Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang

the diverse sceneries of the empire, among them rice paddies of the Yangtze Valley, noted for the peach flowers and bamboo groves and meandering brooks in their midst. Images from great poems were reproduced. In one, after a poem by the eighth-century poet Li Bai, a waterfall was created, falling into a pond of chiselled stones, making music as the force of the water varied. When the sun was in the right place a rainbow appeared in the waterfall, matching the sharp arch of a bridge that dropped from the top of the waterfall down to the pond. To gaze at the rainbow and listen to the water-music in a dainty pavilion perched on the bridge was a favourite pastime of the court. In this pleasure palace, grandeur was of no concern – beauty was everything. Priceless art and treasures that had been accumulated for more than 100 years filled every cranny.
    Before Lord Elgin set fire to this colossal treasure-trove, the palace had been looted by the French, who arrived first. Their commander, General deMontauban, wrote upon seeing the palace: ‘nothing in our Europe can give any idea of such luxury, and it is impossible for me to describe its splendours in these few lines, impressed as I am especially with the bewilderment caused by the sight of such marvels’. His troops fell on their prey with little inhibition. Lieutenant Colonel Wolseley was an eye-witness:‘Indiscriminate plunder and wanton destruction of all articles too heavy for removal commenced at once . . . Officers and men seemed to have been seized with a temporary insanity; in body and soul they were absorbed in one pursuit, which was plunder, plunder.’ The British troops, arriving later, soon joined in, as ‘the General now made no objection to looting’, wrote Robert Swinhoe, staff interpreter to General Grant.‘What a terrible scene of destruction presented itself!’ Grant wrote:
One room only in the palace was untouched. General de Montauban informed me he had reserved any valuables it might contain for equal division between the English and the French. The walls of it were covered with jade-stones . . . The French general told me that he had found two . . . staves of office, made of gold and green jade-stone, one of which he would give me as a present to Queen Victoria, the other he intended for the Emperor Napoleon.
    Among the presents that Queen Victoria received was a little dog. An elderly imperial concubine, who did not flee with the court, had died of fright when the allies arrived. Her dogs, five Pekinese, were brought to Britain and became the origin of the Pekinese breed outside China. One came back with Captain Hart Dunne of the Wiltshire Regiment, who named it‘Lootie’ and presented it to Queen Victoria. In his letter presenting the dog, the Captain wrote, ‘It is a most affectionate and intelligent little creature – it has always been accustomed to be treated as a pet and it was with the hope that it might be looked upon as such by Her Majesty and the royal family that I have brought it from China.’ The little dog caused a little frisson at Windsor. The housekeeper, Mrs Henderson, wrote to her superior, ‘It is very dainty about its food and won’t generally take bread and milk – but it will eat boiled rice with a little chicken and gravy mixed up in it and this is considered the best food for it.’ Her superior seemed somewhat annoyed and scribbled on the back of another, similar letter, ‘A Chinese dog that insists on chicken in its dietary!’ Mrs Henderson was instructed: ‘. . . after a little fasting and coaxing he [ sic ; Lootie was female] will probably come to like the food that is good for him . . .’ In Windsor, Queen Victoria had Lootie painted by the German artist Friedrich Keyl, and she specially requested through her personal secretary, Miss Skettett, that ‘When Mr Keyl sketches the dog he must put something to shew its size it [ sic ] is remarkably small . . .’ Lootie lived in the kennels