As punishment for the torture and killing of European envoys and to force Qing capitulation, Anglo-French forces under Lord Elgin's son James Bruce sacked the Yuanmingyuan, the sprawling imperial garden-palace complex outside Beijing. Soldiers looted treasures for days before burning the buildings, an act still remembered in China as a defining humiliation of the unequal treaty era.
The Yuanmingyuan, known as the Old Summer Palace, was not one building but a vast complex of gardens, pavilions, lakes, and halls that Qing emperors had spent a century and a half building and filling with art, manuscripts, and treasures from across their empire. British and French troops, seeking retribution after Qing officials tortured and killed a group of European negotiators during the Second Opium War, descended on the complex starting around October 18th, and by October 20th the looting had turned into a methodical campaign of destruction.
Soldiers stuffed pockets and wagons with porcelain, jade, silk, and gold before commanders, worried about discipline collapsing entirely amid the free-for-all, ordered the buildings burned to the ground. French writer Victor Hugo would later condemn the destruction as an act of vandalism perpetrated by two supposedly civilized nations against a third. The ruins—scorched marble columns still standing today in a Beijing park—remain a potent symbol in China of Western imperial aggression, invoked in political rhetoric well into the twenty-first century.
Key people: James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, Victor Hugo