ARTEFACTS

The artefacts on this site are organised mostly according to material. They include objects in museums and recently in sale rooms, some of which are well known. The majority are gleaned from textual sources, mostly from the 19th century. These are items referred to as ‘from the Summer Palace’ [more rarely, the ‘Yuen-min-Yuen’] in British newspapers, auction house catalogues and museum archives, among other material. While ‘from the Summer Palace’ does not guarantee provenance at the imperial estate, some of these references may be accurate; they also constitute evidence for Europeans’ conception of the site and Chinese imperial art, as well as the values attached to the Qing imperial collections over time. The site also includes more general references to groups of objects ‘from the Summer Palace’ because these give us a sense of the large quantities of Yuanmingyuan material that may be extant. These textual sources also reflect the mythological stature the site attained in the popular imagination after the war.

Readers will notice that currently there are only a few hundred artefacts listed on the site. The number of known artefacts is much higher and estimates of the original holdings at the Yuanmingyuan are higher still. Efforts to locate and include objects in the Yuanmingyuan Artefact Index are ongoing. The site will be updated on a quarterly basis, beginning 1 April 2016, for the duration of this year. If the site continues, the update policy will be extended, subject to change.

The objects on the site are all given four-digit ID numbers, solely for indexing purposes. They have no function beyond this site and bear no relation to other numbers, such as dates, lot numbers, or museum inventory numbers.

Textual sources for the objects are given in parentheses with each entry. Information from institutional sites about objects, such as dates, attributions or Yuanmingyuan provenance, has been credited to those sites.