The author
The Yuanmingyuan Artefact Index is authored by myself, Katrina Hill. I am an art historian focussing currently on the Age of Empire and the plunder of the Summer Palace. My work on this subject began while I was a master’s student in the art of China at Christie’s Education, London, in 2008, and continued with my doctoral research, which concerned the impact of looted artifacts from the Summer Palace on Victorian aesthetics: museum and exhibition culture, design, fine art, connoisseurship and collecting. You can find my dissertation Complicated objects: artifacts from the Yuanming Yuan in Victorian Britain here: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/83683/
Publications
• “Looters to Collectors: British Soldiers and Their Summer Palace Spoils,” Journal of the History of Collections, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhae028.
• “Enamels ‘Ancient’ and ‘Rare’: The ‘Summer Palace’ Market in Imperial England,” Journal for Art Market Studies 4, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.23690/jams.v4i2.116.
• “The Yuanmingyuan and Design Reform in Britain,” Collecting & Displaying China’s ‘Summer Palace’ in the West, edited by Louise Tythacott (Routledge, 2017).
• “The Yuanmingyuan and Victorian Design,” Oriental Ceramic Society Newsletter, no. 24 (2016).
• “Collecting on Campaign: British Soldiers in China During the Opium Wars,” Journal of the History of Collections 25, no. 2 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhr039.
• “Chinese Ceramics in UK Military Museums,” Oriental Ceramic Society Newsletter, no. 20 (2012).
• “The Victorian Soldier and Chinese Art,” Oriental Ceramic Society Newsletter, no. 17 (2009).