Abstract
A striking feature of the events that transpired in China in the fall of 1860 is their inherently theatrical quality. The French soldiers who looted Yuanmingyuan were not just stealing and destroying, but they were staging a performance. They dressed up in the garments and jewelry of the imperial court, pranced around in the stately chambers speaking homemade Chinese, and made a racket with the emperor’s collection of mechanical birds and music boxes. It was a carnival, a world turned upside-down, a show that the soldiers put on for their own entertainment. Although Lord Elgin, for his part, never would have stooped to such inanities, the final incineration too has a distinctly theatrical quality. After all, Yuanmingyuan had no military significance whatsoever and was singled out only because of its symbolic importance. The final destruction was Elgin’s attempt to demonstrate not only to the Chinese, but also to his own troops and to the newspaper-reading public back home, just what the Europeans were capable of doing and what the emperor was too powerless to prevent. Through the destruction of Yuanmingyuan, China was humiliated and forced to interact with European countries on European terms. The causal connection between these three events—the destruction of a palace compound, the humiliation of a country, a radical change in foreign policy—can exist only in the context of a performance.
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Notes
Garrett Mattingly, “The First Resident Embassies: Mediaeval Italian Origins of Modern Diplomacy,” Speculum 12, no. 4 (October 1937): 423–439.
Compare Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 ), 169–186.
See, for example, Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crises: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, originally published in 1959 (Boston: MIT Press, 1998 ), 86–97.
This is also true of Britain where the national idea often was given an Anglican interpretation. H. S. Jones, “The Idea of the National in Victorian Political Thought,” European Journal of Political Theory 5, no. 1 (January 1, 2006): 12 –21.
John Watson Foster, The Practice of Diplomacy as Illustrated in the Foreign Relations of the United States ( Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906 ), 22–23.
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ( Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1973 ), 17–76.
See, for example, Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine ( Washington: Smithsonian, 1991 ), 49–54.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful ( London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1757 );
Immanuel Kant, “Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful,” in Essays and Treatises on Moral, Political, and Various Philosophical Subjects, vol. 2 (London: William Richardson, 1799), 1–91. For a discussion
see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development ofthe Aesthetics of the Infinite ( Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997 ), 276–289.
Nancy L. Paxton, “Mobilizing Chivalry: Rape in British Novels About the Indian Uprising of 1857,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 1 (October 1, 1992 ): 5–30.
Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-century England ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ), 154–160.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill ( London: Andrew Crooke, 1651 ), 77.
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© 2013 Erik Ringmar
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Ringmar, E. (2013). An Awesome Performance. In: Liberal Barbarism. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031600_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031600_2
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