Good article. The West developed itself, in the past 500 or so years, primarily through the looting of treasures of inanimate objects & enslaving millions in the process. In many cases, they also occupied whole countries.
The West forced their way into several countries / kingdoms of yesteryear (South Asia, Latin America, North America, Africa, Australasia, Middle East) in the guise of "increasing trade & economy", then took over those lands through brutal means, kept it occupied for decades, & then after emptying the lands for whatever they were worth (all their treasures, financial & human capital), left the indigenous population fighting for scraps among themselves for decades to come. All this was going on, while, "civilized" society was ruling over "barbarians".
The Western countries still do the same thing by letting their companies force their way into their former occupied lands (developing countries) in the name of trade & taking advantage of weaker / corrupt governments of those countries (which are propped up by the West), then start plundering the mineral wealth of that country without ever properly compensating those countries, e.g. Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Uganda, Libya, Congo, Peru, Venezuela, Iraq etc.
When a good leader does come along in those former occupied lands, he/she asks for compensation, debt forgiveness, & reassesses all those contracts for mineral wealth being looted out of his/her country. Those leaders are scorned & the West tries to rile up a small minority of that country to create trouble for the that leader, e.g. Venezuela's late leader Chavez. Some other countries, like Greece, when asks for compensation for past wrongs, they are essentially told to go screw off, & "look to the future instead of past." When African countries, e.g. Congo asks for debt forgiveness, they are told that "a loan is a loan & has to be repaid", even though, that loan was essentially paid to a corrupt dictator, who was widely known that he was a corrupt dictator, but he kept getting the loans from international banks & monetary agencies.
How can the public & the honest governments of the developing countries ever trust the Western countries & their leaders, when the recent history of the world is replete with the West's dishonesty, lies, & exploitation of the developing countries with any means necessary?
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There is a deep, unhealed historical wound in the UK's relations with China - a wound that most British people know nothing about, but which causes China great pain. It stems from the destruction in 1860 of the country's most beautiful palace.
It's been described as China's ground zero - a place that tells a story of cultural destruction that everyone in China knows about, but hardly anyone outside.
The palace's fate is bitterly resented in Chinese minds & constantly resurfaces in Chinese popular films, angry social media debates, & furious rows about international art sales.
And it has left a controversial legacy in British art collections - royal, military, private - full of looted objects.
These days the site is just ruins - piles of scorched masonry, lakes with overgrown plants, lawns with a few stones scattered where many buildings once stood. The site swarms with Chinese visitors, taken there as part of a government-sponsored "patriotic education" programme.
As everyone in China is taught, it was once the most beautiful collection of architecture & art in the country. Its Chinese name was Yuanmingyuan - Garden of Perfect Brightness - where Chinese emperors had built a huge complex of palaces & other fine buildings, & filled them with cultural treasures.
A new digital reconstruction by a team at Tsinghua University gives a vivid idea of what this extraordinary place looked like when, 155 years ago, a joint British-French army approached Beijing.
The army was sent towards the end of the Opium Wars to force Chinese imperial rulers to open up their country further to Western trade & influence. In command on the British side was the 8th Earl of Elgin, from one of the most famous families in British imperial history.
French troops reached Beijing & the Summer Palace, where they began helping themselves to porcelain, silks & ancient books - or simply destroying what they found.
British troops joined in when they arrived shortly afterwards. "Officers and men seemed to have been seized with temporary insanity," said one witness. "In body & soul they were absorbed in one pursuit which was plunder, plunder."
Lord Elgin ordered the British troops to burn down the entire Summer Palace complex. The destruction, he wrote later, was intended "to mark, by a solemn act of retribution, the horror & indignation... with which we were inspired by the perpetration of a great crime".
I visited the current Lord Elgin, at his ancestral home in Scotland, to ask how he explained what had happened in 1860.
"There are things that perhaps you might have done differently," he says of his ancestor. "At the same time you've got to judge what was the feeling - intense feeling - at that particular moment."
China rejects such explanations.
"This is what they say to justify their actions," says Wang Daocheng, a leading Chinese scholar of these events. "That's the way they try to maintain the so-called moral high ground."
