would feel guilty and return what it had plundered from China.
Aftermath
Following the sacking of the Old Summer Palace，the Imperial Court relocated to the Forbidden City，where it stayed until 1922，when the Last Emperor，Puyi，was expelled by a republican army.Empress Dowager Cixi built the Summer Palace（“The Garden of Nurtured Harmony”）near the Old Summer Palace，but on a much smaller scale than the Old Summer Palace.
In the present day，the ruins of the European-style palaces are the most prominent building remnants on the site.This has misled some visitors to believe wrongly that the Old Summer Palace was made up only of European-style buildings.A few Chinese-style buildings in the outlying Elegant Spring Garden also survived the fire.The Chinese imperial court restored these buildings and tried to rebuild the whole complex of the Imperial Gardens，but was unable to raise the money and resources due to the difficult situation of China at the time.In1900，many of the buildings which had survived or had been restored were burnt for good by the expeditionary forces sent to quell the Boxer Rebellion.
Most of the site was left abandoned and used by local farmers as agricultural land.Only in the 1980s was the site reclaimed by thegovernment and turned into an historical site.This led to debates in the 1990s surrounding restoration and development issues and a more recent environmental controversy brought a new political life to the park as it became a symbol of China’s“national wound”.
