After the British and French forces captured Beijing in the 10th year of Xianfeng (1860), they occupied the Old Summer Palace. The Chinese defenders were outnumbered. Wen Feng, the minister in charge of the Old Summer Palace, committed suicide by throwing himself into Fuhai. Concubine Chang who lived in the garden was frightened and died. British army leader Elgin, with the support of British Prime Minister Palmerston, ordered the burning of the Old Summer Palace.
3,500 British and French troops rushed into the Old Summer Palace and set it on fire. The fire lasted for three days, and the Old Summer Palace and nearby Qingyi Garden, Jingming Garden, Jingyi Garden, Anyou Palace, Changchun Garden and Haidian were destroyed. The town was burned into ruins. The fire burned for three days and three nights, turning this world-famous garden into ruins and becoming a rare atrocity in the history of world civilization.
A rough estimate of the number of plundered cultural relics in the Old Summer Palace is about 1.5 million, ranging from bronze ritual vessels from China’s pre-Qin period to famous calligraphy and paintings of the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties and various rare objects. Rare treasure. Now only architectural ruins remain, and the Yuanmingyuan Heritage Park has been established.
Extended information:
In the eyes of the British and French invaders, burning the Old Summer Palace could give the Qing government a great shock and force it to surrender as soon as possible.
The Old Summer Palace in the Qing Dynasty was "the residence of the emperor" and had a special political status: it was equivalent to the second palace of the emperor of the Qing Dynasty. It was the political center where the rulers of the Qing Dynasty often lived and issued orders to the whole country. . The five emperors from Yongzheng, Qianlong, Jiaqing to Daoguang and Xianfeng spent most of the year living in the Old Summer Palace, handling government affairs, summoning ministers, and receiving foreign envoys and ethnic minority leaders in the garden.
In a sense, the influence and status of the Old Summer Palace in the minds of the Qing emperors was no less important than that of the Forbidden City. The British knew this very well. Parkes metaphorically said that the Old Summer Palace "is to the Chinese what Buckingham Palace is to us" (Chiang Meng cited in "The Second Opium War", page 219); Elgin knew even more clearly that " The Old Summer Palace was the favorite palace of the Qing emperor" (Volume 1 of Dai Yi's "Modern History of China", page 338). Because of this, the invaders knew that burning the Old Summer Palace would be enough to effectively attack and shock the Qing government.
Baidu Encyclopedia—The Burning of Old Summer Palace