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‘From Those Flames No Light’

The Second Opium War concluded in 1860 with Anglo-French forces looting and sacking the Summer Palace at Yuanmingyuan. Commentators such as Victor Hugo delighted that these incidents occurred under the leadership of Lord Elgin, whose father instigated the Parthenon Sculptures controversy. Memoirists and journalists show that the Summer Palace incident was divisive: looting posed a threat to military discipline, and the wanton destruction occasioned a debate over whether Britain was civilized or barbaric. To some, the melancholy victory evoked the Aeneid. Inevitably debates over repatriation of Summer Palace treasures have invoked discussion of the Parthenon Sculptures. Yet commentators like artist Ai WeiWei show that sculptures that the Chinese Communist Party made emblematic of National Humiliation are not really Chinese and were probably not removed by Europeans. Chinese efforts to retrieve the sculptures demonstrate that modern China, like Victorian Britain, reaches to the cultural past for stability amidst bewildering change.