Understanding the Zodiac Saga in China

Are the Zodiacs National Treasures or Are They Faucets Made by Foreigners? ⁵

As mentioned above, arguments against the Zodiacs’ categorization as “national treasures” have tended to center around their European origins or perceived lack of distinctive Chineseness. However, in the sense of their historical origin and aesthetic characteristics, the relative Chineseness or Europeaness of the Zodiacs is a moot point since they were created by a collaboration between European artists and Chinese craftsmen and designed according to both European and Chinese aesthetic principles. The fountain on which the Zodiacs were mounted, named Haiyantang (Hall of Calm Seas), was the front piece of a larger building that architecturally emulated the palace in Versailles and incorporated waterworks technology from Europe to function as a water clock. Water was pumped into the fountain from a nearby water tower, and each of the twelve statues spouted water from their mouths at every two-hour interval, which culminated in a simultaneous spouting of water at noon. The water clock was engineered by the French mathematician and cartographer Michel Benoist based on European water-working techniques and the statues themselves were designed by Italian court artist Giuseppe Castiglione after the twelve animals of the zodiac, a well-known feature of Chinese art and cosmography (Dematté, 2011).

Not only did the twelve Zodiacs historically correspond to twelve two-hour intervals of time, making them uniquely suited for utilization in a water clock, but the zodiac symbols had a long history of representation in various Chinese art forms from seventh- to tenth-century bronze mirror engravings (Little and Eichman, 2000: 140–41; Dematté, 2011: 133) to ninth- to twelfth-century funerary figurines (Howard et al., 2006: 148, 150, 154). The combination of a zodiac animal head attached to a robed anthropomorphic body also found precedent in Chinese Tang and Song dynasty tomb clay figurines (Howard et al., 2006: 150; Ai, 2011: 51) and Qing dynasty miniature jade figurines. Furthermore, bronze, with which the Zodiacs were plated (although they are often misleadingly called “bronze heads”) was used for casting ritual tools and weapons at least since 1600 bc and later was used for producing objects ranging from Han tomb ornaments to Ten Kingdoms burial figurines and Song temple statues (Howard et al., 2000: 69, 148, 441).

While the basic form and material of the Haiyantang Zodiacs drew inspiration from earlier Chinese art, art experts have claimed that the actual appearance of the heads is not characteristically Chinese but “a Western understanding of a Chinese way” (Ai, 2011: 51), noting that the characterization of each head is, in general, more realistic than typical Chinese animal sculptures, with the bronze plating even tooled to give the impression of fur markings (Priestley, 1989: 155). It has also been pointed out that the tiger head bears a stronger resemblance to a bear, indicating unfamiliarity with the subject on the part of the heads’ designer, Castiglione (Ai, 2011: 56; Kraus, 2004: 201).

When faced with the historical facts, it becomes clear that “are the Zodiacs national treasures or are they faucets made by foreigners?” is a political rather than academically productive question, because it sets up a binary opposition that precludes other or multiple interpretations. In fact, those who challenge the Zodiacs’ status as national treasures on the grounds of their dubious Chinesesness overlook the greater contradictions embedded within the ideological claim of national heritage and its consequent efficacy as internationally accepted currency for nationalism. The claim that the Zodiacs are sacred to the Chinese nation is no more or less tendentious than the claim that Tibetan monasteries or Shang dynasty bronzes or any other object retrospectively labeled as “Chinese” based on a mutable notion of national identity are part of that heritage. This retrospectively constructed notion of national heritage based on the present boundaries and ideologies of some is not unique to China but a key feature of all nations, part of the ideological machinery creating and maintaining the imagined national community (Anderson, 2006).

The relative novelty of conceptualizing objects like the Zodiacs as “national treasures” and “cultural heritage” becomes apparent when one traces the numerous shifts in the way the Zodiacs were valued since their construction in 1760. The zodiac animal heads, whose images are prolifically reproduced in popular media today, were initially bronze-plated sculptures attached to larger stone statues of robed humanoid figures that were placed in a semicircle around the Haiyantang fountain, which adorned one of a series of Western-style buildings (dubbed “the Western Palaces”) nestled in the northeastern corner of a massive and otherwise Chinese-style imperial garden complex called the Yuanmingyuan. The Zodiacs were thus one small and unrepresentative architectural feature of a garden that, at its height, encompassed 160,000 square meters of land and was the main political center and residence of the Qing imperial family since the time of the Yongzheng emperor. ⁶ The Western Palaces’ prominence in historical accounts of the Yuanmingyuan written after the 1950s is largely due to two incidental facts: first, some of the Western-style structures, including the Haiyantang fountain on which the Zodiacs rested, survived the fire of 1860 and subsequent waves of destruction relatively intact because they were built primarily of stone in the Western architectural tradition rather than wood; and second, etchings of twenty buildings from the Western Palaces have also been preserved through the present day, providing concrete evidence as to how they originally looked. While brief descriptions of the Zodiacs sometimes appear in Yuanmingyuan histories written before 2000 as part of a broader description of the many structures within the Western Palaces section, Yuanmingyuan histories written after the auctions of 2000 tend to describe the Zodiacs in more detail or have a dedicated section about them, indicating a shift in their retrospectively perceived historical value.