Soon after the Summer Palace's destruction in 1860, the 8th Earl of Elgin made a triumphant entry to the centre of Beijing, his procession symbolising British & Western domination - & Chinese humiliation.
China is also focusing increasingly on all the art that was looted by French & British forces - & taken to Europe. It was widely traded & still sits in all kinds of private & public collections.
"We're making a plan to start a series of actions to recover these antiques & get them back to China," says Niu Xianfeng, general director of the National Treasures Fund, affiliated to the Chinese Ministry of Culture.
"China will never give up the right to bring these looted or stolen treasures back."
Liu Yang, a researcher who has spent 15 years tracking down the artworks, says "British museums never reply" when he writes to ask what they have. But he has collected hundreds of images of looted items on his computer.
The Royal collection has several other items thought to be connected with the Beijing Summer Palace, including Chinese imperial sceptres, brass plaques & a mahogany screen.
The Wallace Collection in London has magnificent imperial vases from the palace.
British military museums have many items too. At the Royal Engineers' museum in Kent deputy curator James Scott showed me a beautiful jade ornament brought back from the 1860 campaign. There are also parts of a Chinese imperial throne acquired by the officer Charles Gordon - used for many decades as part of the furniture in the officers' mess.
Labelling these items is a sensitive matter. "We don't actually mention the word loot at all. We try to keep the interpretation as neutral as possible," says Scott.
Similar sensitivities are needed by auctioneers, who can make huge profits when items originally taken from the Summer Palace are re-sold today. Proof of their origin as part of the Chinese imperial collection - such as inscriptions by made by the soldiers who looted them - hugely increases their potential value.
Some newly wealthy Chinese have bid for such items. But having to pay for art that was stolen - as many Chinese see it - causes increasing resentment.
And what of the Elgin family? Does today's Lord Elgin think art should be returned to China?
"It's a very good arguing point" he concedes. But "the beauty of something is inherent in it wherever it happens to be".
"These things happen," he says of the 1860 events. "It's important to go ahead, rather than look back all the time."
The French, who joined in the looting of the palace, have been more open about their regret. "We call ourselves civilised & them barbarians," wrote the outraged author, Victor Hugo, about the destruction of the Summer Palace. "Here is what Civilisation has done to Barbarity."
The West forced their way into several countries / kingdoms of yesteryear (South Asia, Latin America, North America, Africa, Australasia, Middle East) in the guise of "increasing trade & economy", then took over those lands through brutal means, kept it occupied for decades, & then after emptying the lands for whatever they were worth (all their treasures, financial & human capital), left the indigenous population fighting for scraps among themselves for decades to come. All this was going on, while, "civilized" society was ruling over "barbarians".
The Western countries still do the same thing by letting their companies force their way into their former occupied lands (developing countries) in the name of trade & taking advantage of weaker / corrupt governments of those countries (which are propped up by the West), then start plundering the mineral wealth of that country without ever properly compensating those countries, e.g. Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Uganda, Libya, Congo, Peru, Venezuela, Iraq etc.
When a good leader does come along in those former occupied lands, he/she asks for compensation, debt forgiveness, & reassesses all those contracts for mineral wealth being looted out of his/her country. Those leaders are scorned & the West tries to rile up a small minority of that country to create trouble for the that leader, e.g. Venezuela's late leader Chavez. Some other countries, like Greece, when asks for compensation for past wrongs, they are essentially told to go screw off, & "look to the future instead of past." When African countries, e.g. Congo asks for debt forgiveness, they are told that "a loan is a loan & has to be repaid", even though, that loan was essentially paid to a corrupt dictator, who was widely known that he was a corrupt dictator, but he kept getting the loans from international banks & monetary agencies.
How can the public & the honest governments of the developing countries ever trust the Western countries & their leaders, when the recent history of the world is replete with the West's dishonesty, lies, & exploitation of the developing countries with any means necessary?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is a deep, unhealed historical wound in the UK's relations with China - a wound that most British people know nothing about, but which causes China great pain. It stems from the destruction in 1860 of the country's most beautiful palace.
It's been described as China's ground zero - a place that tells a story of cultural destruction that everyone in China knows about, but hardly anyone outside.
The palace's fate is bitterly resented in Chinese minds & constantly resurfaces in Chinese popular films, angry social media debates, & furious rows about international art sales.
