ABSTRACT
Regular army British regiments and ones from the Indian Army, some 3,500 soldiers in all, systematically set fire to the Yuanming, Changchun, and Qichun Gardens located to the northwest of the Qing imperial capital at Beijing. The destruction of the gardens came on the heels of several days of plundering of the grounds by British and French forces, as well as by a number of Chinese from the nearby village of Haidian. The bulk of the plundered objects made their way to Great Britain and France, where many were sold off in auction markets, put on public display or entered into the collections of the regiments involved in the invasion of Qing China where they all bore the epithet "from the Summer Palace of the Emperor of China." Members of the foreign diplomatic community and their retainers found the ruins of the European-style palaces in the north-eastern part of the Yuanmingyuan a charming site for picnics.