The emphasis on the Western Palaces and Zodiacs in modern histories has caused historical myopia about the actual importance of the Western Palaces and the Zodiacs to eighteenth-century people. Many of the same imperial records, court poems, memoirs, and architectural sketches that late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century scholars scoured to piece together information about the Western Palaces and Zodiacs suggest that in the eighteenth century the Qianlong emperor did not view the Western Palaces as architecturally or technologically remarkable, but saw them somewhat condescendingly as Western “souvenirs,” glorified display cabinets for all the Western trinkets he had acquired as gifts over the years, and a means of claiming a piece of the West in the microcosmic empire of his garden (Liu, 2005: 134; Kleutghen, 2011: 165). In the massive body of imperial poems and writings that survive, the Western Palaces, unlike many of the Chinese-style scenes in the Yuanmingyuan, are barely alluded to; even fewer are references to the Zodiac statues (Barmé, 1996: 127). In a surviving poem, the Qianlong emperor’s successor, the Jiaqing emperor, in fact dismisses one of the fountains as a perversion of nature’s way (Barmé, 1996: 128). Furthermore, the Western Palaces were perhaps the first section of the garden allowed to fall into disrepair, as early as the later years of the Qianlong emperor’s reign. After the death of the head engineer of the European-style fountains, Michel Benoist, in 1774, the hydraulic machinery broke down and no one was able to fix it. Consequently, the pipes were dismantled after 1775 and eunuchs were made to manually carry buckets of water to fill the fountains whenever the emperor came to see it (Musillo, 2011: 160; Barmé, 1996: 126; Liu, 2005: 324). In 1795, the copper pipes from the fountains were dismantled permanently and reused in other constructions, indicating their relatively low value in comparison to other parts of the garden that the emperor continued to maintain and expand (Kleutghen, 2011: 166). Thus the present-day emphasis on the Zodiacs and the Western Palaces in historical accounts of the Yuanmingyuan is more indicative of the historical circumstances under which they and documents about them survived and contemporary notions of value than their actual social and artistic significance when they were created. Nonetheless, modern narratives tend to project the Zodiacs’ modern significance backward into the past. Exemplary of this is a 2013 episode of Archives of National Treasures, a pseudo-historical documentary series, in which the narrator declares, “After the Zodiacs were constructed they attracted a lot of attention and because of this, Castiglione won great fame” (Yuanmingyuan shoushou, 2013).

In what follows, I will trace a trajectory of shifting values attributed to the Zodiacs in order to show that national cultural heritage is but the most recent trend in a long history of changing value systems applied to the Zodiacs. It must be noted that the Zodiacs specifically were not singled out from other Yuanmingyuan items until the 2000 auctions when the Chinese media reacted to them in particular. Between 1860 and 2000 they circulated in the antiquities market along with other items looted from the Yuanmingyuan, and the provenance of any single head between the time they were known to have been stored at the pre-plundered Yuanmingyuan in 1860 to the auctions of 2000 is almost entirely undocumented. ⁷ It can only be assumed that the same sorts of labels and values were applied to them as other Yuanmingyuan items for which there does exist documentation.

The year 1860 is often identified in Chinese textbooks and other historical narratives as the unforgettable year in which the Yuanmingyuan was looted and burned by British and French soldiers, the Chinese nation was humiliated, and countless national cultural artifacts were lost. However, this association of the Yuanmingyuan and its objects with the Chinese nation was not widespread before the early twentieth century. The Chinese scholar Tyau Ming-chien, in his 1920s English-language history, addressing what he saw as an insufficient sense of national pride among Chinese, argued “most Chinese, when they saw the flames of the Summer Palace, read in it not the weakness of China, but the decadence of the Manchu house” (Tyau, 1922: 183). In fact, often left out of Chinese histories is the fact that after the initial looting of the Yuanmingyuan in 1860 by French and British soldiers, many local Chinese participated in subsequent looting (Barmé, 1996: 137). Even after the reinterpretation of the Yuanmingyuan’s 1860 burning and looting as a national humiliation was widely disseminated through the school system and public commemorations beginning in the 1910s, the imperial objects and structures remaining in the Yuanmingyuan were not treated as “national treasures,” but as coveted spoils, which warlords, local looters, government officials, and others claimed from the overthrown imperial house by exploiting its weak political position and the garden’s insufficient security (Wong, 2001: 161–87).

