Victor Hugo, Yuanmingyuan, and the Boundaries of Orientalism

When I visited Victor Hugo’s house at Place des Vosges in Paris, for the first time in 1996, I expected to feel the dense atmosphere of French literary grandeur, something between Voltairean satire and Napoleonic ambition. After all, Hugo was once an admirer of Napoleon I and a Republican in the lineage of Enlightenment humanism. Yet the room that welcomed me was not overtly French. It was filled with Chinese objects.

I was surprised. When I visited the house again in 2023, Hugo's 1861 letter condemning the Anglo-French looting of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, Yuanmingyuan, came to my mind. I had not read the letter during my first visit and didn’t know what to think. The moral protest echoed through the silence of this room in 2023.

Victor Hugo was not immune to the 19th-century wave of Orientalism, a movement that aestheticized and objectified "the East" for European consumption.

In his poetry collection Les Orientales (1832), Hugo romanticized scenes from the Ottoman world and North Africa. Like many of his Romantic contemporaries, he saw the East not as a living, political subject, but as a landscape of color and sensuality. This is what Edward Said famously critiqued as Orientalism: “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”

The Chinese-style room in Hugo's home reflects the 19th-century European fascination with chinoiserie, a decorative trend rather than a political statement.

The Burning of Yuanmingyuan

To understand the full meaning of Hugo’s protest, one must recall what happened in Beijing in 1860.

During the Second Opium War, Anglo-French forces invaded northern China to enforce the terms of unequal treaties and to demand expanded trade and diplomatic rights. After failed negotiations and the capture and torture of European envoys, British High Commissioner Lord Elgin ordered the systematic destruction of the Old Summer Palace, known as Yuanmingyuan.

This was not incidental looting. It was an intentional act of cultural destruction. Yuanmingyuan was a sprawling imperial complex of gardens, libraries, temples, and artistic treasures. Its destruction was meant to humiliate the Qing court and to demonstrate Western dominance. French troops joined in, and vast quantities of Chinese art and treasure were shipped to Europe.

Victor Hugo, in exile at the time, responded with a now-famous letter addressed to Captain Butler, a British officer:

“One day, two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One looted, the other burned. [...] We Europeans are civilized, and for us, the Chinese are barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism.”

Hugo condemned the act not only as a crime but as a moral and cultural disgrace. He did not romanticize China, but he recognized the asymmetry of power and the hypocrisy of imperial justification.

His letter stands today as one of the earliest and clearest expressions of solidarity with a non-Western civilization subjected to imperial violence.

The Locked Ports of Empire

China’s encounter with European powers in the 19th century unfolded through blockades, unequal treaties, and the imposition of treaty ports. British and French fleets targeted Canton, Tianjin, and other strategic locations to force Qing China into commercial and diplomatic concessions.

The 1858 Treaty of Tientsin, and the military campaigns that followed its partial rejection, made clear that China’s resistance to imperial demands would be met with overwhelming force.

The destruction of Yuanmingyuan was one piece of a larger imperial strategy, economic coercion combined with cultural subjugation. Western powers did not only seek markets and trade routes. They asserted symbolic control through punitive violence.

This imperial advance into China must be situated within the broader transformation of the 19th‑century international economic order.

British and French actions were guided by an emerging doctrine of coercive free trade, in which market access was not negotiated but imposed through military force.

The treaty‑port system forced upon China after the Opium Wars resembled similar arrangements imposed on the Ottoman Empire and parts of Latin America, integrating non‑Western economies into global trade networks under asymmetric conditions. These arrangements locked China into an unequal exchange structure: exporting tea, silk, and later raw materials, while absorbing European manufactured goods, all under externally determined tariff regimes.

Imperialism in this period operated not only through formal colonization, but through informal empire, sustained by financial leverage, naval power, and treaty obligations.

The destruction of Yuanmingyuan should therefore be understood not as an isolated act of excess, but as part of an economic system that combined military coercion with market expansion, subordinating sovereignty to the requirements of an emerging global capitalist order.

Hugo’s Conscience and the Limits of Aesthetic Distance

Returning to Hugo’s home, the presence of Chinese art objects is best understood within the wider context of 19th-century European taste. His “Chinese salon” followed the popular style of the time. Yet unlike many collectors or admirers of the East, Hugo did not remain silent when faced with the destruction of a culture he admired.

Hugo’s protest based on his ethical stance was clear, his position consistent, and his voice, at the time, rare. Hugo condemned violence.

The fact that Hugo never visited China and yet wrote with such empathy only amplifies the value of his protest. His letter did not erase colonial violence, but it disrupted the narrative of Western superiority with an act of public conscience.

To grasp the intellectual uniqueness of this stance, it is useful to compare it briefly with the dominant currents of thought in his time. For instance, Max Weber, writing decades later, portrayed China in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) as a society structurally incapable of rational capitalism due to Confucian values and kinship ties. This was a form of intellectual Orientalism, not visual or poetic, but analytic and hierarchical.

Hugo, by contrast, did not pathologize the East. He wrote not to explain or rank civilizations, but to affirm moral responsibility in the face of destruction.