The Burning of Yuan Ming Yuan
VICTOR HUGO ON THE SACK OF THE SUMMER PALACE
“To Captain Butler
Hauteville House,
25 November, 1861
There was, in a corner of the world, a wonder of the world; this wonder was called the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace was to chimerical art what the Parthenon is to ideal art. All that can be begotten of the imagination of an almost extra-human people was there. Artists, poets and philosophers knew the Summer Palace; Voltaire talks of it. People spoke of the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids in Egypt, the Coliseum in Rome, Notre-Dame in Paris, the Summer Palace in the Orient. If people did not see it they imagined it. It was a kind of tremendous unknown masterpiece, glimpsed from the distance in a kind of twilight, like a silhouette of the civilization of Asia on the horizon of the civilization of Europe.
This wonder has disappeared.
One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned. Before history, one of the two bandits will be called France; the other will be called England."
2024
