When in 1890 Young J. Allen addressed the Protestant missionary conference in Shanghai on “The Changed Aspect of China,” he alluded to things to be “regretted” and “deplored.” These allusions are embedded in his discussion of the “compulsory” changes that had come upon China thirty years earlier, when the Western allies had occupied the capital and the Treaty of Peking had been ratified. Allen had arrived in China in 1860, just as these events were unfolding.
Emblematic of the regrettable and deplorable was the destruction of the vast and magnificent Yuanmingyuan, the imperial Summer Palace outside Peking. We have touched on the precipitating events before, but let’s quickly review the lead-up.
Had it been too much to expect the First Opium War and the 1842 Treaty of Nanking to settle matters for good? Oh, but here were two proud empires, one ancient but now humiliated and hemorrhaging from its wounds, the other mighty in military power and hungry for advantage. This was a combustible brew. And the triggering offense in 1856 was slight.
Naturally, it started in the trading center of Canton. A Chinese-owned ship in port, a lorcha named Arrow, operating under a British flag and captained by an Englishman, was boarded by Chinese authorities. It was believed to be involved in opium smuggling. This may or may not have been the case. And the incident might have been handled diplomatically.
But then entered a twenty-eight-year-old British consul, Harry Parkes. Parkes had grown up in China. And as Robert Bickers aptly puts it, “China was his adult life, his only life, but it was China on his own terms, and so on British terms.”1 He appears to have been the sort that had never seen an offense he would not take, whether to his personal or to British honor. And so the Arrow incident escalated until Canton was under British fire, the old trading factories in ruins, the governor’s yamen under bombardment, and a significant portion of the city destroyed. So began the Arrow War, later called the Second Opium War.
When news of events in Canton reached London, Parliament was roused to retribution. A joint British and French military expedition was launched under Lord Elgin and Baron Gros. Canton was seized and occupied in 1857. Then the expedition moved far to the north, up the coastline toward Tianjin. The Dagu Forts, bristling with canons protecting access to the Beihe River and the city of Tianjin, were taken. The overland route to Peking was open before them.
But now the Chinese capitulated. A treaty was drawn up. It would open ten more treaty ports and a British diplomatic mission in Peking. The treaty was taken back to England to be ratified, and then returned to China by Lord Elgin’s younger brother, Frederick Bruce. There the signed documents were to be exchanged.
But by the time Bruce had returned to China, the emperor, recharged by the grandeur of his ancestral throne, had changed his mind. And when in June 1859 the British ships arrived within range of the Dagu Forts, they came under heavy fire. Four ships were sunk, and some four hundred marines and sailors were killed or wounded. It was a stinging defeat and humiliation for the British. And it would not stand.
In August of the next year, 1860, Lord Elgin returned with a massive British and French fleet of 200 ships and 18,000 troops. It was a day of vengeance. After smashing the Dagu Forts, the British took Tianjin, and then advanced toward Peking. They would thrust the treaty under the emperor’s nose, and he would be forced to sign.
Things might not have taken an utterly disastrous turn had not an advance British negotiating party, under a white flag, been taken captive by Chinese imperial forces. “Kidnapped” was the British assessment. Led by Harry Parkes, and by Elgin’s secretary Henry Loch, the party was imprisoned in Peking and subjected to rough treatment. Several of them died, and a reporter for the Times of London met a gruesome death.
In response, the British and French now fought their way to Peking, leveling their Armstrong guns and shredding the Mongol cavalry. But by the time they reached the capital, the young emperor had fled over the Great Wall. All who were able had also fled the city. The emperor had left his brother, Prince Gong, to deal with the matter.
The capture of Parkes and his party was an indignity Lord Elgin would not abide. His sights now fell on the imperial Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan. This “Garden of Perfect Brightness” was an 800-acre wonder of symmetrical halls, palaces, terraces, temples, pagodas, and secluded courtyards, of floating roofs and flowing gardens, of crested hillocks, dappled ponds, and marble bridges. There was even a European styled section, designed by Jesuit architects in the eighteenth century. Situated on the outskirts of Peking, it was a marvel of the world, a paradise on earth. Outsiders who had seen it ranked it with the Parthenon of Athens, the pyramids of Egypt, and Notre Dame of Paris.
A Pavilion of the Summer Palace Today (Wikimedia Commons)
By the time Lord Elgin arrived, French troops, as well as some British, had already indulged in a spontaneous spree of pillaging and plundering the Summer Palace. Lord Elgin, on surveying the frenzied vandalism and smashed and strewn treasures of delicate porcelain, silk tapestries, and jade filigree, expressed his disgust: “War is a hateful business. The more one sees of it, the more one detests it.”2
But for all that, he was not one to shirk the duties of British honor. And having “examined the question in all its bearings,” at Elgin’s order, and under the British torch, the summer palace was destroyed. For two days “clouds of smoke driven by the wind, hung as a vast black pall over Pekin.” From Elgin’s point of view, it was a surgically calculated “punishment inflicted on the Emperor for the violation of his word, and the act of treachery to a flag of truce.”3
Prince Gong, with the bitter taste of smoke and ash lingering on his tongue, signed the treaty a few days later, on October 24.
