The total destruction of the Qing summer palace of Yuanmingyuan in the fall of 1860 is a momentous episode in the history of late imperial China that continues to haunt China's relationship with the Western world. The recent efforts by official organizations and private individuals to identify and repatriate twelve bronze animal heads representing the Chinese zodiac, which were looted from the imperial complex 153 years ago, are but one example of this troubled legacy.

Drawing on recent advances in “new military history,” Dr. Ines Eben von Racknitz set out to write the story of the destruction of the famed palace as a “history of events” (Ereignisgeschichte), a genre of microhistory in the Annales tradition. Within this framework, she endeavors to explore looting, pillaging, and plundering as a “cultural practice” (p. 12) that is rooted in different imperial traditions and cultures of nineteenth-century Europe. With an impressive grasp of relevant scholarship, Eben von Racknitz connects the invasion of Beijing to the “small wars” that the British and French empires waged in their colonial possessions, to inquire how the different “styles of warfare” (Stile der Kriegsführung, p. 51) of the two empires influenced the practice of looting in the China campaign of 1860.

The British armed forces occupied a relatively low position in Victorian England. One of the few ways in which the military could attract recruits was to lure them with the prospect of looting. Even though the British authorities made persistent, almost “ritual” efforts to regulate and restrain looting, in practice it became increasingly difficult to enforce the regulations. Commanding officers often lost control of their soldiers on the battlefield, which exposed the British to bad publicity, the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 being a salient case in point. In comparison, the French conscript army had a higher status in the Second Empire. But as France had lost most of its overseas colonies in the Napoleonic Wars, the French were less prone to regulate looting when they set out to capture new colonies under Napoleon III. Consequently, the French colonial armies became perilously reliant on forced requisitions to replenish their supplies. As the author demonstrates, these different styles of warfare and looting had direct and fateful consequences in the China campaign of 1860, as the French expeditionary army was provided with a minimum of logistical support and provisions from the home country, whereas the British were able to make full use of their vast supply networks that emanated from the British Raj.

In chapter 3, the centerpiece of the book, Eben von Racknitz demonstrates with considerable narrative skill and a meticulous sense of detail how the two different “military cultures” of the British and the French armed forces led to the total destruction of the Yuanmingyuan. The first plundering of the palace, on October 7–9, 1860, was “not a coldly calculated act” (p. 191), but rather an almost spontaneous outbreak of plunder, or even an “accident” (Unfall), as the allied command had become increasingly unable to restrain the troops during the course of the war. This was especially the case with the French commanders, who had tacitly supported looting as a means of replenishing supplies throughout the war. This laxity of the French command had a deleterious effect on morale in the British ranks. Only afterwards were the British and French able to rationalize the sack of the palace by setting up a prize commission and by dividing the loot according to established practices. In contrast to the first wave of plunder, the subsequent burning and destruction of the Yuanmingyuan—which Lord Elgin in private communications claimed to deplore—was a carefully planned measure designed to humiliate the Qing court into submission and to punish it for capturing a party of British negotiators and killing some of them. Interestingly, the French had no stomach for such a deliberate act of destruction, which ran against the French ambitions to fulfill their contradictory mission civilisatrice in East Asia. The French went to great lengths to distance themselves from the burning of the Yuanmingyuan when the Convention of Beijing finally was signed on October 24, 1860.

While Die Plünderung des Yuanmingyuan deliberately focuses on the experiences, motives, and decision making of British and French operatives on the ground, one sometimes wishes that the author had provided more insights into the policy-making process of the Qing court, and had allowed Qing officials to speak in their own words in this detailed narrative. In this respect, it is regrettable that the author did not avail herself more of Qi Sihe's edited collection of documents from the Second Opium War, which is listed among the sources but rarely used in the narrative. None of this detracts, however, from the general value and contributions of the book, which deserves to be translated and reworked into English.