page_title: Old Summer Palace
section_title: Destruction
hierarchical_section_title: Old Summer Palace / Destruction
caption_attribution_description: 中文（中国大陆）‎: 大水法残迹，在圆明园遗址公园。 English: Ruins of Dashuifa. This is a photo of a (or part of a) Major National Historical and Cultural Site in China identified by the ID CNBJ-010-126
context_page_description: The Old Summer Palace, known in Chinese as Yuanming Yuan, and originally called the Imperial Gardens, was a complex of palaces and gardens in present-day Haidian District, Beijing, China. It is 8 kilometres northwest of the walls of the former Imperial City section of Beijing. Constructed throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, the Old Summer Palace was the main imperial residence of Qianlong Emperor of the Qing dynasty and his successors, and where they handled state affairs; the Forbidden City was used for formal ceremonies. Widely perceived as the pinnacle work of Chinese imperial garden and palace design, the Old Summer Palace was known for its extensive collection of gardens, its building architecture and numerous art and historical treasures. It was reputed as the "Garden of Gardens" in its heyday.
  In 1860, during the Second Opium War, as the Anglo-French expedition force steadily approached Beijing, two British envoys, a journalist for The Times and a small escort of British and Indian troopers were sent to meet Prince Yi under a flag of truce to negotiate a Qing surrender. Meanwhile, the French and British troops reached the palace.
context_section_description: In 1860, during the Second Opium War, British and French expeditionary forces, having marched inland from the coast at Tianjin (Tientsin), arrived in Beijing (Peking).
  In mid-September, two envoys, Henry Loch and Harry Parkes went ahead of the main force under a flag of truce to negotiate with Prince Yi and representatives of the Qing Empire at Tongzhou (Tungchow). After a day of talks, they and their small escort of British and Indian troopers (including two British envoys and Thomas William Bowlby, a journalist for The Times) were taken prisoner by the Qing general Sengge Rinchen. They were taken to the Ministry of Justice (or Board of Punishments) in Beijing, where they were confined and tortured. Parkes and Loch were returned after two weeks, with 14 other survivors. 20 British, French and Indian captives died. Their bodies were barely recognizable.
  On the night of 5 October, French units diverted from the main attack force towards the Old Summer Palace. At the time, the palace was occupied by only some eunuchs and palace maids; the Xianfeng Emperor and his entourage had already fled to the Chengde Mountain Resort in Hebei. Although the French commander Charles Cousin-Montauban assured his British counterpart, James Hope Grant, that "nothing had been touched", there was extensive looting by French and British soldiers. There was no significant resistance to the looting, even though many Qing soldiers were in the vicinity.
  On October 18, Lord Elgin, the British High Commissioner to China, retaliated against the Chinese resistance by ordering the destruction of the Old Summer Palace. Destroying the Old Summer Palace was also thought to be a way of discouraging the Qing Empire from using kidnapping as a means of resisting British invasion. It took 3,500 British troops to set the entire place ablaze, and the massive fire lasted for three days. Unknown to the troops, some 300 remaining eunuchs and palace maids, who concealed themselves from the intruders in locked rooms, perished with the burnt palace buildings. Only 13 buildings survived intact, most of them in the remote areas or by the lakeside. (The palace would be sacked once again and completely destroyed in 1900 when the forces of the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded Beijing.) Charles George Gordon, who was then a 27-year-old captain in the Royal Engineers and part of the 1860 Anglo-French expeditionary force, wrote about his experience:
  We went out, and, after pillaging it, burned the whole place, destroying in a vandal-like manner most valuable property which [could] not be replaced for four millions. We got upward of £48 apiece prize money ... I have done well. The [local] people are very civil, but I think the grandees hate us, as they must after what we did the Palace. You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one's heart sore to burn them; in fact, these places were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully. Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt, considered as brass. It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army.
  British and French looters preferred porcelain (much of which still graces British and French country houses) while neglecting bronze vessels prized locally for cooking and burial in tombs. Many such treasures dated back to the Shang, Zhou and Han dynasties and were up to 3,600 years old. A specific exception was the looting of the Haiyantang Zodiac fountain with its twelve bronze animal heads. Some of the most notable treasures ended up at the Chinese Museum in the Palace of Fontainebleau, which Empress Eugénie specifically set up in 1867 to house these newly acquired collections.
  Once the Old Summer Palace had been reduced a sign was raised by the invaders with an inscription in Chinese stating, "This is the reward for perfidy and cruelty". The burning of the palace was the last act of the war.
  According to Professor Wang Daocheng of the Renmin University of China, not all of the palace was destroyed in the original burning. Instead, some historical records indica
caption: Ruins of the European-style palaces
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