Trophies of War: Representing ‘Summer Palace’ Loot in Military Museums in the UK
Journal: Museum and Society
Year: 2015

In October 1860, at the culmination of the Second Opium War (1856-60), Britishand French troops looted and then burnt the imperial buildings in the Yuanmingyuan(known at the time by foreigners as the ‘Summer Palace’) in the north of Beijing.This widespread destruction of China’s most important complex of palaces, andthe dispersal of the imperial art collection, is considered one of the most extremeacts of cultural destruction of the nineteenth century. Over a million objectsare estimated to have