Even the foreign looters themselves did not initially see the items they were plundering as representative of the Chinese nation or belonging to its people. In fact, in the English General Elgin’s personal diary, he explicitly states that his decision to burn the Yuanmingyuan in 1860 was intended to punish the emperor, as opposed to the Chinese people, in retaliation for inhumane treatment of prisoners of war (Elgin, 1872: 361–67; Elgin and Walrond, 2011: 219–20). In other words, objects from the Yuanmingyuan were conceptualized by the looters in terms of personal effects of the emperor rather than cultural objects belonging to China as a whole. Tellingly, Yuanmingyuan loot that flowed out of Beijing into European markets afterward was labeled “From the Summer Palace of the Emperor of China” (Hevia, 1994, 1999, 2008, 2013). It was only retrospectively that the garden’s plunder was condemned in Europe as the barbaric destruction of China’s art and culture by critics such as Victor Hugo. ⁸

The Yuanmingyuan Zodiacs are assumed in numerous histories, news reports, and documentaries to have been among the objects taken by the British and French soldiers during their frenzied looting of the garden in 1860. Imaginative reenactments of the plundering of the Zodiacs have also been rendered in film. For example, Chinese Zodiac opens with a brief narrative of the Yuanmingyuan’s history that includes a scene depicting foreign soldiers ripping the Zodiac heads from their bodies atop the Haiyantang fountain and posing for a photograph with them (Shier shengxiao, 2012). Similarly, in the 2006 documentary Yuanmingyuan, which was repeatedly screened at the on-site museum of the Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park, there is a scene where British officers gleefully auction off looted objects scattered on a long table, including the monkey and ox heads (Yuanmingyuan, 2006). However, in an interview, Chinese art experts and former Sotheby’s employees Lark E. Mason and Joe-Hynn Yang suggest that the heads might not have been looted by the British and French forces during their plundering of the Yuanmingyuan in October of 1860 after all. Mason speculates that the Zodiacs were probably disassembled and stored before the British and French invasion of the garden, noting that the existing heads, when examined closely, do not display signs of the kind of damage associated with being forcibly removed from their mounts and transported by hasty looters (Mason and Yang, 2011: 193). This hypothesis seems plausible given that, as previously mentioned, the Haiyantang fountain had ceased to function as a water clock as early as 1775 and the copper pipes attached to it are known to have been permanently dismantled in 1795 (Kleutghen, 2011: 166). Furthermore, French and British soldiers were not the only groups to loot the Yuanmingyuan, not even necessarily the first. At least one British soldier wrote about encountering Chinese looters during his own looting of the garden, and Qing officials charged with managing the garden after the emperor’s flight wrote numerous memorials reporting a spate of lootings by local bandits in addition to foreign soldiers (M’Ghee, 1862: 216; Wang and Fang, 1999: 891–920). Even after partial order was restored to the garden, Qing authorities were unable to stop further looting by local thieves, or retrieve more than a fraction of the items that had been stolen, which began appearing in local antiquities markets (Wong, 2001: 156). Such markets were frequented by a growing population of European consumers in the years following the 1860 conflict (Hevia, 1999: 201); thus it is not implausible for the Zodiacs to have been purchased at one of these markets and taken to Europe.

Mason also emphasizes the Zodiacs’ lack of provenance and suggests that the heads would probably not have been coveted by European soldiers since they were relatively large, heavy, and less valuable than many of the other types of objects available (Mason and Yang, 2011: 194). Hevia’s 2000 article on the looting of the Yuanmingyuan supports this argument, suggesting that European soldiers and officers were primarily interested in precious gems and metals like gold and silver, and “curiosities” that would sell well in Europe, while the Indian army troops sought out clothing, silks, furs, and jewels (Hevia, 1999: 193). While Mason’s hypothesis that the Zodiacs were looted after the Anglo-French invasion cannot be confirmed by historical documents, neither can the supposition that the Yuanmingyuan Zodiacs were carried off by French and British soldiers. The looting of the Yuanmingyuan by French and British soldiers and the subsequent British auction held on-site are events corroborated by numerous accounts from the journals of participants and observers from both the French and English sides, but the Zodiacs specifically are not mentioned in any of these accounts. Yet, the possibility that the heads were not in fact looted by foreigners has never been raised in Chinese-language studies and histories of the Zodiacs to my knowledge, likely because it challenges the whole ideological premise of what is clearly a political narrative: that the Zodiacs are objects of national patrimony that were humiliatingly stolen by foreign imperialists.

