Founded in 1707 and located in what is now Beijing's Haidian district, the Yuanmingyuan was once widely regarded as the pinnacle of Chinese imperial garden and palace design, with a collection of art and historical treasures, and is internationally famous. During the Qing Dynasty, the Qianlong Emperor often handled state affairs here, and the Forbidden City was used for formal ceremonies. In its heyday, the Yuanmingyuan was also known as the "Garden of Ten Thousand Gardens".
However, during the Second Opium War, the Anglo-French forces stormed the Yuanmingyuan and plundered it. These barbaric soldiers stole the ancient books, gold, paintings, bronze sculptures, porcelain and silk treasured in the garden, and burned the Yuanmingyuan into ruins with another fire, resulting in the destruction of countless cultural relics and treasures, and hundreds of palace people were burned alive.
In response, the French writer Victor Hugo, known for "Notre Dame de Paris" and "Les Misérables", reflected on the crimes committed by Western invaders in a letter in 1861, writing: "One day, two robbers broke into the Yuanmingyuan. One of them robbed, the other set fire... Later they laughed and left, hand in hand back to Europe. We claim to be civilized people, but we call them 'barbarians', and this is what civilized people do to 'barbarians'. ”
The perpetrator of this heinous crime was the Englishman James Bruce, the eighth Earl of Elgin in England. His father, Thomas Bruce, is also very famous, because Thomas Bruce once raided the Parthenon in Athens, he forcibly dismantled nearly 60% of the statues in the temple, and then shipped to England to sell to the British government and the British Museum, thus obtaining a large fortune.
On October 6, 1860, James Bruce, with the support of then British Prime Minister Palmerston, ordered his army to break into the Old Summer Palace and plunder it. An eyewitness at the time said: "Officers and soldiers both seem to have gone crazy, and their bodies and souls are pursuing the same thing, which is plunder, plunder. ”
Many exquisite works of art, including sculptures, porcelain, jade, silk robes, delicate textiles and gold, were looted. James Bruce also organized an auction of thousands of works of art and other looted treasures, which were then used as pay and compensation to treat soldiers or comfort their families.
Later, according to UNESCO, these lost Chinese artifacts appeared in at least 47 museums from different countries. For a long time since then, China's cultural relics protection agencies and patriots have been trying to find these cultural relics that originally belonged to China, and many foreign museums and collectors have avoided this, but some collectors have friendly returned the collections to China, such as the Pinault family in France, which has announced that the rat and rabbit heads of the zodiac signs will be donated to China free of charge.
On the other hand, the British government regarded James Bruce as a "great hero". Because during the Second Opium War, he led the British army to bomb Guangzhou, and forced the Qing government to sign the Sino-British Treaty of Tianjin. After burning the Yuanmingyuan, he coerced the Qing government to sign the Beijing Convention on behalf of the British. These treaties brought great wealth to Britain, but they brought great calamity to our country.
James Bruce later returned to England, where then-British Prime Minister Palmerston appointed him Governor-General of India in 1862. The following year, James Bruce set out from the Governor's Residence for a public mission in Sialkot, but the arduous journey at high altitudes exhausted him. While crossing the Chadri River between Korla and Rahul, James Bruce stepped onto a rickety wooden bridge, which was very simple and made of ropes and blocks of wood. James Bruce took a few steps on the bridge, suddenly felt his heart beat faster and unable to breathe, and finally he died of a heart attack.
(Source: Wikipedia)
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