An Awesome Performance

Abstract

A striking feature of the events that transpired in China in the fall of 1860 is their inherently theatrical quality. The French soldiers who looted Yuanmingyuan were not just stealing and destroying, but they were staging a performance. They dressed up in the garments and jewelry of the imperial court, pranced around in the stately chambers speaking homemade Chinese, and made a racket with the emperor’s collection of mechanical birds and music boxes. It was a carnival, a world turned upside-down, a show that the soldiers put on for their own entertainment. Although Lord Elgin, for his part, never would have stooped to such inanities, the final incineration too has a distinctly theatrical quality. After all, Yuanmingyuan had no military significance whatsoever and was singled out only because of its symbolic importance. The final destruction was Elgin’s attempt to demonstrate not only to the Chinese, but also to his own troops and to the newspaper-reading public back home, just what the Europeans were capable of doing and what the emperor was too powerless to prevent. Through the destruction of Yuanmingyuan, China was humiliated and forced to interact with European countries on European terms. The causal connection between these three events—the destruction of a palace compound, the humiliation of a country, a radical change in foreign policy—can exist only in the context of a performance.