Furthermore, a historical examination of the trajectory of Yuanmingyuan loot reveals that it was subjected to multiple and changing value schemes in tempo with changing political and aesthetic contexts and was not associated with cultural heritage specifically until the late twentieth century. Directly after the English and French soldiers’ chaotic looting of the garden on October 7–8, the English commanders, following established procedures based on British prize law, confiscated all of the items and held an auction just outside the Yuanmingyuan, in which each soldier could bid freely for the items he desired (Hevia, 1999: 194–95). Money from the auctions was then divided among the soldiers according to rank. The objects that had been capriciously snatched up during a breach in military order were thus effectively converted into a systematic means of rewarding military service and reinforcing military hierarchy.

Afterward these items made their way back to Europe, where the best were given to the English queen Victoria for her personal collection. The French commander, General Montauban, also selected choice pieces of loot and had seven carts of it sent to the French empress Eugénie, much of which is still preserved today in the museum of the Chateau de Fontainebleau in Paris (Brizay, 2005 [2003]; Samoyault-Vertlet et al., 2010). The rest of the objects were either taken back by soldiers or sold and circulated in the international art market until they found their way into private art collections and public exhibitions. Other objects illegally looted from the Yuanmingyuan by Chinese looters between 1860 and the early twentieth century, possibly including the Zodiacs, often were sold to wealthy foreigners and circulated through the same channels. Auctions that included loot from the Yuanmingyuan among other objects were frequent from 1860 to 1865, particularly in Europe and the United States, where demand for such objects was high. Until the early twentieth century, Chinese loot sold abroad was grouped along with other “curiosities”—a somewhat condescending term used by Europeans to describe strange or exotic objects, especially those taken from foreign lands (Hevia, 1994, 321; 2008: 133). Chinese objects were valued more for their novelty than for their craftsmanship and were typically considered aesthetically inferior to European art. Yuanmingyuan loot, although treated as a symbol of Chinese sovereignty and its inability to stand up against European might, was evaluated aesthetically according to the same Eurocentric principles as other Chinese and pseudo-Chinese objects. Often the pieces that drew the most attention were not the most artistically nuanced, but the most sensational, such as a drinking cup purported to be the skull of Confucius (Hevia, 1994: 330). The attitude of Europeans toward Chinese objects in this period was eerily similar to the dismissive attitudes the Manchu emperors had displayed toward European objects in the mid-Qing (Clunas, 2004; Pagani, 1998).

However, beginning in the late nineteenth century, research and publications on Chinese art by Westerners employing new nomenclature and systems of categorization, as well as an increase in public displays and encounters with Chinese art, contributed to the gradual elevation of the status of Chinese objects from mere curiosities to legitimate works of art. The art market became more globalized as the twentieth century progressed and auctions of Chinese dynastic art were held in China beginning in the mid-1990s, where such items were valued as high art according to European standards.

After World War II, a discourse on world cultural heritage related to the solidification of the nation-state as a dominant political form began to posit historical and artistic objects as valuable not only for their aesthetic characteristics, rarity, and symbolic prestige, but as world cultural heritage. This somewhat paradoxical term denoted objects and sites exemplary of the cultural achievements of the specific nation from which they originated, while at the same time belonging to the common heritage of all humanity. This means of conceptualizing objects was formally validated in Europe by the UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage in 1972, and began to be institutionally embraced in China by the late 1970s. Before this period, from the early twentieth century, items looted by foreigners were largely viewed in China from the perspective of national humiliation, an idea that was not incompatible with the idea of national patrimony, but which had its own origin, set of associations, and metaphors that must be distinguished from the international discourse on world cultural heritage with which it later merged.

But Why Zodiacs?

This notion of national humiliation is the crux of why the Zodiacs have become such evocative symbols of national patrimony in twenty-first-century China. Without understanding the national humiliation narrative preceding the three Zodiac heads’ appearance in the Hong Kong auctions of 2000 and how it was inculcated into the populace via the construction of national monuments, the education system, public commemorations, and controlled media, it is impossible to understand the indignation expressed by Chinese media and common citizens in reaction to the auctions of 2000.