But in the wider tapestry of history, the destruction was a pyrrhic performance of British imperial power. In the social architecture of China—of all cultures—it was foolish to imagine separating imperial glory from the honor of the nation as a whole. The Yuanmingyuan was far more than an extravagant villa of imperial pleasures. While it did not carry the cosmic symbolism of the Forbidden City of Peking, with its axially positioned temples, the Yuanmingyuan mirrored the imperial glory. For the emperor was the hub at the center of the empire, the axis point where heaven and earth intersected. Elgin had barbarically profaned hallowed ground and committed an act of cultural vandalism that had few rivals.
What was not destroyed was taken, and the treasures of the Yuanmingyuan are even today housed in numerous museums and private collections in the West.4 While the memory of the “rape” and destruction of the Yuangmingyuan is a fixture in the People’s Republic of China’s curated gallery of humiliations.5
Months after the destruction, on the far side of the world, a little Pekingese dog was presented to Queen Victoria. It had been discovered in the imperial summer palace. Victoria was delighted with this darling memento of that event. Her own little “Looty.”
When Lord Elgin was sailing for China in 1857, he had spent time reviewing the “Blue Book” annals of Britain’s project in China. Elgin had noted: “It is impossible to read the blue-books without feeling that we have often acted toward the Chinese in a manner which it is very difficult to justify; and yet their treachery and cruelty come out so strongly at times as to make almost anything appear justifiable.”6 Reading Elgin’s letters and journals, we find an educated and cultured man, a Christian gentleman, capable of keen insights and shrewd judgments. But how easily his conscience pivoted on the and yet of British imperial honor.
Having returned to England, Elgin reflected on the demolition of the Summer Palace. In the face of much criticism—Victor Hugo had called France and England a pair of bandits7—Elgin’s defense had stiffened. In 1861, at an annual banquet of the Royal Academy, he warmed to his subject:
No one regretted more sincerely than I did the destruction of that collection of summer-houses and kiosks, already, and previously to any act of mine, rifled of their contents, which was dignified by the title of Summer Palace of the Chinese Emperor.
……
I make bold in the presence of this company to say, the people of this country entertained—of an atrocious crime, which, if it had passed unpunished, would have placed in jeopardy the life of every European in China, I felt that the time had come when I must choose between the indulgence of a not unnatural sensibility and the performance of a painful duty.
Having scanned the full ambit of China’s culture, in all its bearings, he then concluded:
The distinguishing characteristic of the Chinese mind is this— that at all points of the circle described by man's intelligence, it seems occasionally to have caught glimpses of a heaven far beyond the range of its ordinary ken and vision.
But what the flames of Yuanmingyuan had not consumed, Elgin now tossed onto a funeral pyre of China’s cultural achievements.8 Having invented gunpowder, China had traded the path to “military supremacy” for firecrackers. Having invented the mariner’s compass, it had traded “maritime supremacy” for mere “coastal junks.” Having invented the printing press, it had traded “literary supremacy” for “stereotyped editions of Confucius.” And for all its vaunted achievements in artistic color and design, it had offered “the most cynical representations of the grotesque.”
“Nevertheless,” he allowed, “I am disposed to believe that under this mass of abortions and rubbish there lie hidden some sparks of a diviner fire, which the genius of my countrymen may gather and nurse into a flame.”9
The treaty Prince Gong had signed with the British, and then with the French, was cataclysmic for the Qing Empire. In addition to the new treaty ports, China would pay eight million taels of silver to Britain and France to cover the cost of the war. Kowloon would be ceded to the British as an augment to the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, the opium trade would be legalized, and missionaries would be given free access to all regions of China. With these matters settled, the British and French armies withdrew from Beijing by November 1.
The once mighty Qing Empire was now wobbling on its feet. With unequal treaties, indemnities, and losses, it had suffered a staggering blow to the head. Meanwhile—as we have earlier explored—the Taiping civil war was a red-hot cancer in its bowels.
The Western mind, with its back to the of the past, is ever oriented toward the future. Progress! The Eastern mind backs into the future, with its eyes on the past. And past humiliations are ever in view.
Too simplistic? No doubt. But with an enduring kernel of truth.10
Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914 (Penguin, 2011), 138.
James Bruce, Earl of Elgin. , Letters and Journals of James Bruce, Eighth Earl of Elgin, ed. Theodore Walrond (London: John Murray, 1872), 362.
James Bruce, Earl of Elgin. Letters and Journals, 367.
Louise Tythacott, “The Yuangmingyuan and Its Objects,” in Collecting and Displaying China’s “Summer Palace” in the West: The Yuangmingyuan in Britain and France, ed. Louise Tythacott (New York: Routledge, 2018), 3-24.
Zheng Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 52-53.
James Bruce, Earl of Elgin, Letters and Journals, 185. Italics added.
Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Vintage Books, 2012), 165.
Today the Chinese Communist Party celebrates “Four Great Inventions” of Chinese civilization: paper, the compass, gunpowder, and printing. See Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation, 43-45.
James Bruce, Earl of Elgin, Letters and Journals, 391-93.
These Eastern and Western views of time are reflected in the title of Graham Peck’s fascinating book, Two Kinds of Time (University of Washington Press, 2008 [1950]). Interestingly enough, the idea of “backing into the future” is also found in the Hebrew Bible, where the future can be rendered as “the behind days” (as a rower with their back to their course).