Liberal Barbarism: the European Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China
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Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China Ringmar, Erik 2013 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Ringmar, E. (2013). Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China. Palgrave Macmillan. 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LUND UNIVERSITY PO Box 117 221 00 Lund +46 46-222 00 00 Download date: 30. Sep. 2021 Part I Introduction 99781137268914_02_ch01.indd781137268914_02_ch01.indd 1 77/16/2013/16/2013 1:06:311:06:31 PPMM 99781137268914_02_ch01.indd781137268914_02_ch01.indd 2 77/16/2013/16/2013 1:06:321:06:32 PPMM Chapter 1 Liberals and Barbarians Yuanmingyuan was the palace of the emperor of China, but that is a hope lessly deficient description since it was not just a palace but instead a large com- pound filled with hundreds of different buildings, including pavilions, galleries, temples, pagodas, libraries, audience halls, and so on. Yet Yuanmingyuan was not only a set of buildings but also a set of gardens filled with trees, flowers, lakes, streams, man-made mountains, and much else besides. The Europeans called it a “summer palace,” but this is not correct either since this was where most Qing dynasty emperors spent most of their time, including the winters. The real summer palace was instead located in Chengde, in inner Mongolia, beyond the Great Wall.1 Yuanmingyuan is sometimes referred to as a “European palace,” and it is true that there were European-style buildings within the compound, but they occupied only a small fraction of the whole and replicas of various Chinese and many other kinds of buildings featured much more prominently. 2 What, then, was Yuanmingyuan? “In order to describe it,” said Maurice d’H é risson, an interpreter to the French a who came here in 1860, I would need to “dissolve all known precious stones in liquid gold and paint a picture with a diamond feather whose bristles contain all the fantasies of a poet of the East.”3 Yet an Englishman, John Barrow, who visited in 1791, found nothing much to praise: “I saw none of those extravagant beauties and picturesque embellishments which had made Yuanmingyuan famous throughout Europe.” 4 The fact that the descriptions of Yuanmingyuan are contradictory, inconclusive, and often plain wrong is not surprising. The imperial garden compound was not built to be described, but instead it was quite explicitly built to be indescribable; it was not meant to be a place as much as a world, an alternative reality filled with as much detail, secrets, and surprises as the world outside. In addition, it was not intended to be shown but to be hidden. Obscured by a 15-foot wall, it was quite impossible for outsiders to see what was going on inside, and even those guests who occasionally were invited, never saw more than a small portion of the buildings and gardens. 5 This was the secluded world intended for the exclusive use of only one 99781137268914_02_ch01.indd781137268914_02_ch01.indd 3 77/16/2013/16/2013 1:06:321:06:32 PPMM 4 Liberal Barbarism individual—the emperor of China. This was where he lived and worked, surrounded by his women, children, and eunuch courtiers, but it was also where he relaxed and was entertained. It was a perfect world; an ideal world that answered perfectly to the emperor’s wishes. Like all gardens, only more so, Yuanmingyuan was a vision of paradise, a place without worry or strife; a place of abundance, harmony, and peace. “There are flowerbeds, screens of trees,” wrote Emperor Yongzheng after he moved here in 1725, “and there is no need to water them to see them prosper.” The birds in their nests, the fish in their ponds, happy to fly and swim, gather as they wish, no doubt because of the healthy and happy configuration of the site, so fertile and good. Everything comes together in serenity to prosper and reside here, to give peace and splendor. 6 This was the world into which a combined Anglo-French army suddenly burst in the fall of 1860. In the evening of October 6, French troops under the command of General Charles Cousin-Montauban scaled the walls and took possession of the compound from which Emperor Xianfeng had departed hastily two weeks earlier. The following morning, despite orders from the commanders not to touch any- thing, the imperial collections were sacked. The soldiers, including many officers, ran from room to room, “decked out in the most ridiculous-looking costumes they could find,” looking for loot. 7 The ceramics were smashed, the artwork pulled down, the jewelry pilfered, and rolls of the emperor’s best silk were used to tie up the army’s horses. “Officers and men seemed to have been seized with a temporary insanity”; “a furious thirst has taken hold of us”; it was an “orgiastic rampage of looting.”8 T h e n on October 18, James Bruce, the Eighth Lord Elgin, the highest-ranking diplomat and leader of the British mission to China, decided to burn the entire compound to the ground. Since most of the buildings were made of cedar wood, they burned eas- ily and quickly, but since the compound was so large, it still took two days to com- plete the task. “When we first entered the gardens,” said Garnet Wolseley, a British officer and author of an eyewitness account of the campaign, “they reminded one of those magic grounds described in fairy tales; we marched from them upon the 19th October, leaving them a dreary waste of ruined nothings.”9 “Not a vestige remains of the palace of palaces,” said Robert M’Ghee, chaplain to the troops. “Now back again to Pekin, a good work has been done.”10 Liberal Barbarians There is a word for people who behave this way—we call them “barbarians.” To be a barbarian is the opposite of being civilized. Civilization is what distinguishes human beings from animals. Animals are completely determined by material cir- cumstances and by their desire for food, drink, and sex. Humans are animals too, of course, but in addition we reflect on our circumstances and the results of our reflec- tions leave traces in the form of philosophy, science, and arts. Human history is more than anything the stories that can be told about these traces. In the European tradition, barbarians are intruders who think nothing of laying in ruins that which human culture has built up; they are jealous of the achievements of others and 99781137268914_02_ch01.indd781137268914_02_ch01.indd 4 77/16/2013/16/2013 1:06:321:06:32 PPMM Liberals and Barbarians 5 destroy the things they cannot understand because they cannot understand them. By obliterating the traces of the past, they deny their own humanity as well as the humanity of others. As such they are the enemies not only of the people they are attacking but also of us all. It was ostensibly for the exact opposite reason that the Europeans had arrived in China. They were there to civilize the Chinese; they were going to show them the superiority of European civilization and convince them to follow its examples. There are many ways to describe mid-nineteenth century European societies and no label will cover all complexities and nuances, but “liberal” captures an important, perhaps a dominant, aspect. As applied to relations between states, liberalism stood above all for freedom of exchange, a faith in the values of civilization and in inter- national law. These three concerns were interrelated: the unimpeded circulation of goods, money, people, and ideas assured that civilization would spread, and the more civilized the countries of the world became, the more attentive they would be to the stipulations of international law. A lack of circulation, liberal Europeans were convinced, was China’s problem. 11 The Chinese had closed themselves off from the rest of the world, built walls around their kingdom and their minds, and this had made them both ignorant and weak. The Europeans were going to open China up: expose the country to the world, that is, expose it to the forces of civilization. The destruction of Yuanmingyuan does not fit easily into this account. Liberalism, according to the liberals’ own self-understanding, is a matter of fun- damentally good people doing fundamentally good things for fundamentally good reasons. Since all connections to barbarism are ruled out by definition, liberals can never properly understand themselves. Instead liberal Europeans have preferred to blame the event on “bad apples” within their ranks, or, more commonly, they have preferred not to remember the event at all. 12 History textbooks used in European schools rarely mention the North China Campaign of 1860; there is no book in English that exclusively deals with the destruction of the imperial palaces and gar- dens, and the event is quickly passed over in most accounts of British imperialism.