Yuanmingyuan on Display: Ornamental Aesthetics at the Musée Chinois

Abstract

One of many factors that made the Yuanmingyuan important was its holding of many thousands of art objects, most of elite imperial manufacture, that were spread among several temple complexes, dozens of residences and audience halls, and dozens more buildings used for leisure, administration, and storage. With countless objects destroyed by looters or fire, and with most others scattered among hundreds of soldiers and numerous Chinese opportunists, the Chinese Museum (Musée chinois) at the Château de Fontainebleau became the largest single fragment of Yuanmingyuan’s material culture (see Figures 10.1 and 9.4). Since the British army’s gifts to Queen Victoria were interspersed among the Royal Collections, the French gifts to Empress Eugénie constitute the only true collection of Yuanmingyuan art, composed into a coherent display that reconstructs—partially and grotesquely—an echo of the collective material life that inhabited the lost palace grounds. Offering a small glimpse into a vast domain, the museum refracts that view through the overlapping lenses of imperialism, politics, religion, collecting, craftsmanship, and imagination. Describing and explaining this refractive representation of Yuanmingyuan is the central aim of this chapter.