And it has left a controversial legacy in British art collections - royal, military, private - full of looted objects.
These days the site is just ruins - piles of scorched masonry, lakes with overgrown plants, lawns with a few stones scattered where many buildings once stood. The site swarms with Chinese visitors, taken there as part of a government-sponsored "patriotic education" programme.
As everyone in China is taught, it was once the most beautiful collection of architecture & art in the country. Its Chinese name was Yuanmingyuan - Garden of Perfect Brightness - where Chinese emperors had built a huge complex of palaces & other fine buildings, & filled them with cultural treasures.
A new digital reconstruction by a team at Tsinghua University gives a vivid idea of what this extraordinary place looked like when, 155 years ago, a joint British-French army approached Beijing.
The army was sent towards the end of the Opium Wars to force Chinese imperial rulers to open up their country further to Western trade & influence. In command on the British side was the 8th Earl of Elgin, from one of the most famous families in British imperial history.
French troops reached Beijing & the Summer Palace, where they began helping themselves to porcelain, silks & ancient books - or simply destroying what they found.
British troops joined in when they arrived shortly afterwards. "Officers and men seemed to have been seized with temporary insanity," said one witness. "In body & soul they were absorbed in one pursuit which was plunder, plunder."
Lord Elgin ordered the British troops to burn down the entire Summer Palace complex. The destruction, he wrote later, was intended "to mark, by a solemn act of retribution, the horror & indignation... with which we were inspired by the perpetration of a great crime".
I visited the current Lord Elgin, at his ancestral home in Scotland, to ask how he explained what had happened in 1860.
"There are things that perhaps you might have done differently," he says of his ancestor. "At the same time you've got to judge what was the feeling - intense feeling - at that particular moment."
China rejects such explanations.
"This is what they say to justify their actions," says Wang Daocheng, a leading Chinese scholar of these events. "That's the way they try to maintain the so-called moral high ground."
Soon after the Summer Palace's destruction in 1860, the 8th Earl of Elgin made a triumphant entry to the centre of Beijing, his procession symbolising British & Western domination - & Chinese humiliation.
China is also focusing increasingly on all the art that was looted by French & British forces - & taken to Europe. It was widely traded & still sits in all kinds of private & public collections.
"We're making a plan to start a series of actions to recover these antiques & get them back to China," says Niu Xianfeng, general director of the National Treasures Fund, affiliated to the Chinese Ministry of Culture.
"China will never give up the right to bring these looted or stolen treasures back."
Liu Yang, a researcher who has spent 15 years tracking down the artworks, says "British museums never reply" when he writes to ask what they have. But he has collected hundreds of images of looted items on his computer.
The Royal collection has several other items thought to be connected with the Beijing Summer Palace, including Chinese imperial sceptres, brass plaques & a mahogany screen.
The Wallace Collection in London has magnificent imperial vases from the palace.
British military museums have many items too. At the Royal Engineers' museum in Kent deputy curator James Scott showed me a beautiful jade ornament brought back from the 1860 campaign. There are also parts of a Chinese imperial throne acquired by the officer Charles Gordon - used for many decades as part of the furniture in the officers' mess.
Labelling these items is a sensitive matter. "We don't actually mention the word loot at all. We try to keep the interpretation as neutral as possible," says Scott.
Similar sensitivities are needed by auctioneers, who can make huge profits when items originally taken from the Summer Palace are re-sold today. Proof of their origin as part of the Chinese imperial collection - such as inscriptions by made by the soldiers who looted them - hugely increases their potential value.
Some newly wealthy Chinese have bid for such items. But having to pay for art that was stolen - as many Chinese see it - causes increasing resentment.
And what of the Elgin family? Does today's Lord Elgin think art should be returned to China?
"It's a very good arguing point" he concedes. But "the beauty of something is inherent in it wherever it happens to be".
"These things happen," he says of the 1860 events. "It's important to go ahead, rather than look back all the time."
The French, who joined in the looting of the palace, have been more open about their regret. "We call ourselves civilised & them barbarians," wrote the outraged author, Victor Hugo, about the destruction of the Summer Palace. "Here is what Civilisation has done to Barbarity."
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