1st Edition
Collecting and Displaying China's “Summer Palace” in the West The Yuanmingyuan in Britain and France
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Part I: Overviews
1. The Yuanmingyuan and its Objects
Louise Tythacott
2. The Afterlives of a Ruin: The Yuanmingyuan in China and the West
James L. Hevia
3. From The Summer Palace 1860: Provenance and Politics
Nick Pearce
Part II: The Yuanmingyuan in Britain
4. The Yuanmingyuan and Design Reform in Britain
Kate Hill
5. "True Beauty of Form and Chaste Embellishment": Summer Palace Loot and Chinese Porcelain Collecting in Nineteenth-century Britain
Stacey Pierson
6. "Chinese Gordon" and the Royal Engineers Museum
James Scott
7. "Rose-water Upon His Delicate Hands": Imperial and Imperialist Readings of the Hope Grant Ewer
Kevin McLoughlin
Part III: The Yuanmingyuan in France
8. Henri Bertin (1720-1792) and Images of the Yuanmingyuan in Eighteenth-century France
John Finlay
9. Empress Eugénie’s Chinese Museum at the Château of Fontainebleau: An Unusual Décor in the "House of the Ages"
Vincent Droguet
10. Yuanmingyuan on Display: Ornamental Aesthetics at the Musée Chinois
Greg M. Thomas
Index
Biography
Louise Tythacott is Senior Lecturer in Curating and Museology of Asian Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her books include Surrealism and the Exotic, The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display and Museums and Restitution: New Practices, New Approaches.
"The history of modern Sino-European relations is still insufficiently known, yet it is of such vital importance to an understanding of China's place and self-positioning in the world today. This volume of essays on Yuanmingyuan by leading and pioneering authors on the topic expertly guide readers through controversial terrain. They provide often unpublished new materials and original perspectives that will generate new scholarship in a lively field of inquiry."
--Ting Chang, University of Nottingham
"The fate of the objects from Beijing’s Summer Palace – including their roles in shaping Western views of China and ongoing debates about repatriation – is an immensely interesting and important subject. This book is very welcome for opening up these questions and bringing new scholarly depth to the debates."
--Sharon Macdonald, Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
"This collection of essays by ten authors brings together collection- and object-focussed studies on aspects of the 1860 partial destruction by Anglo-French forces of the Yuanmingyuan, the large and magnificent complex of palaces and gardens built by and for the Qing emperors between 1709 and 1783. ...This is a useful and extremely thorough collection."
--Beth McKillop, The Oriental Ceramic Society Newsletter