National humiliation refers to the idea that the series of aggressive acts such as invasion, plundering, occupation of territory, and imposition of unjust demands impressed upon China by foreign imperialists (including Americans, Europeans, and Japanese) during “the century of humiliation” (roughly from the First Opium War in 1839 to the end of World War II in 1945) amounts to a humiliation shared by all people of the Chinese nation. Although the emphases and associations of the national humiliation narrative have changed over time, national humiliation remains a prominent theme in Chinese history education and the narrative has been perpetuated in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries by projecting events such as Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997 and China’s hosting of the Olympics in 2008 as proof that China has redeemed itself from its weak position in the past and will no longer tolerate foreign bullying. ⁹

The notion of national humiliation can be traced back to the early twentieth century when Chinese reformers began to retrospectively view China’s numerous defeats in the preceding wars and foreign countries’ unequal policies toward China as humiliating not only to the state, but to all Chinese as citizens of the Chinese nation. Chinese intellectuals grew increasingly convinced that if China was to recover from its weakened position and redeem itself internationally, it needed both technologically advanced weaponry and a greater national consciousness. One of the biggest problems, they argued, was that the Chinese people did not feel a sufficient sense of affront at the numerous humiliations foreign imperialists had imposed on China, including territorial invasion, looting of artifacts, and the imposition of unequal treaties and indemnities. Furthermore, many held that the Manchu Qing government was weak and corrupt, and was to blame for allowing this sad state of affairs. Therefore, not forgetting national humiliation became a theme for pre-1911 revolutionaries and reformers to promote an early form of popular nationalism and anti-Manchu sentiment. ¹⁰

The looting and burning of the Yuanmingyuan in 1860 was cited within this context as an exemplary moment of national humiliation, and reformers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao wrote about the profound sense of shame they felt at viewing objects that had been looted from the Yuanmingyuan in displays abroad (Hevia, 1994: 336, and 2003: 334). This association of the Yuanmingyuan with national humiliation survives to this day, but the narrative of national humiliation was expanded and revised in a palimpsestic way over the course of the twentieth century.

Between 1915 and 1949, conflicts with Japan and the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) shifted the narrative focus away from the Opium Wars to the threat of Japanese imperialism. The burning and looting of the Yuanmingyuan was commemorated as but one event among a growing saga of humiliations inflicted upon China by imperialists. These events were incorporated into the national education system and by the 1920s, they were commemorated annually in twenty-four officially recognized national humiliation days (Cohen, 2003: 173n2n3).

Between 1949 and 1976, the national humiliation narrative took on new associations under the leadership of Mao Zedong and the Communist state. The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 was presented in the context of the national humiliation discourse as a victory over imperialists and an end to the century of humiliations. National humiliation was adapted to Communist ideology in the form of a strong anti-imperialism that reinvented Chinese peasants and officials during the Qing as heroic resisters against the onslaught of imperialism and feudal corruption. Chinese objects such as those looted from the Yuanmingyuan were rearticulated as “the crystallization of the wisdom of the Chinese laboring masses” (Wang, 1953: 429). In the 1950s and 1960s, the Communist government adopted a somewhat paradoxical view toward historical sites and objects or “cultural relics” 文物. On one hand, they should be preserved in order to “recognize the achievements of the ancient working people in architectural creation and to critically evaluate the national tradition and embrace its good aspects, thereby developing a modern ‘socialist’ architecture” (Lai et al., 2004: 86, quoting architectural historian Chen Mingda). On the other hand, they were “manifestations of a decadent and outmoded past” that should be destroyed to make way for China’s renewal as a modern nation (Lai et al., 2004: 86). This latter view won out in the late 1960s and was implemented with zeal during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), in which Confucianism, the imperial system, and ideas associated with feudalism were denounced and large quantities of historical sites and artifacts were systematically destroyed as representative of the class enemy.

After the death of Mao Zedong put an end to the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the new administration resumed the initiative to restore and preserve the nation’s cultural artifacts with increased vigor. The national humiliation narrative was again reinterpreted and expanded. The construction of the Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park beginning in the 1980s around the few surviving ruins of the eighteenth-century imperial garden contributed to the reinstatement of the burning of the Yuanmingyuan as an exemplary moment of imperialist aggression. The park’s design and construction were overseen by a group of Chinese scholars, experts, and officials who received funding and support from the municipal government. The aim was to advance patriotic education, encourage tourism to sights in the capital, improve research on Chinese traditional gardens, and promote international interactions about history and culture (Wang, 1986: 535). With its official opening in 1988, the park became a prominent part of the interrelated network of media through which narratives and ideas connected to national humiliation were conveyed to the Chinese populace.

