The significance of these witnesses to a more cordial encounter between East and West 100 years earlier was presumably lost on the French general as he gave the order to destroy the palace. Based on European designs, they were the work of Chinese bronzemakers. Animal-headed human figures arranged in two groups of six poured out water in turn every two hours. With some 18th-century engravings, these make it possible to reconstruct the weirdest part, the monumental fountains in the form of the 12 signs of the Zodiac as known in the Chinese tradition. Photographs taken after the 1860 fire show the structures, halfway between Versailles and Roman palazzi. If the painting was once stolen, two animal bronze heads were the remains of a destroyed monument, the palaces of the Yuanmingyuan now in ruins.

Keen to stress the imperial provenance, Christie's noted 'from a private collection in Scotland where it was stored in a trunk with a label stating that it had been taken from the Summer Palace.' At Christie's, a scroll called 'Autumn Cries on the Artemisia Plain' was stamped with the emperor's eight seals, implying treasured possession. The Qianlong emperor (1736-1795), curious about exotic things, loved Castiglione's work. Castiglione learned the language and took up painting in the Chinese technique under the name 'Lang Shining.'ДЄ hybrid art came into existence, blending Western naturalism with the elliptical stylization of Chinese painting since Song times. If the Jesuits were not very effective at making converts, they themselves were converted to Chinese culture. Western missionaries flocked to Far Eastern lands, hoping to convert them to Christianity. On the cover of Christie's catalogue an imperial dragon roared as if in fury at the title in gold lettering that ran across its chest, 'The Imperial Sale: Yuanmingyuan.' In the preface, Rosemary Scott recounted the story of the palace built between 17 on the designs of the Jesuit, Giuseppe Castiglione. Once, deliberately, in 1860 when the French and British soldiery burned down the Yuanmingyuan palaces because their governments were infuriated by the Xianfeng emperor's refusal to bow to their every demand, and this week, unintentionally by the auction houses in their way of presenting the sale of the Imperial spoils.Д¬hinese readers with a sense of history must have jumped up as they ran through the catalogue of the auctions scheduled on April 30 at Christie's and on May 2 at Sotheby's. In this case, the insult was repeated twice. But the place was Beijing, and in the East memories are long when insult is added to injury. True, it happened in 1860, which seems an eternity ago to Westerners. When a colonial expeditionary force burns down an imperial palace, steals the art that can be moved and destroys the rest, there is cause for annoyance.

Reduced to bare bones, the government of the most powerful Asian country, China, effectively moved in to buy back four 18th-century works of art that it felt, with every reason, had been taken out of the country in outrageous circumstances. Historic events that took place this week will have incalculable repercussions in the international approach to cultural monuments.

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