“Imagine some inexpressible construction, something like a lunar building, and you will have the Summer Palace. Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze and porcelain, frame it with cedar wood, cover it with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there a harem, elsewhere a citadel, put gods there, and monsters, varnish it, enamel it, gild it, paint it…”
Jin Tiemu’s documentary Yuan Ming Yuan (2006) opens with this lyrical description of the titular Summer Palace, penned by Victor Hugo in the nineteenth century. The film illustrates the palace’s life and death, which parallels the destiny of Qing Dynasty, the last imperial dynasty of China. Located in the northwest of Beijing, Yuan Ming Yuan was the brainchild of three generations of emperors in the heyday of the Qing Empire. It is said to have been the apogee of Chinese architecture and landscape, encompassing not only architectural elements from all around China but also from the West. While a token of pride, Yuan Ming Yuan is also remembered as a symbol of humiliation in Chinese history. The palace was looted and destroyed by the Anglo-French Allied Forces in 1860, as the Qing Empire declined in the face of peasant uprisings and foreign invasion.
The film’s digital reconstruction of the Summer Palace is mind-blowing both in scale and in detail, and the reenactment of historical characters allows the viewer a vicarious experience of life inside the imperial palace. But as the Chinese saying goes, the documentary flowers but bears no fruit, hua er bu shi. Despite its beautiful images, Yuan Ming Yuan does not encourage serious reflection on the past. Instead, it’s little more than a superficial portrayal of historical events that omits many important details and taps into anti-Western and China-resurgence mentalities.
To use Victor Hugo’s words, aesthetically Jin’s team did “build a dream” with the documentary, which took more than six years and a million dollars to make. Thirty-five minutes of the total running time is allotted to digital reconstruction of Yuan Ming Yuan’s landscape and architecture. Exquisite visual effects, such as the lustre of the famous bronze animal sculptures and the panorama of the entire complex of gardens and palaces at sunset, are indeed a feast for the eyes.
Even better, the film does not stop at Yuan Ming Yuan’s aesthetic splendor but provides a glimpse into the life of people who lived there, giving history a human quality. Part of the film is narrated by three European missionaries who work for the royal court and explore the palace with curiosity and admiration. They tell anecdotes of court life, which transform historical figures into lively individuals with whom the audience can empathize. For example, there is a mock town inside the palace where eunuchs play the roles of vendors, magistrates, craftsmen, and even thieves, so that the royal family can get a taste of an ordinary person’s life by visiting the mock market, bargaining with merchants, witnessing theft, and even participating in mock courts to interrogate thieves.
Unfortunately, this level of detail is not carried over when the film transitions to the decline of Yuan Ming Yuan in the hands of foreign invaders. The second part of the film sets up a dichotomy of innocent but close-minded Chinese with primitive weapons against evil-minded aggressive Western imperialists with advanced weapons. Without any in-depth analysis, the documentary is only a fancy repetition of my elementary school history lesson on Yuan Ming Yuan. It tells only a partial truth that aims to promote nationalistic sentiments among its audience, most of whom are Chinese.
Instead of anatomizing France’s and England’s imperialism and examining the root causes for the invasion, the film focuses on visualizing the Qing court’s lack of militarism and the calamity it suffers as a result. We hear the narrator lamenting about the absence of development in Chinese weapons and see repeated scenes of brutally wounded Chinese soldiers falling from their horses. In other words, Yuan Ming Yuan aims not to make the viewers understand why the tragedy took place but only to leave them gnashing their teeth in anger because foreign invaders destroyed this other-worldly beauty in China. The film plays into the larger trend of nationalistic narrative of history: China was bullied by Western powers because it was weak, and now it must reemerge as a strong power so as not to be bullied again.
The documentary also completely demonizes the English and French soldiers. From their first appearance, the soldiers all look vicious and frantic, walking with hunched backs and sinister smiles. Both the French and the English commanders look like your typical comic book villains, one with a poker-face, the other with an evil grin. Yes, in a way, they were demons for having destroyed such a treasure of human history. But at the same time, it should not be forgotten that they, too, were ordinary human beings who couldn’t resist the temptation of carrying off war trophies that later turned into a looting frenzy. It is simply unnecessary and dishonest to take all human qualities out of them for dramatic effects.
Worse, the film deliberately omits an important fact that contributed to the destruction of the palace: the Qing government kidnapped and tortured members of the Anglo-French Forces’ negotiation team. Twenty-one out of the thirty-nine kidnapped men died in prison, including Thomas Bowlby, a reporter of the Times of London and a close friend of the English commander Lord Elgin. Shocked by the death of his good friend and the other men and worried about his reputation if he were to do nothing to avenge their murder, Elgin ordered his men to destroy the palace as retribution against the Qing government, despite objections from the French side. The atrocity by the Qing court in no way justified Elgin’s ruthless decision, but, at least, he was certainly not the capricious and lunatic character in the documentary who decides to destroy the palace out of the blue and with unanimous support from the Anglo-French Forces.
Yuan Ming Yuan takes the easy path of presenting the tragedy as a tale of mindless savages from the West plundering Chinese civilization, when the real story was much more complicated. If the Summer Palace is going to be turned into a monument to anything, it should not be one to nationalism. Instead, memories of Yuan Ming Yuan should stand as a reminder of human beings’ capacity both to create extraordinary beauty with their wisdom and to destroy such beauty under the spell of morbid ideologies.