New narratives of national humiliation that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, including those written on the plaques and brochures in the Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park, were significantly different from those of the Maoist era. While they parroted the anti-imperialism of previous narratives, cited the Opium Wars and destruction of the Yuanmingyuan, and dutifully included Chinese Communist rhetoric praising the laboring masses, they fused these with modern notions of world cultural heritage by emphasizing the cultural contributions of Chinese civilization and the enormous loss to that heritage inflicted by the barbaric looting and destruction of imperialists (Yuanmingyuan Administration, 1994). The victor narrative of the Maoist era that presented the Communist Party as the leader of a Chinese national populace that had broken the shackles of a backward feudal society and valiantly triumphed over the foreign imperialists was incompletely transformed into a victim narrative, whereby the newly strong Chinese citizens must remember the humiliating defeats they had suffered and the offenses they had endured at the hands of foreigners in order for them to take pride in China’s new-found strength and modernity, and assert the cultural and artistic glory of Chinese civilization to an international audience. ¹¹

At the same time, the narrative of national humiliation remained open to further expansion as new events of national significance unfolded. National humiliation became a narrative lens through which international events were interpreted. When Hong Kong was returned to PRC control in 1997 after colonization by the English since 1842, the event was celebrated in China as more evidence that China had become a powerful nation no longer subject to humiliations imposed by foreign imperialists. In fact, an enormous clock counting down to the return of Hong Kong was erected in the Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park alongside a model of the Hong Kong skyline and a dragon that snaked along much of the park, drawing an explicit link between the Yuanmingyuan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese nation (Robin McNeal, personal communication, March 1, 2014). In addition, a series of events were held at the Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park to commemorate the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, including a nationally televised lantern festival in front of the iconic Dashuifa fountain and the dedication of a “never forget the national humiliations” 勿忘国耻 wall engraved with the text of the unequal treaties imposed on China during the Opium War period (Wang and Fang, 1999: 1223–24). Thus, through this elaborate narrative, Hong Kong and the Yuanmingyuan became the metaphorical embodiments of the Chinese nation that had once suffered humiliation at the hands of foreign imperialists, but had now reclaimed its dignity through independence and renewal.

On the other hand, the memory of national humiliation inculcated into Chinese citizens through school, “patriotic education bases” 爱国主义教育基地 (National Patriotic Education Site, 2009), and the surrounding network of media in the 1990s, contributed to a kind of victimization complex whereby foreign actions (particularly those of Japan and the United States) were interpreted as aggressive attempts to humiliate China, and Chinese triumphs were highlighted as a means of overcoming past humiliations. In 1998, China’s loss of the bid to host the 2004 Olympics was cited by the author of a newspaper editorial in a long list of attempts by foreigners to humiliate China (Gries, 2004: 21). This sentiment was reversed in 2001 when China won the bid for the 2008 Olympics, and many Chinese looked forward to it as an event that would “suture the painful wounds of colonization and humiliation at the hands of foreign powers” (Price and Dayan, 2009: 5). Similarly, when a U.S. airplane bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, despite public apologies issued by President Clinton, it was interpreted by many angry Chinese as an American attempt to humiliate China (Gries, 2004: 98–108). Even in the twenty-first century, insecurities stemming from the entrenched idea of national humiliation continue to color Chinese international policy, most recently in the highly publicized dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu or Senkaku Islands (Wong, 2014). Considering how the national humiliation narrative was frequently expanded as new grievances emerged, and was activated as a lens for interpreting international relations in the late twentieth century, it is unsurprising that the auctions of Zodiac heads infamously looted from the Yuanmingyuan garden that took place in 2000 in Hong Kong, a land that was itself “repatriated imperialist booty,” sparked indignation among Chinese patriots (Kraus, 2004: 204).

Of course, understanding the psychological implications of the national humiliation narrative for Chinese national collective thinking only partially answers the question of why the Zodiacs became the preeminent symbols in China’s efforts to repatriate lost artifacts. The question still remains why the Zodiacs, as opposed to other objects looted from China by foreigners, were singled out. The Yuanmingyuan Zodiacs were by no means the only looted objects from the Yuanmingyuan to appear on the international auction market in the late twentieth century. In fact, a large hexagonal vase also looted from the Yuanmingyuan was up for auction by Sotheby’s along with the tiger head in 2000, but this received far less attention from Chinese critics (Kraus, 2004: 199).

The primary reason the Zodiacs, rather than other objects of Yuanmingyuan loot, became the preeminent objects of popular indignation in 2000 was because the ruins of the Haiyantang fountain were still in existence: they had been reassembled and prominently featured at the Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park since the 1980s and were widely recognized by the Chinese populace since their image had been mass-produced in a proliferation of Yuanmingyuan-related media. Therefore, when the Zodiac heads emerged at the 2000 auction in Hong Kong, they were immediately identifiable, not just to experts, but to a great percentage of the Chinese populace, who had taken school trips to see the ruins and seen images of the Haiyantang reproduced in textbooks, news reports, documentaries, and even imperial dramas on TV.

