. In 1860, during the
Second Opium War, a combined Anglo-French expeditionary force, having marched inland from the coast at
Tianjin (Tientsin), arrived in
Beijing (Peking). In mid-September, two envoys,
Henry Loch and
Harry Parkes, went ahead of the main force under a flag of truce to negotiate with
Prince Yi and representatives of the Qing Empire at
Tongzhou (Tungchow) and to scout out campsites behind enemy lines. The delegation included
Thomas William Bowlby, a journalist for
The Times, along with a small escort of British and Indian soldiers. As the talks concluded on 18 September, the Allied forces
attacked Qing troops in the area who they believed were redeploying for an ambush, and the Qing court learned that the British had detained the prefect of Tianjin. It was around this time that the Qing general
Sengge Rinchen took the members of the delegation prisoner as they were traversing Qing lines to return to the expeditionary forces. The delegates and their escort were taken to the
Ministry of Justice (or Board of Punishments) in Beijing, where they were confined and tortured. Parkes and Loch were returned after two weeks, with 14 other survivors. Nineteen British, French and Indian captives died as a result of the torture. On the night of 5 October, French units diverted from the main attack force towards the Old Summer Palace. At the time, the palace was occupied by only some eunuchs and palace maids; the
Xianfeng Emperor and his entourage had already fled to the
Chengde Mountain Resort in
Hebei. Although the French commander
Charles Cousin-Montauban assured his British counterpart,
James Hope Grant, that "nothing had been touched", extensive looting of the palace had already been carried out by Allied soldiers. There was no significant resistance to the looting, even though many Qing soldiers were in the vicinity. Destroying the Old Summer Palace was also a warning to the Qing Empire not to use kidnapping as a political tactic against Britain. It took 3,500 British troops to set the entire place ablaze, and the massive fire lasted for three days. No French soldier participated. Unbeknownst to the troops, some 300 remaining
eunuchs and palace maids, who concealed themselves from the soldiers in locked rooms, perished when the palace complex was burnt. Only 13 buildings survived intact, most of them in the remote areas or by the lakeside. (The palace would be sacked once again and completely destroyed in 1900 when the forces of the
Eight-Nation Alliance invaded Beijing.)
Charles George Gordon, who was then a 27-year-old captain in the
Royal Engineers and part of the 1860 Anglo-French expeditionary force, wrote about his experience: British and French soldiers preferred porcelain while neglecting bronze vessels prized locally for cooking and burial in tombs. Some of the most notable treasures ended up at the
Chinese Museum in the
Palace of Fontainebleau, which
Empress Eugénie specifically set up in 1867 to house these newly acquired collections. Once the Old Summer Palace had been reduced a sign was raised by the Allied expeditionary force with an inscription in Chinese stating, "This is the reward for perfidy and cruelty". The burning of the palace was the last act of the war. According to Professor Wang Daocheng of the
Renmin University of China, not all of the palace was destroyed in the original burning. Instead, some historical records indicate that 16 of the garden scenes survived the destruction in 1860. The burning of the Old Summer Palace is still a very sensitive issue in China today. The destruction of the palace has been perceived as barbaric and criminal by many Chinese, as well as by external observers. In his letter "Expédition de Chine",
Victor Hugo described the looting as, "Two robbers breaking into a museum. One has looted, the other has burnt. ... one of the two conquerors filled its pockets, seeing that, the other filled its safes; and they came back to Europe laughing hand-in-hand. ... Before history, one of the bandits will be called France and the other England." In his letter, Hugo hoped that one day France would feel guilty and return what it had plundered from China. For his apologetic literature, a bust of the French writer was erected in the Old Summer Palace in 2010. ==Aftermath==