Yuanmingyuan’s Treasure: Biographies of the Qianlong Emperor’s Manuscript

“Huangchao liqi tushi” (“皇朝禮器圖式”, Illustrations of Imperial Ritual Paraphernalia, “HCLQTS” in abbreviation), a collection of illustrated manuscripts under commission of the Qianlong Emperor (1711-1799), represents the emperor’s aspiration to create and codify a universal ritual system for the imperium. In 1860, in a radical event of the Second Opium War between the Qing court and an Anglo-French military alliance, Yuanmingyuan, once a splendid imperial palace complex, was burnt down and spoiled. A collection of “HCLQTS” folios becomes one of numerous items of Yuanmingyuan loot removed to Europe. Folios can be identified in Western museums, auctions, and personal collectors’ hands. This historic object, involved in complex social relations across time and space, deserves in-depth study. Regarding production, although completion is officially claimed in 1759, revisions continue until 1772. Decades of work result in different colour-painting and printed editions. “HCLQTS” content is complex, with six sections specifying ritual objects for particular ritual scenarios, including jiqi (“祭器”, sacrificial vessels), yiqi (“儀器”, scientific instruments), guanfu (“冠服”, costumes and accessories), yueqi (“樂器”, musical instruments), lubu (“鹵簿”, insignia), and wubei (“武備”, arms and armours). Functions, meanings, and purposes are radically modified after the 1860 looting act, via changes to its human relations and social contexts. Kopytoff’s work on the relationship and movement of objects between commodity status and singularity status, Appadurai’s work on the social lives of things and object itineraries, and Bourdieu’s theory of distinction and taste are used to frame the analysis, while recent discussions of contested heritage and decolonisation of museums support the eventual conclusions. Considering the object as having social agency, a dialectic relationship between human intentions and object autonomy is explored. I split “HCLQTS” social life into three stages: the indigenous, a turning point, and the European. In its indigenous life, “HCLQTS” emerges from Qianlong’s commission for his ritual reform, driven by the emperor’s ritualisation of the imperium, his apperception of painting arts that is highly resonant towards a European linear perspective, and an ideological construction of a Grand-Unity China. The sacking of Yuanmingyuan in 1860 is the turning point that breaks the object unity and mobilises it into discrete itinerants to Europe. Initially serving as a symbol of Qing sovereignty, the European looting act starts diverting its career into a political symbol of European conquest over the Qing empire, art commodities that, misrecognised, fail to achieve high economic value, and pieces of mere ‘curiosities’ that are likely neglected. The fragmentation into discrete folios produces three trajectories. In the first, driven by different auction houses’ and individual collectors’ interests, a batch of “HCLQTS” folios moves in and out of the British art market. When held in collectors’ hands, it becomes singularised, meeting buyers’ personal experiences and emotions, differently from the auction house experience, where it is commonly represented as an art good for profit-maximisation purposes. In the second trajectory, respectively, British Museum’s 1973 and the British Library’s 2002 exhibition, one single “HCLQTS” folio serves as ideological instrument to craft British modernity, with colonial implications. Notably, the object history of British looting is silenced in both cases. In the third trajectory, as a display item in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s permanent exhibition, the colonial echoes of another “HCLQTS” folio’s social life take a more subtle form. While the looting history is still absent from public representation, the object becomes a form of ‘chinoiserie’ that unfolds the institute’s prestige, while indulging in racialisation of a Chinese Other, and evoking audiences’ fetishism towards Chinese design and fashion. The thesis concludes with reflections for possible future research and museum practice.