Furthermore, a series of twenty engravings commissioned by the Qianlong emperor and produced between 1781 and 1786 by Manchu court artist Yi Lantai 伊兰泰 depicting buildings from the Western Palaces, including the Haiyantang, had also survived, allowing researchers to connect the Zodiacs to the Haiyantang fountain without a doubt (Merewether, 2011: 89; Zhang, 2012: 200–201). This gave the Zodiacs an identifiable and tangible connection to the Yuanmingyuan, which, because of the construction and promotion of the Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park, had renewed its ties with national humiliation in public consciousness over the preceding two decades. As Mason explains: “We don’t have depictions of the interiors showing the Western tapestries and the great Western works of art that Qianlong received, the great Chinese works of art that were there, the Chinese artworks inside the palace that were made in a Western style—the jades, the bronze, the paintings, all types of things that were there. We don’t have pictures of those. We have a picture of the fountain and it’s easy to see the heads. That is why these have been singled out” (Mason and Yang, 2011: 194).

Another factor that qualifies the Zodiacs, as opposed to other extant pieces of Yuanmingyuan art, for use as public symbols is their physical characterization as zodiacs, animal spirits assigned to each individual based on birth year that have played a major role in popular folklore and beliefs for many centuries. Long before the Zodiacs themselves became widely recognizable in China and were commoditized as key chains, postcards, and other trinkets, generic zodiacs were already a pervasive part of popular media and consumer culture, depicted on any number of consumable objects from wall hangings to protective charms. Thus, images of the Yuanmingyuan Zodiac heads, along with the politically charged historical narrative of their decapitation from the national body by foreigners, were easily marketed to a domestic audience, who could relate first to their physical manifestation as the familiar animals of the zodiac and then to their purported history as objects that were stolen from the Chinese nation. In fact, Ai Weiwei’s “Circle of Animals” exhibit, by featuring deliberately imprecise facsimiles of the original Zodiacs with minimal context, can be seen as an attempt to expose the artificiality of the Zodiacs’ political meaning in China and revert them into something that “everyone can have some understanding of, including children and people who are not in the art world” (Ai, 2011: 63).

However, if the Zodiacs were chosen as symbols because of their tangible connection to the Yuanmingyuan ruins, easily discernible place in the national humiliation narrative, and relatable form, then why in 2000 specifically? Two of the bronze heads had surfaced in a Sotheby’s New York auction of 1987 and three in the Sotheby’s London auction of 1989, but, in the words of Mason, “there was no real interest from China” (Conover, 1988; Priestley, 1989; Mason and Yang, 190). There are several possible explanations for this question of timing. First and perhaps foremost is that although construction began on the Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park in 1984 and tourists began visiting a temporary exhibit at the site in the early 1980s, the excavation and rehabilitation of ruined buildings from the Western Palaces section, including the Haiyantang fountain, were not completed until 1992 (Wong, 2001: 192). This meant that although the association between the Yuanmingyuan and the national humiliations inflicted by imperialists had already been renewed as a subject of public discourse, images of the ruined buildings were not dispersed in public media as iconic symbols of the Yuanmingyuan until the 1990s. In other words, in 1987 and 1989, the Haiyantang fountain was still unknown to the general populace. It was not until the 1990s that busloads of schoolchildren were directed to the ruins section of the park specifically and taught the names of the dilapidated structures there. The iconic images that were to be featured on the covers of textbooks and brochures, and appear in movies, documentaries, and dramas, had not yet been produced. The Zodiacs were not yet part of a widespread historical consciousness and thus did not show up on China’s political radar.

Moreover, the auctions of 1989, at least, took place on June 13, just over a week after the events of “6-4,” or what has come to be known as “the Tiananmen Square Massacre” in the West. At that moment, the state-run Chinese media were likely too absorbed in domestic damage control to pay much attention to an auction being held abroad. The 2000 auctions, on the other hand, took place in Hong Kong just three years after the territory had been repatriated to the motherland and at a time when international conduct was being closely scrutinized by the Chinese media and, through them, the Chinese public. Therefore, in terms of current events, June of 2000 was a much more auspicious time for the introduction of patriotic super-symbols.

Another factor that cannot be overlooked is China’s growing interest in the global discourse of cultural heritage, which was introduced to China as early as the 1930s by Chinese scholars who had studied abroad (Lai et al., 2004), but was not substantively implemented in national policy until the late 1970s, when there was a proliferation of domestic legislation regarding cultural property and a shift from a previous more narrowly anti-imperialist approach to a focus on national patrimony or cultural nationalism. ¹² In 1985, national efforts at cultural preservation were formally identified with international aims of preserving world culture with China’s ratification of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention of 1972. It was at this point that Chinese site managers began to actively market sites as “world cultural heritage” in order for them to be included on UNESCO’s official World Heritage List. Although the Yuanmingyuan Ruins Park was not submitted to the world heritage list, this shift is detectable in the rhetoric employed in Yuanmingyuan narratives, particularly in the 1990s and the twenty-first century. ¹³ The strong narrative link between the Yuanmingyuan’s artifacts and national humiliation was not lost; rather, such objects became both representative of Chinese culture specifically and world culture more generally. For example, in a 1994 narrative of Yuanmingyuan history that was printed on a brochure available at the park bookstore and on the official park website, the term “culture of humankind” 人类文化 is used twice in addition to the terms “national treasure” 国宝 and “cultural artifact” 文物 to describe the architectural and cultural artifacts that were lost when the Yuanmingyuan was burned and looted by French and British soldiers.

By 2000, when the Zodiacs appeared for auction in Hong Kong, cultural heritage 文化遗产 was already a familiar term in the Chinese vocabulary and had been applied to Yuanmingyuan objects in narratives where China and the world had been deprived of this cultural heritage by foreign imperialists. While Chinese popular outrage over the auctions was fueled by the inculcated notion of national humiliation, by using the diction and ideology embedded within the term “cultural heritage,” which was not overtly incompatible with the notion of national humiliation, ¹⁴ China was able to stake a claim to the Zodiacs based on international law laid down by the UNESCO convention of 1970 and the subsequent UNIDROIT Convention of 1995, and to join the ranks of other nations demanding the return of illegally obtained cultural heritage.

I do not mean to suggest that the Chinese reaction to the auctions of 2000 was a political conspiracy to press for repatriation; popular outrage and government demands that the auctions be halted were consistent with patterns of Chinese behavior in reaction to previous events perceived as national humiliations. However, the escalation of the event into a concerted government-sponsored campaign for the repatriation of China’s cultural heritage and the metamorphosis of the heads into icons of national patrimony were undoubtedly propelled by political agents who saw in the evocative power of the Zodiacs a convenient means of galvanizing the populace to assert China’s right to reparations from the international community. In other words, the repatriation campaign is not simply about retrieving aesthetically or historically important artifacts for the edification of both domestic and international people. It is a political move orchestrated by Chinese authorities to reassert a political message best captured in the famous dictum “The Chinese people have stood up!” to both an international and domestic audience. ¹⁵

Conclusion: From Qianlong to Jackie Chan—The Return of the Zodiacs

The movie Chinese Zodiac climaxes with Jackie Chan’s character, JC, diving head-first toward a live volcano in order to save the bronze dragon head from imminent destruction. Despite sustaining grievous injuries, he succeeds, and his former rival, a foreign art thief, humbly concedes defeat and lays the dragon head before him. In this way, the Chinese national fantasy is fulfilled on screen: the twelve Zodiac heads are reunited with the national body; JC, initially concerned only with making a living, has renounced his selfish ways and become a proper patriot and champion of cultural heritage; and finally, the foreigners, awed by the moral force of Chinese patriotism, have acknowledged China’s rightful ownership of objects that had been wrongfully stolen by their ancestors.

The movie can easily be interpreted as a political narrative, one that utilizes popular mass media and the familiar images of the Zodiacs to impress the importance of cultural heritage repatriation as a patriotic value on the Chinese populace. The movie was relatively well received in China, grossing more than 800 million yuan (127 million dollars) at the box office and obtaining a rating of 6.8/10 on Douban, in contrast to North America where it received negative reviews and grossed a mere 90,000 dollars (“Cheng Long,” 2013). However, most Chinese online reviewers focused on the action scenes, special effects, and humor, seeing the plot and patriotic message as secondary. Does this lack of attention indicate apathy toward the subject of repatriation, or perhaps that the idea of cultural heritage repatriation has become such an internalized value that it requires no comment? Just whose national fantasy are the Zodiacs playing out?

The Zodiacs began as a minor feature of the Qianlong emperor’s imperialistic fantasy to possess and display even that which was geographically distant within the confines of his private garden. Today they are keystones of a different, and yet no less imperialistic fantasy that seeks to claim chronologically distant objects as the property of the Chinese nation by availing itself of the internationally accepted language of cultural heritage. Never mind about these objects’ tendentious Chineseness, never mind that they may not have actually been plundered by foreigners, it is the narrative that matters, and its ability to assure the projected Chinese people (again) that China has indeed overcome the century of humiliation.